Abstract

When Alasdair MacIntyre argues that moral argument is essentially narrative, he has given us an important new way to think about the moral life. He has also offered us a telling insight into what may be wrong with his whole project. That project is itself a narrative of "decline and fall," a sort of apocalypse, a Beginning and an End. ;Narrative: we begin our stories in a way that will allow us to get where we want to go. MacIntyre, it seems to me, wants to get to a deeply pessimistic account of the "modern" situation, which he calls an unparalleled moral catastrophe. In order to do so, he needs a narrative account of Greek origins--which is where the West "begins." ;By focusing upon the circularity of this argument, I mean to say that if MacIntyre's Beginning is wrong, then so may be his cataclysmic intuition of the End. This essay is an attempt to read the Greek past very differently, and less romantically, than he does--by concentrating on the concept of tragedy. ;Using MacIntyre--and to a lesser extent George Steiner--I have developed the notion of the "tragic posture," to which both thinkers succumb, on my reading. This posture has four chief characteristics: a romanticizing of the past; a disparaging of the "modern" present; a simplification of the Greek concept of tragedy, which also invokes tragic language in regard to the "modern" fall, and a belief that Christian and Greek, gospel and tragedy, are antonyms. We are given to believe that tragedy is about unhappy endings, that we are living in the midst of a tragedy, because we are "ending" badly, even now. I will argue--using Hegel's and Nietzsche's tragic vision, both absolutely grounded in Greece--that this fixation upon ending is neither Greek, nor Christian. ;It is, further, my hope that the recovery of an authentically "classical" tragic perspective may help us go some way toward undoing the tragic posture--which is in my view the only real or imagined "modern" catastrophe