Galen Strawson, whose work I discuss at length in the next chapter, distinguishes between two theses concerning narrativity. The “psychological Narrativity thesis is a straightforwardly empirical, descriptive thesis about the way ordinary human beings actually experience their lives” and states “that human beings typically see or live or experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort, or at least as a collection of stories” (AN, 428). The “ethical Narrativity thesis” is normative and “states that
experiencing or conceiving one's life as a narrative is a good thing; a richly Narrative outlook is essential to a well-lived life, to true or full personhood” (AN, 428).30 The combination of differing positions with respect to these two theses leads to a matrix of four possible views:
Strawson thinks the “dominant view in the academy today” is that “all normal non-pathological human beings are naturally Narrative and also that Narrativity is crucial to a good life,” followed by the view that we “are not all naturally Narrative in our thinking”
but should be (AN, 429).31 On the other side, he describes Sartre, via Roquentin in Nausea, as claiming that we do think of ourselves in narrative terms, but shouldn't.32 Finally, Strawson himself thinks that both claims are false: only some people are naturally narrative, and one needn't be to live well. There are no universal claims to be had here.
Between the two dominant positions, it's not clear where Strawson places
30 That neither MacIntyre nor Taylor would straightforwardly accept this distinction can be seen in their rejection of the “naturalistic fallacy” as a fallacy (see AV, 56ff; SS, 53ff).
31 I adopt Strawson's shorthand of “narrative” as an adjective (e.g., “we should be narrative”) meaning more fully, “we should employ narrative in our thinking about ourselves.” I leave off unnecessarily capitalizing it, however.
32 I challenge this orthodox reading of the novel in chapter five.
ethical
MacIntyre and Taylor, however (he never explicitly says). They both advocate for the ethical narrativity thesis, in Strawson's terms. But do they think we are naturally narrative in our self-understanding? If they do, then it would be difficult to understand why there's any problem here worth discussing at length. We should understand ourselves narratively; fortunately we do, and naturally! Alternatively, if MacIntyre and Taylor don't think we are naturally narrative, then it's difficult to see how they could claim it is necessarily central to our self-understanding. Strawson qualifies the dominant view (the position that we are and should be narrative), writing that it “does not entail that everything is as it should be; it leaves plenty of room for the idea that many of us would profit from being more Narrative than we are” (AN, 429). This sounds most like MacIntyre and Taylor, but Strawson's qualification allows too great a variety of positions to be lumped together in the same square of the matrix: we should be narrative, and we naturally are, but to what extent?
Let me suggest that a third thesis, in addition to the psychological and ethical narrativity theses, would help make sense of the variety of narrativist views now on offer.
Call it the zeitgeist narrativity thesis. The psychological narrativity thesis asks whether each of us naturally conceives of him or herself narratively. The ethical narrativity thesis asks whether we should. The zeitgeist narrativity thesis asks whether our prevailing theories of ourselves conceive of us in narrative terms, whether, to use one of MacIntyre's phrases, one thinks that this is the self-image of the age. Do we live in a narrativist age?
MacIntyre and Taylor on the one hand and Strawson on the other all position themselves against what they describe as our prevailing self-images. Yet, holding opposing views, they can't be positioned against the same set of self-images. They must have differing ideas about the contemporary zeitgeist. There's always hay to be made by positioning oneself against the zeitgeist or, to put in more cynically, by construing the zeitgeist as
against one's own views, such that they become more notable.33 Adding this further thesis to the matrix better allows us to schematize MacIntyre's and Taylor's views, and to understand their motivations.
Given these three theses one could draw a revised matrix of eight possible positions. Some of the combinations aren't particularly interesting, however, so I'll discuss only those relevant here. If MacIntyre and Taylor held that we are naturally narrative, should be, and also that we live in a narrativist age, then it would be hard to understand why they would need to write at length about narrativity, as here there is no dissonance between is, ought, and self-image, what we do, should do, and how we conceive of ourselves. We might call this the position of the happy narrativist
underlaborer, one who works out the details of narrative self-understanding to maximal coherence. I don't think we can locate MacIntyre and Taylor here, as we wouldn't then be able to make sense of how they take themselves to be fighting against false self-images.
