Self-Making and World-Making

Abstract

I want to speak with the voice of one who takes seriously Wittgenstein's statement that the function of the philosopher is to help the fly out of the bottle. I am the fly. The philosopher who has helped me most whenever I found myself trapped in the Wittgensteinian bottle is Nelson Goodman. I propose to set forth some conjectures and hypotheses that need particularly to be elucidated by a strong philosophical mind. They all have to do with a subject that is deceptively simple: how people give account of themselves or, in its broader form, what they do when they set forth an autobiography. In autobiography, we set forth a view of what we call our Self and its doings, reflections, thoughts, and place in the world. Now, just what the referent is in such discourse is an extremely difficult matter to specify. And it is to some of these difficulties that I want to address my attention. I should say, by the way, that my reflections are not all hypothetical. I have what in modern jargon is called a database. We have been involved, a group of us in New York, in gathering spontaneous, non-artful, if there is such a thing, autobiographies from ordinary people. We solicited volunteers and simply asked them: Tell us the story of your life. We assured them first that we were not clinicians but that, nonetheless, we would like very much to find out, using very Goodmanian language, how they constructed a picture of their lives. An odd thing happened. We interviewed a man, and then interviewed his sister whom he had recommended to us, and then she said, You know my other brother would like to be interviewed too, and before long we had interviewed all the members of the same family: two grown daughters and sons, the father and the mother. Perhaps for the first time in human history-at least I could find no report in the literature of anything comparable-we had interviewed separately