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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: What Is a Philosophy of Autobiography?

Art Imitating Life Imitating Art: literary narrative and autobiographical narrative -Marya Schechtman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226268088.003.0001
[Fiction, Literature, Narrative, Persons, Peter Lamarque, Self]
Narrative views of the self have been criticized on the grounds that they make the implausible and dangerous assumption that our lives are like works of literature. This paper provides a response to this objection which acknowledges that there are important differences between life and literature, but insists that there are also philosophically significant similarities. Starting from a version of the objection offered by Peter Lamarque, the paper uses the film Stranger than Fiction as a jumping-off point to develop a revised narrative view. On this revised account persons are characterized by a narrative attitude toward their lives in which they simultaneously assume the roles of character, author, and reader. This attitude yields a kind of life narrative that infuses our lives with meaning, while avoiding the difficulties outlined by Lamarque. (pages 22 - 38)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
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A Person's Words: Literary Characters and Autobiographical Understanding -Garry L. Hagberg
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226268088.003.0002
[autobiographical understanding, relational selfhood, words in context, Milan Kundera, Iris Murdoch, self-knowledge]
According to a traditional Cartesian conception of selfhood, the human self, as a repository of inwardly knowable content, exists prior to and separable from any context, situation, or relation into which it contingently enters. Corresponding to this view is the conception of linguistic meaning as being wholly determined by the inward mental content of the speaker also independent of any external relations. In striking contrast to this, the relational conception of selfhood developed by the classical American pragmatists and others since sees the self as created within, and constituted by, the webs of relations into which it enters and within which it actually acquires its identity and its content. I suggest here that there is a parallel way of looking at words, and that to truly understand a person is in part to genuinely understand the webs of relations, references, allusions, connotations, cross-circumstance resonances, and so forth that give a person's words their meaning. This, I suggest, is close to what Wittgenstein referred to as "the field of a word", which he insisted is decisive in determining a word's meaning. Thus the understanding of a person biographically requires an understanding, with this relation-embedded complexity, of their words; and to understand ourselves autobiographically is to work through an understanding of our own words, our own ways of seeing meaning-determining relations. I examine these ideas in examples drawn from Milan Kundera, Iris Murdoch, and Rousseau, suggesting that what is at issue here in terms of human understanding is true in life just as it is in literature. (pages 39 - 71)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
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Body, Memory and Irrelevancies in Hiroshima mon amour -Christopher Hamilton
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226268088.003.0003
[Hiroshima mon amour, Weil, Spinoza, Body, vulnerability, mood]
The aim of this paper is to reflect on the way human beings tell the story of their lives by looking at a specific case of such, Alain Resnais' film Hiroshima mon amour. Partly by employing some fragments of the work of Simone Weil and Spinoza, and offering a new interpretation of the film, it is argued that the film draws attention to the way in which a human being is nothing more than his or her body. We can view ourselves this way in a certain mood but, generally speaking, we flee this knowledge of ourselves because it reveals our deepest vulnerability, knowledge of which we cannot bear. Hence, in fleeing it, we necessarily get things (partly) wrong in any autobiographical telling of our life, even as we seek to relate the truth. (pages 72 - 95)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
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Memory, Self-understanding, and Agency -Marina Oshana
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226268088.003.0004
[Memory, self-understanding, agency, self-government, identity, anterograde amnesia]
This chapter discusses the aspects of a person's identity or "selfhood" that must be available to the person, and the manner in which these must be available, in order for the person to function as a self-governing agent. One functions as a self-governing agent when one anticipates one's intentions as leading to action by way of self-monitoring behavior. This requires access to the beliefs, values, dispositional traits, memories, and skills that undergird the person's motivational psychology and that make possible recognition of oneself as a temporally-extended being. This affords a person a psychic connection with his past activity, enabling the person to think of himself, to treat himself, and to be treated by others as a being whose life stretches to the future. Case studies are employed to show that self-governing agency is largely absent in the lives of persons beset by disorders of memory. (pages 96 - 121)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
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Telling Our Own Stories: Narrative Selves and Oppressive Circumstance -John Christman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226268088.003.0005
[Narrative, Selves, Oppression, cultural identity, self-concept]
