The power of narrative, self-knowledge and self-narrative

Can the power of narrative be illuminated by the evolutionary sciences? Or is it rather the opposite: don’t the evolutionary sciences find in the power of narrative the most striking proof of their explanatory limits?

We will find this debate in France, where it continued in the theses developed by Paul Ricœur and Michel Foucault on the notion of narrative. Ricœur did so, notably in his trilogy entitled Time and Narrative. Foucault did so in a less explicit but no less substantial way, notably in the reflections he developed in The Hermeneutics of the Subject on particular forms of narrative: the hupomnemata. It is on the basis of this apparently limited literary phenomenon, which brings into play a particular form of self-narrative, that we will show how interesting it can be to achieve once again the “breakthrough” that Husserl speaks of when he refers to the book he published in the early years of the twentieth century under the title Logical Investigations (Husserl 1901).

There is one use of literature that, more than any other, can show the limits of the notion of human nature and, for this reason, constitutes a crucial point in this debate. Its purpose is to offer those who use it the possibility of a self-reflection that the ancient Stoics called “hupomnemata”.

Hupomnemata are texts written for oneself, the purpose of which is to serve as a support for free self-analysis (without, of course, necessarily involving an approach based on the categories and principles of psychoanalysis but not necessarily incompatible with it either), often focusing, in the manner of self-examination, on acts about which the person using this method is questioning himself.

The analysis of the hupomnemata will take us to the point where the lines of investigation drawn by the works of Ricœur and Foucault meet. And, in so doing, we will also be led to examine one of their common inspirations: the book Being and Time, published by Martin Heidegger in 1927, which lies at the heart of the debate on philosophical anthropology (Heidegger 1927). Indeed, this book can be read (and has been actually read by some) as an anthropology, even though this qualification has always been vigorously rejected by its author. Based on a new French translation of Being and Time (Heidegger 1927), we will show that the book proposes a “situationology”, and also show how this differs from an anthropology.

Although the primary function of hupomnemata is not publication, some published master texts are typical forms of it or are related to it: Montaigne, The essais (Montaigne 1598); Rousseau, The Confessions (Rousseau 1782); Stendhal, The life of Henri Brulard, Memoirs of egotism, On Love (Stendhal 1890, 1892, 1882), Gombrowicz, Diary [1953-1969] (Gombrowicz 1969); Sartre, War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War (Sartre 1983) and, in a very special way, Proust, In Search of Lost Time (Proust 1927).

It is on the basis of the analysis of these works that we shall begin a critical examination of the theses of literary Darwinism and, through the latter, of the whole of evolutionary sociology. Indeed, it is enough to show the biases inherent in an approach based on a limited but significant point for a theoretical edifice that concealed its fragilities under the guise of common sense to collapse. We will show that the self-analytical, often uncompromising writing developed by these authors, which tends towards a certain veracity (if not always sincerity), is both the best illustration of the situationology we mentioned earlier and the best critique of literary Darwinism.

Thus, it is by reactivating our understanding of Being and Time that we can better understand why and in what way the project of an evolutionary social science can only lead to a dead end. Moreover, on this basis, it becomes possible to grasp what constitutes the effectiveness of the hupomnemata: an effectiveness that was already identified in antiquity but remained misunderstood at the time.

But first of all, why do stories play such a fundamental role in all existence and in all social life? It is by asking these fundamental questions that we will be able to identify some of the intuitions that guide our approach. Although the link has not been explicitly made, literary criticism, in examining the internal workings of the writing of Mallarmé, Proust or Joyce, has sought to describe powers that are not unlike those that give hupomnemata their effectiveness. It is with this question, then, that we will begin our investigation.

Overview of the journey

In the first part, we define the scope of the field of narrative. In the first chapter (Inchoativity and the birth of narrative), we set out the foundations of the problem of the power of narrative. We then analyse what it means to “tell stories” and ask why humans have always done so, even in the form of simple gossip (Chapter Two: Anchestrality of narrative). On this occasion, we introduce the notion of “native narrative”, which is manifested in the very gossip to which Chapter Three is devoted (Chapter Three: The daily nature of narrative). And we show the role played here by the “figure of destiny”, a concept that lies at the heart of the theoretical propositions we seek to develop in this book.

Then, in the second part, we examine what is at stake in a narrative. We ask what makes a narrative capable of giving rise to being or, conversely, of suppressing being (Chapter Four: Being and narrative). We then follow the theses of philosophers who have developed opposing arguments on the question of narration and its importance (chapter five: The pros and cons of narrativity). In chapter six, we look at the links between narrative and politics, showing that they always involve a form of anticipation of the future based on the past, which is the main property of the figure of destiny (The politics of Albertine). Then, in Chapter Seven (Memory and history), we return to Maurice Halbwachs’ reflections on collective memory and the difference between memory and history. From this we develop the concept of the line of intelligibility of a history (Chapter Eight: The lines of intelligibility of history). In chapter nine, we show that the line of intelligibility of a narrative is no less valid for a historical narrative than for a fictional one, or even for a self-narrative that mixes the historical and the fictional (The novel and the power of the narrative).

For this reason, the self-narrative deserves special attention, which we devote to it in a third section. Chapter Ten presents a genealogy of writing about the self (Genealogy of the self-narrative). As both Paul Ricœur and Michel Foucault were interested in self-narrative, albeit from different angles, we follow their respective analyses and show how they complement each other in chapter eleven (Ricœur and Foucault, thinkers of narrative). Going back to the sources of these two works, we highlight, in chapter twelve (Dasein and self-narrative), the links they have with the treatise published by Heidegger in 1927 under the title Being and Time.

It is then possible, in the fourth part, to draw philosophical conclusions from these analyses. Chapter Thirteen analyses the effectiveness of the self-narratives that the Stoics called “hupomnemata”, focusing not on the notion of “destiny”, but on that of the “figure of destiny”, with an emphasis on the role played by the notion of temporality (Rethinking stoicism). Chapter Fourteen follows the discussions in the cognitive sciences and contemporary neurosciences which, in their own way, have reworked the concept of temporality born of phenomenology (The science of temporality). Following on from these reflections, we show in Chapter Fifteen that the treatise Being and Time proposes a situationology that we distinguish from anthropology in Chapter Fourteen (Anthropology and situationology). Such an approach suggests the possibility of being extended by an epistemology of political discourse (Chapter Sixteen: Towards an epistemology of political discourse).