Garry L. Hagberg
Editor
Narrative and
Self-Understanding
11© The Author(s) 2019
G. L. Hagberg (ed.), Narrative and Self-Understanding,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28289-9_2
2
The (Literary) Stories of Our Lives
Jukka Mikkonen
1
It has become a commonplace that narrative plays an important, even
essential role in our understanding of reality and ourselves. We constantly
hear that we experience the world as narratives and communicate our
experiences by them; that our memories of the past, our explanations of
the present, and our plans for the future take the form of a story.1
The
great story of our time is story itself.
1
I will use the terms narrative and story interchangeably. Also, I will use synonymously the terms
self, person and personal identity.
J. Mikkonen ( )
Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
e-mail: Jukka.Mikkonen@tuni.fi
An earlier version of this paper was published in Finnish in the philosophical journal niin & näin
3/2016. I want to thank the Finnish Cultural Foundation for funding the Cognitive Relevance of
Aesthetics project (2016–2018) which this article is a part of.
12
Narrative is repeatedly claimed to be our most fundamental form of
processing, organizing and communicating information. For instance,
the cognitive scientist Mark Turner states in The Literary Mind (1996)
that “most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized
as stories.”2
For him, “narrative imagining—story—is the fundamental
instrument of thought. Rational capacities depend upon it. It is
our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning,
and of explaining. It is a literary capacity indispensable to human cognition
generally” (LM, pp. 4–5).
Turner indeed thinks that everyday narrative imagining is a literary
capacity. And he is not alone: Alasdair MacIntyre, for one, believes that
people understand themselves and their lives as narratives; for MacIntyre,
even ordinary conversations are dramatic works, which have their beginnings,
middles, and ends.3
Daniel Dennett, in turn, makes an analogy
between selfhood and artistry, claiming that “we are all virtuoso novelists,”
as “we try to make all of our material cohere into a single good
story,” namely, our autobiography, in which the “chief fictional character
is one’s self.”4
Similarly, David J. Velleman states that “we invent ourselves
. . . but we really are the characters whom we invent.”5
The psychologist
Jerome Bruner goes much further in claiming that narrative does not
only represent reality but also constitutes it. In his view, we organize our
experience in narrative form and, further, “our experience of human
affairs comes to take the form of the narratives we use in telling about
2
Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), preface; hereafter
abbreviated LM.
3
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2007 [1981]), pp. 211 & 215–218; hereafter abbreviated AV.
4
Daniel Dennett, “Why Everyone is a Novelist,” Times Literary Supplement 16–22 Sept (1988):
1028–1029 (1029). MacIntyre, for his part, thinks that we are never more than “co-authors” of our
narratives, as we cannot decide the “plot” of our life by ourselves (see AV, p.  213). David
Polkinghorne is more modest: we are narrators, not authors, of our “self-stories,” as “we do not
control all the circumstances that affect the outcome of those stories” (Donald E. Polkinghorne,
“Narrative and Self-Concept,” Journal of Narrative and Life History 1 (1991): 135–153 (146);
hereafter abbreviated “NSC”). Marya Schechtman thinks that we should look at our self-narratives
from the point of view of a character, author, and critic, see “The Narrative Self,” in The Oxford
Handbook of the Self, ed. Shaun Gallagher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 413–415.
5
David J. Velleman, “The Self as Narrator,” in Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism. New
Essays, ed. John Christman & Joel Anderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
pp. 56–76 (58).
J. Mikkonen
13
them.”6
For Bruner, stories “impose a structure, a compelling reality on
what we experience.”7
But there is suspicion, too, about narrative. Literary narratologists
have been dissatisfied in the wide, superficial use of the concept of narrative
in social sciences and the inflation thus caused: they have spoken of
“narrative hegemony” (Kreiswirth) and “narrative imperialism” (Phelan),
which both lose what is distinctive of narrative and flatten the phenomenon
studied.8
A related concern in literary studies is that narrative imperialism
reduces all the diversity and polyphony of literature into ideal
models, schemas, and stereotypes. In analytic philosophy, in turn, there
has been scepticism about the very concept of narrative and its explanatory
power: narrative is difficult to define, and appeal to it does not seem
to add much to our explanations of human action.9
This essay explores the epistemic significance of narratives. I will first
examine the recent philosophical criticism against self-narratives and
views on the potential dangers of artistic narratives and argue that it
builds on problematic assumptions: the idea that the epistemic value of
narrative would equal to its historical accuracy (real-life narratives) or
realism and resemblance between the story and the world (literary narratives).
