Planificación

Bearing in mind the foregoing account of MacIntyre’s thought, one might draw the conclusion that MacIntyre’s own method of enquiry is tradition-constituted and that this is what particularly defines his work. It might then also be thought that for a researcher to follow a MacIntyrean line of enquiry, his or her research design should likewise be characterised by being tradition-constituted. But this would be only part of the story.

It is, by MacIntyre’s account, all but impossible for anyone to undertake any enquiry whatsoever which is not tradition-constituted, whether that tradition be Foucauldian postmodernism, Husserlian phenomenology or British empiricism. We could say, perhaps that MacIntyre insists that the enquirer declare from within which tradition they

14For instance, by the word ‘integrity’ bankers mean something very different thing from what Aristotelians mean, and an understanding of this is essential to the research. It is not similarly essential for the researcher to understand the formulae by which the statistics of the M3 money supply are calculated.

are making their enquiry, but then this would be no more than is normally required of any PhD in social science. The language varies, of course. Cresswell (2004, p. 5), in offering researchers a menu of five ‘approaches’ appropriate for qualitative research for them to choose amongst, says that he used to call them ‘traditions’. A central part of MacIntyre’s thesis is that enquiry is as a matter of historical fact tradition-constituted, whether we like to think so or not, and it seems mainstream social science agrees with him in this respect.

What is distinctive about MacIntyre’s own procedure of enquiry and argument is not just that it is undertaken from the standpoint of some tradition or other, but that it is philosophy in the form of narrative enquiry. The core thesis which he seeks to develop in his major works is that enquiry which is consciously tradition-constituted is superior to either encyclopaedia or genealogy. His means of developing that thesis is narrative.

Tradition-constituted enquiry is always historically situated and can only properly unfold through the telling of a sequence of events, which give a context for interpretation.

The narrative procedure of MacIntyre’s philosophy

This is made very clear in the opening chapter of After Virtue, in which he sets out what his method will be, and it is a method which he continues to pursue in his next two major works, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. At the start of After Virtue, MacIntyre (2007) sketches out his well-known apocalyptic scenario of a world which is intellectually so disordered that it cannot detect its own disorder. He paints a picture of a fictional future, in which, due to a global catastrophe, the resources of natural science have been lost. In time, an attempt is made to restore them but, by this point, knowledge of those sciences has been so eroded that only fragments remain. No one has a sufficient understanding anymore to be able to reconstruct those fragments into a restored whole, so that people debate the merits of this or that theory or principle, but with no real idea of how the whole system originally functioned. Disputes are rendered both irresolvable and futile. Any

philosopher of science in this state of affairs will offer no more resources than anyone else; without a knowledge of the original system which made sense of the fragments now in play, all that philosophers will be able to do will be to analyse and articulate the status quo. MacIntyre compares this fictional future for the natural sciences with what he diagnoses as the actual state of moral philosophy now; we do in fact now live with and debate with the fragments of what used to be a coherent whole moral system, and because we do not understand the way that those elements once fitted together into a whole and functioning system, we live in a state of intellectual chaos in which we can

In this context, MacIntyre not only portrays moral philosophy as incoherent, but also portrays contemporary philosophy more generally as unable to offer any resolution, since both analytical and phenomenological approaches to philosophy are capable only of describing and articulating what they encounter in contemporary language and in social life. It is only through a historical and narrative approach to philosophy that any adequate diagnosis can be offered:

‘In the real world the dominant philosophies of the present, analytical or phenomenological, will be as powerless to detect the disorders of moral thought and practice as they were impotent before the disorders of science in the imaginary world. Yet the powerlessness of this kind of philosophy does not leave us quite resourceless. For a prerequisite for understanding the present disordered state of the imaginary world was to understand its history…[in a sense which] Hegel called philosophical history and what Collingwood took all successful historical writing to be… We shall have to ask whether we can find in the type of philosophy and history propounded by writers such as Hegel and Collingwood - very different from each other as they are, of course - resources which we cannot find in analytical or phenomenological philosophy.’ (MacIntyre, 2007 pp2-3)

In Chapter 1 of After Virtue the primary device used to make MacIntyre’s argument for the method of argument which he then proceeds to employ is itself a fictional

narrative¹⁵, and this is explicitly self-referential. MacIntyre is using a narrative method to argue for the strength of that method.

Without further preamble, MacIntyre then writes After Virtue in exactly this way, combining history and philosophy in order to present his argument about the current state of moral philosophy. MacIntyre’s own procedure does, of course, very directly concern history in an academic sense, but this does not exclude narratives of other kinds, including biography, autobiography, fiction and drama. All of these are legitimate sources of understanding, and in After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? MacIntyre uses different types of narrative to suit his purpose at

appropriate points, whether that be Jane Austen’s novels, Sophocles’ tragedies, Thucydides’ history or Homer’s poems. In each case, he is interested not only in the story which first presents itself, but also the stories behind the story: Why did

Thucydides write his History of the Peloponnesian War the way that he did? What was it in the changing social structures of 5th Century Athens that enabled Sophocles to write the dramas that he wrote, and what changes to social structures did Sophocles enable in writing the way that he did? MacIntyre is always interested in situatedness,

15 It is striking in this context how close his procedure is to what Williams (2002) describes as his own method of fictional genealogy.

so much so that when he considers and criticises Hume in Chapter XV of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, he spends as much time on Hume’s biographical story as on Hume’s philosophical writing.

Narrative in empirical enquiry

It follows that any researcher wishing to follow a MacIntyrean line of enquiry must employ a narrative technique in some respect. This does not have to be history in an academic sense, but it does need to involve the hearing and telling of stories. In a research interview, the researcher will be interested in their interlocutor’s story and the context in which that story unfolds; and in the presentation of findings, narrative will play an important part in explaining and justifying any theses which emerge.

It follows also that the questions which are characteristically MacIntyrean are not strictly the questions of phenomenological philosophy concerning personal lived experience nor the questions of analytic philosophy concerning linguistic structures, although MacIntyre is concerned with these questions too. Rather, MacIntyre’s characteristic questions are ones of narrative causation and meaning in the context of the unity of a human life: ‘I can only answer the question “What am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”’ MacIntyre (2007, p.216). We rightly think of questions of practices and institutions, excellence and effectiveness, traditions and rationality as being characteristic of MacIntyre’s project, but these more specific questions only arise as they do after the basic questions of life narratives have been pursued.