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• Thread on MacIntyre and Therapeutic Narratives (with @noampomsky)

  A narrative is an agent’s Story considered as Intelligible in terms of roles, communities, values, etc. This type of therapeutic narrative is more like an inner Story. It doesn’t cohere outwards, it’s not meant for others, it’s often secret and confidential.

  My Story should be something that people could tell in broad strokes, maybe after my death, in an Intelligible and hopefully nice way. That wouldn’t be a Story of my confidential inner turmoils, etc—it would be about who I was, what I did, what I said.

• 📙 After Virtue

  Once we have understood its importance the claim that the concept of an action is secondary to that of an Intelligible action will perhaps appear less bizarre and so too will the claim that the notion of ‘an’ action, while of the highest practical importance, is always a potentially misleading abstraction.

  The Aristotelian tradition has occupied two distinct places in my argument: first, because I have suggested that a great part of modern morality is Intelligible only as a set of fragmented survivals from that tradition, and indeed that the inability of modern moral philosophers to carry through their projects of analysis and justification is closely connected with the fact that the concepts with which they work are a combination of fragmented survivals and implausible modern inventions; but in addition to this the rejection of the Aristotelian tradition was a rejection of a quite distinctive kind of morality in which rules, so predominant in modern conceptions of morality, find their place in a larger scheme in which the virtues have the central place; hence the cogency of the Nietzschean rejection and refutation of modern moralities of rules, whether of a utilitarian or of a Kantian kind, did not necessarily extend to the earlier Aristotelian tradition.

  Secreted within Marxism from the outset is a certain radical individualism. In the first chapter of Capital when Marx characterizes what it will be like ‘when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly Intelligible and reasonable relations’ what he pictures is ‘a community of free individuals’ who have all freely agreed to their common ownership of the means of production and to various norms of production and distribution. This free individual is described by Marx as a socialized Robinson Crusoe; but on what basis he enters into his free association with others Marx does not tell us. At this key point in Marxism there is a lacuna which no later Marxist has adequately supplied. It is unsurprising that abstract moral principle and utility have in fact been the principles of association which Marxists have appealed to, and that in their practice Marxists have exemplified precisely the kind of moral attitude which they condemn in others as ideological.

  In the first chapter of Capital when Marx characterizes what it will be like ‘when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly Intelligible and reasonable relations’ what he pictures is ‘a community of free individuals’ who have all freely agreed to their common ownership of the means of production and to various norms of production and distribution. This free individual is described by Marx as a socialized Robinson Crusoe; but on what basis he enters into his free association with others Marx does not tell us. At this key point in Marxism there is a lacuna which no later Marxist has adequately supplied. It is unsurprising that abstract moral principle and utility have in fact been the principles of association which Marxists have appealed to, and that in their practice Marxists have exemplified precisely the kind of moral attitude which they condemn in others as ideological.

  Each of the shorter-term intentions is, and can only be made, Intelligible by reference to some longer-term intentions; and the characterization of the behavior in terms of the longer-term intentions can only be correct if some of the characterizations in terms of shorter-term intentions are also correct.

  And the unity of a Virtue in someone’s life is Intelligible only as a characteristic of a unitary life, a life that can be conceived and evaluated as a whole.

  But to this I want to reply that the concept of an Intelligible action is a more fundamental concept than that of an action as such. UnIntelligible actions are failed candidates for the status of Intelligible action; and to lump unIntelligible actions and Intelligible actions together in a single class of actions and then to characterize action in terms of what items of both sets have in common is to make the mistake of ignoring this. It is also to neglect the central importance of the concept of Intelligibility.

  A central thesis of this book is that the breakdown of this project provided the historical background against which the predicaments of our own culture can become Intelligible.

• 📙 Being-In-The-World

  Traditional Ontology has always sought to understand the everyday world by finding something on the level of the occurrent, such as substance, sense data, or representations in transcendental consciousness, that is supposed to be Intelligible without reference to anything else, and then sought to show how everything else can be seen to be Intelligible because it is built up out of these self-sufficient elements.

• 📙 Learning From MacIntyre

  In Narrative so construed, we do not need an Intelligible plot with a beginning, middle and end: we do not all have to be Aristotelian tragic heroes. Rather, Narrative for MacIntyre, is a Story of repetition and re-creation: of our repeated efforts to get clearer on, perhaps revise and shape, and try to achieve our final ends.

• 📙 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

  The “last” philosophy, could there be such a thing, would not be a philosophy, as we know it, at all: it would be, if it were Intelligible, an odd kind of poem, or an odd kind of technical manual.

• 📙 The Spell of the Sensuous

  This new, seemingly autonomous, reflective awareness is called, by Socrates, the psyche, a term he thus twists from its earlier, Homeric significance as the invisible breath that animates the living body and that remains, as kind of wraith or ghost, after the body’s death. (The term psychê was derived from an older Greek term, psychein, which meant “to breathe” or “to blow”.) For Plato, as for Socrates, the psychê is now that aspect of oneself that is refined and strengthened by turning away from the ordinary sensory world in order to contemplate the Intelligible Ideas, the pure and eternal forms that, alone, truly exist.