Second, I will propose that the narrow concept of knowledge
applied in the debate is unsuccessful in explaining our use of narratives
and should be replaced with the concept of understanding. Finally, I will
illustrate how the debate on the epistemic value of stories, everyday and
literary, takes a new course with the concept of understanding.
6
Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 1–21 (5); see
also Jerome Bruner, “Life as Narrative,” Social Research 71 (2004) [1987]: 691–710 (692).
7
Jerome Bruner, Making Stories. Law, Literature, Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003),
89; hereafter abbreviated MS.
8
Martin Kreiswirth, “Merely Telling Stories? Narrative and Knowledge in the Human Sciences,”
Poetics Today 21 (2000): 293–318 (311); James Phelan, “Editor’s Column. Who’s Here? Thoughts
on Narrative Identity and Narrative Imperialism,” Narrative 13 (2005): 205–210 (206).
9
See e.g. Paisley Livingston, “Narrativity and Knowledge,” in The Poetics, Aesthetics, and Philosophy
of Narrative, ed. Noël Carroll (Malden: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 25–36.
2 The (Literary) Stories of Our Lives
14
2
The critics of narrative explanations (and narrative conception of personhood
in particular) object to the idea that one’s self could be made into a
story. Self-narratives, the stories we tell about ourselves, are said to be
situational. It is claimed, for instance, that one’s condition affects how
one understands and tells one’s life. The critics are not concerned with the
reality of the events themselves—a divorce, the death of a child, move to
another city—, but the selection of the events included in the story, the
significance given for them, and the teller’s understanding of them, such
as the motives the teller sees guiding her and others’ actions. The content
of self-narratives and the teller’s evaluation of their content is said to vary
with regard to the purpose of the story, the context of the telling, the
audience (real persons or imaginary readers), and the like. Even more:
who is really familiar with herself, the critics ask. In addition to psychoanalysis,
recent study in neurosciences is used to support critics’ doubt on
people’s self-understanding.
We have various stories of ourselves. Peter Lamarque remarks that we
“return to the major events in our lives and recount them over and over
in different narratives from different points of view,” which makes the
idea of unity and coherence crumble away.10
Lamarque claims that “the
more important the event, the more perspectives it invites, thus the more
narratives we relate, often in conflict with each other.” For him, narrative
does not produce unity or personal identity but presupposes it; people
who tell narratives of themselves already have a strong sense of self,
whereas “those of us without any such self-assurance will hesitate to
embark on a grand self-narrative, being too aware of the tensions, inconsistencies
and multiple personalities in our lives” (TON, p. 64). If we
want to use an artistic analogy, we ought to follow Roland Barthes and
say that we are not the protagonist of a novel but the whole cast in it.11
10
Peter Lamarque, The Opacity of Narrative (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014),
63–64; hereafter abbreviated TON. In Lamarque’s view, “impression given by the term ‘narrative’
is of a complete, rounded story with a beginning, middle and end that helps make sense of complex
events. The model is historical narrative or the complex narratives of fiction. But personal narratives
virtually never attain completeness, closure or unity” (p. 64).
11
See Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1980 [1975]), p. 123.
J. Mikkonen
15
Our understanding of the significance of past events in our lives and
their impact on us changes as our (self-)knowledge develops. We are able
to explain some of our actions only afterwards. When being active participants,
living our lives forward, we might not have been able to properly
reflect our doings. On the other hand, our memories change, and our
stories of the past may be anachronistic. Peter Goldie asserts that “the
demands of narrativity . . . seem to drag us towards thinking of our past
thoughts, feelings, and deliberations as more determinate than they in
fact were, and as reflective of an agency of which at the time we seemed
quite bereft.”12
Anagnorisis or epiphany, the moment of critical discovery
or revelation—“the moment I realized that”—hardly exists in life as
clearly as in dramatic stories we tell afterwards.
For Galen Strawson, a major worry with self-narratives is our tendency
to revision: to “engage unconsciously in invention, fiction of some sort—
falsification, confabulation, revisionism—when it comes to one’s apprehension
of one’s own life.”13
Strawson argues that one’s “telling and
retelling one’s past leads to changes, smoothings, enhancements, shifts
away from the facts” (“AN,” 447).14
This means, he claims, that “the more
you recall, retell, narrate yourself, the further you risk moving away from
accurate self-understanding, from the truth of your being” (“AN,” 448).15
The speak of the “truth of one’s being” brings along extensive questions—
Is personality something innate and stable? How experiences exist before
they are told or thought?—but Strawson’s remark of revision in storytelling
describes a phenomenon familiar to many. Primo Levi, the Italian
author known especially for his holocaust memories, says in an oft-cited
passage of The Drowned and Saved that “[t]he memories which lie within
us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the
12
Peter Goldie, The Mess Inside. Narrative, Emotion, & the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), p. 148; hereafter abbreviated TMI.
