Tuesday 19 May 2015

Burkeman on Narratives

Fascinating piece by Oliver Burkeman on narratives

Could you have a meaningful life without this sense of continuity, this feeling that you are the person to whom your childhood happened, and who’ll experience your old age? Surely nobody could think of the scenes of their life – childhood summers, first kisses, bereavements – as lacking any connecting thread whatsoever?

But Galen Strawson, another philosopher, says this is exactly how he experiences the world, and he suspects he’s not alone. “I have a past, like any human, [and] I have a respectable amount of factual knowledge about it,” he concedes in Against Narrativity, a 2004 paper highlighted recently by the behavioural scientist Jess Whittlestone. “Yet I have no sense of my life as a narrative with form.”