Abstract
It has become a commonplace that narrative plays an important, even essential role in our understanding of reality and ourselves. Recently, however, analytic philosophers have questioned narrative’s alleged epistemic value. This essay defends the epistemic significance of narratives, everyday and literary. First, it will argue that the philosophical attack on the value of narratives operates on problematic concepts. Second, it proposes that the epistemic significance of narratives is not to be explained in terms of knowledge but understanding.
An earlier version of this paper was published in Finnish in the philosophical journal niin & näin 3/2016. I want to thank the Finnish Cultural Foundation for funding the Cognitive Relevance of Aesthetics project (2016–2018) which this article is a part of.
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Notes
- 1.
I will use the terms narrative and story interchangeably. Also, I will use synonymously the terms self, person and personal identity.
- 2.
Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), preface; hereafter abbreviated LM.
- 3.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007 [1981]), pp. 211 & 215–218; hereafter abbreviated AV.
- 4.
Daniel Dennett , “Why Everyone is a Novelist,” Times Literary Supplement 16–22 Sept (1988): 1028–1029 (1029). MacIntyre , for his part, thinks that we are never more than “co-authors” of our narratives , as we cannot decide the “plot ” of our life by ourselves (see AV, p. 213). David Polkinghorne is more modest: we are narrators, not authors, of our “self-stories,” as “we do not control all the circumstances that affect the outcome of those stories” (Donald E. Polkinghorne, “Narrative and Self-Concept,” Journal of Narrative and Life History 1 (1991): 135–153 (146); hereafter abbreviated “NSC”). Marya Schechtman thinks that we should look at our self-narratives from the point of view of a character, author, and critic, see “The Narrative Self,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Self, ed. Shaun Gallagher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 413–415.
- 5.
David J. Velleman, “The Self as Narrator,” in Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism. New Essays, ed. John Christman & Joel Anderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 56–76 (58).
- 6.
Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 1–21 (5); see also Jerome Bruner, “Life as Narrative,” Social Research 71 (2004) [1987]: 691–710 (692).
- 7.
Jerome Bruner, Making Stories. Law, Literature, Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 89; hereafter abbreviated MS.
- 8.
Martin Kreiswirth, “Merely Telling Stories? Narrative and Knowledge in the Human Sciences,” Poetics Today 21 (2000): 293–318 (311); James Phelan, “Editor’s Column. Who’s Here? Thoughts on Narrative Identity and Narrative Imperialism,” Narrative 13 (2005): 205–210 (206).
- 9.
See e.g. Paisley Livingston, “Narrativity and Knowledge,” in The Poetics, Aesthetics, and Philosophy of Narrative, ed. Noël Carroll (Malden: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 25–36.
- 10.
Peter Lamarque , The Opacity of Narrative (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014), 63–64; hereafter abbreviated TON. In Lamarque’s view, “impression given by the term ‘narrative ’ is of a complete, rounded story with a beginning, middle and end that helps make sense of complex events. The model is historical narrative or the complex narratives of fiction . But personal narratives virtually never attain completeness, closure or unity” (p. 64).
- 11.
See Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1980 [1975]), p. 123.
- 12.
Peter Goldie, The Mess Inside. Narrative, Emotion, & the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 148; hereafter abbreviated TMI.
- 13.
Galen Strawson, “Against Narrativity,” Ratio 17 (2004): 428–452 (443); hereafter abbreviated “AN.”
- 14.
For criticism of the psychological support which Strawson cites for his claim, see Paul John Eakin, “Narrative Identity and Narrative Imperialism. A Response to Galen Strawson and James Phelan,” Narrative 14 (2006): 180–187 (184); hereafter abbreviated “NINI.”
- 15.
Crispin Sartwell, for one, claims that we may become trapped in our narratives , being unable to live in the present, see End of Story. Toward an Annihilation of Language and History (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), chs. 1 & 2.
- 16.
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage International, 1989), pp. 23–24.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Edward Shils, Tradition (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 51; hereafter abbreviated T.
- 19.
David Novitz aptly remarks that even introspection is not just about remembering. Rather, Novitz points out that what we can recall about our past depends greatly on the questions we ask ourselves, whereas the questions depend on our purposes in asking them; purposes, in turn, are largely shaped by social influences. David Novitz, The Boundaries of Art: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Place of Art in Everyday Life (Christchurch: Cybereditions, 2001 [1992]), p. 115.
- 20.
See Dan Zahavi, “Self and Other. The Limits of Narrative Understanding”, in Narrative and Understanding Persons, ed. Daniel D. Hutto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 179–201 (181–182). See also Bruner, MS, pp. 65–66 & 69.
- 21.
Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 64; cf. p. 47; hereafter abbreviated NS.
- 22.
Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978), 103; see also p. 104.
- 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.
- 27.
Cf. Jeanette Bicknell, “Self-Knowledge and the Limitations of Narrative,” Philosophy and Literature 28 (2004): 406–416 (415). Our lives might resemble novels, “but bad ones, cluttered and undisciplined ones,” says David Carr (“Life and the Narrator’s Art,” in Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, ed. Hugh J. Silverman & Don Ihde (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985), pp. 108–121 (115)). Paul Ricœur , in turn, reminds one of the distinctive temporality of literary narratives (story/plot distinction, iterativity) in his Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 160.
- 28.
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.136. See Roquentin’s encounter with the root of the chestnut tree in Sartre’s Nausea. For “viscosity,” see also Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Être et le Néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), pp. 646–662.
- 29.