13
Galen Strawson, “Against Narrativity,” Ratio 17 (2004): 428–452 (443); hereafter abbreviated
“AN.”
14
For criticism of the psychological support which Strawson cites for his claim, see Paul John
Eakin, “Narrative Identity and Narrative Imperialism. A Response to Galen Strawson and James
Phelan,” Narrative 14 (2006): 180–187 (184); hereafter abbreviated “NINI.”
15
Crispin Sartwell, for one, claims that we may become trapped in our narratives, being unable to
live in the present, see End of Story. Toward an Annihilation of Language and History (Albany: SUNY
Press, 2000), chs. 1 & 2.
2 The (Literary) Stories of Our Lives
16
years go by, but often they change, or even grow, by incorporating extraneous
features”.16
Levi admits that practice (or “frequent re-evocation”)
“keeps memories fresh and alive”, but he adds that “a memory evoked too
often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become fixed in a
stereotype, in a form tested by experience, crystallized, perfected, adorned,
installing itself in the place of the raw memory and growing at its
expense”.17
Whose memories actually are our memories? The sociologist Edward
Shils notes that one’s memory does not consist only of the recollections
of personal experiences but from the memories of others, such as one’s
family members and friends.18
One ought to add: as they remember and
interpret those events.
Of course, a narrative needs to be narrated, and in public telling social
norms and conventions guide story-telling: what one can tell and how—
think of personal religious or sexual matters, for instance. In public selfnarration,
one’s self seeks form and content from surrounding cultural
models, such as a “new mother,” a “failed businessman,” and the like.19
Self-narration follows historical and communal structures of
meaning-giving.20
Moreover, story-telling has various social functions. We tell stories to
explain our choices and to illustrate our values to ourselves and others.
Conformists among us stylize their stories to match the values of the
context; Anthony Kerby goes to argue that “the individual is in fact something
of a chameleon, adapting itself very much to the needs of the
16
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage
International, 1989), pp. 23–24.
17
Ibid.
18
Edward Shils, Tradition (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 51; hereafter abbreviated T.
19
David Novitz aptly remarks that even introspection is not just about remembering. Rather,
Novitz points out that what we can recall about our past depends greatly on the questions we ask
ourselves, whereas the questions depend on our purposes in asking them; purposes, in turn, are
largely shaped by social influences. David Novitz, The Boundaries of Art: A Philosophical Inquiry into
the Place of Art in Everyday Life (Christchurch: Cybereditions, 2001 [1992]), p. 115.
20
See Dan Zahavi, “Self and Other. The Limits of Narrative Understanding”, in Narrative and
Understanding Persons, ed. Daniel D.  Hutto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),
pp. 179–201 (181–182). See also Bruner, MS, pp. 65–66 & 69.
J. Mikkonen
17
moment.”21
We tell ironic, exaggerated stories of our failures to amuse
our friends and sad stories of the same events to elicit their sympathy,
both sort of stories (their public tellings) perhaps helping us to understand
and overcome the events. Also, it is tempting to use narratives to
affect to people’s attitudes (see NS, p. 90). Including those of our own: we
might underrate our shameful doings in a story as if the story could
change the past.
It is often suggested that we constantly balance between accuracy and
coherence in real-life story-telling. Akin to literary narratives, real-life narratives
are also built with expectations and twists: what we aimed for,
what we expected, what could have happened, and what ultimately happened
(see Bruner, MS, pp. 13–15). This is required in order to maintain
the audience’s interest and to convey our expectations and intentions—
not to mention emotions—at the time of experience. And in building
this tension, the dramatic structures of artistic stories easily sneak in.
On the other hand, the context of telling sets the criteria for evaluation.
Police interrogators believe that stories may be true or false, and so
believes a poststructuralist making a report of an offence. In turn, we are
charitable for a person who in her autobiography embellishes her life and
“forgets” certain incidents in her past, for it is so human. In our everyday
life, we hear all sorts of anecdotes and gossips, which we value as informative
or entertaining, depending on the context and our interests.
Narratives draw us in many directions. But the critics of narrative think
that things may get really bad, if we bring artistic and real-life stories too
close together.
