The story of your life, or life as a work of art
January 12th 2007 00:26
We're besieged by narratives. We're trained to recognize and produce them. We tell anecdotes, read books, watch movies.
"Story" can mean a range of things. There's two vague qualities I particularly have in mind. Firstly, that a story has order and unity -- that the scenes and acts of a movie are unrandom, have reasons to be there. And secondly, that the whole is perceived as about something, even when that something is ambiguous. A lot of the traditional game of English papers has been to reduce a book to a single proposition, a theme, and to produce "evidence" to justify one's interpretation, or to defend it against other candidates.
Personally, I try not to read art this way. I don't ask after the meaning of a sunset, so I don't ask after the meaning of a theatrical experience. But there seem to be plenty of people who read life this way. That is, they see the world in terms of story, or themselves as protagonists.
This is a factor, for instance, in the belief that you're not just another statistic, that you're special, and if you just go with the flow you'll have a happily ever after -- that everything will naturally turn out all right.
This is a factor in apocalyptic thinking -- the urge to storify history.
And it's nigh unavoidable in the case of your own past -- to see sense in its sequence of events.
For reasons of genetics or conditioning, a lot of us narrative-think.
And some go a further step -- and not only find narrative in life, but claim that a good life should have the qualities of a good story -- including being as unified as possible, and as meaningful as possible.
There is something of this approach in Robert Nozick, when he asserts that the contours of happiness have an independent weight to its amount -- given a choice, people would accept a slight decrease in area in return for an upwardly sloping curve.
And there's a more developed version in Ronald Dworkin, when he thinks that people want to die appropriately, and, if possible, in such a way as to confirm the values they lived by. We worry about death, says Dworkin, just as we might worry "about the effect of a play's last scene or a poem's last stanza on the entire creative work... People think it important not just that their life contain a variety of the right experiences, achievements, and connections, but that it have a structure that expresses a coherent choice among these".
But to both Nozick and Dworkin, good narrative/aesthetic completeness is just one element of the life well lived. Whereas Jenann Ismael, in a lecture on death, gives it (I think) centre place.
To paraphrase some of her claims:
-- Works of art have a "holistic value" that's not reducible to the value of their parts. If you focused on the intrinsic worth of notes or colours, and tried to compose music or paint a picture based on a local standard throughout, you'd end up with your favourite note repeated over and over, or the canvas covered with your favourite shade. The meaning of the work does not reside in any one part, but you perceive it by surveying the whole, considering the arrangement of components, asking whether they add up to anything.
-- In similar fashion do we approach life. When you pull back from the day-to-day and consider the whole, you ask about coherence, direction, unity of character, whether a consistent set of values drives it, whether it adds up to anything or expresses anything worth expressing.
-- You also think about wasted time, false starts, half-finished projects, equivocal choices. Just as we've been disappointed by movies that don't add up to anything or go anywhere, so a life that's not well lived is slapdash, arbitrary, without theme or direction, not guided by and not expressing overarching values or an integrated personality.
-- A painting needs a frame to be meaningful. Similarly, life needs limits -- birth and death -- to have this sort of meaning.
-- Our lives take shape under our direction like a painting takes shape beneath a brush. Our choices fill the canvas. Every stroke cumulatively gives rise to the whole. And if we have an idea of what we want the painting to look like, we should make everything directed towards that end product, should bring life and ourselves into sharper focus. A life well lived should have an eye half-cocked towards the big picture, and adapt itself to the shape and size of the frame.
-- We don't know how much canvas we have -- there's a risk that at any moment the brush will be ripped from our hand. We need to have enough down so that the picture will always make sense, at any time that the brush is taken -- but we also need projects in the works, to fill out the rest of the picture if the brush remains. How you negotiate this practical dilemma is how you choose to live.
Now, on what basis does Ismael give this lyrical description, combining the "meaningful" life and the good one? How does she know that the bad life is haphazard and the good life coherently structured? How does she make the jump from talking about holistic value in music and painting to speaking of life?