Strawson takes himself to be fighting against false self-images as well. If the psychological and ethical narrativity theses are both false, does he think the zeitgeist narrativity thesis is true, that we live in an age where our prevailing philosophical, anthropological, and psychological theories of the self center on concepts like narrative and character? It's not clear to me how he would answer this question. Narrativity is
“intensely fashionable,” he writes (AN, 428). Does he mean that it is a passing trend? Or does he mean that these views have found a deep-seated place in our self-image? From a wider perspective, surely it is naturalism that dominates the contemporary philosophical climate. Perhaps when it comes to thinking about the self, narrativity now dominates even as, on wider ontological and metaphysical matters, naturalism does—and we've ghettoized these realms of thinking from one another such that the tension is not felt. In
33 It's possible that the zeitgeist has shifted between 1981, when MacIntyre was writing, and 2004, when Strawson was, but it seems rather fast to be likely.
any case, Strawson hopes that we'll come to see the psychological and ethical theses as false, and thus that our self-image will align against the zeitgeist narrativity thesis. This shifts us toward the other side of the revised matrix.
We are naturally narrative, and we should be, but this is not how our prevailing theoretical self-images conceive of us: this, finally, is where we should locate MacIntyre and Taylor. Our theories of self-understanding are inadequate and reductive, actively working to occlude or distort our wiser, ordinary understanding of what it is to be a person—which is and should be narrative in character. For MacIntyre, the site of
interesting friction is between the zeitgeist and ethical narrativity theses. We are naturally narrative, but modernity has fractured our lives into roles. Rejecting the zeitgeist of modernity will allow us to recover the natural order of our lives. What is to be changed is how we live. For Taylor, the site of interesting friction is between the zeitgeist and
psychological narrativity theses. We are naturally narrative, but naturalism has led us to try to talk about ourselves as if we weren't, as if narrativity were an illusion of folk psychology. Rejecting naturalism's ways of speaking will allow us to recover the natural order of things. What is to be changed is how philosophy talks—mostly a theoretical problem. MacIntyre's and Taylor's arguments, though aiming for the same ends, work by way of different intermediary assessments.
Given this background, what are we to make of MacIntyre's famous claim that each of our lives is quest-like, guided by one ideal of the good or at least the search for an ideal of the good? Are lives quests (psychological narrativity), should they be (ethical narrativity), or should we theorize them this way (zeitgeist narrativity)? The grand
narrative of After Virtue is one of the fracturing of ethical and social life under modernity.
Spelled out, MacIntyre's characterization of our lives isn't simply descriptive. Rather, it's something like this: people's lives used to be coherently unified under a traditional
concept of the good. Modernity, in freeing us from some straightforwardly bad
traditions, went overboard and made tradition, generally speaking, suspect. It has thus left us, beings constituted to find unity in a principle beyond ourselves, not only without such a principle, but conceptually and socially ill-equipped to see how to find one, or even to realize that we need to. His claim that our lives naturally assume the form of narratives, which looks descriptive, is thus really loaded with a normative nostalgia.34 Perhaps a singular term for this tone would be restorative or revivalist.
