Abstract

László Tengelyi criticizes Alasdair MacIntyre’s conception of narrative in his book The Wild Regions of Life History. MacIntyre responds by asserting that Tengelyi’s position is compatible with his own. In this paper, I analyze MacIntyre’s claim by reviewing Tengelyi’s criticism, which is that experience is the locus of sense-making and narrative is derivative to it, and the role that narrative plays in MacIntyre’s philosophy, which I will argue is that of practical reason. This then leads me to agree with MacIntyre because practical reason, as a form of reflective discourse, is developed from lived experience without denying that lived experience is more primordial, according to the phenomenological tradition Tengelyi draws upon. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of this compatibility, such as narrative being an interpretive process, the possibility of breakdowns overturning forms of narrative self-understanding, and the fact that narratives cannot offer totalizing explanations of human action.