COHERENT AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Temporal experience is inextricable from the universal human penchant for telling stories. The question,“who am I?” refers to the story of a life.
Selfhood can be viewed as the intersection of the narrative unity of autobiography with physical, bodily continuity through time.
Character emerges and evolves in the public arena. Personal identity is not a surface impression existing solely in our own heads. The way that we construe ourselves in moments of private subjectivity, whether meta-examined or not, is never far from the influence of the viewpoints of others. It is in this sense that we are co-authored. The identity of the self is not seamless. Having been cast into the world with others and facing an inevitable demise, we dwell in the vicissitudes of everyday experience. We cannot close the book except by suicide, but autobiography is revisable. Our predicament is to plot coherent stories about ourselves as we move forward, facing conflict, complexity and change.
Is the process of plotting a specific, coherent autobiography for ourselves any different from constructing synthetic knowledge in general?
Can we say that our narrative identity evolves over time? If so how reasonable is it to think in terms of a natural selection of competing alternative narratives? Does sanity itself depend on an ability to distil a coherent autobiography?
To what extent are we co-authored? How are our personal dispositions and emotional traits modified by our formative years in a specific culture?
Is it possible to adopt a radical solipsistic stance? If solipsism is a form of insanity, how might it be cured?
TWISTS OF FATE
A tragic reversal of fortune can temporally dwarf other chapters of a coherent life story. Traumatic experiences, like experiencing the ravages of war, or the sudden loss of a loved one, can leave us high and dry with the dogged task of rewriting the plot of our own life story. Previously settled autobiographical events may become irrelevant or given different emphasis. Our existing fore-structures of understanding are temporarily bulldozed by the severity of the event confronting us.
At first we feel powerless and seem to have no room for maneuver. The stress and painful emotions have a strong emotional presence. We project and recount scenarios endlessly. We fumble for a coherent way to, somehow, carry on. Only with the passage of a considerable amount of time will the overwhelming presence of a cataclysm fade.
SOURCES FOR COHERENT AUTOBIOGRAPHY
the way in which Dasein stretches along between birth and death. The ‘connectedness of life,’ in which Dasein somehow maintains itself constantly...
Ricoeur’s response to Heidegger hinges on the power of story-telling (1988: 246):
What justifies our taking of the subject of an action, so designated by his or her, or its proper name as the same throughout a life that stretches from birth to death? The answer has to be narrative. To answer the question ‘who’ as Hannah Arendt has so forcefully put it, is to tell the story of a life.
Ricoeur, Paul (1988) Time and Narrative, Volume 3. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Heidegger, Martin (1962) Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row. (Originally published as Sein and Zeit, 1926.)
French Philosopher [1915-2005 ]
[W]hat the agent is able to do and say intelligibly as an actor is deeply affected by the fact that we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives. Only in fantasy do we live what story we please. In life… we are always under certain constraints. We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making. Each of us being a main character in his own drama plays subordinate parts in the dramas of others, and each drama constrains the others.
Macintyre, Alisdair (1984) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Second Edition. Notre Dame, Indiana. University of Notre Dame Press.
Scottish moral philosopher [1927- ]