Compare this argumentative approach to that found in many postmodern texts, in which it is inverted. In Roland Barthes's “Death of the Author,” to cite one famous example, the waning of authorial intentionality as the locus for a text's meaning is, it would appear by the rhetoric, merely described: this has happened. Here are Barthes's phrasings: “writing is the destruction of every voice, every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite oblique space where our subject slips away […] No doubt it has always been that way […] We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning,” and so on (1977, 142-148, emphases added). But outside of professional literary criticism—outside of very small sub-circles of critics, really—
most everyone still does care what an author thinks his or her works mean. To describe the author as dead is really to slyly petition for it. Describing Foucault's “What Is an Author?” (which is similar to Barthes's essay) Alexander Nehamas writes that the “essay calls for abolishing [the figure of the author] altogether and for establishing a new and different way of dealing with literary texts” (1986, 685, emphasis added). Putting it that way loses much of Foucault's rhetorical approach: it is not simply an argument, but an assessment of how critical practice is already changing. It is an attempt to display the fruits of such a new approach, to win over by example and by inaugurating a new way of talking about authors. Could one make Barthes's or Foucault's case in a rhetorically
34 Lyotard, in theorizing “master (or grand or meta) narrative,” would criticize MacIntyre's account as based on a never-existent “lost 'organic' society” (15).
neutral way? Perhaps: one could begin to itemize what would be lost and gained if one stopped appealing to an author's intentions in reading a text. But in addressing an issue as fundamental as how a literary text generates meaning, where does one turn for a criterion to measure loss and gain? Instead, Barthes and Foucault leap to a new way of speaking, and in doing so offer other critics a model for future work. Barthes's approach is liberalizing and forward-looking, whereas MacIntyre's and Taylor's is nostalgic and reactionary (if that can be said in as unloaded a manner as possible).
Barthes, Foucault, MacIntyre, and Taylor all write in a tone that can be called redescriptive, following Richard Rorty's use of the term. Rorty argues that most important philosophical arguments have this form:
Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things. [...] The method is to redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it, thereby causing them to look for appropriate forms of nonlinguistic behavior [….] This sort of philosophy does not work piece by piece, analyzing concept after concept, or testing thesis after thesis. Rather, it works holistically and pragmatically. It says things like “try thinking of it this way”—or more specifically, “try to ignore the apparently futile traditional questions by substituting the following new and possibly interesting questions.” (1989, 9)
Especially in this last claim, it might seem odd to characterize MacIntyre and Taylor by way of Rorty. This is only because Rorty is forward-looking, however. He draws on historical examples only to remind us that our current way of thinking is thoroughly contingent. But the method is generalizable. Instead of asking us to ignore traditional questions and look at things in their new way, MacIntyre and Taylor push past our often confused and quibbling concerns and try to see things as some previous epoch did, because that approach was better and more coherent. Rather than moving
straightforwardly from premises to a conclusion, a redescriptive method either inaugurates new vocabularies, transfiguring the world, or it recovers and adapts old vocabularies, revitalizing past ways of seeing. “But it does not argue for this suggestion on the basis of antecedent criteria common to the old and the new language games. For
just insofar as the new language really is new, there will be no such criteria,” Rorty concludes (1989, 9). These are the arguments—or more usually works or even lifework, as it may take a philosopher's entire career to bring about such a change—that, in
Kuhnian terms, bring about new paradigms of thinking, rather than accepting the
prevailing paradigm.35 With only descriptive and normative registers in play, and a clear distinction between them, it is difficult to make a philosophical argument concerning something as fundamental as our conception of the self. Rather than arguing that one should view it this way rather than that, based on some comparison grounded in an agreed-upon criterion, one describes the self in a new (or old and lost) way in the hopes that it will be recognized and taken up by others.
Much of MacIntyre's and Taylor's work is not redescriptive in this sense.
Frequently their writing is historical, or criticizes an opponent's position as incoherent, or is straightforwardly argumentative. It is the approach that underlies the complicated tone of their discussion that is redescriptive. Their claims about self-understanding are not straightforward descriptions of how we are or should be, descriptions made with an already-agreed-upon set of concepts. Rather, their claims are redescriptive, in that they attempt to shed various accumulated and misleading ways of talking about ourselves, offering a description previously unfamiliar but which we might recognize as true.
