Galen Strawson: Our Lives Are Not Stories

  The Voyage of Life: Childhood, by Thomas Cole (1842), via Wikimedia Commons

We can’t help but tell stories about our lives. It could be a tale from years ago, depicting our days at school, replete now with its own heroes, villains, and mythology.

It could be an anecdote about when we were hurrying through the rain, late for a date, and a passing lorry roared through a puddle to drench us to the bone.

It could be a past glory or heartbreak, which over the years has shed all extraneous detail to become in memory a touchstone of pure feeling.

Some thinkers suggest our weakness for a good story betrays an inherent human quality. We are all naturally disposed to impose some kind of narrative upon our lives. As the writer Terry Pratchett puts it in The Globe:

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett, meanwhile, suggests each of us are characters in an ongoing story that’s been progressing since our birth. As he writes in a 1988 piece for the Times Literary Supplement:

We are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behavior, and we always try to put the best ‘faces’ on it we can. We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character at the center of that autobiography is one’s self.

Narrative struts its stuff not just in our personal lives but in many aspects of our culture. Nations construct histories. Politicians spin ideology. Companies develop brand stories. Celebrities build personal brands. Non-celebrities do, too.

Think of the CV and covering letter: effective ones weave the story of why we are the natural fit for this job at this precise moment in time: that every moment of our employment history has been building to this grand crescendo, this wonderful opportunity, this unique role we were born to fulfill. (And then we repurpose the application, swapping out the company name).

Whether it’s constructed in public or private, identity is the name of the game. We’re all briefly here, carving out our own stories. If we want to live good lives, we better ensure our stories are good ones.

As the philosopher Marya Schechtman summarizes in her 1998 book, The Constitution of Selves:

constituting an identity requires that an individual conceive of his life as having the form and the logic of a story—more specifically, the story of a person’s life—where ‘story’ is understood as a conventional, linear narrative.

And to develop fully as authentic people, Heidegger tells us, we must own the narrative: we must be the heroic authors of our own tales.

But is viewing life this way the best or only way to approach it?

In his famous 2004 paper Against Narrativity, the philosopher Galen Strawson suggests that, while it’s easy to get swept away by this narrative view of life and the self, its power is vastly overstated.

Not everyone constructs and lives out their life as a story, Strawson argues, and nor does a good life require a coherent story arc.

In fact, thinking of life and the self only in terms of narrative, Strawson claims,

hinder[s] human self-understanding, close[s] down important avenues of thought, [and] impoverish[es] our grasp of ethical possibilities.

Are you ‘Diachronic’ or ‘Episodic’?

Some people are ‘Diachronic’, Strawson observes. They feel a continuous sense of self from the past into the future, and connect different parts of their life into a coherent whole.

Not everyone is like this, however: Strawson claims that many people - himself included - are ‘Episodic’.

For episodic individuals, the ‘I’ experiencing the present moment is genuinely distinct from the ‘I’ that existed ten, twenty, thirty years ago. There is no urge to forge any kind of psychological continuity between earlier and later selves. As Strawson writes:

I have no significant sense that I – the I now considering this question – was there in the further past… [this] certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t have any autobiographical memories of these past experiences. I do… And they are certainly the experiences of the human being that I am. It does not, however, follow from this that I experience them as having happened to me…

Episodic individuals have memories; they just don’t identify, in a continuous narrative sense, with the subject present in those memories. The past happened to someone else; the beginning is always now.

Strawson thinks the existence of episodic individuals like himself disproves the assumption that humans are inherently narrative.

And, given there need not be a single protagonist journeying through time, Strawson reflects, neither is there an obligation to force the disjointed events of the past into a unified plot.

Reducing everything to a narrative risks distorting reality

Advocates of narrativity argue that without some story linking our past and future, responsibility and growth become hard to make sense of.

But the riposte from Strawson is that imposing narrative on everything could actually be harmful. It opens the door to a certain revisionism and self-deceit: our egos tidy up past events to better serve a particular autobiographical narrative.

Nietzsche nicely articulates this process in Beyond Good and Evil:

‘I did that,’ says my memory. ‘I could not have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually the memory yields.

But as well as self-aggrandizing, narrative can also be self-limiting. We believe certain stories about who we are, and so prevent ourselves from becoming something else. This is a form of what existentialists call bad faith.

The solution for Strawson is to release ourselves from the assumption that life needs to be a good, coherent story in order to be good or coherent: “The business of living well is, for many, a completely non-Narrative project.”

An episodic approach might be less prone to revisionism and rumination on the past, Strawson suggests. Given episodic individuals tend not to thread back to their past selves, they are primed to show up to the present moment without being bogged down by the weight of some previous identity.

This doesn’t mean rejecting or having some kind of intentional amnesia towards the past; it just means understanding what happened in the past need not take narrative form. We don’t need to identify with our past selves in order to make sense of our lives or live well, Strawson argues:

I’m a product of my past, including my very early past, in many profoundly important respects, but it simply does not follow that self-understanding, or the best kind of self-understanding, must take a narrative form, or indeed a historical form.

Strawson cares about who he is now. He doesn’t care about how his current self connects to his past self, or the story of how he might one day develop narratively into another character. He shares the bemusement of the journalist Goronwy Rees, who he quotes as follows:

For as long as I can remember it has always surprised and slightly bewildered me that other people should take it so much for granted that they each possess what is usually called ‘a character’; that is to say, a personality with its own continuous history…

Our lives need not resemble the linearity of a flowing narrative. In fact, Strawson concludes, a strictly narrative view “risks a strange commodification of life and time”:

It misses the point. ‘We live’, as the great short story writer V. S. Pritchett observes, ‘beyond any tale that we happen to enact...’

What do you make of Strawson’s arguments?

Strawson’s Against Narrativity throws up many questions around personal identity, selfhood, memory, responsibility, and what it means to exist in and through time. What do you make of his analysis?

• Do you think a good life requires a coherent, unified story arc?
• Do you live your life as a narrative? Or do you tend to be more episodic?
• Is there a happy medium? If life isn’t one huge story, could it be an interconnected collection of short ones?
• If core parts of our identities do not persist through time, to what extent should we be held responsible for past actions?

To inform your answers, you might enjoy the following related Philosophy Breaks:

• Kierkegaard: Life Can Only Be Understood Backwards, But It Must Be Lived Forwards
• Thich Nhat Hanh on Healing the Wounds of the Past
• ​Nietzsche On What ‘Finding Yourself’ Actually Means​
• Sartre’s Waiter, ‘Bad Faith’, and the Harms of Inauthenticity​
• Anātman, the Buddhist Doctrine of No-Self: Why ‘You’ Do Not Really Exist
• ‘Dao’ in Chinese Philosophy: Harmonizing with the Way
• Ruth Chang on Making Difficult Life Decisions​

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