To cut a short lecture shorter, I think she's attempting to draw significance from people's tendency to think in narrative, and is partly saying "This account of the good life rings true for me; does it ring true for you also?" or "This account makes sense of all the various beliefs and questions I have; do you know of a better hypothesis?" She's in effect partly playing (on my interpretation) the ethicists' intuition game. Some of the players of this game believe that intuitions give direct access to truth (like divine revelation, or an answer obtained during prayer); while others want to make their intuitions consistent, to swallow some and fiddle with the rest until there emerges a systematization they can live with.
Intuition-mongering can be problematic. Thought experiments, hypotheticals, are notorious for aiming at agreement and eliciting, instead, a variety of opinions. And if, for whatever reason, one believes there's no objective answer to be found, then isn't that the end of the matter? -- why should the possibility of systematization offer consolation? What would success in systematization amount to? Couldn't there be multiple possible ways to make everything consistent? And why, after all, is a belief set that's inconsistent or not fully mapped out necessarily worse, per se, than a systematized one? -- Contradictions in your beliefs, or uncertainties, can speak of the respect in which you hold the difficulty of answering; while neatness and lack of mess can speak of fascist simplification.
However, abandonment of objective values and intuitions can apparently still lead to an "aesthetic" approach.
Jean-Paul Sartre believed that God was dead and humans were free. And yet he spoke of "inauthenticity" and "bad faith", and the superiority of the directed life -- the life "for itself" over the life "in itself". It was important to him to take control, and there were ways in which one had to exercise choice.
Whereas if we were truly free, then the decision to shape your life at all would be a purely personal one, as good as any other: the philosopher is not in any position of authority, but is simply a particular kind of individual. Compare the Wittgensteinian idea that philosophy is therapy for those bewildered by language.
And as for how to shape life, what would there be but blank page -- just as in art -- to fill as it pleased you, with no standards beyond those you set.
One more thought, but don't read this unless you're anal retentive or are a sucker for punishment.
There's any number of ways to classify theories of the good life. You can group them by chronology, or by objects of concern, or by number of consonants in their names. Similar questions arise when speaking of literary genre. No category system is right or wrong, but: (a) some don't have room for all that they purport to classify; and (b) some classification schemes are more useful than others (though any is liable to becoming insufficient).
Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons (1984) says there are three types of theories of self-interest. So the question I want to pose is: Could aesthetic theory, narrative theory, count as a fourth alongside Parfit's three?
The existing types seem to share at least three attributes.
Firstly, they distinguish between self and other.
Secondly, they're not a checklist of goals, but are open-ended, maximizable qualities. If you're into pleasure, then there's no "best" life" as such -- there's always more pleasure that you can cram in.
Thirdly, they're "intrinsic" goods:
-- Hedonism: You don't pursue pleasure for the sake of anything (so this line of thinking goes) -- you pursue it because it's good in itself. Whereas money is "instrumental", not intrinsic -- you earn it to spend it.
-- Desire fulfilment: Perhaps it's not about pleasure -- it's all about want; and desires don't necessarily relate to happiness; and lives go better the more desires you satisfy.
-- Objective list: John Finnis (for instance) would claim that there's a number of maximizable qualities, none of which is reducible to any other. All of these are necessary for the good life -- whether or not they give you pleasure and whether or not you would ever desire them. In Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980) he lists: life; knowledge; play; aesthetic experience; sociability or friendship; practical reasonableness; and religion (metaphysical beliefs).
But aren't hedonism and desire fulfilment just single-item objective lists? -- Well, presumably Parfit separates "monovalent" from multivalent simply because it's convenient -- for whatever reason, perhaps partly historical usage.
And couldn't any single quality be proposed as the basis of a new type, like maximizing courage, or amount of chocolate eaten, or aces served? -- Well, presumably Parfit has applied some sort of plausibility or commonality criteria and has screened out the infinity of suggestions beyond these three. The virtues are an interesting suggestion; but most people would agree that you don't eat chocolate or serve aces for their own sake, but in order to experience pleasure, etc.
Now, an "aesthetic" approach to life, wanting to maximize unity or meaning, could count as a fourth type if:
-- it shared the three attributes (was a matter of self and not other; was a maximizable quality; and was intrinsic and not reducible to hedonism or desire fulfilment);
-- the four-types structure was convenient;
-- and the theory itself was plausible.
