There has been a vast wave of work on narrative in the last decade: this work includes numerous volumes on the philosophy of narrative and its definition, on the place of narrative in literary analysis, on the sense-making power of narrative construction, on narrative in its evolutionary aspects, and on the relation between narrative and the constitution of personhood . However, one sees less work specifically on the relation s between literary narrative and self-understanding . Self-knowledge and its philosophical questions have often remained within their domain, while discussions of literature and fictional narrative s have with equal frequency remained within theirs. The time seems right to bring these topics together, a project that the present volume undertakes.
The problem of self-knowledge is of course one of universal interest; the nature or character of its achievement has been one continuing thread in our philosophical tradition since at least Plato . Just as the nature of storytelling, the assembly of individual bits of a potential story into a coherent narrative structure, has been central to the study of literature since at least Homer. But how do we gain knowledge from an artform that is by definition fictional, by definition not a matter of ascertained facts, as this would apply to the understanding of our lives? Initially, this may seem a rather blunt contradiction – fact does not derive from fiction . But in truth , on closer inspection it turns out not to be a contradiction at all. The sense-making structures that we observe, discover, analyze, reflect upon, and/or witness, in literature are mimetic at a foundational level – they themselves are drawn in their essentials from life. So it may be the case that when we see ourselves in the mimetic mirror of literature, what we see is not only a single character, not only a matter of identifying with a single protagonist, but also something on a larger scale. It may be a matter of recognizing long-form structures, long-arc narrative shapes that give a place to – and thus make sense of – the individual episodes of experience that we place into those structures.
But of course at precisely this juncture a pressing question arises: do we make that sense, or do we discover it? Or, as the chapters brought together here carefully and steadily reveal, is that bifurcated question itself perhaps too blunt, perhaps too crude, to accommodate the intricacies involved in the emergence of our narrative s of self-understanding? The making versus discovering dichotomy suggests that the entire process of arriving at a long-form self-narrative will be wholly one or the other, and thus wholly a matter of fiction (if the former, i.e. made and projected onto life) or fact (if the latter, i.e. discovered in the living of a life). But that dichotomy is as stern, as categorically mutually exclusive, as is the claim that fact is one thing, fiction another, and there is thus no possibility of capturing any truth of life in literary form or from literary experience. Every reader in a state of reflective absorption knows this simple division to be false – false by being too general, or too crude, or too blunt – and thus unable to capture what is of humane importance here. The chapters that follow are not delimited by this too-quick and too-ready categorization or conceptual picture. Indeed, they show in varied and individual ways how the matters at hand are far more interesting than any such dichotomy could accommodate. While some of the chapters descend into the detailed particularities of literary narrative s, others proceed by discussing broader themes to which the literary works discussed contribute. Similarly, some of the chapters discuss issues of self-understanding on the level of personal or individual moral choice and engagement, while others assess the relevance of literary texts for society-wide ethical concerns; a few incorporate both approaches, moving between levels of the individual and the collective. In all cases, the authors chose their specific literary narrative s because they saw contained within them significant insight concerning selfhood and the intricate processes of gaining self-understanding that seemed both to invite and to repay close scrutiny. Because the very concept of self-understanding is not unitary, not reducible to one single essence common to all cases, but is rather distributed across an instructively expansive range of human circumstances and situations, a multiplicity of approaches, interwoven with a multiplicity of narrative-textual examples, is what is called for: the concept of self-understanding calls for an expansion, and not a narrowing, of intellectual vision. Indeed, a rich mosaic of cases will show us much more than would any attempt at reduction or singular definition.
Diving directly into these issues, Jukka Mikkonen begins Part I (Self, Self-description, Story ) by observing that it is often simply assumed that narrative plays an important role in our understanding of reality and in self-constitution. But he also observes that recently, analytic philosophers have pointedly questioned narrative ’s epistemic value. His chapter thus initiates this collection by defending the epistemic significance of narrative s, both everyday and literary. First, he argues that the philosophical attack on the value of narrative s operates with problematic or unsound concepts. But second, setting in motion the underlying theme of this book, Mikkonen’s chapter intriguingly and more fundamentally proposes that the epistemic significance of narrative s is not to be explained in terms of knowledge , but rather of understanding .
Next, Nora Hämäläinen continues the discussion by noting that moral change as viewed within a historical perspective is a prominent theme in narrative literature, but this dimension of our moral lives has been left in the shade of what she calls a context sensitive universalism that guides the mainstream of moral philosophical readings of literature after Nussbaum , Murdoch , Diamond and Cavell , among others. By focusing on Robert Pippin’s reading of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, Hämäläinen’s chapter addresses the special way in which literature is a place for the philosophical exploration of the historicity of morality. And she argues in favor of making more space for what she calls the facticity of change in ethics and for subtlety detailed ethical readings of literature, which she sees not only as helpful but indeed as a necessary prerequisite for both individual and collective moral self-understanding.
Completing Part I, Samuel Clark begins his chapter with the observation that autobiography is a distinctive and valuable kind of reasoning toward ethical knowledge . But then how can autobiography be ethical reasoning ? Clark distinguishes four ways in which autobiography can be involved in reasoning: as clue to authorial intentions; as container for conventional reasoning; as historical data; and as thought experiment . But he then shows how autobiography can itself be reasoning, which he accomplishes by investigating its generic form. Autobiographies , as Clark analyzes the genre, are particular, enabling vivid display of and education in value-suffused perception . They are diachronic, enabling critique by ironic contrast. And they are compositional, enabling sense-making by placing events within a temporal structure. But these features alone, Clark observes, don’t distinguish autobiographies from novels. Should we therefore accept a deflationary or in a sense circular account of a fourth generic feature of autobiographies , that they are self-reflective , just to demarcate the contrast? Clark argues for something more: he instead pursues a more ambitious account of self-reflection and the distinctively autobiographical reasoning it enables, which, rightly understood, involves a realism constraint, a reflexive explanation constraint, and a unique kind of address to first-person problems of the self. He concludes his chapter with an interpretation of an exemplary work of autobiographical reasoning, Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of George Sherston.
Íngrid Vendrell Ferran begins Part II (The Examined Mind) with an exploration of Unamuno’s narrative fiction s, seen as thought experiments regarding the self and the self’s emotions . The chapter begins by developing a notion of the thought experiment that is consonant with his understanding of philosophy as a form of literature. Ferran next focuses on the philosophy of the emotions implicit in his major essay Del Sentimiento trágico de la vida, then turning to a case study of the particular emotion of envy in the novel Abel Sánchez. The chapter’s final section addresses different forms of knowledge about the emotions as conveyed by Unamuno’s fictional works.
Jeff Wieand begins his chapter by identifying and evaluating two opposed themes in Emerson’s writings about the human self: the self as one with the Over-Soul – with an emphasis on passivit...