Ricoeur and MacIntyre: On the Self

Abstract

Alasdiar Macintyre, and Paul Ricoeure both tried in their ethical concerns to reestablish the human person, the singular self as a conscious moral agent and connected this sense of self to the narrative. They differed on the claims for the self as established out of a literary structure, a text, by literary and historical means to specify the goals and organize the meaning of past actions and events. The literary narrative explains the present and leads like the plot of a novel to the future. It is precisely this closure of the text, possible in literature, but impossible in life which serves as the basis of Paul Ricoeur’s dispute with Macintyre. Ricoeure arguing from a phenomenological-existential point of view that the difference between literary fictions and the stories of lived experience is precisely the latter’s shifting boundries and lack of stability and totalizing functions as a singular totality. How Ricoeur borrows from, credits then builds upon the work of others is the objective of the following investigation.