However we conceive of the relationship between narrative and the self, our account needs to be able to explain both the fragmentation MacIntyre and Taylor lament and the unity they recommend. In the next chapter, I turn to Strawson, who has become the most prominent critic of narrativity. He argues that when one puts narrative at the center of philosophical thinking about the self, one is unable to grasp how plural our approaches to self-understanding in fact are.
35 Rorty frequently invokes Kuhn in this manner (see, for example, 1989, 6, 20). Perhaps surprisingly, Rorty is dismissive of most contemporary fiction, much in the way Gardner is. See “American National Pride: Whitman and Dewey” in 1998, where he criticizes Pynchon and Stephenson in particular.
Chapter Two
Deconstructing “Galen Strawson”:
The Phenomenology of Selves, Subjects, and Human Beings
Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter.
“Personal density,” Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemünde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, “is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.”
“Temporal bandwidth,” is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar “ t”
considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now—what you're doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment....
“Uh,” he turns slackmouth to Närrisch, “what are we ...”
“What are we what?”
“What?”
“You said, 'What are we …,' then you stopped.”
“Oh. Gee, that was a funny thing to say.”
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (509)
Galen Strawson's “Against Narrativity” appeared in 2004 and established his reputation as the most prominent opponent of narrative views of the self. Strawson attacks narrativity categorically, across the board:
Talk of narrative is intensely fashionable in a wide variety of disciplines [....] There is widespread agreement that human beings typically see or live or experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort, or at least as a collection of stories [and that] a richly Narrative outlook is essential to a well-lived life, to true or full personhood. […] Is any of this true? I don't think so. It seems to me that MacIntyre, Taylor and all other supporters […] are really just talking about themselves.
(AN, 428, 437)1
He speculates on the causes of narrativity's popularity:
I […] suspect that those who are drawn to write on the subject of 'narrativity' tend to have strongly Diachronic and Narrative outlooks or personalities, and generalize from their own case with that special, fabulously misplaced confidence that people feel when, considering elements of their own experience that are existentially fundamental for them, they take it they must also be fundamental for everyone else. (AN, 439)2
Not shying away from his own generalization, he concludes, concerning this misplaced confidence that all of our existential constitutions are similar: “I think that this may be the greatest single source of unhappiness in human intercourse” (AN, 439n25).
It has become unavoidable to take on Strawson's essay in any discussion of
1 Boyd similarly describes the fundamental narrativity of the self as a false truism (159).
2 Strawson claims that there is no burden on him to explain narrativity's popularity. Even if this is true, surely some explanation beyond projection, “intellectual fashion,” and the notion that “Theorizing human beings tend to favor false views in matters of this kind” would be welcome (AN, 439). If one thinks that the claims of narrativity are false but widely held, then a bit of philosophical therapy or exorcism of the sort associated with the later Wittgenstein would be valuable.
narrativity. This is true for the wrong reasons. Strawson is invoked not merely as an opponent or interlocutor, but as if he has chastened narrativists. Marya Schechtman, for example, writes in a programmatic register and directly in response to Strawson: “The more hyperbolic assertions must be weeded out, and claims about what work a narrative account of identity can accomplish must be made more modest and specific” (NUP, 155).3 The claims of narrativity indeed require more precise statement. Inasmuch as they provide answers to questions that arise in everyday life and language, precision—if it is not to shuck the real weight of these questions—is difficult to come by. Central to my arguments, however, is the notion that the claims of narrativity are not in need of
narrativity. This is true for the wrong reasons. Strawson is invoked not merely as an opponent or interlocutor, but as if he has chastened narrativists. Marya Schechtman, for example, writes in a programmatic register and directly in response to Strawson: “The more hyperbolic assertions must be weeded out, and claims about what work a narrative account of identity can accomplish must be made more modest and specific” (NUP, 155).3 The claims of narrativity indeed require more precise statement. Inasmuch as they provide answers to questions that arise in everyday life and language, precision—if it is not to shuck the real weight of these questions—is difficult to come by. Central to my arguments, however, is the notion that the claims of narrativity are not in need of