Don’t Treat Your Life as a Project
The idea that we narrate our lives to ourselves, and that doing so is part of living well, is sufficiently commonplace that its most vocal critic, the philosopher Galen Strawson, could describe it as “a fallacy of our age.” He lists an impressive roster of advocates, including the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks (“Each of us constructs and lives a ‘narrative’ … this narrative is us”), the psychologist Jerome Bruner (“We become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives”), and a murderers’ row of philosophical big hitters: Alasdair MacIntyre, Daniel Dennett, Charles Taylor, and Paul Ricoeur. For Taylor, a “basic condition of making sense of ourselves [is] that we grasp our lives in a narrative … as an unfolding story.” And for Dennett, “We are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behavior, more or less unified … and we always try to put the best ‘faces’ on it we can. We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography.”
It sounds appealing, in a way. Who doesn’t think they have a brilliant memoir