I honestly don't know if these criteria are met, but it seems to me that aesthetic theory has at least this advantage that warrants its inclusion: whereas the other three types terminate in assertions about human nature and what is objectively good, aesthetic theory constitutes an alternative that terminates in freedom.
Notes
The idea of intrinsic goods is famously expressed in Aristotle: "Since there are apparently many ends, and we choose some of them... because of something else, it is clear that not all ends are complete. But the best good is apparently something complete. And so, if only one end is complete, the good we are looking for will be this end; if more ends than one are complete, it will be the most complete end of these." -- Terence Irwin (tr), Nicomachean Ethics, 1999, 1097a26-30.
Nietzsche does and doesn't fit as a narrative-theory ethicist. He talks about creating ourselves day by day, but his eternal recurrence myth is directed towards living a life you can live with rather than forming a work of art.
The idea that our narrative shapes our experience of the world is one that is associated, among other people, with Paul Ricoeur. He speaks of the quality that plots have of "intelligibility", and of the "transfiguration of daily reality brought about by fiction itself" -- the way that fiction doesn't utterly lack connection to the real world but has "productive reference": "[T]he plots that we invent help us to shape our confused, formless and in the last resort mute temporal experience." -- Paul Ricoeur, "On interpretation" in Alan Montefiore (ed), Philosophy in France Today, 1983.
Ricoeur also shares with Jenann Ismael a belief in something like a narrative theory of personal identity. I don't know anything about the idea, but it seems to have a not insigificant literature. Maria Villela-Petit, in the course of arguing against the theory, describes Ricoeur's version as follows: "In other words, story telling makes it be that there is someone who can be referred to when we ask: 'Who has done this?', 'Who has behaved in this way?', or 'To whom did such a thing happen?' This comes down to asserting that an individual or collective entity can only be identified along with and through the act of composing what we call a narrative, be it of the fictive or the historical kind."
The connection between a narrative theory (or an "accumulated memory" theory) of the self and a narrative theory of the good life is ambiguous to me (though Ismael seems to imply that there is one). It might be along the lines of: we value these things while we live, so they are good candidates for things that we should direct our lives to achieving.
Friday 14 December 2007: John Rawls in A theory of justice (1971) writes: "Two other principles apply to the overall shape of plans... One of these is that of continuity... The whole plan has a certain unity, a dominant theme. There is not, so to speak, a separate utility function for each period... A second closely related principle holds that we are to consider the advantages of rising, or at least of not significantly declining, expectations... Even though the total sum of enjoyment is the same... increasing expectations provide a measure of contentment that makes the difference." It's not clear to me what he means, but he does seem to be at least gesturing towards something like a narrative theory.
The Dworkin quote is from Life's Dominion (1994). The Foucault is from a series of interviews conducted in 1983 and combined as "On the genealogy of ethics", printed in Paul Rabinow (ed), Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 1994, p 262.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia articles Moirae, Blue Poles, God Is Dead, Paul Ricoeur. The image of John Finnis came from the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. That of Jenann Ismael came from a Sydney Uni podcast page.
"Story" can mean a range of things. There's two vague qualities I particularly have in mind. Firstly, that a story has order and unity -- that the scenes and acts of a movie are unrandom, have reasons to be there. And secondly, that the whole is perceived as about something, even when that something is ambiguous. A lot of the traditional game of English papers has been to reduce a book to a single proposition, a theme, and to produce "evidence" to justify one's interpretation, or to defend it against other candidates.
Personally, I try not to read art this way. I don't ask after the meaning of a sunset, so I don't ask after the meaning of a theatrical experience. But there seem to be plenty of people who read life this way. That is, they see the world in terms of story, or themselves as protagonists.
This is a factor, for instance, in the belief that you're not just another statistic, that you're special, and if you just go with the flow you'll have a happily ever after -- that everything will naturally turn out all right.
This is a factor in apocalyptic thinking -- the urge to storify history.
And it's nigh unavoidable in the case of your own past -- to see sense in its sequence of events.