3
Lamarque has extensively criticized views that seek to understand real
lives in terms of literary narratives. He maintains that literary narratives
and our real-life narratives are qualitatively different. For him, the content
of a literary work is “perspectival” and essentially given from a
21
Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 64;
cf. p. 47; hereafter abbreviated NS.
2 The (Literary) Stories of Our Lives
18
particular point of view. This “opacity,” as he calls it, “runs deep in narrative
representation: tone, irony, humour, connotation, allusion, narrative
voice and other aspects of representation colour all narrative that aspires
to literary status. Or, more accurately, one should say that readers come
to literary works with an expectation, that narrative perspective of this
kind is salient, that the modes of representation are significant”
(TON, p. 166).
Because of the opacity of literary narratives, Lamarque is sceptical of
the view that works of literature could directly aid our conception of self,
for instance, by offering paradigmatic character types and guiding our
behaviour, or by shaping our lives through their structures and plots (see
TON, viii). He thinks that literary works could serve as models for reallife
narratives, would they be read in superficial ways or “transparently,”
“as works to look through but not at” (TON, viii–ix). However, Lamarque
argues that when we attend to the works as works of literature—that is,
opaquely—the parallels with our lives appear strained (TON, ix). He
claims that to see fictional characters as ordinary people, and their lives
essentially like ours, is to “ignore all essentially literary qualities and
reduce literature to character and plot at the same level of banality as
found in the stories we tell of ourselves” (TON, p. 68).
In this view, Nelson Goodman would be trivializing matters when saying
that “‘Don Quixote,’ taken literally, applies to no one, but taken figuratively,
applies to many of us—for example, to me in my tilts with the
windmills of current linguistics”.22
Superficial would also be Arthur
C. Danto, who says that
[T]he greatest metaphors of art I believe to be those in which the spectator
identifies himself with the attributes of the represented character: and sees
his or her life in terms of the life depicted: it is oneself as Anna Karenina,
or Isabelle Archer, or Elizabeth Bennet, or O: oneself sipping limetea; in
the Marabar Caves; in the waters of East Egg; in the Red Chamber …
where the artwork becomes a metaphor for life and life is transfigured. . . .
[A]rtistic metaphors . . . are in some way true: to see oneself as Anna is in
22
Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978), 103; see also
p. 104.
J. Mikkonen
19
some way to be Anna, and to see one’s life as her life, so as to be changed by
experience of being her.23
Lamarque claims that when we consider iconic literary characters as
abstractions and apply them to the real world, we come “to lose everything
that makes them literary in the first place,” namely, their characteristics
crafted in nuanced fictional descriptions (TON, p. 68).24
Moreover,
he emphasizes that everything in literary narratives serves aesthetic (or
dramatic) purposes: from an external point of view, the reasons which
fictional characters have for their actions are chosen to meet “aesthetic,
structural and genre-based demands for works of that kind,” which means
that in literary narratives every detail is created and has relevance with
regard to the overall design of the work (TON, ix & pp. 78–79).25
These distinctive features of literary narratives lead Lamarque to conclude
that modelling our lives on literary narratives would distort our
understanding of reality and ourselves.26
More precisely, it would lead us
to (i) seek meaning where there is mere coincidence, to (ii) let formal
structures dictate action instead of rational choice, to (iii) aestheticize our
lives, and to (iv) impose a “false teleology” on our lives (TON, ix & p. 30).
Explanations based on literary narratives might lead to self-deception,
such as confabulation; one’s considering oneself as a character in a plot
would, in turn, be “self-aggrandisement” (TON, p. 29). Moreover, a “literary”
view of life could constrain one’s action and undermine one’s sense
of being in control of one’s life, as one starts to drift the way demanded
by the “genre” (e.g. tragedy) and the “plot”—as in Freudian “fate neurosis”
(Schicksalneurose). And while literary narratives have a dramatic
23
Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1981), pp. 172, 173; emphasis in original.
24
However, when praising the richness of art, we ought not to forget the colourfulness of everyday
events, the meaningful tones and nuances in ordinary conversation, gestures and facial expressions.
Indeed, one could argue that no textual presentation can ever reach the complexity of everyday
(multisensuous) human encounters.
25
See also Bernard Williams, “Life as Narrative,” European Journal of Philosophy 17 (2007): 305–314
(310–311); Polkinghorne, “NSC,” p. 146.