See Goldie, TMI, 70–72. Noël Carroll remarks that we can think of closure as a phenomenological impression of finality, see “Narrative Closure,” Philosophical Studies 135 (2007): 1–15 (4–5); David J. Velleman, in turn, identifies closure with emotional resolution, see “Narrative Explanation,” The Philosophical Review 112 (2003): 1–25 (6–7).
- 30.
The conception of narrative based on coherence and unity is highly contested in literary studies as well as in social sciences, see e.g. chapters in Beyond Narrative Coherence: An Introduction, ed. Matti Hyvärinen, Lars-Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo & Maria Tamboukou (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Company, 2010) and Matti Hyvärinen, “‘Against Narrativity’ Reconsidered,” in Disputable Core Concepts of Narrative Theory, ed. Göran Rossholm & Christer Johansson (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 327–345 (328–330).
- 31.
Paul Ricœur , “History as Narrative and Practice,” Philosophy Today 29 (1985): 213–222 (214). Likewise, the critic Roy Pascal claims that “autobiographies offer an unparalleled insight into the mode of consciousness of other men. Even if what they tell us is not factually true, or only partly true, it always is true evidence of their personality ” (Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 1).
- 32.
Paul John Eakin , Fictions in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 3; see also Eakin (How Our Lives Become Stories. Making Selves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), ch. 2) and Eakin (“NINI,” p. 181). For a view of plasticity and procedurality of identities in autobiographical writing, see Martin Löschnigg, “Postclassical Narratology and the Theory of Autobiography,” in Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, ed. Jan Alber & Monika Fludernik (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), p. 262.
- 33.
Nonetheless, autobiographies depict events of which many can never be verified; and where there have been witnesses to the reported events, their testimonies are also subject to interpretation and assessment.
- 34.
Catherine Z. Elgin, Considered Judgment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 123; Catherine Z. Elgin, “Understanding and the Facts,” Philosophical Studies 132 (2007): 33–42 (35–36); hereafter abbreviated “UF.”
- 35.
See Neil Cooper, “The Epistemology of Understanding,” Inquiry. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 38 (1995): 205–215 (213); hereafter abbreviated “TEU”; Catherine Z. Elgin, “Art in the Advancement of Understanding,” American Philosophical Quarterly 39 (2002): 1–12 (3–5); hereafter abbreviated “AAU.”
- 36.
See e.g. Linda Zagzebski, “Recovering Understanding,” in Knowledge Truth, and Duty. Essays on Epistemic Justification, Responsibility, and Virtue, ed. Matthias Steup (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 235–251 (241 & 244); hereafter abbreviated “RU”; Linda Zagzebski, On Epistemology (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2009), pp. 144–145; Jonathan L. Kvanvig, The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 96–97 & 192; hereafter abbreviated TVKPU.
- 37.
See Cooper, “TEU,” 206; Catherine Z. Elgin, “From Knowledge to Understanding,” in Epistemology Futures, ed. Stephen Hetherington (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 199–215; Elgin, “UF,” pp. 33–42.
- 38.
Elgin, “AAU,” p. 11; see also Catherine Z. Elgin, “True Enough,” Philosophical Issues 14 (2004): 113–131 (131); hereafter “TE”; Elgin, “UF,” p. 38; Catherine Z. Elgin, “Is Understanding Factive?,” in Epistemic Value, ed. Duncan Pritchard, Allan Miller & Adrian Hadock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 322–330.
- 39.
Catherine Z. Elgin, “Understanding: Art and Science,” Synthese 95, 1993 [1991], 13–68: 14; Zagzebski, “RU,” p. 242.
- 40.
Donald E. Polkinghorne, “Narrative Configuration in Qualitative Analysis,” in Life, History and Narrative, ed. J. Amos Hatch & Richard Wisniewski (London: The Falmer Press, 2003 [1995]): 5–24 (11).
- 41.
See Daniel D. Hutto, “Narrative and Understanding Persons,” in Narrative and Understanding Persons, ed. Daniel D. Hutto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 1–15 (12); Daniel D. Hutto, “Narrative Practice Hypothesis,” in Narrative and Understanding Persons, ed. Daniel D. Hutto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 43–68 (52–60). See David Cooper, “Life and Narrative,” International Journal of Moral and Social Studies 3 (1988): 161–172 (165). For the relevance of small stories to personal identity, see also Michael Bamberg & Alexandra Georgakopoulou, “Small Stories as a New Perspective in Narrative and Identity Analysis,” Text & Talk. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse Communication Studies 28 (2008): 377–396. Yet, it is open to question how much we ought to broaden the concept of narrative . It has been claimed that a narrative fragment or a short narrative explanation loses the idea of narrativity, and that the explanatory power of minuscule narrative explanations is not due to their narrativity but causal dimension, for instance (see Lamarque, TON, pp. 63, 65). These remarks certainly require careful exploration. Nonetheless, the problem might look different if we think narrative in experiential terms and narrativity in terms of degrees.
- 42.
Jens Brockmeier & Hanna Meretoja, “Understanding Narrative Hermeneutics,” StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 6 (2014): 1–27 (6).
- 43.
In addition to Polkinghorne, see Goldie (TMI, p. 2) and Gregory Currie, “A Claim on the Reader,” in Imaginative Minds, ed. Ilona Roth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 169–186 (174 & 176–177).
- 44.
Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative I, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin & David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 75.
- 45.
See Peter A. French, The Virtues of Vengeance (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001) for a literary-philosophical exploration of vengeance.
- 46.
For the value of errors in the advancement of understanding , see Catherine Z. Elgin, “Ignorance, Error, and the Advancement of Understanding” (manuscript, Internet).
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Mikkonen, J. (2019). The (Literary) Stories of Our Lives. In: Hagberg, G. (eds) Narrative and Self-Understanding. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28289-9_2
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