I Write about Myself, Therefore I Am

Are we really who we think we are?  Is the face we present to the world a reflection of our "inner self", or just a social mask?  Is the "self" something inherent in us, or something we construct?  These are philosophical questions that may occur to anyone who reads (or writes) autobiography, memoir, or personal essays; and, to judge from the volumes of "life writing" being published these days, that's a lot of people.  J. Lenore Wright's book The Philosopher's "I": Autobiography and the Search for the Self is not aimed at most of them.  It is a scholarly study of autobiographies by five philosophers — Augustine, Descartes, Rousseau, Nietzsche and Hazel Barnes (for whose presence in this pantheon Wright does not, in my opinion, make a convincing case), written primarily for an academic readership.  But it does contain some ideas that may be of interest to a more general audience, and I'll begin with these.

          Throughout the book, Wright talks about autobiography — both the writing and the reading of it — as a way of coming to know ourselves.  Autobiographical writing has the power not only to reflect but to shape the self.  Through writing, we

mitigate the possibility of forgetfulness…by creating a personal identity through language…..Writing autobiographically springs from the psychological and ontological structure of our being. 

As a writer, reader and teacher of autobiography, I find these ideas congenial; but I wonder if Wright is preaching to the choir when she says, "To understand both who and what we are, we must translate identity into self-narration".  Must a car mechanic, or a stockbroker, or a chef, engage in self-narration in order to understand who they are?  I suppose it all depends on how you define "self-narration", which could be understood to include all the stories we tell about ourselves, in whatever form we tell them.  Yet Wright's study focuses only on literary forms, because

self-reflection is richest when undertaken in narration, wherein literary and rhetorical devices…can raise questions of identity and essence by reflecting on the self we deposit in our writing.

          The idea of the self as a literary "deposit", rather than something that is a "true" reflection of an essential identity, is important if we are to understand autobiography as an act of creation — something "fruitful" — rather than the mere transcription of the "facts" of a life.  What matters, Wright says,

is not whether the propositional content of self-representation is true or false, but whether the self-image presented is fruitful or not, that is, whether it generates self-knowledge and/or contributes to our understanding of the self and its relation to others.

Self-understanding, for both writer and reader, is not merely analytic but also creative — a point that Wright develops from the philosopher Gadamer, for whom "understanding a text mimics understanding the self; it is a process of both discovery and creation".  The book's conclusion is particularly good.  Rather than just living out our autobiographical accounts (or perhaps just writing up what we have already lived out), "we live up to them," says Wright:

We strive to unify our selves and provide continuity to our experiences through self-reflection and self-narration…[but] self-narration does not culminate in self-knowledge; rather, it initiates an ongoing process of self-knowledge…By both discovering and creating ourselves, we implicate ourselves in the process of self-knowing and artful living.

Just what exactly Wright means by "artful living", however — and it is a phrase that appears throughout her book — is never quite clear.  It seems to have something to do with creating oneself; but she also seems to assume a more specific meaning, which remains elusive for the uninitiated.  (I will return to this point in a moment.)

          To see the self as at least partly created is to take a position in a philosophical debate over the nature and epistemology of the self, and one of the purposes of Wright's book, as her subtitle indicates, is to present an account of the evolution (or, to use Nietzsche's word, "genealogy") of our ideas of the self.  In this genealogy, she identifies two fundamentally different perspectives: the "essentialists" and the "constructivists".  The former, represented by Augustine and Descartes, hold that the self (what Wright calls the "writer-self") is something inherent, discoverable through introspection, and therefore — philosophically speaking — "ontological".  This conception of the self Wright calls the "Inner self".  Constructivists, epitomized by Nietzsche (and the textually-oriented approach that he inspired, including Derrida and Foucault), believe that the self is something constructed through language, and therefore "rhetorical".  Wright calls this constructed self the "Outer self", and its creator the "author-subject". 

Wright sees Rousseau as a transitional figure, mediating between these two different accounts of the self, while anticipating — to a greater degree than Descartes, even — the split self (or "bifurcated self", Wright calls it) of modernity.  The particular kind of self that Rousseau both reveals and constructs in his Confessions Wright calls a "historical figure", someone whose identity consists partly of his public record (including the social relations, letters, documents, of the "writer-self") and partly of the persona, or "author-subject", constructed by readers of his autobiography.  Earlier in her book, Wright identifies Rousseau as "an essentialist with constructivist tendencies"; though at the end she switches priorities: "Self-reflection for Rousseau is an act of creation disguised as an act of discovery".  Either way you choose to have it, the discussion of Rousseau provides the hinge in the book between the essentialists Augustine (self equals memory, which is ultimately the memory of God) and Descartes (thought is the essence of self — the famous Cartesian "cogito, ergo sum"), and the constructivist Nietzsche, for whom the self is a rhetorical, literary product of the instinct to create, another term for the "will to power".  Writing, for Nietzsche, is not so much the assertion of a self as it is the overcoming of the self.  In his own words: "Writing ought always to advertise a victory — an overcoming of oneself which has to be communicated for the benefit of others."  According to Wright, Nietzsche's Ecce Homo is the first "anti-autobiography":

Nietzsche posits many author-subjects and ascribes contradictory claims to them….his multiple self-presentations give style rather than unity to the author-subject he projects.

The focus on style rather than unity in a philosophical autobiography is a feature of what Wright, following Alexander Nehamas, calls "artful living", or "living artfully".  Early in her introduction, Wright comes as close as she ever will to explaining this term:

Extending the analysis of Alexander Nehamas in The Art of Living, I argue that autobiographical philosophers form a collective of uncommon, idiosyncratic, and artful thinkers who use self-narration as a method of self-examination.

Unfortunately, readers who haven't read Nehamas' book (and I was one) will feel left out, because Wright never fully explains what is meant by this recurring phrase.  Nehamas himself is more helpful.  In the introduction to his book, subtitled "Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault", and containing chapters on Montaigne and Nietzsche as well, he tells us that the "art of living" is what philosophers who live their philosophy do: it is philosophy as a way of life.

People become philosophers because they are able and willing to be the best human type and to live as well as a human being possibly can.  What one believes and how one lives have a direct bearing on one another….The philosophers of the art of living make the articulation of a mode of life their central topic….Those who practice the individualistic art of living need to be unforgettable….Philosophy as the art of living began with Socrates.

These are refreshing thoughts, and clearly have inspired Wright's study of her five "unforgettable" philosophers.  But a fuller explanation of her use Nehamas would have been welcome.  Perhaps the omission was a deliberate one, though, considering her book's primary audience: academic philosophers who might already be expected to be familiar with the term, and its author.  This brings up another minor fault of the book, to which scholarly studies are all too often prone: convoluted jargon.  I will be merciful and provide only one brief example: "We reenact the discursive act invoked in creating [Augustine's] Confessions by instantiating a dialogue that is semiotically related to the text."  I have no idea what this sentence means — and I too am an academic.  It reminds me of the sort of stuff I had to read when I was working on my dissertation, eons ago. 

Which is why, I suppose, I shouldn't be too hard on Prof. Wright.  Her intellect possesses all the vigor and fervor of youth, and her subject is timely and interesting.  If her prose sometimes suffers from the occupational hazards of our profession — well then, she has lots of time to work on it.  She just needs to be careful not to let her professorial "author-subject" get in the way of her inherent "writer-self".  Or is it the other way round?

© 2008 Joshua Gidding

Joshua Gidding, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English, Dowling College, is author of Failure: An Autobiography.

Comment on this review