Virtue or Ideology? Narrative Hexis Structure: A Temporal-Phenomenological Unification of Virtue Ethics and Critical Theory

This paper constructs a self-narrative ethics centred on the Narrative Hexis Structure (NHS), demonstrating how the ontological ground of virtue is derivable from the minimal structure of consciousness, and establishing on this basis a criterion for distinguishing virtue from ideology. The central derivation proceeds as follows: in its primordial form, intentionality is merely the capacity for distinction; intentional projection constitutes an intentional field, that which is distinguished lies within the field, and that which is not distinguished does not exist for the propositional. The origin of the intentional field, that is, the source of distinction, cannot but exist: to bear the propositional is to presuppose a source performing distinction as its premise. This argument addresses Husserl’s self-constitution of the stream of consciousness: even if the field is self-constituting within the stream of consciousness, constitution as a temporal activity already presupposes the presence of temporality, whereas the primordial form of the subjectobject antinomy is non-temporal; self-constitution is therefore inapplicable at this primordial stage, and the unavoidability of the source is unaffected by it. Yet this source is, by the closure of the field, drawn in as an object of projection — the subject, as the source of distinction, loses its identity as source when placed within the field, and is equivalent to the nonexistent when placed outside the field. This is the subject-object antinomy, a structural predicament at the purely logical level. After three logical response paths are shown to lead to unacceptable consequences, resolution can only depend on the sole temporal resource present outside the logical level: bodily temporality; temporality thereby acquires an ontological source independent of logical constitution, rather than being derived from a non-temporal constituting activity. Appropriation, the other aspect of intentionality, arises within this predicament as the capacity to place the subject-object antinomy, introducing temporality, and is underivable from distinction. The attrition of intentionality, as the interface through which bodily temporality passively permeates consciousness, causes the subject to encounter the anticipatory concept of “not-yet-absent”; the first appropriation of “not-yet-absent” simultaneously generates retention and protention, establishing the minimal causal chain, and the temporality of the persona is thereby generated as a constitutive part of consciousness. The NHS framework advances two levels of reconstruction of Husserl’s tripartite structure of time-consciousness: the present is the blank between retention and protention, not a temporal point that can be appropriated; and retention and protention have ontological asymmetry — retention is embedded in bodily temporality and has an objective ground, while protention is the subject’s directional inclination and depends on the completeness of the causal chain. On this ontological basis, the paper derives the structural conditions of the three functions of virtue: the individual coherence function corresponds to the continuity of the causal chain (the internal maintenance of temporality); the communal function corresponds to the sustained supply of objects appropriable by intentionality (the acquisition of external goods depends on the community’s mechanism of external goods distribution); the critical function corresponds to the correctability of the causal chain (a closed causal chain can only be maintained through defensive repetition and will eventually collapse). The three functions are derived directly from the conditions of the persona’s temporality, not imposed as external ethical requirements. The paper simultaneously derives the ontological ground of the persona’s will toward absence: “notyet-absent” is the generative condition of the persona’s temporality; in the recurring nontemporal unfolding of the subject-object antinomy