Clotho spins the thread, Lachesis measures it, Atropos cuts it...
***
For reasons of genetics or conditioning, a lot of us narrative-think.
And some go a further step -- and not only find narrative in life, but claim that a good life should have the qualities of a good story -- including being as unified as possible, and as meaningful as possible.
There is something of this approach in Robert Nozick, when he asserts that the contours of happiness have an independent weight to its amount -- given a choice, people would accept a slight decrease in area in return for an upwardly sloping curve.
And there's a more developed version in Ronald Dworkin, when he thinks that people want to die appropriately, and, if possible, in such a way as to confirm the values they lived by. We worry about death, says Dworkin, just as we might worry "about the effect of a play's last scene or a poem's last stanza on the entire creative work... People think it important not just that their life contain a variety of the right experiences, achievements, and connections, but that it have a structure that expresses a coherent choice among these".
Jenann Ismael
To paraphrase some of her claims:
-- Works of art have a "holistic value" that's not reducible to the value of their parts. If you focused on the intrinsic worth of notes or colours, and tried to compose music or paint a picture based on a local standard throughout, you'd end up with your favourite note repeated over and over, or the canvas covered with your favourite shade. The meaning of the work does not reside in any one part, but you perceive it by surveying the whole, considering the arrangement of components, asking whether they add up to anything.
-- In similar fashion do we approach life. When you pull back from the day-to-day and consider the whole, you ask about coherence, direction, unity of character, whether a consistent set of values drives it, whether it adds up to anything or expresses anything worth expressing.
-- You also think about wasted time, false starts, half-finished projects, equivocal choices. Just as we've been disappointed by movies that don't add up to anything or go anywhere, so a life that's not well lived is slapdash, arbitrary, without theme or direction, not guided by and not expressing overarching values or an integrated personality.
-- A painting needs a frame to be meaningful. Similarly, life needs limits -- birth and death -- to have this sort of meaning.
-- Our lives take shape under our direction like a painting takes shape beneath a brush. Our choices fill the canvas. Every stroke cumulatively gives rise to the whole. And if we have an idea of what we want the painting to look like, we should make everything directed towards that end product, should bring life and ourselves into sharper focus. A life well lived should have an eye half-cocked towards the big picture, and adapt itself to the shape and size of the frame.
-- We don't know how much canvas we have -- there's a risk that at any moment the brush will be ripped from our hand. We need to have enough down so that the picture will always make sense, at any time that the brush is taken -- but we also need projects in the works, to fill out the rest of the picture if the brush remains. How you negotiate this practical dilemma is how you choose to live.
Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952 by Jackson Pollock
***
Now, on what basis does Ismael give this lyrical description, combining the "meaningful" life and the good one? How does she know that the bad life is haphazard and the good life coherently structured? How does she make the jump from talking about holistic value in music and painting to speaking of life?
To cut a short lecture shorter, I think she's attempting to draw significance from people's tendency to think in narrative, and is partly saying "This account of the good life rings true for me; does it ring true for you also?" or "This account makes sense of all the various beliefs and questions I have; do you know of a better hypothesis?" She's in effect partly playing (on my interpretation) the ethicists' intuition game. Some of the players of this game believe that intuitions give direct access to truth (like divine revelation, or an answer obtained during prayer); while others want to make their intuitions consistent, to swallow some and fiddle with the rest until there emerges a systematization they can live with.
Intuition-mongering can be problematic. Thought experiments, hypotheticals, are notorious for aiming at agreement and eliciting, instead, a variety of opinions. And if, for whatever reason, one believes there's no objective answer to be found, then isn't that the end of the matter? -- why should the possibility of systematization offer consolation? What would success in systematization amount to? Couldn't there be multiple possible ways to make everything consistent? And why, after all, is a belief set that's inconsistent or not fully mapped out necessarily worse, per se, than a systematized one? -- Contradictions in your beliefs, or uncertainties, can speak of the respect in which you hold the difficulty of answering; while neatness and lack of mess can speak of fascist simplification.
***
However, abandonment of objective values and intuitions can apparently still lead to an "aesthetic" approach.
