Abstract
This essay attempts to sort out what is at stake in some of the quite different claims made on behalf of narrative: for example, the difference between the empirical claim that we happen to be creatures who understand ourselves through stories and the essentially normative claim made, for example, by Taylor, that it is a “basic condition of making sense of ourselves… that we grasp our lives in a narrative.” The essay argues that that the boldest earlier claims for narrative failed to take into account a distinction between the perspectives of narrativists and episodists—the former tending to construe a temporal integrity through numerous life events and the latter inevitably unable to see life as more than a series of disconnected episodes.
From Galen Strawson, Real Materialism and Other Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008) [first published in Ratio, 2004].
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Notes
- 1.
Sartre 1938.
- 2.
See e.g. 100 CE: 214–17 (473B–474B).
- 3.
1915: 562–3.
- 4.
The Episodic/Diachronic distinction is not the same thing as the Narrative/non-Narrative distinction, as will emerge; but there are marked correlations between them.
- 5.
Although a culture could in theory exert significant selective pressure on a psychological trait. For descriptions of revenge cultures see Blumenfeld 2003.
- 6.
- 7.
The sense of perpetual beginning is not at all a sense of perpetual inchoateness. That which is always launching out may be well or strongly formed and may be felt to be. Updike also talks in a Narrative fashion of our ‘religious … persistence, against all the powerful post-Copernican, post-Darwinian evidence that we are insignificant accidents within a vast uncaused churning, in feeling that our life is a story, with a pattern and a moral and an inevitability’ (1989: 216); and although this has no resonance for some, it fulfils a powerful psychological need in many and is common.
- 8.
I hope to discuss this in Life in Time. For a sketch, see Strawson 1997: §9.
- 9.
As noted, this difference tends to run alongside the difference between Narratives and non-Narratives, but is certainly not coextensive with it.
- 10.
Cf. e.g. Heidegger 1927.
- 11.
1910: 91.
- 12.
In an earlier published version of this paper I classified Joseph Conrad as Narrative, and this was cogently questioned by John Attridge in the Letters column of the Times Literary Supplement (10 December 2004). In his ‘personal remembrance’ of Conrad, Ford Madox Ford observes that ‘Conrad had very strongly the idea of the Career. A career was for him something a little sacred: any career .... A frame of mind, a conception of life, according to which a man did not take stock of the results of his actions upon himself, as it were at long range, was something that he had never contemplated’ (1924: 130–5). It seems, though, that this was an effort that Conrad made, something that did not flow from any natural Narrativity, something learnt, like the neatness of sailors, to which Ford compares it. Attridge notes Conrad’s ‘youthful indifference to the overall plot of his existence’, and quotes Conrad’s judgement of his youthful self as ‘not having any notion of life as an enterprise that could be mismanaged’.
- 13.
The term ‘I*’ and its cognates can function in phenomenological contexts to convey the content of a form of experience that incorporates the presumption whether or not the presumption is actually correct. I’ll omit the ‘*’ when it’s not necessary.
- 14.
It does not have any sort of ‘from-the-outside’ character (that would be a bit like my seeing a film of myself falling taken by a third party).
- 15.
1938: 64. Sartre is as much concerned with relatively short-term passages of life as with life as a whole.
- 16.
- 17.
Dennett (1988), Times Literary Supplement, 16–22 September.
- 18.
Schechtman 1996: 93, 119.
- 19.
1989: 47, 52.
- 20.
1989: 51–2. I reject the ‘because’ and the second ‘hence’.
- 21.
1989: 52.
- 22.
1990: 158.
- 23.
Excessive self-concern is much more likely to be the cause of religious belief in someone who has come to religion than in someone who has been born into it. That does not change the fact that religious belief in general, ostensibly self-denying, is one of the fundamental vehicles of human narcissism.
- 24.
1981: 203–4.
- 25.
One problem with it, and it is a deep problem, is that one is almost certain to get one’s ‘story’ wrong, in some more or less sentimental way—unless, perhaps, one has the help of a truly gifted therapist.
