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Narrative and
Self-Understanding
Edited by
Garry L. Hagberg
Narrative and Self-Understanding
Garry L. Hagberg
Editor
Narrative and
Self-Understanding
Editor
Garry L. Hagberg
Department of Philosophy
Bard College
Annandale On Hudson, NY, USA
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland
AG 2019
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and trans-
mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or
dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents
v
vi Contents
Index267
Notes on Contributors
ix
x Notes on Contributors
of the Self. She is the author of Philosophy, Literature and the Dissolution
of the Subject: Nietzsche, Musil, Atay (Peter Lang, 2014) and numerous
articles on related subjects.
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 relations
between literary narrative and self-understanding. Self-knowledge and its
philosophical questions have often remained within their domain, while
discussions of literature and fictional narratives 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
G. L. Hagberg (*)
Department of Philosophy, Bard College, Annandale On Hudson, NY, USA
e-mail: hagberg@bard.edu
or individual moral choice and engagement, while others assess the rele-
vance of literary texts for society-wide ethical concerns; a few incorporate
both approaches, moving between levels of the individual and the collec-
tive. In all cases, the authors chose their specific literary narratives 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 expan-
sion, 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 narra-
tives, both everyday and literary. First, he argues that the philosophical
attack on the value of narratives 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 narratives 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
4 G. L. Hagberg
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 observa-
tion 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 pur-
sues 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 reason-
ing, Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of George Sherston.
Íngrid Vendrell Ferran begins Part II (The Examined Mind) with an
exploration of Unamuno’s narrative fictions, seen as thought experiments
regarding the self and the self ’s emotions. The chapter begins by develop-
ing a notion of the thought experiment that is consonant with his under-
standing 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.
1 Introduction: Literary Experience and Self-Reflection 5
some way to be Anna, and to see one’s life as her life, so as to be changed by
experience of being her.23
23
Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1981), pp. 172, 173; emphasis in original.
24
However, when praising the richness of art, we ought not to forget the colourfulness of everyday
events, the meaningful tones and nuances in ordinary conversation, gestures and facial expressions.
Indeed, one could argue that no textual presentation can ever reach the complexity of everyday
(multisensuous) human encounters.
25
See also Bernard Williams, “Life as Narrative,” European Journal of Philosophy 17 (2007): 305–314
(310–311); Polkinghorne, “NSC,” p. 146.
26
See also Peter Goldie (TMI, pp. 161–173) for our “fictionalizing tendencies,” such as plotting out
our lives, finding agency where it is none, desiring for closure, and thinking in terms of genre and
character; and Strawson (“AN,” pp. 441–443) for our tendencies to form-finding, story-telling and
revision.
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