In recent decades thinkers from several fields of inquiry have claimed that selves or persons should be understood as essentially narrative in their structure. However, in many social conditions people exist without a surrounding linguistic or cultural milieu that recognizes and supports their own language of memory and self-definition. Insofar as narratives require a publicly intelligible language that makes sense of the story form that narratives embody, the existence of persons who live under conditions where their own internal sense of character and meaning has no resonance in the public culture renders the view that selves are nothing but narratives problematic. In reflecting on these phenomena, I discuss cases where people's memories and self-conceptions are in tension with the public standards of meaningfulness that would guide the intelligibility of personal narratives in the surrounding dominant culture. I argue that such cases complicate significantly the narrative understanding of persons. (pages 122 - 140)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
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Self-Deception, Self-Knowledge and Autobiography -Somogy Varga
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226268088.003.0006
[Self-knowledge, Self-deception, Autobiographical Writing]
Authors engaging in autobiographical projects are usually driven by a desire for a profound self-knowledge. However, the process of recollection and reflection that is involved in this process is prone to self-deception. This chapter addresses the issue of self-deception in the context of autobiographical writing. (pages 141 - 155)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
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Autobiographical Acts -DK Levy
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226268088.003.0007
[Autobiography, Wittgenstein, Murdoch, Ethics, Form and Content, Creative Work, Autobiographical Act]
I challenge a familiar view that the challenge in writing autobiography is the requirement to overcome self-deception, dishonesty and cowardice to recover the past. I locate a prior challenge concerning the decision to undertake the *act* of autobiography. The autobiographical act is a presentation in a medium, with a motive, conveying a judgment of the author's life. The act is integral to the autobiography because it gives form to the content. I argue that autobiography is a distinctive kind of creative work that necessarily implicates the author's moral authority in a moral judgment about her life. The challenge of the autobiographical act is finding creditable motives and secure means for the act and the judgment it conveys. The perils of this challenge mean *inter alia* that one should sometimes not write autobiography. I make my argument using extracts from Iris Murdoch's diaries and Wittgenstein's confession and remarks on autobiography. (pages 156 - 177)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
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Writing about others – an autobiographical perspective -Merete Mazzarella
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226268088.003.0008
[responsibility to others, understanding others, love and understanding, ethics and biography]
This piece is essayistic in two senses of the word: it is not academic and it is also tentative in its approach. It discusses the responsibilities which follow from writing about a person one loves - in this case my mother about whose life and death I wrote a book in 1992. It asks a number of questions: What difference does it make whether the person one writes about is alive or dead? What does it means to say that you understand another person? To what extent is a biography of a loved one also inevitably autobiography? Are there ethical problems involved in the rhetorical choices one makes in order to structure one's narrative – say, in turning other family members into minor characters? (pages 178 - 192)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
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From 'I' to 'We': Acts of Agency in Beauvoir's Philosophical Autobiography -J. Lenore Wright
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226268088.003.0009
[Simone de Beauvoir, Woman, Self, Other, Ontological, Rhetorical, Universal, Particular]
The aim of this chapter is to analyze the ways in which "being a woman"—being a woman philosopher, specifically—positions Simone de Beauvoir to produce a form of philosophical autobiography that is grounded in the self and the self-other relation. Beauvoir's dual stance—her "double voice" to employ JoAnn Pilardi's phrase—is rare in autobiographical work. To explore this element of her work, the chapter is divided into two parts: (1) I, Simone and (2) We, Women. Part One shows how Beauvoir's autobiographical reflections challenge traditional conceptions of the self by moving between the particular and the universal and jettisoning the self-other distinction. Part two maintains that Beauvoir's commitment to the particular generates a distinctive voice for women philosophers, one rooted in the ontological and rhetorical dimensions of phenomenal experience. By elevating concrete experience within her philosophical analyses, Beauvoir enacts agency in both a philosophical and a political sense. (pages 193 - 216)
This chapter is available at:
    University of Chicago Press
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Fraudulence, Obscurity and Exposure: the Autobiographical Anxieties of Stanley Cavell -Áine Mahon
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226268088.003.0010
[Stanley Cavell, Scepticism, Fraudulence, Obscurity, exposure]
Stanley Cavell has always urged philosophical writing to follow lines of the subjective and the intimately revelatory. His work on philosophical scepticism, in particular, develops with a personal urgency markedly at odds with the usual standards and styles of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. Áine Mahon follows these lines of the subjective from Cavell's earliest work on scepticism and modernism to his 2010 memoir, Little Did I Know; Excerpts from Memory. Pushing further on the philosopher's writerly risks and realisations, and distilling from his idiosyncratic oeuvre three guiding anxieties – "fraudulence", "obscurity" and "exposure" – in point throughout Mahon's discussion is Cavell's very paradoxical combination of the autobiographical and the philosophical, of the personal and the transcendent. (pages 217 - 236)
This chapter is available at:
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List of Contributors

Index