Whereas if we were truly free, then the decision to shape your life at all would be a purely personal one, as good as any other: the philosopher is not in any position of authority, but is simply a particular kind of individual. Compare the Wittgensteinian idea that philosophy is therapy for those bewildered by language.
And as for how to shape life, what would there be but blank page -- just as in art -- to fill as it pleased you, with no standards beyond those you set.
| Question: But if one is to create oneself without recourse to knowledge or universal rules, how does your view differ from Sartrean existentialism?
Michel Foucault: I think that from the theoretical point of view, Sartre avoids the idea of the self as something that is given to us, but through the moral notion of authenticity, he turns back to the idea that we have to be ourselves -- to be truly our true self. I think that the only acceptable practical consequence of what Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to the practice of creativity -- and not that of authenticity. From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art. |
***
One more thought, but don't read this unless you're anal retentive or are a sucker for punishment.
There's any number of ways to classify theories of the good life. You can group them by chronology, or by objects of concern, or by number of consonants in their names. Similar questions arise when speaking of literary genre. No category system is right or wrong, but: (a) some don't have room for all that they purport to classify; and (b) some classification schemes are more useful than others (though any is liable to becoming insufficient).
Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons (1984) says there are three types of theories of self-interest. So the question I want to pose is: Could aesthetic theory, narrative theory, count as a fourth alongside Parfit's three?
The existing types seem to share at least three attributes.
Firstly, they distinguish between self and other.
Secondly, they're not a checklist of goals, but are open-ended, maximizable qualities. If you're into pleasure, then there's no "best" life" as such -- there's always more pleasure that you can cram in.
Thirdly, they're "intrinsic" goods:
-- Hedonism: You don't pursue pleasure for the sake of anything (so this line of thinking goes) -- you pursue it because it's good in itself. Whereas money is "instrumental", not intrinsic -- you earn it to spend it.
-- Desire fulfilment: Perhaps it's not about pleasure -- it's all about want; and desires don't necessarily relate to happiness; and lives go better the more desires you satisfy.
John Finnis
But aren't hedonism and desire fulfilment just single-item objective lists? -- Well, presumably Parfit separates "monovalent" from multivalent simply because it's convenient -- for whatever reason, perhaps partly historical usage.
And couldn't any single quality be proposed as the basis of a new type, like maximizing courage, or amount of chocolate eaten, or aces served? -- Well, presumably Parfit has applied some sort of plausibility or commonality criteria and has screened out the infinity of suggestions beyond these three. The virtues are an interesting suggestion; but most people would agree that you don't eat chocolate or serve aces for their own sake, but in order to experience pleasure, etc.
Now, an "aesthetic" approach to life, wanting to maximize unity or meaning, could count as a fourth type if:
-- it shared the three attributes (was a matter of self and not other; was a maximizable quality; and was intrinsic and not reducible to hedonism or desire fulfilment);
-- the four-types structure was convenient;
-- and the theory itself was plausible.
I honestly don't know if these criteria are met, but it seems to me that aesthetic theory has at least this advantage that warrants its inclusion: whereas the other three types terminate in assertions about human nature and what is objectively good, aesthetic theory constitutes an alternative that terminates in freedom.
***
Notes
The idea of intrinsic goods is famously expressed in Aristotle: "Since there are apparently many ends, and we choose some of them... because of something else, it is clear that not all ends are complete. But the best good is apparently something complete. And so, if only one end is complete, the good we are looking for will be this end; if more ends than one are complete, it will be the most complete end of these." -- Terence Irwin (tr), Nicomachean Ethics, 1999, 1097a26-30.
Nietzsche does and doesn't fit as a narrative-theory ethicist. He talks about creating ourselves day by day, but his eternal recurrence myth is directed towards living a life you can live with rather than forming a work of art.
Paul Ricoeur
Ricoeur also shares with Jenann Ismael a belief in something like a narrative theory of personal identity. I don't know anything about the idea, but it seems to have a not insigificant literature. Maria Villela-Petit, in the course of arguing against the theory, describes Ricoeur's version as follows: "In other words, story telling makes it be that there is someone who can be referred to when we ask: 'Who has done this?', 'Who has behaved in this way?', or 'To whom did such a thing happen?' This comes down to asserting that an individual or collective entity can only be identified along with and through the act of composing what we call a narrative, be it of the fictive or the historical kind."
