Life as Part of a Story
Against philosopher Galen Strawson's article
I was recently reading a 2015 essay by philosophy professor Galen Strawson against "the dangerous idea that life is a story". I've frequently thought of my life as a story, so I read it with interest.
Strawson makes some good points. He says that someone's life often isn't best viewed as a unified whole, because many people aren't single integrated people. Viewing your life as a story, he continues, leads you to try to control your life - which is difficult and counterproductive when it can develop in ways you don't know about in advance. In fact, life often does go in near-random ways with new events.
There are real perils he's warning against, which he's described better than I could. But, just because it can be dangerous doesn't mean people shouldn't try. Trying to drawing a storyline through the scattered events of your life can be a good thing. The way Strawson warns against isn't the way in which I think of my life as a story. What's more, as someone who's thought a lot about stories and history, I think he's missing some important aspects of the nature of story - which mean that a person's life actually is a story or part of a story.
A good way to get perspective on your life is to look at history.
History, as I've said a lot on this blog, is a story. What's more, it's a fractally deep story. We can tell one grand narrative of history - as school history classes often do - where we pick out events that relate to each other in sweeping narratives. But, that's glossing over a lot. We can also look deeper at any part of that story and find new stories there. For instance, before visiting Prague several years ago, I realized I didn't know what was going on in Czechia between the 1600's and 1900's - so I started reading about it, and found there were lots of stories there. This's true of every part of history.
We can see this as many different stories: so there would be one story of 1800's Czechia, another of the 1800's United States, another of technological development in the United States, another of the life of Paul Revere, and so on down to each other individual person's life and individual chapters in their lives. In this sense, your life in the present day is a story.
But it's not a simple story. Those stories interplay with each other in a way that often cuts off or diverts individual stories. On a national level, when I was reading about Czech history, it was driven off-course by World War I which started (and had every turning point) far away from Czechia. Or on an individual level, take Paul Revere's life, as I wrote about earlier — he thought he knew what direction his life was taking, but it was driven off course by how his fellow revolutionaries found him much more useful, and how he proved much more successful, in technological development than in politics or the military. Because of this, when I read a biography, I often read it not just to read about the person but the time he lived in and the role he played in the larger story of history.
This's because nobody lives their life alone. We play a part in each other's life story - sometimes on purpose; sometimes through myriad small actions each day where we don't even think about how we're impacting another person. Even if we tried to predict at the time how we're impacting other people, we'd fail. But we can't get away from these impacts on the individual daily level, much less the level of large-scale events that get into history books.
My life and yours are, in a way, two stories. But they aren't isolated stories. My life has been thrown dramatically off-course by other people, or by global events; I'm sure yours has as well. Sometimes I act like an active protagonist in my own life; other times I'm more acted upon. In one way, my life and yours are two subplots of the great story of history that none of us can comprehend fully. They can be taken as individual stories - but only if we remember a protagonist isn't always the main actor in a story.
"All human life is life-writing," as Strawson paraphrases neurologist Oliver Sacks as saying.
Nor can we even understand our own subplots. In part, that's because we're still living them.
Can we say Paul Revere's life was a story? Absolutely. It's a story written about in many biographies. Did he have an "autobiographical narrative which acts as the lens through which we experience the world," as Strawson quotes another philosopher saying? Yes, absolutely.
But, for most of Revere's life, that autobiographical narrative was wrong - or at least very incomplete. He thought he was rising up a social ladder; he thought he was treading a path to political glory. He wasn't completely wrong; we remember him today for his famous midnight ride at the start of the American Revolution. But he didn't realize until very late in life that his much more valuable contribution to America - and one that occupied him for much more of his life - would be in smithing bells and copper.
Revere did eventually come to realize this in the 1790's. After then, he poured his energy into copper all the more - and America was better for it. But not everyone comes to this realization. Alexander Hamilton went to his death (in his duel with Aaron Burr) convinced that his policies to industrialize America and build a strong central government were going down to miserable failure. At the time, things had turned against them. But times would change again, and I'm convinced that of all the Founding Fathers he would find the most to recognize in modern America.
You could say that when Revere chose to start pouring more energy into copperworking, he grasped one of Strawson's objections to narrativizing life: that each person is an "inner crowd" with many aspects to his personality.
But in another way, I think Revere had already appreciated that he contained both the thwarted statesman and the smith. After all, he had kept his smithy running (profitably) all the time he was positioning himself for politics. We can only guess how he viewed it (we only have a few fragments of his private correspondence), but I think that it was a choice to be content as a smith - to build his ambitions using that part of his identity rather than denying it.
Yet, Revere was "many people," but I would guess that didn't stop him from narrativizing his life even after that point. At least, it hasn't stopped his later biographers.
So, how should we construct narratives for our lives, when we're living them in the moment and not knowing how they'll eventually be seen? When, as Virginia Woolf says (as quoted by Strawson), we have many daily events that don't conveniently arrange themselves in a plot?
But - daily events that don't conveniently arrange themselves in a plot are no trouble to me as a reader. A story can easily have scenes that just serve to build out character and advance subplots or sub-subplots even if not the major plot arc. Fans of TV serials can easily recognize this in slice-of-life episodes. Yes, there're many more such events in my life... but the grand story of history is a much larger story than anything I've read or watched, so it has much more room for subplots and character advancement each of which is its own smaller story.
Of course, we don't know at the time which events don't serve larger plot arcs. As C. S. Lewis put it, "How can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are 'on' concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it... We do not even know whether we are in Act I or Act V. We do not know who are the major and who the minor characters."
(Are there major characters? Characters more major than others in an ultimate sense? Sometimes as I dig into history I wonder. I've just been reading a history of Christian revivals in America in which the whole saga of the War of Independence is a mere side-reference...)
Lewis continues, after pointing out all these things we don't know, "The Author knows." Sharing Lewis's Christian faith, I agree: I believe God is the one telling the grand story of history - even though, like a good author, He lets us the characters play our parts freely according to our characterizations. This means it does have meaning, even the parts no human sees at the time or remembers afterwards.
Strawson finishes his essay with a quote from Nietzsche about mentally lining up events in your life to reveal "the fundamental law of your true self." I agree that's a telling way of revealing it; proceeding as you might analyze a character in a story, to analyze your life as a character in the story of history.
Strawson objects that this doesn't work for everyone, because many people can't truthfully detect what threads stand out in their lives in this way this. He's not wrong. Even aside from our personal biases, our characters are more detailed, because the story we're in is larger and deeper than any story we've read. Self-knowledge can only come by "bits and pieces" (as he suggests as an alternative); even though the pieces are often larger by some methods than by others.
But the other reason it isn't as telling is that, if you're still here to "line up" events, you're still here to develop your character. And that's vitally important, for our stories are still being told.
Aristotle seems to disagree with this idea, in his discussion of plot as an essential element of story:
"Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero. For infinitely various are the incidents in one man's life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action. Hence the error, as it appears, of all poets who have composed a Heracleid, a Theseid, or other poems of the kind. They imagine that as Heracles was one man, the story of Heracles must also be a unity."
Thanks for this. Reading Strawson, I see that, to him, seeing your life as a story is all about self-authorship. He is not even considering, let alone arguing against, the notion that our lives might actually be a story for real. He is conducting his analysis entirely within the postmodern position that individual experience is all there is, and debating the relative merits of writing the story of your life vs. accepting it for the chaos it is.
But as Christians, of course, we do believe that our lives are part of a story, and story in which every part matters, even if we cannot yet see how all the threads of the plot will resolve. Which leads me to the thought that telling a story may be an inherently religious activity.