Judging from the amount of attention now given in our culture to "life-writing" of all sorts — autobiography, memoir, confession, diaries, journals, and that newest and loudest member of the family, the blog — it should come as no surprise that this interest has come to academia as well.  Indeed, among some academics it is not that new; James Olney's groundbreaking Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography was first published 35 years ago.  But Olney is a literary scholar, and this newest study is a collection of 13 essays by philosophers (all but one) on the autobiographies of Western philosophers, from St. Augustine to Bertrand Russell. 

As a collection it is uneven.  The essays vary considerably in quality, with three excellent pieces (the Introduction, and the articles on Augustine and Nietzsche) and four (on Abelard, Descartes, Hume and Russell) making either weak or inconclusive cases.  The remaining six essays, while sometimes tough sledding for those of us not formally trained in philosophy, are at least somewhat useful as an introduction (at a fairly high level) to the autobiographical writings of philosophers — masters of analysis, but not necessarily self-analysis (despite Freud's comment that "the degree of introspection achieved by Nietzsche had never been achieved by anyone, nor is it likely ever to be reached again").

            As philosophers, the contributors are interested in the philosophical content of the autobiographies they discuss.  The co-editor of the book, Thomas Mathien, writes in his introductory essay that autobiography may have five philosophical aims: confession, moral example, apology, consolation, and characterization of general human nature.  He then explains each of these in detail, providing examples from the literature.  What is most interesting about Mathien's essay, however, is not his overview but the idea that autobiography provides "a text to live up to".  In producing a particular account of his life story (no women thinkers are discussed), the autobiographer thereby becomes accountable for the reader's expectations. 

Departure from a course of action that can be described as a plausible continuation of the account will be inhibited.  Should such a departure occur, it will need explanation.  A life still open to many possible futures and a range of alternative accounts has been interpreted by a supreme authority.  As a result, future possibilities are limited, certain routes are barred.

While there certainly are, and must be, restrictions in the writing of autobiography (adherence to biographical fact being perhaps the principal one — and, lately, the most controversial), Mathien's formulation seems to suggest an overly-ethical reading of autobiography, and of the complex relationships between narrator, protagonist and reader that it entails.  If, as Nietzsche held, the writing of autobiography is productive rather than reflective of a self, then that self is more fluid and subject to revision than Mathien's account would allow.  Mathien himself notes that "the philosopher's autobiography is likely to be a transforming event even for its author".  So who is to say that this transformation ends with the writing of the autobiography?  And who is to say that the autobiographer is a "supreme authority" about her life?  She could also be seen as merely one author of it.  (A biographer, for example, or an autobiographical novelist, would author it quite differently.)

            This idea of the restrictions inherent in the autobiographical endeavor is taken up again in an excellent essay on St. Augustine's Confessions.  According to Samantha Thompson, Augustine shows us that behind every intellectual position is a desire; yet

nothing outside us makes us move; we are the origin of our own loves.  In this freedom, however, there is a kind of constraint.  We originate our loves, but we also follow them.  We cannot choose what we love; rather our choices are a manifestation of our loves.

In the Confessions, as Thompson reads it, God uses Augustine's manifold desires — both sacred and profane — to bring him to encounter certain people and texts, who then become the "material" of both his autobiography and the conversion that is its goal — just as people, and their stories, are the material of God's larger plan.

The Confessions forms a picture of interlocking human lives and stories, a mosaic of God's activity in the world through his creatures as it comes to a point to save a particular creature.

The mosaic formed by the essays — more discrete than interlocking — that comprise Montaigne's autobiography is a secular one, so the author deals with the implied vanity of autobiography in a different way.  Whereas Augustine could use God's plan, and his own eventual conversion in accordance with it, as the excuse for writing about himself, Montaigne — like Cardinal Newman 300 years later, as treated in Jay Newman's interesting essay — makes the refreshing proposal that self-examination is actually a form of modesty.  The writing of autobiography belongs to those who are not great, says Montaigne; the great have better things to do. (His standard is the lives of the great ancients.)  Montaigne is interested in the value of the "commonplace soul" — an "obscure mute life which slips by".  "The most beautiful of lives, to my liking, are those which conform to the common measure, human and ordinate, without miracles and without rapture." 

