Abstract
In the innovative and engaging Philosophy, Literature and Understanding, Jukka Mikkonen investigates a range of developments in multiple disciplines that have complicated traditional debates between cognitivists and non-cognitivists about literature. To avoid the extremes this debate has fallen into, Mikkonen develops a middle course that grounds the cognitive value of literature in its contributions to cultural and self-understanding. As part of this argument, Mikkonen offers an account of how literature can contribute to self-understanding via its narrative form despite what he sees as deep differences between real-life and literary narratives. He concludes that literature can (obliquely) aid our understanding of emotions like grief due to their shared processual nature, and self-understanding generally through its artificiality, the awareness of which allows us to recognize and correct fictionalizing narrative tendencies in our life-narratives. While I agree with Mikkonen’s conclusions, I believe they are too modest and that he provides the resources to claim even greater cognitive benefits from literature. Focusing on what it means to ‘have a self-narrative’ and describing narrative work as it occurs both unreflectively and through self-conscious reflection, this paper argues that that the selectivity, interpretation, and revision said to fictionalize life-narratives are in fact critical to self-understanding, which requires imaginative engagement of the sort Mikkonen sees as characteristic of the practice of literature. This suggests additional and more direct potential cognitive benefits of literature for self-understanding than Mikkonen describes, strengthening and supporting his broader position.
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Notes
For a somewhat more detailed description of these activities see my book The Constitution of Selves (Marya, 1996).
See, e.g.,(Michaelian, 2016, pp. 123-200) It is also important to recognize that there are contexts in which genuine fidelity in at least some details is required for a memory’s success (e.g., eyewitness testimony in court). The larger story here will include sensitivity to context in memory reconstruction. The crucial point is that this is probably not the most common use of memory.
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Schechtman, M. Self-Narrative, Literary Narrative, and Self-Understanding. Philosophia 52, 11–20 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-023-00687-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-023-00687-0