- 26.
1994: 190.
- 27.
1960: 9–10. Pessoa also experiences himself as not really having or being a specific self at all, and this feature, valued in many religious traditions, may well be positively correlated with Episodicity when it occurs naturally. Pessoa, however, experiences himself as multiply personalitied, and this is quite another matter.
- 28.
Shaftesbury 1698–1712: 136–7; Epictetus is an important influence.
- 29.
Taylor is explicit that it is when I am not ‘dealing with such trivial questions as where I shall go in the next five minutes but with the issue of my place relative to the good’, that ‘making sense of my present action … requires a narrative understanding of my life’ (1989: 48).
- 30.
I think this may be the greatest single source of unhappiness in human intercourse.
- 31.
There are, however, many interesting complications. See Life in Time.
- 32.
MacIntyre does not in the passages I have quoted explicitly say that the narrativity of a life requires Narrativity. In After Virtue he is particularly concerned with the idea that ‘to think of a human life as a narrative unity is to think in a way alien to the dominant individualist and bureaucratic modes of modern culture’ (1981: 211), and this remark was principally a criticism—an excellent one—of the social sciences of the time.
- 33.
From now on I will omit the qualification about ‘parts of one’s life’ and take it as read.
- 34.
‘Discern’, ‘apprehend’, ‘find’, ‘detect’ all have non-factive readings.
- 35.
Hubbard 1909: 32.
- 36.
I judge Stendhal to be strongly Episodic but subject to Diachronic flashes. Jack Kerouac is I think a clear case of an Episodic looking for larger form. There are also clear elements of this in Malcolm Lowry. Laurence Sterne makes comedy out of Episodicity. Jerry Fodor cites Anthony Powell, whom I have not read, as a fine example of an Episodic aspiring to Narrativity.
- 37.
It’s well known that fully conscious lies can forget their origins and come to be fully believed by their perpetrators.
- 38.
- 39.
- 40.
Brewer (1988) argues that the evidence that supports ‘the reconstructive view of personal memory … does not seem very compelling’. See also Wagenaar 1994; Baddeley 1994: 239; Swann 1990. Ross (1989) argues that revision that seems to serve self-esteem may be motivated by nothing more than a concern for consistency.
- 41.
1886: §68.
- 42.
- 43.
- 44.
See e.g. Pillemer 1998: ch. 2.
- 45.
For more formal evidence, cf. e.g. Wagenaar 1994, ‘Is memory self-serving?’.
- 46.
Even if we did all tend to see our lives in a favourable light, it would not follow that we were all revisers: some will have self-favouring, self-respect-preserving justifications of their actions already in place at the time of action, and so have no need for subsequent revision.
- 47.
Malamud 1979.
- 48.
1991: 418; my emphasis. Dennett takes the story to be primarily about who we are, and to that extent it seems that the word ‘account’ would do as well as ‘story’, even though it will refer to particular events in one’s life.
- 49.
Schechtman 1996: 96. This is a strong expression of her view, which has usefully weaker forms (cf. e.g. pp. 117, 159).
- 50.
1996: 117.
- 51.
- 52.
- 53.
Matthew vi. 34. This way of being in the present has nothing to do with the ‘aesthetic’ way of being in the present described and condemned by Kierkegaard.
- 54.
Note, though, how Tom Bombadil in The Lord of the Rings can produce a certain anxiety.
- 55.
1563–1592: 32.
- 56.
Op. cit. p. 33. ‘A second advantage’ of poor memory, he goes on to note, ‘is that … I remember less any insults received’.
- 57.
Wilkes 1998.
- 58.
Pritchett 1979: 47. I am grateful to audiences in Oxford (1999), Rutgers (2000), and Reading (2003) for their comments and to Alan Jenkins at the Times Literary Supplement.
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Strawson, G. (2015). Against Narrativity. In: Speight, A. (eds) Narrative, Philosophy and Life. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9349-0_2
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