What’s your story?

This often-asked question might indicate our curiosity about another person’s life; yet, by asking this question, we also make ourselves available for the other. Sharing our life stories requires trust and compassion – from both the listener and the teller. For example, can the person telling his or her story be trusted? Can they even trust their own memories? Are we giving them our full attention? Telling your story is also an introspective or moral evaluation of yourself. Do you become too judgmental and critical in your self-narration, or the opposite, do you exaggerate?

The anthology Philosophy and Life Writing deals with these questions and challenges. In the introduction, the two editors, D.L. LeMahieu and Christopher Cowley, write that philosophy and life writing are connected in that both investigate the relationship between abstraction and subjectivity, the limitations of language, and how accurately our memory can capture lived experience (p. 1). It could relate to how we might understand ourselves in light of certain ideals or norms, or how our first-person memories might differ from other people’s experiences. Who is right, and how right (i.e., true) can we be? 

The term “life writing” refers to a broad range of genres, such as memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, confessions, personal essays, and novels. What is at stake is not only what these stories about our lives say about us, but also how convincingly they can tell our stories to ourselves and to others.

The anthology consists of ten essays originally published in the journal Life Writing. For those familiar with philosophy, the essays discuss many well-known philosophers, spiritual people, literates, and writers, such as Teresa of Avila, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm Dilthey, Walter Benjamin, Albert Camus, Bryan Magee, Mikhail Bakhtin, Merleau-Ponty, and Judith Butler. Other notable thinkers, such as Agustin, Beauvoir and Sartre, are mentioned only in passing. 

All the essays are academic and are aimed at an academic audience including researchers and students; however, the essay on Camus and the last essay about trauma and Butler would also appeal to a broader audience. 

Philosophical life writing encourages the reader to think along. For instance, it makes us consider whether our “self” is a given essence, or whether it is constituted by our interrelationships with other people, places, and our historical place in time. Peter Antich argues in “Narrative and the Phenomenology of Personal Identity in Merleau-Ponty”, through the lens of Merleau-Ponty, that his distinction between the “pre-personal” and “personal” can help us understand how we can acknowledge – almost in a Heideggerian sense – that we are thrown into certain political classes, genders or racial structures. They simply existed before (pre-personal) we become conscious hereof (personal). Once we are aware of them, they might help us to understand our own story better, just as they might keep us rooted in a particular narrative structure, making us less open to new life forces. 

To really appreciate what is philosophical about life writing, it might be helpful to recall how the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy as “the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” (What is Philosophy?). “Concepts,” they write a few pages later, “are only created as a function of problems.” I believe the essays in the anthology are confirmations hereof. For instance, the various forms of life writing (confession, diary, novel) can, to some extent, be seen as concepts connected to problems; without which, they would have no meaning. This doesn’t mean that all kinds of confessions create the same concepts. Rather, this form of life writing is organized around certain concepts: whether a subject is autonomous or dependent, whether transparent self-knowledge is possible or not, or whether truth is given or constructed. The problem they all face is related to the struggle and limitation of obtaining self-knowledge. 

For example, in the essay “Self-management and Narrativity in Teresa of Avila’s Work” by Noelia Bueno-Gómez, who writes about Avila’s book The Book of Her Life, we can read that “herself is an object of daily hard work (in terms of self-reflection and self-improvement) and her subjectivity becomes an enlarged experimental space full of struggle and contradictions” (p. 5). 

Another example could be related to reading the confessions of Augustin or Rousseau, who operate with different objectives: Augustin is much humbler because he knows what is true beforehand; therefore, he aims to use his struggle in a both illustrative and educational way. In contrast, Rousseau seems keener about settling the score about himself; he much more openly debates the delicate relationship between lying and truth. Marco Menin, who writes about Rousseau’s confessions in “’S’éclairer en dedans’: Rousseau and the Autobiographical Construction of Truth”, emphasizes how fiction not only gives access to truth but also constructs it. Philosophy and literature filter through one another, he says. To study moral truth or construct a theory of the human being “one cannot but help make use of fictional tools” (p. 28).

Using fictional tools does not, however, make life writing a piece of fiction. And yet, according to Butler, then there are things in our life we can only guess about. “I am always recuperating, reconstructing, and I am left to fictionalize and fabulate origins I cannot know,” Butler is quoted for saying (p. 145). 

Butler, who has written about the limitations of one’s account of the past, not simply due to the lack of memory about our earliest years, but also due to our vulnerability: “the state of being open to injury, or being susceptible to being wounded” (p. 143). A crucial element is how we are exposed to violence (women and certain races more than men and other races), but also the vulnerability of all human beings when it comes to loss. The meaning of loss can take many forms: death, trauma, and illness that affects our memory or capacity to speak. 

Grace Whistler’s essay about Camus is perhaps the most obvious example of showing the relationship between fiction and philosophy. That is, by using fiction as a way to create a space of possibilities for sharing morally questionable actions, doubts or thoughts, which are meant not for the reader to condone, but rather to forgive or learn from. In other words, fiction can also enlarge the interpretative space of the reader. Camus’ famous revolt begins when he identifies himself with other men and women, saying “human solidarity is metaphysical” (p. 89). By witnessing suffering, Camus draws a line and says “no.” The point is, of course, that suffering doesn’t have to be based on his own experience; instead, through an emphatic identification with the others, he also can speak for those who lack words. 

The anthology’s last essay “Narrating Trauma: Judith Butler and Narrative Coherence and the Politics of Self-Narration” by Kurt Borg, returns to Butler to show how it might not be possible to tell a coherent story about ourselves. However, this doesn’t mean that we should not try, especially if a person is suffering a traumatic experience. There is obvious therapeutic strength in reconstructing one’s story after a traumatic incident, regardless the gray zone between truth and creative memory. 

The past is not something static we can consult like opening a drawer; rather, each re-collection edifies what happens due to new discoveries or stages in one’s life. For example, being a nihilist as a teenager might be regarded as cool; whereas, twenty years later it may be seen as merely naïve and interpreted as a crucial steppingstone in the development of one’s more mature attitude toward life. Perhaps, Benjamin describes the potential of the past best, when saying: “Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but its theatre” (p. 69).

This anthology can be seen as a variety of  invitations to interact with the theater of the past. 

© 2020 Finn Janning

Finn Janning, PhD, philosopher and writer.