Questioning the Self

Abstract

There seems to be a prima facie assumption among philosophers, generally speaking, that autobiographical texts are less relevant than so-called theoretical texts. This is, in a sense, yet another repetition of the Republic's agon between poetry and philosophy; mythos or narrative on the one hand, and strict argumentation on the other; universalizability vs. the singularity of an individual life. Aside from the Confessions of Augustine and of Rousseau, there are simply not that many autobiographies taken seriously (by the philosophical mainstream) as philosophical texts in their own right. The result of this assumption is a tragic waste of valuable resources for penetrating further into crucial philosophical questions. The origin of this (unwarranted) assumption is, I believe, to be found in the notion that the boundaries between autobiographical literature, fiction, and theory are more or less rigid and defined, and that (therefore) something that falls outside the boundaries of the philosophical (strict argumentation, at the extreme reduced to the S is P formalism of pure symbolic logic) is not much worth looking at. As Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and others have argued, however, genres cannot be demarcated that simply. This is not necessarily to say that there are no significant differences whatsoever between genres, or even that we could-or should !-attempt to operate without these demarcating lines.1 It is simply to say that these Unes are (phenomenologically speaking) constituted unities of meaning, and consequently have a contingent, historical, and constructed character, that they blur into one another. They are not only flexible, but, as with any unity of meaning, (ultimately) deconstructible. It would seem, then, that the exclusion of some texts from the realm of the philosophically purely on the basis that their primary focus is autobiographical, is simply untenable or naive, particularly (one would think) when these texts were written by trained philosophers. To ask the question whether there is anything that is said in the autobiographical works of a given philosopher, that is not said elsewhere in his or her philosophical corpus, is to lose sight of this fact: these texts deserve at least the same kind of consideration as any other philosophical texts, whether or not they turn out to have a great deal different to say or not. The prima facie assumption, then, should be for, rather than against, the inclusion of these texts in any rigorous study of a given philosopher's thought. For those interested in the recovery of any kind of philosophical anthropology, the importance of the autobiographical is acute, insofar as any autobiography, as Richard White has argued, at least implicitly presupposes some account of the selfhood of its author/narrator.2 To invoke a classical topos from Augustine (Confessions IV),the quaestio mihi factus sum-the question, mystery, or enigma that I become to myself, especially during the moments of difficulty in my own life-is a particularly urgent problem within the autobiographical genre. It would seem then, that far from ignoring these texts, we ought to be training our lenses solidly on them, in the hope that they might be of some service to us in reconstructing what it could mean to be a person or self. To neglect them entirely, or even simply to abandon them as the bailiwick of literary theorists and critics, as trained philosophers have by and large done, is an enormous disservice to this area of philosophical inquiry. I am-I hope it is clear-not saying that literary critics have not done interesting and important work in this area. My point here is merely the converse of my earlier argument: while we ought to avoid the tendency to reify the constructed boundaries in Western literature, we should not by that same token simply abandon them. Philosophers, by virtue of a different kind of training, bring a different set of with them when they approach a text-and even within the disciplinary genre of philosophy (because this institutional structure, too, is a constituted, contingent, and historical unity of meaning), these tools (and the approaches to which they belong) can vary widely, as we see within the continental and analytic camps. …