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Political Theory
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BOOKS IN REVIEW
A FTER VIR TUE h ' A lasdair MacInt ire. Notre Dame: Universit ' of
Notre Dami1e Press, 1981. P. 252. $15.95.
315
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316 POLITICAL THEORY / MAY 1982
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BOOKS IN REVIEW 317
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318 POLITICAL THEORY / MAY 1982
virtues express the natural ends toward which human beings tend. W
would be at one with ourselves in expressing those virtues. But Macln-
tyre, trying to formulate a vision of the good life without this conception
of natural human ends, is forced to pitch his formulation at a very high
level of abstraction. The good life for "man" as such includes the virtues
of integrity and constancy; it is additionally "the life spent in seeking the
good life for man and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those
which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good
life for men is."
A Nietzschean would object not only to the abstract character of this
statement-it assumes the appearance of those abstract universals
which Nietzsche and MacIntyre both condemn as empty--but would
also charge that because telos has been drained from the modern
conception of nature, any effort to mold the self into a coherent, inte-
grated, virtuous self must be seen as the imposition of an artificial unity
upon an accidental phenomenon. And, as the contemporary Nietz-
schean Michel Foucault insists, the struggle to keep tiliS artificial produc-
tion intact will entail the denial, confinement, and treatment of "the
other" which does not fit into its frame. The modern theorist of virtue
becomes, on this reading, the unwitting agent of the bureaucratic, "disci-
plinary" society he condemns. And the bifurcated structure of the con-
temporary human sciences expresses (still on this reading) the gap
between the mode of explanation available to modernity to explain
bodily processes and the mode it requires to interpret action or deter-
mine responsibility.
I am not saying that the Nietzschean must triumph in this debate. I
am saying both that the response becomes treacherous after Aristote-
lian telos and Hegelian Geist have been lost and that Maclntyre has not
pursued this part of his assignment very far in the text submitted to us.
Until the gap between the modern conception of the body and its
conception of the subject has been reduced, the Nietzschean will have
space to deconstruct any theory of a "telos... constituting the good" of
the embodied human self.
If one combines these two central objections to Maclntyre's theory
one can hear the message inside the words of Zarathustra: "It is a
distinction to have many virtues, but a hard lot; and many have gone
into the desert and taken their lives because they had wearied of being
the battle and the battlefield of the virtues." The disturbance created by
this message is exacerbated when we consult Maclntyre's own conclu-
sion, formulated in the last paragraph of the text, that modernity is
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BOOKS IN REVIEW 319
-William E. Connoll/
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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