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Stories and Selves: A Twisted Love Story about the Meaning of Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2024

Elisabeth Camp
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Abstract

I argue that stories are ‘equipment for living’ in two senses: retrospectively, they provide ‘configurational comprehension’ of a temporal sequence of events; prospectively, they offer templates for action. Narrative conceptions of the self appear well poised to leverage these functional roles for stories into an intuitively compelling view of self-construction as self-construal. However, the narrative conception defines selves in terms of the lives they live: a self is the protagonist in a lifelong story. And narrative structure is itself defined by ‘retrospective necessity’: the meaning of events within a story is given by their contribution to that story's ending. Together, this entails that life stories hold selves metaphysically, epistemically, and practically hostage to their ends. Fortunately, narratives are just one species of interpretive frame. I suggest some alternative types of frames, including identity labels and metaphors, that support configurational comprehension, action guidance, and self construction without shackling selves to their lives’ ends.

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Paper
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 95: Words and Worlds: New Directions in the Philosophy of Language , May 2024 , pp. 157 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2024

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Footnotes

This paper extends arguments in my (2011). Thanks to audiences at the 45th Conference on the Great Mother and the New Father, the Royal Institute of Philosophy, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the New England Workshop on Metaphysics, and North Carolina State. Special thanks to Abbot Cutler, Jeanne D'Amico, Nick Adamski, Avi Steinhardt, Lucy O'Brien, Xinhe Wu, Nevin Johnson, and Isabel Uriagereka Herburger for discussion, and to Justin Khoo for very helpful commentary.

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