            As Mathien's Introduction noted, this emphasis on "the common measure" is one of the features of philosophical autobiography, which is concerned with arriving at a characterization of human nature — the general through the particular.  A similar impulse is at work in Vico's autobiography, which uses what Domenico Pietropaolo calls "synecdochic allegory": the individual is presented as a microcosm of the species, and "allegory is the device through which [Vico] can see his history in relation to the history of humanity", and can trace the evolution of both through what Vico calls "self-meditation" (and Montaigne called "self-examination"):

Self-meditation can enable us to understand that the cognitive and moral development necessary to a single individual in order for him to emerge from his fallen state is reflective of the one required by mankind as a whole to reach harmony of social being.

Self-meditation — and self-examination — are also practiced by Rousseau, not only in the famous opening of his Confessions, but also, as Eve Grace points out, at the opening of the autobiographical Reveries — though with a historically and philosophically significant difference:

I will perform on myself, to a certain extent, the measurements natural scientists perform on the air in order to know its daily condition.  I will apply the barometer to my soul, and these measurements, carefully executed and repeated over a long period of time, may furnish me results as certain as theirs.

Rousseau's interest in ascertaining his "inner" or "secret sentiments", Grace contends, was part of his rationalist, Enlightenment quest for a "science of happiness" — a project in which autobiography formed a crucial part.  (Compare the post-rationalist project of Freud, 150 years later). 

The first half of Mill's Autobiography shows us the dark side of such a quest, as well as its futility (at least in the rationalistic way Rousseau conceived it).  Mill's precocious, "corrosively" analytical education at the hands of his father produced a "mental crisis" (today we would call it a severe depression) when he was 20 or 21, from which he emerged through what Fred Wilson calls a course of "informal psychotherapy", involving the reading of autobiographical works by Marmontel and Wordsworth, and then meeting and falling in love with Harriet Taylor, who was married at the time (she later became his wife).  In the course of recovering from his depression, Mill came to believe that — despite the beliefs of Rousseau and the utilitarian philosophers, of whom Mill was one — happiness cannot be a goal in life, only a by-product of some other goal.

Did someone say happiness?  That most suffering of all philosophers, Nietzsche — plagued for much of his adult life by migraines, stomach and eye ailments, not to mention dementia at the end — had a vision of happiness that combined his personal trials and famous amor fati ("not merely to bear what is necessary…but to love it") into an expression of gratitude for his life that served as the beautiful epigraph for his autobiography, Ecce Homo:

On this perfect day, when everything is ripening and not only the grape turns brown, the eye of the sun just fell upon my life: I looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once.  It was not for nothing that I buried my forty-fourth year today; I had the right to bury it; whatever was life in it has been saved, is immortal.  The first book of the Revaluation of All Values, the Songs of Zarathustra, the Twilight of the Idols, my attempt to philosophize with a hammer — all presents of this year, indeed of its last quarter! — How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life? — and so I tell my life to myself.

Wright brilliantly shows us how this life, already so largely made up of books and writing, and presented in Ecce Homo as an interpretation (and re-interpretation) of Nietzsche's own earlier books, has with the writing of the autobiography been transformed back into writing again —  into "a literary persona", as Wright puts it: a kind of writing that denies the existence (or even the possibility) of a unitary self, which has made Nietzsche the darling — and progenitor — of deconstructionist critics.  In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche deliberately, perversely, humorously (and perhaps madly?) conflates himself, whoever that is, with the subjects of his writing.  He tells us that the essay "Schopenhauer as Educator" should be read as "Nietzsche as Educator"; that "the name Voltaire on one of my essays — that really meant progress — toward me"; and that in "Wagner in Bayreuth", "in all psychologically decisive places I alone am discussed — and one need not hesitate to put down my name or the word 'Zarathustra' where the text has the word 'Wagner'".

            What are we to make of this?  Two months to the day after completing Ecce Homo, Nietzsche collapsed in the street after tearfully embracing an abused old horse, and never regained his sanity — though he lived another eleven years.  Is the suggested substitution of himself (or his alter-ego, Zarathustra) for some of the other figures he writes about in his autobiography merely a sign of the syphilitic dementia that eventually killed him?  A sign, certainly — but not of pathology, says Wright.  Rather, it is a kind of reinterpretation of his earlier texts, by the writer himself, that Wright calls "externalization".  Wright takes as the illustrative figure for this act of "externalization" an extraordinary moment in Ecce Homo in which Nietzsche says, of the text of his book Daybreak, that it "lies in the sun…like some sea animal basking among rocks.  Ultimately, I myself was this sea animal."  Writing like this is worth a thousand diagnoses.  For Wright, the figure of the sea animal stands for a deconstructive process of reinterpretation "which reflects Nietzsche's denial of a fixed and enduring author-subject..  ..; meaning is decisively severed from author's intent and the texts are thereby liberated to say any number of different things."  Or, in Nietzsche's own words, from The Genealogy of Morals:

The cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it….

