Abstract
Autobiography is a distinctive and valuable kind of reasoning towards ethical knowledge. But how can autobiography be ethical reasoning? I distinguish four ways in which autobiography can be merely involved in reasoning: as clue to authorial intentions; as container for conventional reasoning; as historical data; and as thought experiment. I then show how autobiography can itself be reasoning by investigating its generic form. Autobiographies 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 in a temporal structure. But these features don’t distinguish autobiographies from novels. Should we therefore accept a deflationary account of a fourth generic feature of autobiographies, that they are self-reflective? I instead pursue a more ambitious account of self-reflection and the distinctively autobiographical reasoning it enables, involving a realism constraint, a reflexive explanation constraint, and unique address to first-person problems of the self. I conclude with an interpretation of an example work of autobiographical reasoning, Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of George Sherston, against the idea that self-owning is necessary to the good human life.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
I take the idea that reasoning involves reason-guided change from Gilbert Harman, Change in View: Principles of Reasoning (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1986).
- 2.
The situationist literature in psychology is full of examples of the last. See John Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) for summary and application.
- 3.
Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (with a new preface, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2016), p. 1.
- 4.
I mean to remain neutral here in two large debates about reasons. First, reductionism: are reasons to be explained by something else, for example desires or the structure of the rational will, or are they primitive? See T. M. Scanlon, Being Realistic About Reasons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Second, motivation: must one’s reasons for action , in particular, be connected with one’s actual or possible desires? See Bernard Williams, ‘Internal and External Reasons’ in Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 101–13. Nothing I say here is intended to commit me to any view about either of these.
- 5.
Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (with a commentary on the text by A.W. Moore, London: Routledge, 2006), p. 1.
- 6.
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography in John M. Robson & Jack Stillinger eds, Collected Works volume 1: Autobiography and Literary Essays (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), pp. 1–290.
- 7.
Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone (London: Calder and Boyars, 1973).
- 8.
Doris Lessing, Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 (London: Harper Collins, 1994).
- 9.
Samuel Clark, ‘Love, Poetry, and the Good Life: Mill’s Autobiography and Perfectionist Ethics’, Inquiry 53(2010): 565–578.
- 10.
Richard Wollheim, Germs: A Memoir of Childhood (London: Waywiser, 2004); The Thread of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
- 11.
R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939).
- 12.
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
- 13.
Bernard Williams, ‘Moral Luck’ in Moral Luck, pp. 20–39.
- 14.
Compare Françoise Cachin, Gauguin: The Quest for Paradise (London: Thames & Hudson, 1992); David Sweetman, Paul Gauguin: A Complete Life (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995).
- 15.
One classic example of this method is Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘The Trolley Problem’, The Yale Law Journal 94(1985): 1395–1415.
- 16.
This distinction between being schematized and being hypothetical as typical features of thought experiments is due to John Martin Fischer, ‘Stories’ in Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 129–143.
- 17.
Samuel Clark, ‘Hume’s Uses of Dialogue’, Hume Studies 39(2013): 61–76.
- 18.
In Siegfried Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (London: Faber and Faber, 1937).
- 19.
This list of perceived values is influenced by Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
- 20.
This paragraph draws on the literature of moral particularism, especially David McNaughton, Moral Vision: An Introduction to Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) and Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). But I am only taking on the ideas of value-perception and of education in it, and can remain neutral about the further question whether all moral reasoning is particularistic, or whether it also involves general principles.
- 21.
Samuel Clark, Living Without Domination: The Possibility of an Anarchist Utopia (new edn, Routledge 2016).
- 22.
On which see Yuval Harari, ‘Martial Illusions: War and Disillusionment in Twentieth-Century and Renaissance Military Memoirs’, The Journal of Military History 69(2005): 43–72 and The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
- 23.
Max Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography (London: Picador, 2004); John Stuart Roberts, Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) (London: Metro, 2005); Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: Soldier, Poet, Lover, Friend (London: Duckworth, 2013).
- 24.
Henry James, The Golden Bowl ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (London: Penguin, 2009); Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, essays 4 and 5.
- 25.
Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory (25th anniversary edn, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), argues that the classic war memoirs of the First World War should be understood as autobiographical novels in the same genre as James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh.
- 26.
Peter Goldie, The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), chapter 2. James Wood, How Fiction Works (London: Vintage, 2009).
- 27.
Sassoon, Complete Memoirs, p. 1.
- 28.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations ed. Charlotte Mitchell (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 3.
- 29.
James Frey, A Million Little Pieces (London: John Murray, 2003).
- 30.
John Dolan effectively skewers Frey’s artistic and reflective failures in ‘A Million Pieces of Shit’, The Exile, May 292,003 (online, accessed 7 July 2016). Chapter 11 of Ben Yagoda, Memoir: A History (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009) puts the discovery of Frey’s lies in the context of other such scandals about false autobiographies.
- 31.
Compare Gilbert Ryle’s argument that ‘Self-consciousness, if the word is to be used at all, must not be described on the hallowed para-optical model, as a torch that illuminates itself by beams of its own light reflected from a mirror in its own insides. On the contrary it is simply a special case of an ordinary more or less efficient handling of a less or more honest and intelligent witness.’—The Concept of Mind (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1963), p. 186.
- 32.
Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Memoirs of a Romantic Biographer (London: Harper Perennial, 2005).
- 33.
For example Oliver Sacks, ‘The Lost Mariner’ in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (London: Picador, 1986), pp. 22–41 and ‘The Last Hippie’ in An Anthropologist on Mars (London: Picador, 1995), pp. 39–72.
- 34.
Angus Wilson, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). Compare Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself: And Other Autobiographical Writings ed. Thomas Pinney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
- 35.
Edmund Gosse, Father and Son ed. Peter Abbs (London: Penguin, 1983). See further Clark, ‘Love, Poetry, and the Good Life’; Samuel Clark, ‘Pleasure as Self-Discovery’, Ratio 25(2012): 260–276.
- 36.
Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1993).
- 37.
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (New York: Knopf, 1976).
- 38.
There are versions of this idea in, for example, John J. Davenport, Narrative Identity, Autonomy, and Mortality: from Frankfurt and MacIntyre to Kierkegaard (New York: Routledge, 2012); Harry Frankfurt et al., Taking Ourselves Seriously & Getting it Right ed. Debra Satz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Connie Rosati, ‘The Story of a Life’, Social Philosophy and Policy 30(2013): 21–50.
- 39.
Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer in Complete Memoirs, pp. 343–4. Hereafter abbreviated ‘IO’.
- 40.
This movement between immediacy and doubledness is not unique to battle. On a similar movement in craft work, see Samuel Clark, ‘Good Work’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 34(2017): 61–73.
- 41.
I draw here on L. A. Paul, Transformative Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
- 42.
Siegfried Sassoon, Collected Poems 1908–1956 (London: Faber and Faber, 1984). See especially Counter-Attack and Picture-Show. For the reception and influence of Sassoon, and of other poets and autobiographers of the war, see Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Clark, S. (2019). Rationalism About Autobiography. In: Hagberg, G. (eds) Narrative and Self-Understanding. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28289-9_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28289-9_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-28288-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-28289-9
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)