Autobiography as Philosophy: The Philosophical Uses of Self-Presentation (review)

From its title alone, it would be difficult to judge how many utq readers might be interested in this edited volume. It is perhaps not unreasonable to assume that a collection of philosophy essays coming from Toronto would be written for – and for the most part, by – analytic philosophers who have in mind a particular understanding of ‘philosophy.’ Already certain of what philosophy is, we might expect them to enumerate the clear and distinct conditions under which autobiography will count ‘as philosophy,’ if ever it does. In their introduction, however, the editors take aim at this narrow conception of philosophy:

The writing of philosophy is now measured by professional standards. Those standards specify that, even where a text is not yet presented in a clear, impersonal and argumentative form, it should, in principle, be translatable into one . . . . [T]here are canons, instructions in their use, and the constant pressure of professional publication as an enforcement mechanism.

This is one of the more critical passages, but it suggests that contemporary conventions of professional philosophy might not lend themselves to a fair discussion of autobiographical writing. Must autobiography obey the idiomatic and argumentative forms of analytic philosophy if it is to be deemed philosophical? Is autobiography an epistemological enterprise? Could it be ‘translated’ into something abstract and impersonal? The answer is a guarded no.

While many such collections are criticized for a lack of cohesion among the essays, it is just this tension that energizes the volume and makes it interesting. The essays take their positions within a debate over what counts as philosophy and, for that matter, autobiography. If philosophers presume a distinction between fact and fiction, this border becomes troubled and contested. What, for instance, is the self and its relation to the language in which that self finds (self-)expression? Is the writing necessarily intentional and transparent, or do we agree with Hume who, as Donald Ainslie writes, ‘denies that we have special control over or insight into ourselves?’ How, then, will the self relate to itself and to others? In what terms will that self-relation take place – in philosophical terms, through literary discourse, metaphor, allegory, and other rhetorical figures? Moreover, how – by whose terms – shall we judge how these myriad approaches should relate? Does philosophy have the final word? This is an old quarrel between the Sophists and philosophy, and it might be difficult to persuade most philosophers of ‘the primacy of rhetoric in the pursuit of truth,’ as Domenico Pietropaolo puts it in his chapter on Vico.

The two editors themselves seem at odds in their contributions. Mathien enumerates several ‘communicative purposes’ of autobiography, each of which qualifies autobiography as ‘philosophical’ (note the diminutive adjectival form): confession, example, apology, consolation, and (more vaguely still) as an inquiry into human nature. Presumably, each of the collection’s essays could be categorized accordingly. Meanwhile, Wright offers two tremendously nuanced and well-researched chapters, one on Montaigne, the other on Nietzsche. The essay on Montaigne is a study on the rhetorics of autobiographical vanity: how Montaigne steers a course between a vanity that would be distasteful to his reader, on the one hand, and excessive modesty, which would have little to recommend him to his reader, on the other. Fortunately, this essay departs from philosophical conventions to look at language and tone, asking how the autobiographer achieves a self-presentation that is neither too high nor too low. Giving an account of oneself is, then, a rhetorical matter. Confession can be a false display of ‘humility,’ for instance. Wright’s essay on Nietzsche is equally fine and should have wide appeal not just to Nietzsche scholars, but to literary critics and historians. Wright emphasizes the rhetorical conditions under which autobiography is produced: ‘Memory is unreliable, sincerity impossible to establish, language distorting, and the holy trinity of autobiographical persons – author, narrator, and protagonist – can seemingly never be made into One.’ Here is some grist for the...