It seems the point of MacIntyre's exercise is to locate a premise of “unity” in the ways we have come to identify virtue and extend its moral, intellectual traditions (186). Nevertheless the implication of his work is that virtue often serves as a marker of difference and hence value between different kinds of activities and people: the broader, organized practice versus its mere metonymic action (187); those who let virtue breed goodness to sustain practices both internally and to a lesser extent externally versus those who let virtue breed vice as well as the disruption of practices and communities. Thus we can perhaps approach projects of enlightenment in a world often generally dubbed “post-modern” by questioning if virtue is a narrative of necessary difference, complex unity and integrity sought through pluralistic debate.

What makes education both a good and qualitatively "good?" How do we in respect of and sometimes in opposition to our university’s regulations take up MacIntyre’s crucial concern for what the notion of virtue entails? In other words, how does virtue operate in academic communities? Moreover, which virtues are privileged as being integral to practices of becoming a “whole,” self-knowing, successful citizen? In Humanities classrooms are we more caught up in the activity of delineating common ideas of virtue in opposition to other possible terms: i.e. investigating how each of us, in light of our respective material realities, can re-conceptualize potentially confining, elitist, uniform traditions of art, sport, intellectualism, science, etc.? Or are we educated to preserve traditional espousals of virtue, as MacIntyre does to a certain degree with Aristotle?

In "Morality Versus Ethical Substance" Jameson summarizes MacIntyre’s view: “individual conceptions of morality are dissolved in a vision of collective ethical substance; and indeed for MacIntyre the one great deficiency of Aristotle from any modern standpoint is the absence of from classical thought historicity” (151). Based on the short texts we have read this week, it appears unsound to judge virtue apart from tradition insofar as history itself is given the role of a temporal, aesthetic virtue for which complete adherence is not the absolute rule but rather a principle with which any artist, poet, philosopher or educator creating anew must exist in a state of tension. In T.S. Eliot’s words this is a relationship of “responsibili[ty]” and mutual “conformity” ("Tradition and Individual Talent" 15). If this is true, what occurs during transitions from one theoretical movement or critical mode to another? From modernism to post-modernism? From new criticism to new historicism? From feminism to post-feminism? From Marxism to Marxianism? Are these shifts somehow the work of virtue? Do we respect historical practices when we dismiss past methods as being outmoded and thus no longer indicative of today’s intellectual excellence?

What does it mean to enjoy a “whole human life” (MacIntyre 203)? MacIntyre himself admits that a complete understanding of virtue cannot be achieved by discussing practices and their effects (200-01). Arguably the question of wholeness may be approached through the topic of process. Whether it is the pursuit of “a certain kind of life,” a je ne sais quoi intrinsic to art (MacIntyre 190), or the “transmutation” (Eliot 19) achieved by the poet who gives away particular expressions of his/her ego to produce art which is generically emotional (22), clearly process and not product is attributed, here, with great ethical weight. Learning how to transform words, images and ideas is equated with not just the process of becoming human but with the work required to render this activity as “telos” (MacIntyre).

But why must there be violence involved in this transformation of the self into something that is other-than, more-than but less-than? However esoteric, Eliot’s concept of “depersonalization” (17) brings to mind fears of reification. The pained yet liberated artist/thinker trope has currency in academia, and it is even institutionalized: i.e. funding—or lack thereof— often determines how busy, how introverted and how social we will be, to what extent we will fulfill expected roles, uphold competing communities and potentially deprive ourselves of a so-called balanced existence: “a man may be so engrossed by his painting that he neglects his family…” (MacIntyre 200).