Selves on Selves: The Philosophical Significance of Autobiography

Introduction

Philosophers of literature do not take much of an interest in autobiography.¹ In one sense this is not surprising. As a certain prejudice has it, autobiography is, along with biography, the preferred reading of people who do not really like to read. The very words can conjure up images of what one finds on bookshelves in Florida retirement communities and in underfunded public libraries, books with titles like Under the Rainbow: The Real Liza Minnelli or Me: Stories of My Life (Katharine Hepburn).² Hardly rousing material, at least from the philosophical point of view.

But on a moment’s reflection, it becomes clear that the initial prejudice is unfounded. Never mind the fact that there are obviously examples of autobiographical writing that succeed wildly as literature (just think of Rousseau’s Confessions); it isn’t the literariness of autobiography that should interest philosophers. It is the fact that autobiography, at its best, offers highly detailed, concrete case studies of something of deep and abiding philosophical interest: the self. If one considers that in recent years there has been a so-called narrative turn in the philosophy of the self, the timing seems perfect for the philosopher to discover autobiography. For if selfhood is even in part a kind of narrative achievement, as a good many philosophers and psychologists claim it is, then what better place to explore what a self is than in the narratives the autobiographer weaves?³ Seen from this perspective, autobiography looks to be one of the last unexplored frontiers in literary aesthetics and is a place where the interests of the philosopher of literature and the philosopher of mind can come together and mingle in unexpected and fruitful ways. Literary aesthetics, like aesthetics more generally, is constantly looking for new ways to show that artworks can occasion and guide philosophical reflection, and it is striking that so little attention has been paid to the role that autobiography can play in this.

There is one exception to the above, a recent book that attempts to carve out a space for the philosophical study of autobiography, and a discussion of it provides the occasion for this essay. The book is Garry Hagberg’s Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness.⁴ What Hagberg’s book does extremely well is show that the philosophical study of autobiography offers a new way to look at many of the old problems in the philosophy of the self: problems of self-knowledge, self-interpretation, and self-expression, among others. Like all bold books that take a first step into new territory, Describing Ourselves raises almost as many questions as it answers, which is just as well, since it gives the rest of us something to think about. And like all good books, Hagberg’s leaves one with the urge to continue the conversation, and that is what I do in this essay. After surveying some of the most striking features of Hagberg’s theory, I outline some of these further questions it raises and then hazard an answer to what I take to be the most pressing of them.

Hagberg’s Sense of Self

Hagberg’s central goal in Describing Ourselves is to undo the Cartesian theory of the self and replace it with a Wittgensteinian account (for various reasons it is best not to describe what Wittgenstein does as offering a “theory” of the self). It might seem odd that a book that is interested in autobiography would be concerned with such a thing, but it turns out to be an inspired move. Casting the competition as Wittgenstein contra Descartes is admittedly nothing new—Wittgensteinians have been doing this for a good many years now—but Hagberg’s use of autobiography to guide his discussion makes his critique of Cartesianism feel surprisingly fresh.⁵ Since the point of much of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is that the mind is not an inner “thing” that we can explore through introspection, it would thus seem that we can...