The connection between a narrative theory (or an "accumulated memory" theory) of the self and a narrative theory of the good life is ambiguous to me (though Ismael seems to imply that there is one). It might be along the lines of: we value these things while we live, so they are good candidates for things that we should direct our lives to achieving.
Friday 14 December 2007: John Rawls in A theory of justice (1971) writes: "Two other principles apply to the overall shape of plans... One of these is that of continuity... The whole plan has a certain unity, a dominant theme. There is not, so to speak, a separate utility function for each period... A second closely related principle holds that we are to consider the advantages of rising, or at least of not significantly declining, expectations... Even though the total sum of enjoyment is the same... increasing expectations provide a measure of contentment that makes the difference." It's not clear to me what he means, but he does seem to be at least gesturing towards something like a narrative theory.
***
The Dworkin quote is from Life's Dominion (1994). The Foucault is from a series of interviews conducted in 1983 and combined as "On the genealogy of ethics", printed in Paul Rabinow (ed), Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 1994, p 262.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia articles Moirae, Blue Poles, God Is Dead, Paul Ricoeur. The image of John Finnis came from the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. That of Jenann Ismael came from a Sydney Uni podcast page.
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Comment by Damo
My brain hurts.
I was told that in any narrative there must ne a conflict or it is over before we start.
Only three possible conflicts exist.for any Human:
Man fights Nature,
Man fights Man,
Man fights Himself.
A biography can contain all three conflicts but conclude nothing about the value of the persons life. Yet does that make it a terrible worthless story?
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Thanks very much for making it through this! And sorry for the length. I did try to shorten, I swear.
You ask a key question.
I suppose the beginnings of an answer are that when anyone uses a metaphor, when one compares object x to object y, it's never the case that ALL of object y's qualities are relevant. If I compare someone to a cat, I might be talking about their movement, and needn't imply that they drink milk.
So when people compare the good life to a good story, I don't think that they intend the sort of comparison that you make. Does a life need to have battles with nature or man or itself in order to count as a good life? -- I don't think anyone would suggest this. Rather, they're talking about other common qualities of stories -- like coherence of theme, unity of the separate parts...
But exactly which qualities are relevant and which are not? -- The plain fact, which your question brings out, is that "narrative theorists" don't go into much detail on the matter, and leave the issue unresolved, ambiguous.
Other suggestions for common qualities of stories:
-- there's numerous classifications by theme that are similar to your three-item model. Depending on what structure the classifier uses, they can come up with nine items, or twenty items, etc.
-- there's Joseph Campbell's hero's journey -- the idea that myths have a certain symbolic structure...
-- when speaking of turning points in the narrative rather than themes, stories commonly have this sort of pattern: they begin in the everyday, then there is some imbalance or problem. The story continues until that imbalance is corrected. The scenes progress postive negative positive negative -- one step forward, then two steps back -- until the protagonist gets to the worst case scenario in the third act. Then, against all the odds, he/she end up triumphing after all.
Comment by Deorre
Stress Alive
Man Lessons
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
The speaker whom I quoted, Jenann Ismael, in turn quotes Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. When Ilyich is fading, he thinks of his memories -- his mother's skirt rustling -- and contemplates how all these moments will be lost. The android at the end of Blade Runner thinks similar thoughts. I once wrote a short post on this topic...
If you don't believe in spiritual stuff, then information loss is the only real kind of loss -- in a world where matter is recycled, where every atom in your body will form into something new.
Ismael notes that part of what we treasure as most precious in our lives are such apparently incidental moments -- things that have no meaning for anyone else. But for us they have value -- because it's only we who understand the psychological context properly, the weighting of each object, the connections to other objects and events -- and it's only we who know the place that these happenings have in our own personal story.
Comment by Damo
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Hunt Famous
Orble Post of the Day
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Comment by MelissaA
Fun Facts
Bet that didn't stop them there. ; )
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog