Thesis: It is better to live as if one’s life were a story, yet many people cannot live that way.
A conventional story has a finite number of named characters, many of whom know many of the rest. These characters have constraints and limitations, but they also face at least some consequential choices. The choices they make contribute to the plot. Their choices tend to be related to their inner lives: their beliefs, desires, and character traits. Although they may spend most of their time separately and quietly, the narrative emphasizes their interactions. In fact, dialogue occupies much of a conventional novel and all the text of a play or a screenplay. In biographies and narrative histories, quotations from speech may be shorter, but they are are often prominent. What the characters think, do, and say is noticed and preserved–at least by the narrator, and usually by some of their fellow characters.
We can feel that our lives are like this, and we can be correct about it. Or we can feel (rightly or wrongly) that this is not how we live. Here are some threats to living as if in a story:
- Modern economies (capitalist or socialist) that organize masses of workers so that each one feels little agency, while many live so precariously that they cannot make consequential decisions.
- State tyranny, which not only blocks consequential choices and suppresses frank discussion but also invades the private spaces in which people could develop independent beliefs and values.
- Hypertrophied science and technology, which make human behavior appear mechanical and predictable, or which actually control human beings.
- Bureaucracy, which minimizes individual agency by applying rules, metrics, and files.
- Ideologies, in the pejorative sense of all-encompassing theories that explain individual choices away or that replace human characters with abstractions, such as classes or nations, as the major protagonists.
- Loneliness or isolation, meaning the absence of the interactions that would constitute a conventional story.
- A lack of solitude, an inner life that can be described in a narrative and connected to overt actions.
- Catastrophes, which wipe out the memories of characters and their actions.
(On that last point, Jonathan Lear writes:
Not long ago, I listened to a lecture on climate change. The lecture went as one might expect. There was a warning of impending ecological catastrophe and talk of the “Anthropocene,” suggesting that our age—the age in which humans dominate the Earth—is coming to an end. At the end of the talk, there was a discussion period. At one point, a young academic stood up and said simply, “Let me tell you something: We will not be missed!” She then sat down. There was laughter throughout the audience. It was over in a moment.
Lear develops the idea that missing or mourning things is a distinctively human contribution; and it is ineffably sad that no one would miss homo sapiens, even if we cause our own extinction, and even if other species would be better off without us. It means that all the stories would be gone.)
I think many of us assume that our lives are like stories and that some other people notice and remember our roles in them. For us, the evaluative questions are: How is this story turning out? And what kind of a character am I? I would rather live in a comedy than in a tragedy, and I aspire to be the hero rather than the villain in my own little patch.
However, I think the main thrust of Hannah Arendt’s philosophy is that there is an antecedent question: Am I in a story at all? (See, e.g., The Human Condition, chapter v.) I believe she would say that it is better to be the villain in a tragedy than not to inhabit any kind of story, and that most modern people no longer do. The list of threats (above) comes directly from her work.
Note that this is a different ideal from the common one of authorship. For instance, Immanuel Kant defines ethical individuals as the authors of the rules that govern them:
The will is therefore not merely subjected to the law, but in such a way that it must also be regarded as self-legislating, and precisely for that reason must it be subject to the law (of which it can consider itself the author [als Urheber]).
In contrast, Arendt writes:
Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer. Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but nobody is its author (The Human Condition, p. 184)
For her, politics is the domain where people are characters but there is no author. This is a result of plurality: there are many of us, and no one (not even a dictator) can solely determine the outcomes.
Jürgen Habermas holds a generally similar view but presents all the citizens of a community as its authors (in the plural):
According to the republican view, the status of citizens is not determined by the model of negative liberties to which these citizens can lay claim as private persons. Rather, political rights—preeminently rights of political participation and communication—are positive liberties. They guarantee not freedom from external compulsion but the possibility of participation in a common praxis, through the exercise of which citizens can first make themselves into what they want to be—politically autonomous authors of a community of free and equal persons.
Authors and characters are metaphors, not literal descriptions. As such, they capture certain compelling ideas without fully describing reality. Here I want to suggest that the metaphor of characters draws our attention to urgent issues. We need social, political, and intellectual reforms to enable more people to live like characters in stories. These reforms require intentional action. We must be the authors of contexts in which people can be characters.
Sources: Jonathan Lear, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life (Harvard, 2022, p. 1); Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (my trans.); Habermas, “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” in Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton University Press, 1996). p. 22. See also: Hilary Mantel and Walter Benjamin; Kieran Setiya on midlife; a vivid sense of the future; the coincidences in Romola; and Freud on mourning the past.