26
See also Peter Goldie (TMI, pp. 161–173) for our “fictionalizing tendencies,” such as plotting out
our lives, finding agency where it is none, desiring for closure, and thinking in terms of genre and
character; and Strawson (“AN,” pp. 441–443) for our tendencies to form-finding, story-telling and
revision.
2 The (Literary) Stories of Our Lives
20
closure, Lamarque argues that real lives “just ‘terminate’, quite often in
medias res” (TON, pp. 29–30).27
A truth is that real-life narratives and literary narratives are radically
different. But it is equally true that we, or most of us, have a tendency to
give our experiences, and memories and plans, a story form. We use narrative
in giving meaning (conceivability) and significance (value). Reality
is a chaotic and incomprehensible flow, if we have no conception of causality,
and life dull and meaningless without purposeful action. In his
classic work The Sense of an Ending (1967) Frank Kermode says that we
cannot stand the “nauseous and viscous” contingency of reality.28
We cannot
bear the randomness or uncertainty of life but need sense, structure
and aim. We strive for a closure—which may be emotional, a mere feeling
of this being it.29
This is important especially in traumatic cases. What
happened to a missing person? We accept a judgement made of a speculation:
so it must have been. The need for stories is existential: literature
fulfills—and disturbs—this longing for sense.
Those who are critical of the value of real-life and literary narratives
base their criticism on two problematic ideas: first, a narrow and contested
conception of narrative that is defined in terms of plot and emphasizes
unity and coherence and, second, an idea that the epistemic value of
narrative lies in its ability to record events.30
When we approach narrative
as a vehicle for understanding, the matter looks different.
27
Cf. Jeanette Bicknell, “Self-Knowledge and the Limitations of Narrative,” Philosophy and
Literature 28 (2004): 406–416 (415). Our lives might resemble novels, “but bad ones, cluttered
and undisciplined ones,” says David Carr (“Life and the Narrator’s Art,” in Hermeneutics and
Deconstruction, ed. Hugh J. Silverman & Don Ihde (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985), pp. 108–121
(115)). Paul Ricœur, in turn, reminds one of the distinctive temporality of literary narratives (story/
plot distinction, iterativity) in his Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 160.
28
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000), p.136. See Roquentin’s encounter with the root of the chestnut tree in Sartre’s Nausea.
For “viscosity,” see also Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Être et le Néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), pp. 646–662.
29
See Goldie, TMI, 70–72. Noël Carroll remarks that we can think of closure as a phenomenological
impression of finality, see “Narrative Closure,” Philosophical Studies 135 (2007): 1–15 (4–5);
David J. Velleman, in turn, identifies closure with emotional resolution, see “Narrative Explanation,”
The Philosophical Review 112 (2003): 1–25 (6–7).
30
The conception of narrative based on coherence and unity is highly contested in literary studies
as well as in social sciences, see e.g. chapters in Beyond Narrative Coherence: An Introduction, ed.
Matti Hyvärinen, Lars-Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo & Maria Tamboukou (Philadelphia:
J. Mikkonen
21
4
In narrative theory deriving from the hermeneutic and phenomenological
tradition, self-narration is seen not as reconstruction but construction.
Paul Ricœur, for one, says that “we recognize ourselves in the stories
that we tell about ourselves. It makes very little difference whether these
stories are true or false, fiction as well as verifiable history provides us
with an identity.”31
We change constantly, and (self-)narration is continuous
(re-)interpretation. The literary critic Paul John Eakin argues that
“autobiographical truth is not a fixed but an evolving content in an intricate
process of self-discovery and self-creation.”32
Kerby, in turn, proposes
that we should speak of the “pragmatic and relative adequacy” of real-life
narratives, for “narrative truths” are “more a matter of facilitating understanding
and integration than of generating strict historical verisimilitude.”
(NS, pp. 83 & 89–90) This is not to say that autobiographical
narratives are free from the facts (or the author’s beliefs),33
but that from
the viewpoint of cognition, narratives are not mere record of events.
In epistemology and philosophy of science, philosophers such as
Catherine Elgin, Neil Cooper, and Linda Zagzebski have emphasized the
value of understanding in our cognitive endeavours and thus come near to
the hermeneutic and phenomenological tradition. As they see it,
John Benjamins Pub. Company, 2010) and Matti Hyvärinen, “‘Against Narrativity’ Reconsidered,”
in Disputable Core Concepts of Narrative Theory, ed. Göran Rossholm & Christer Johansson (Bern:
Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 327–345 (328–330).
31
Paul Ricœur, “History as Narrative and Practice,” Philosophy Today 29 (1985): 213–222 (214).