No doubt.  But I like the sea animal better.

Nietzsche is always a hard act to follow, and it is no different in this collection.  The next essay, on the historian and philosopher of history R.G. Collingwood, concludes — uncontroversially — that he sought a rapprochement between thought (philosophy) and action (history), and that the latter was more important to him than the former.  The study of history teaches us the principle of "extemporization", which Collingwood illustrates by the rather quaint example of "everybody's tailor":

Everybody has certain rules according to which he acts in dealing with his tailor….But so far as he acts according to these rules, he is dealing with his tailor only in his capacity as a tailor, not as John Robinson, aged sixty, with a weak heart and a consumptive daughter, a passion for gardening and an overdraft at the bank.

Insofar as historical knowledge is knowledge of particulars, it is equivalent to the historian's self-knowledge, gained through the study of history.  The historian then becomes what he studies:

If he is able to understand, by rethinking them, the thoughts of a great many different kinds of people, it follows that he must be a great many kinds of man.  He must be, in fact, a microcosm of all the history he can know.

This sounds much like Vico — in different clothing.

The concluding essay, on Bertrand Russell, fails to conclude anything, other than that Russell's Autobiography does not reflect his philosophy.  Three other essays in the collection — on Abelard, Descartes, and Hume — are similarly unhelpful.  From Donald Ainslie's comparison of Hume's parsimoniously short autobiography (a mere 21 paragraphs — but after all, he was a Scotsman) with other of his writings — including his greatest work, A Treatise of Human Nature — we learn that autobiography was not important to Hume, who

denies that we have special control over or insight into ourselves….instead…we are immersed in our lives, manifesting traits of character the effects of which might wholly pass us by.  On this Humean view, there is nothing special about autobiography, and the modesty that he shows in the "Life" is wholly appropriate.  An autobiography probably should not be anything more than a twenty-odd paragraph, cursory summary of the major events in the person's life.

No Proustian Hume — or Ainslie.  Fair enough — but should it take 18 rather laborious pages to conclude this? 

Calvin Normore's essay on Abelard purports to examine the question of "how we can be perfected through suffering" — a theme that the tragic Church doctor, who was involuntarily castrated after becoming the lover of his young student Eloise, knew perhaps better than anyone.  Yet in the end the essay fails to illuminate — or even support — its promising theme.  The essay on Descartes suffers from a like shortcoming.  Titled "Exile and Philosophy", it begins by calling attention to the fact that Descartes, like many philosophers (Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein), lived most of his life as an expatriate, and wrote his major works in exile.  From this the author, Andre Gombray, infers a "dialectic" in Descartes between "foreignness" and "intimacy".  This dialectic is invoked again at the end of the essay.  Yet we never learn exactly what the dialectic consists of — what the connection is between foreignness and intimacy in Descartes' philosophy.  The omission is especially frustrating since the question of the relationship between exile, foreignness and intimacy in Descartes — not to mention that between exile and philosophical productivity in general — is an intriguing one, and we are curious to know more.

One has the sense, reading the weaker essays in this book, of an unfortunate three-act production that never quite got off the ground, yet persisted to the end through sheer stubbornness.  The authors first agreed to contribute articles to the collection without clearly thinking about what it was they had to say on the subject of autobiography and philosophy.  Then they wrote essays that still didn't make clear what it was they had to say — if anything.  Finally, the editor somehow saw fit to include these essays in the collection.  The result, predictably, is a mixed bag.  Three of the essays — the Introduction, and those on Augustine and Nietzsche — are excellent, and several others (on Montaigne, Vico, Rousseau, Newman, Mill, and occasionally Collingwood) are worthwhile.  Whether the whole together is worth the price of admission is a question I will leave up to the buyer — unless she happens to be a librarian, in which case this book would be a good addition to holdings in both philosophy and narratology.

© 2007 Joshua Gidding

Josh Gidding, PhD, Dowling College, Long Island, New York.  (Josh Gidding is a failure).