The other strand of our modern condition, MacIntyre calls "genealogy." For the genealogists with their hermeneutic of suspicion the claims of the encyclopedia project to base ethics in reason, in emotion, or in committed choice appear (justifiable so) as hollow and suffering from bad faith. The genealogists (perhaps beginning with Frederick Nietzsche) conclude that the very claim of objective truth is an arbitrary will-to-power. There is no final truth, only the positioning of social groups, each seeking their own piece of the pie. "Truth" is power, discovered by uncovering opponents’ hidden "genealogies," their suspect claims or secret motives. One gains power by deconstructing the other side’s claims to truth. For some, people are products of psycho-social and cultural economic forces; hence, there is not even a real self and no life narrative to which one is accountable.
However, as MacIntyre points out "the genealogist's narrative presupposes enough unity, continuity, and identity to make such disowning possible" (214). In other words, the claim that we are finally nothing but predetermined social and biological fictions itself requires an observational stance beyond "the myth of consciousness."
As Charles Taylor notes, "[A] person without a framework altogether would be outside our space of interlocution; he wouldn't have a stand in the space where the rest of us are. We would see this as pathological."
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