The fertile conjunction of philosophy and life writing generates many possibilities for study: the relationship between conceptual abstractions and the subjectivities of the philosophers who created them; the frustrating limitations of language to recapture lived experience; the fragilities of memory; the problem of ascribing meaning to experiences that elude coherent explanation; the persistent risk of self-deception. Philosophers have engaged in many forms of life writing from the exhaustive revelations of Augustine to the brief resume of David Hume. Some have thought about the issues of autobiographical reflection without bothering to write one themselves. Others find the whole enterprise uninteresting. In this special issue of Life Writing, scholars from a number of academic disciplines and countries illuminate how a range of thoughtful individuals addressed the often elusive affiliations between the theoretical and the personal, the abstract and the concrete. The articles are arranged roughly in the chronological order of their subject matter, but they also, perhaps coincidentally, group themselves into a typology of related issues.
The first two articles address the moral and ethical concerns of two prominent figures, one from the sixteenth and the other from the eighteenth century. Noelia Bueno-Gomez explores the moral predicaments within the work of Teresa of Avila, whose autobiography sought to record an exemplary life of Christian humility. Bueno-Gomez reveals the unavoidable dilemmas of proclaiming one's religious modesty and detachment from worldly rewards. Among her arguments, she notes that Teresa deployed a rhetoric that sought to navigate around the pride of self-affirmation and the condemnation of religious censors. Jean-Jacques Rousseau lived in a more secular age, but his Confessions sought forgiveness, if not from a priest, then from the reader. For generations commentators have feasted upon the contradictions within his work. To help explain these apparent inconsistencies, Marco Menin claims that Rousseau believed in more than one kind of truth. Drawing from the Reveries, Menin shows how Rousseau conceptualised the notion of a ‘moral truth’ which differed from conventional views of true and false. Unlike ‘effectual truth’ that opposes itself to fiction, a ‘moral truth’ might embody imaginative reconstructions that disclose autobiographical realities inaccessible to empirical verification. The Confessions embodies the veracity of such necessary fictions.
The next three essays concentrate on thinkers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when, among many other preoccupations, writers contemplated the relationship between structure and agency. R. J. Manheimer explores how John Stuart Mill's belief in individual free will collided in his Autobiography with the more deterministic materialism that he inherited from his father. Mill never entirely reconciled the intractable contradictions of British utilitarianism, but his personal narrative detailed how the events of his life, including the emotional crisis of his youth, revealed the range of individual choices that might be made within an historically structured environment. The complex relationship between the individual and larger social forces also animated the writings of Wilhelm Dilthey whose views on autobiography become the subject of the essay by Helga Lenart-Cheng. She argues that Dilthey valued autobiography because it revealed the deeper meanings that connected individuals with their embeddedness in history. She explores the ambiguities of Dilthey's evolving views concerning self-reflection and the life world of individuals. Although Dilthey himself never wrote an autobiography, his conceptual framework heavily influenced an emerging tradition of German life writing. Part of this tradition in the twentieth century was Walter Benjamin's Berlin Childhood Around 1900, an elusive, often mystical work that Christopher Hamilton interrogates in his essay. Hamilton argues that in his attempt to recapture an enchanted childhood Benjamin reconfigured and decentred the notion of personal agency within the various ideological structures that permeated his youth and in often mysterious ways shaped his fallible adult memories. Hamilton explores the changing meaning of time and space for Benjamin and illuminates how his quest for a lost world reflected the Modernist infatuation with fragmented aesthetic truths.
The essays by Grace Whistler and D. L. LeMahieu examine in different ways the relationship between the Self and the Other in life writing. Whistler engages the works of Albert Camus, whose fictionalised confessional writing in such works as The First Man and The Fall sought to unravel the complexities of the inter-subjective encounter. Whistler argues that, inspired by Augustine and Rousseau, Camus created personal narrators whose occasional unreliability amuse and irritate the reader, but help illuminate the nuances of confessional revelation. In both its candour and evasiveness, life writing inspires empathetic identification. LeMahieu examines the life and work of Bryan Magee, the British philosopher and populariser whose isolation and feelings of abandonment during his impoverished childhood helped shape a lifetime of metaphysical enquiry. In his various autobiographies, books on philosophy and successful television broadcasts, Magee created narratives of connection between individuals and abstractions, and between great philosophers and the general public. Magee discovered in ideas the bonding tissue between himself and others.
The final three essays confront issues of narrativity. Borrowing from Mikhail Bakhtin, Daphne Erdinast-Vulcan applies the notion of heterobiography to life writing. Erdinast-Vulcan explores the difficult questions that surround autobiography as both a representation of a life and the retrospective narrative performance of it. She argues:
autobiography may be conceived as generated out of the tensile relations between the ‘centripetal’ vector of subjectivity, that is, the need for narrative framing, coherence, and containment, and the equally powerful ‘centrifugal’ vector generated by the subject's innate ‘incompleteness’, the resistance to being framed and contained.
A careful reading of these essays reveal the porousness of any typology that seeks to categorise them. Moral concerns about the truthfulness or hubris of life writing blend into the limits of self-knowledge generated by the conundrums of structure and agency. The relationship between self and others encompasses the fallibility of memory and the re-presentation of a single life as a coherent story artfully told. Obviously there is much more to be said about the relationship between philosophy and life writing. We hope that this special issue might provide a gentle provocation.
Notes on contributors
D. L. LeMahieu is the Hotchkiss Presidential Professor of History at Lake Forest College. He has published extensively on modern British cultural history.
Christopher Cowley is associate professor at the School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Ireland. He works primarily on ethics, moral and legal responsibility, and theories of the self. He is the author of Moral Responsibility (Routledge 2013) and has edited The Philosophy of Autobiography (University of Chicago Press 2015) and Supererogation (Cambridge University Press 2015)