Against Narrativity
Author: Galen Strawson1
Source: Ratio, Volume 17, Number 4, December 2004 , pp. 428-452(25)
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing
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Abstract:
I argue against two popular claims. The first is a descriptive, empirical thesis about the nature of ordinary human experience: each of us constructs and lives a narrative . . . this narrative is us, our identities (Oliver Sacks); self is a perpetually rewritten story . . . in the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we tell about our lives (Jerry Bruner); we are all virtuoso novelists. . . . We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character . . . of that autobiography is ones self (Dan Dennett). The second is a normative, ethical claim: we ought to live our lives narratively, or as a story; a basic condition of making sense of ourselves is that we grasp our lives in a narrative and have an understanding of our lives as an unfolding story (Charles Taylor). A person creates his identity [only] by forming an autobiographical narrative a story of his life, and must be in possession of a full and explicit narrative [of his life] to develop fully as a person (Marya Schechtman).Document Type: Research article
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9329.2004.00264.x
Affiliations: 1: Department of Philosophy, University of Reading
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