Likewise, the critic Roy Pascal claims that “autobiographies offer an unparalleled insight into the
mode of consciousness of other men. Even if what they tell us is not factually true, or only partly
true, it always is true evidence of their personality” (Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 1).
32
Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 3; see
also Eakin (How Our Lives Become Stories. Making Selves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999),
ch. 2) and Eakin (“NINI,” p. 181). For a view of plasticity and procedurality of identities in autobiographical
writing, see Martin Löschnigg, “Postclassical Narratology and the Theory of
Autobiography,” in Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, ed. Jan Alber & Monika
Fludernik (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), p. 262.
33
Nonetheless, autobiographies depict events of which many can never be verified; and where there
have been witnesses to the reported events, their testimonies are also subject to interpretation and
assessment.
2 The (Literary) Stories of Our Lives
22
understanding is more important than possessing individual truths and
knowledge. Systematizing roughly their views, they hold that:
(i) Understanding concerns the whole phenomenon and cannot be
broken into bits.34
(ii) Understanding is seeing and creating connections between bits of
knowledge.35
It is about grasping explanatory relationships in a large
body of information and seeing causal and conceptual relations
between parts of a whole and between the parts and the whole.36
(iii) Understanding is giving significance to individual truths.37
Cognitive
progress is not only about gaining new information but deepening
what we already know: evaluating the information we have at
our disposal.
(iv) Understanding is (in certain interpretations) non-factive. Some
truths may be trivial, whereas some falsehoods are useful approximations
or idealizations (ideal gas or H2O, for instance).38
The advancement
of understanding may require deliberate distortion, and
accurate knowledge and understanding of the whole can draw us in
opposite directions (“TEU,” p. 210).
34
Catherine Z. Elgin, Considered Judgment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 123;
Catherine Z.  Elgin, “Understanding and the Facts,” Philosophical Studies 132 (2007): 33–42
(35–36); hereafter abbreviated “UF.”
35
See Neil Cooper, “The Epistemology of Understanding,” Inquiry. An Interdisciplinary Journal of
Philosophy 38 (1995): 205–215 (213); hereafter abbreviated “TEU”; Catherine Z. Elgin, “Art in
the Advancement of Understanding,” American Philosophical Quarterly 39 (2002): 1–12 (3–5);
hereafter abbreviated “AAU.”
36
See e.g. Linda Zagzebski, “Recovering Understanding,” in Knowledge Truth, and Duty. Essays on
Epistemic Justification, Responsibility, and Virtue, ed. Matthias Steup (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), pp.  235–251 (241 & 244); hereafter abbreviated “RU”; Linda Zagzebski, On
Epistemology (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2009), pp.  144–145; Jonathan L.  Kvanvig, The Value of
Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
pp. 96–97 & 192; hereafter abbreviated TVKPU.
37
See Cooper, “TEU,” 206; Catherine Z.  Elgin, “From Knowledge to Understanding,” in
Epistemology Futures, ed. Stephen Hetherington (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 199–215;
Elgin, “UF,” pp. 33–42.
38
Elgin, “AAU,” p. 11; see also Catherine Z. Elgin, “True Enough,” Philosophical Issues 14 (2004):
113–131 (131); hereafter “TE”; Elgin, “UF,” p.  38; Catherine Z.  Elgin, “Is Understanding
Factive?,” in Epistemic Value, ed. Duncan Pritchard, Allan Miller & Adrian Hadock (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 322–330.
J. Mikkonen
23
(v) Understanding comes in degrees and is characteristically a process
(TVKPU, p. 196).
(vi) Understanding is largely non-propositional. We understand automobile
engines, diseases, and the like.39
The development of understanding
manifests itself in the ability to present new, insightful
questions, for instance (See e.g. “AAU,” p. 5).
Narrative explanations and understanding seem close companions, as
causality and evaluation play a central role in both of them. Narratives
convey understanding, as they do not only store information but structure
and value it; as Kerby remarks, “in the telling we seem also to be
immediately involved in generating the value of a certain state of affairs
or course of action, of judging its worth, ethical or otherwise” (NS, 54;
emphasis in original). The psychologist Donald Polkinghorne, in turn,
suggests that “storied memories retain the complexity of the situation in
which an action was undertaken and the emotional and motivational
meaning connected with it. Narrative cognition configures the diverse
elements of a particular action into a unified whole in which each element
is connected to the central purpose of the action.”40
Nevertheless,
the notion of understanding systematized above concerns primarily the
natural world and paradigmatically scientific explanations. What it is to
understand oneself or the social world?
