Abstract
Should ethically serious people seek for unity in their lives, for harmony, for coherence? Is this a requirement on living a good life, a requirement on flourishing or eudaimonia? Should we aim for some kind of self-authorship or narrative self-constitution, as Marya Schechtman and Dan McAdams have suggested? Many think we should. This chapter argues for the opposite view, assembling and reflecting on a dossier of contrary quotations from many sources, including Proust, Montaigne, Alice Munro, Georges Perec, and Keats.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
I want Death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.
Michel de Montaigne (1563–92, 99)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Amis, M. 2015. The Turbulent Love Life of Saul Bellow. Vanity Fair, May.
Bellow, S. 1959. Henderson the Rain King. New York: Viking Press.
Blattner, W. 2000. Life is Not Literature. In The Many Faces of Time, ed. L. Embree and J. Brough, 187–201. Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer.
Brainard, J. 1970–3/2001. I Remember. New York: Granary Books.
Bruner, J. 1987. Life as Narrative. Social Research 54: 11–32.
Bruner, J. 1994. The “Remembered” Self. In The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative, ed. U. Neisser and R. Fivush. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
de Montaigne, M. (1563–92/1991). The Complete Essays, trans. M.A. Screech. London: Penguin.
Dennett, D. 1988. Why Everyone is a Novelist. Times Literary Supplement 16–22 (September): 1016, 1028–1029.
Einstein, A. 1931. About Free Will. In The Golden Book of Tagore: A Homage to Rabindranath Tagore from India and the World in Celebration of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Ramananda Chatterjee, 77–84. Calcutta: Golden Book Committee.
Emerson, R.W 1835–8/1965. Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 5. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Emerson, R.W. 1844/1983. Experience. In Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America.
Erikson, E. 1968. Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: Norton.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. 1945/1978. The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Frisch, O. 1979. What Little I Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gray, S. 2008. Coda. London: Faber and Faber.
Greer, G. 1986. Article in the Times, February 1.
James, H. 1899. The Awkward Age. New York: Harpers.
Keats, J. 1819/1958. Letter of February 14–May 3, 1819 to George and Georgiana Keats. In The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, 2 vols., ed. H. Rollins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Klee, P. 1965. The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918. London: Peter Owen.
Larkin, P. 2003. Continuing to live. Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber.
Leader, Z. 2015. The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964. New York: Knopf.
Levine, R. 1998. A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist. New York: Basic Books.
Locke, J. 1694. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2nd ed. London: Dring and Manship.
MacIntyre, A. 1981. After Virtue. London: Duckworth.
McAdams, D. 2005. The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By. New York: Oxford University Press.
McAdams, D., R. Josselson, and A. Lieblich. 2006. Introduction. In Identity and Story: Creating Self in Narrative. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
McCarthy, M. 1962/1964. The Art of Fiction, No. 27. In Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Second Series, ed. G. Plimpton. New York: Viking Press.
Meek, J. 2013. Memories We Get to Keep. London Review of Books, June 20.
Midgley, M. 1984. Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay. London: Ark.
Munro, A. 2001. Go Ask Alice. The New Yorker. February 19.
Nehamas, A. 1985. Life as Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nietzsche, F. 1874a/1988. Schopenhauer als Erzieher. In Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Sämtliche Werke Kritische Studienausgabe vol. 1, rev. ed. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Nietzsche, F. 1874b/1997. Schopenhauer as Educator. In Unfashionable Observations, trans. R. Gray. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Perec, G. 1978. Je me souviens. Paris: Hachette.
Pessoa, F. 1914/1998. The Keeper of Sheep. In Fernando Pessoa & Co: Selected Poems, ed. and trans. R. Zenith. New York: Grove Press.
Proust, M. 1913–27/1987. A la recherche du temps perdu. Paris: Pléiade.
Ricoeur, P. 1985/1988. Time and Narrative, vol. 3. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Roth, P. 1986/2005. The Counterlife. London: Vintage.
Rotter, J.B. 1966. Generalized Expectancies for Internal Versus External Control of Reinforcement. Psychological Monographs 80 (1): 1–28 (Whole Number 609).
Sacks, O. 1985. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. London: Duckworth.
Salter, J. 1975. Light Years. New York: Vintage International.
Sartre, J.-P. 1938/1996. La nausée. Paris: Gallimard.
Schechtman, M. 1996. The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Schechtman, M. 2001. Empathic Access: The Missing Ingredient in Personal Identity. Philosophical Explorations 4: 95–111.
Schechtman, M. 2005. Self-Expression and Self-Control. In The Self? ed. G. Strawson. Oxford: Blackwell.
Schechtman, M. 2007. Stories, Lives, and Basic Survival. In Narrative and Understanding Persons, ed. Daniel D. Hutto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schechtman, M. 2014. Staying Alive. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shakespeare, W. 1599–1600/2004. As You Like It, ed. J. Dusinberre and Arden Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury.
Shelley, P. 1818a/2003. Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills. In Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, ed. Z. Leader and M. O’Neill. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shelley, P. 1818b/2003. Revolt of Islam ‘Dedication: To Mary—’. In Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, ed. Z. Leader and M. O’Neill. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Somerset Maugham, W. 1949. A Writer’s Notebook. London: Heinemann.
Strawson, G. 2007. Episodic Ethics. In Narrative and Understanding Persons, ed. D. Hutto, 85–115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, H. 1836. The Statesman. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman.
Thomas, L. 1983. The Attic of the Brain. In Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. New York: Bantam Books.
Tolstoy, L. 1886/2008. The Death of Ivan Illich. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, trans. D. McDuff. London: Penguin.
Tulving, E. 1985. Memory and Consciousness. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne 26: 1–12.
Updike, J. 1989. Self-Consciousness. London: Deutsch.
Updike, J. 1995. The Man Within. The New Yorker, June 26.
Velleman, D. 2005/2006. The Self as Narrator. In Self to Self, ed. D. Velleman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Waggenaar, W. 1994. Is Memory Self-Serving? In The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative, ed. U. Neisser and R. Fivush. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wegner, D.M. 2002. The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Woolf, V. 1925/2008. Modern Fiction. In The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 4: 1925 to 1928, ed. A. McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press.
Woolf, V. 1926. Undated. See entry of 25 July, The Diary of Virginia Woolf 1925–30, vol. 3. London: Penguin.
Wu Cheng-en, attrib. 1592/1993. Xiyouji (Journey to the West), vol. 1., trans. W.J.F. Jenner. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.
Zenith, R. 2002. Introduction. In The Book of Disquiet, ed. F. Pessoa. London: Penguin.
Zimbardo, P., and J. Boyd. 2008. The Time Paradox. New York: Random House.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Strawson, G. (2018). The Unstoried Life. In: Altobrando, A., Niikawa, T., Stone, R. (eds) The Realizations of the Self. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94700-6_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94700-6_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-94699-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-94700-6
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)