Fascinating
piece by Oliver Burkeman on narratives
Could you have a meaningful life without this sense of continuity,
this feeling that you are the person to whom your childhood happened,
and who’ll experience your old age? Surely nobody could think of the
scenes of their life – childhood summers, first kisses, bereavements –
as lacking any connecting thread whatsoever?
But Galen Strawson,
another philosopher, says this is exactly how he experiences the world,
and he suspects he’s not alone. “I have a past, like any human, [and] I
have a respectable amount of factual knowledge about it,” he concedes
in Against Narrativity, a 2004 paper highlighted recently by the behavioural scientist Jess Whittlestone. “Yet I have no sense of my life as a narrative with form.”