Self is a complex aggregation of beliefs, emotions, and attitudes. It
would be challenging to speak of such an entity as a whole, as the notion
of objectual understanding implies. Is the object of self-understanding
one’s present self—one’s uppermost attitudes, beliefs and emotions—or
some aspect of the self, a personality trait, a way of behaving, and the
“unity of life” only indirectly? Perhaps we should not ask too much from
self-narratives or any other sort of explanations of the self. Indeed, some
have proposed that even brief narrative explanations could have an
important role in enhancing our understanding of ourselves. Daniel
39
Catherine Z. Elgin, “Understanding: Art and Science,” Synthese 95, 1993 [1991], 13–68: 14;
Zagzebski, “RU,” p. 242.
40
Donald E. Polkinghorne, “Narrative Configuration in Qualitative Analysis,” in Life, History and
Narrative, ed. J. Amos Hatch & Richard Wisniewski (London: The Falmer Press, 2003 [1995]):
5–24 (11).
2 The (Literary) Stories of Our Lives
24
Hutto, for one, argues for the value of “small narratives” in self-narration,
whereas David Cooper claims that we render our actions intelligible by
“little narratives”.41
For example, narrative explanations, by which we
illuminate our actions with respect to our values and purposes, are our
attempts to understand ourselves and to communicate this understanding
to others. Such narratives are often fragmentary, and their unity and
coherence are ultimately brought in by the reader or hearer; many of our
stories are joint accomplishments and produced in dialogues. Also, we
should be modest about the idea of seeing connections. None of us is able
to name the “relevant factors” that have contributed to making of our
self, but many of us can tell illuminating stories of formative events, ideals,
hopes and fears, influential persons, and the like, in our lives.
The idea of the potential value of falsehoods and idealizations, in turn,
fits well the common idea of self-narratives. Our earlier misconceptions
of ourselves—those that we now acknowledge to be false—are an important
part of our self-understanding and history (See T, p. 50). Moreover,
we make deliberate distortions in order to achieve cognitive ends, the
falsehoods and idealizations serving our understanding of how things are
(see “TE”). For instance, I may think what I was like as a child and imagine
being that child as a basis to understand my temper and ways of reacting
today, yet acknowledging that my imaginative projection is a
simplification. Of course, one’s false beliefs about oneself, such as extreme
confidence in one’s abilities, may be pragmatically useful; still, they do
not enhance but distort one’s self-understanding. Idealizations are
41
See Daniel D. Hutto, “Narrative and Understanding Persons,” in Narrative and Understanding
Persons, ed. Daniel D. Hutto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 1–15 (12);
Daniel D. Hutto, “Narrative Practice Hypothesis,” in Narrative and Understanding Persons, ed.
Daniel D. Hutto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 43–68 (52–60). See David
Cooper, “Life and Narrative,” International Journal of Moral and Social Studies 3 (1988): 161–172
(165). For the relevance of small stories to personal identity, see also Michael Bamberg & Alexandra
Georgakopoulou, “Small Stories as a New Perspective in Narrative and Identity Analysis,” Text &
Talk. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse Communication Studies 28 (2008):
377–396. Yet, it is open to question how much we ought to broaden the concept of narrative. It has
been claimed that a narrative fragment or a short narrative explanation loses the idea of narrativity,
and that the explanatory power of minuscule narrative explanations is not due to their narrativity
but causal dimension, for instance (see Lamarque, TON, pp. 63, 65). These remarks certainly
require careful exploration. Nonetheless, the problem might look different if we think narrative in
experiential terms and narrativity in terms of degrees.
J. Mikkonen
25
valuable when they are used as assumptions or hypotheses in an enterprise
that aims at solving out how things are.
The processual view of understanding also suits the idea of narrative as
a continuous, social project. Jens Brockmeier and Hanna Meretoja aptly
remark that understanding is not “realized in a single act of comprehension.
Subject to dialogue, conflict, and contest, it is a process carried out
through revisions and reinterpretations that are, in principle, endless.”42
Our views and attitudes develop; we aim for the harmony of our inner
voices and travel there through success and failures. The stories we tell
reflect back to us as remarks and questions, gestures and meaningful
silence. Understanding affects the understood, and we wander in a lifelong
circle.
