Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will Leona Toker Richard Freadman , Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. 394 pp. What is the will? Is it "real" or just a name, a shortcut to a cluster of ideas? Is it a force, a potentiality, a faculty, a substance, an event? In what sense does one "have" a will, weak or strong, "free," or "conditioned," or "determined"? Arthur Schopenhauer saw the Will as Kant's mysterious thing-in-itself but, unlike Kant, claimed that the Will is knowable —not through the five senses but through introspection. As if following Schopenhauer's hint, Richard Freadman's Threads of Life proposes to study insights into what we may mean when we say "the will" with the help of autobiography, the most avowedly introspective of literary genres. Threads of Life is not Schopenhauerian in other ways —if only because it problematizes the concept of the will. Though the appendix surveys perspectives on the will from Aristotle, St. Augustine, Maimonides, and Aquinas to Ricoeur and Wittgenstein, the main text discusses philosophers and writers whose positions on the subject are deeply conflicted, whether in terms of their self-contradictions and their conscious changes of mind or because their literary practices stand in oxymoronic relationships to their tenets. Freadman's focus is on what he calls reflective autobiographies, or "first-person life-writing in which there is a significant and sophisticated component of reflection of the meaning and larger implications of the life being written, and of life in general" (22); such works do not merely reflect the culture within which they were produced but render the authors' attempts to transcend this culture and assert the selves they would fashion despite its conditioning. The writing, especially the writing of twentieth-century intellectual autobiography, emerges as part of this self-fashioning. Freadman starts with "contexts": the determinist undercurrents in Nietzsche's, Marx's, and Freud's treatments of the freedom of the will and reversals in the valorization of the will by Sartre, Gilbert Ryle, and Derrida. His next step is a sustained discussion of much read but seldom analyzed autobiographies of theorists, such as the neo-Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (who had, in a fit of insanity, strangled his wife in 1980), the behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner, and the literary critic Roland Barthes.1 [End Page 168] Freadman shows that these intellectuals' beliefs in the determinant role of the social, familiar, or intellectual environment, and their concomitant downplaying of individual agency, are actually deconstructed by the highly individualized character of their own autobiographical works —for example by the alphabetical ordering of material in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, a willful debunking of culturally conditioned "protocols of self-disclosure" (39). The tense relationship between principle and practice is also explored in the discussion of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, a slightly fictionalized memoir by a near-legendary exponent of courageous virile pursuits. In contrast to the heroic image projected by Hemingway's public persona, the book emphasizes the element of chance rather than exertions of the will. The chapter stages a reciprocal relationship between the theory of "moral luck" (Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams) and the insights into the workings of the somewhat narcissistic creative consciousness attested to by Hemingway's account of his post-World War I years in Paris. Hemingway's ability to harness his subconscious creative energies for the sake of his writing is contrasted to his failure to control the irrational sense of emptiness or hunger that may be held accountable for the breakup of his first marriage. One might further suggest that the freedom and power of the will designed Hemingway's writing rather than his personal relationships, but even in his writing one could observe uneasy combinations between an aleatic receptiveness to the moral luck of afflatus and a virtuoso stylist's disciplined effort and skill. By contrast, the chapter on Simone de Beauvoir, strategically placed in the middle of the book and central to its concerns, follows the vicissitudes of Beauvoir's ideologically motivated exertion of the will in the construction of her self and her life —and in the teeth of...