5
As we think of cognition in terms of understanding, the question of the
value of narrative now looks different. But where does that put literary
narratives—the paradigmatic narratives? There are various ways to explore
the value of literary narratives as for the potential to contribute to our
understanding of ourselves and reality. I propose that two aspects that
ought to be paid attention in exploring the cognitive significance of literary
narratives are processuality and artificiality. The former relates to our
engaging with literary narratives and the latter to our exploring them.
As noted, a chief fascination with narrative is its ability to embody
emotional and motivational meanings and connect these to the actor’s
purpose.43
Narrative illuminates structural dimensions, development,
and change. Peter Goldie emphasizes that an emotion such as grief should
not be conceived as a mental state or event but a process, “a complex pattern
of activity and passivity, inner and outer, that unfolds over time”
(TMI, p.  56). For Goldie, grief “includes characteristic thoughts,
42
Jens Brockmeier & Hanna Meretoja, “Understanding Narrative Hermeneutics,” StoryWorlds: A
Journal of Narrative Studies 6 (2014): 1–27 (6).
43
In addition to Polkinghorne, see Goldie (TMI, p. 2) and Gregory Currie, “A Claim on the
Reader,” in Imaginative Minds, ed. Ilona Roth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007),
pp. 169–186 (174 & 176–177).
2 The (Literary) Stories of Our Lives
26
judgements, feelings, memories, imaginings, actions, expressive actions,
habitual actions, and much else besides, unfolding over time” (TMI,
p. 62). Given their dramatic structures and the kind of engagement they
invite, including the central role of anticipation in narrative imagining,
literary works provide us an insight into the processual dimension of
emotions, such as the causes and stages of grief and sorrow, and the
unfolding of actions like punishment or forgiving. It even seems that
certain actions and phenomena invite narrative explanation because of
their nature; Ricœur famously states that “the whole history of suffering
cries out for vengeance and calls for narrative.”44
Artistic narratives help
us to understand such complex processes. Works such as The Iliad,
Hamlet, The Count of Monte Cristo, and “The Cask of Amontillado” illuminate
the abstract concept of vengeance—its motivational and emotional
dimensions—and prompt moral philosophical thought on it.45
Yet, we should recall the remarks on the qualitative differences between
real-life and literary narratives and notice the textuality of insights in literature;
to pay attention how the manner of representation shapes the
content of a literary work (see TON, pp. 149, 151). Our worldly reflections
ought to be sensitive to the textual and dramatic aspects of literary
insights—the ideas we arrive at in reading literature. Rather than saying
that literary narratives show or tell us what vengeance ultimately is, we
might speak of an “eye-opening effect” and evaluate our insights on functionalist
criteria, by their ability to help us in formulating questions on
the philosophy and psychology of vengeance, for example.
Moreover, when we explore literary narratives from an “external” viewpoint,
acknowledging their artificiality, we gain insight into literary
schemes and techniques of storytelling that affect our everyday stories.
Goldie suggests that by conceiving the differences between real-life narratives
and literary narratives we come to acknowledge our fictionalizing
tendencies, our use of distorting artistic models—and that this is a cognitive
gain (TMI, p. 151). Certainly, at the age of narrative imperialism
narrative competence has become a valuable skill. For example, many
44
Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative I, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin & David Pellauer (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 75.
45
See Peter A. French, The Virtues of Vengeance (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001) for a
literary-philosophical exploration of vengeance.
J. Mikkonen
27
literary narrative devices have become part of our real-life stories and
incorporated in our cognitive apparatus without us noticing it. Free indirect
discourse, for instance, has entered newspaper reporting, and the
“narrative turn” in journalism has lead to instances in which journalists
describe third person subjective experiences (based on interviews, inferences
from behaviour, or mere speculation). Sensitivity to narrative techniques—a
skill we refine in reading literature—is a real increase in
understanding real-life narratives.46
Such acuity also help us to observe
and disentangle mythical and rhetorical aspects in stories that surround
us and affect our values and behaviour: political speeches, advertisements,
entertainment, and the like.
Narrative surely is not the only tool in understanding the self, others,
or the world, and the various meanings and values associated with literature
surely do not reduce into narrativity. Still, it is interesting to notice
how the focus on narrativity reorients the age-old philosophical debate
on the cognitive value of art. Narrative foregrounds, for instance, questions
of the processual nature of cognition and the distinctivity and artificiality
of literature, issues of which philosophers have been aware but
which they have too often put in the footnotes.
46
For the value of errors in the advancement of understanding, see Catherine Z. Elgin, “Ignorance,
Error, and the Advancement of Understanding” (manuscript, Internet).
2 The (Literary) Stories of Our Lives