Galen Strawson Against Narrativity (Part One)

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Introduction to Close Reads

1:00This is Close Reads. A philosophy podcast with Mark and Wes. I'm Wes Alwyn. And I'm Mark Linsenmeier.

1:10Welcome to Close Reads. It's a new dawn, a new era. Spring has come upon us. And we thought we'd do something quite different than the Hegel and Kierkegaard that we've done of late. I had run into on social media an article somewhere. I don't actually remember. A reference to this essay by Galen Strossen against narrativity.

Essay on Narrativity

1:38I see it is from 2004. We did a little Galen Strossen before, but just in, for a partial exam in life, in the context of his father, P.F. Strossen, writing about free will and Galen responding to him. I don't even clearly remember sort of what his deal was, but, you know, this should be something. There's no free will. That's what his thing was. I mean, I know P.F. Strossen's thing was that, well, there might not be free will, but it doesn't really matter.

2:12Like, because our getting pissed at people for wronging us, for instance, and wanting them punished is more basic

Free Will

2:20and doesn't actually have anything to do with the philosophical notion of free will. Yeah. He's like an anti-compatibilist, anti-Libritarian or however you would put it. So, you know, if you recall, he had the example of the guy who was a serial killer or something who had a crappy childhood and various other arguments as to why determinism makes free will impossible. All right. So I think of Galen as a sort of classic modern analytic philosopher that this is probably a very self-enclosed,

2:56doesn't rely on a lot of other, actually, I'm skimming down and I see he mentions, Sartre, Marcus Aurelius, and Plutarch in the first four paragraphs. So maybe this is entirely wrong, but usually these are pretty smooth to read and internally coherent such that we don't feel like, you know, when you're reading Derrida or something that, you know, there's a whole other, there's a lexicon that we're not privy to.

Narrative and Non-Narrative

3:23So hopefully we should be able to go pretty quickly through this. Any other preconceptions?

3:29Can we just talk about why would you think life should be lived according to or should be thought of in terms of a narrative, right? That that's the way we make sense of our lives is because we have these projects, because we can tell a story and where I am today makes narrative sense. If that concept means anything, given my background and my desires and my dreams. And so I can think about, you know, when I was 20 years old and all the things I wanted out of my life and then look back now and at least see some sort of coherence, not necessarily

4:06to judge whether I was a success or failure, according to those earlier expectations. Maybe I was an idiot back then and I had a unrealistic or unwise expectations. Yeah.

Episodic and Diachronic

4:18I feel like this has come up in a bunch of recent episodes in some way or another. Your question is, do you have any initial thoughts about that before we even hear Galen's opinion here? I don't, I need to know more what he, what he means rather than. And if it's the idea that life is a, we experience our life as a, as a narrative, I, I need to know more specifically about what, what that means. It's just too, too vague, uh, an assertion.

4:49I mean, in some way, you know, it seems obviously true in a way, but I can see someone arguing against it if they want to pin us down on some particular meaning of narrative. All right, proceed.

Talk of Narrative

5:05Talk of narrative is intensely fashionable in a wide variety of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, theology, anthropology, sociology, political theory, literary studies, religious studies, psychotherapy, medicine, and law.

5:18All right. This is, this is promising. With a list like that, you can't go wrong. There's widespread agreement that human beings typically experience their lives as a narrative or story, or at least some, as some sort of collection of stories. I'm going to call this the psychological narrativity thesis using the word narrative with capital letter to denote a specifically psychological property or outlook. If one is narrative, then, huh? If one is narrative, it's a weird way to put it.

5:50If one is narrative, then, as a first approximation, N, one sees or lives or experiences one's life as a narrative or story of some sort, or at least as a collection of stories.

6:07Do you, do you love the, the, uh, the fake mathematics here? Yeah. We're going to start with N in brackets. Are we going to, oh, I see. We're going to get D and E and a bunch of other letters. Yay. Do one more. These are short paragraphs. As it stands, the psychological narrativity thesis is a straightforwardly descriptive, empirical, psychological thesis about the way ordinary, normal human beings experience their lives. This is how we are. It says, this is our nature.

6:38But it is often coupled with a normative thesis, which I will call the ethical narrativity thesis, according to which a richly narrative outlook on one's life is essential to living well, to living well, to true or full personhood. All right. All right. The psychological narrativity thesis versus the ethical narrativity thesis. So we're getting a little, a little more clear in the way you were asking so that we can actually evaluate what it wants to say. The descriptive thesis and the normative thesis have four main combinations.

7:09One may, to begin, think the descriptive thesis true and the normative one false. One may think that we are indeed deeply narrative in our thinking, and that is not a good thing. The protagonist of Sartre's novel, Nausea, holds something like this view. It is also attributed to the Stoics, especially Marcus Aurelius. Do we know that this is the case? Marcus Aurelius, I recall, says, you know, you should see everything as happening in the great system of the universe, which is harmonious.

7:42So it was a sort of a theodicy kind of approach. Even if you don't see why you have your particular role. Well, this is this is the role you were assigned. Just do your damn job. Don't worry about. So, OK, so maybe this is what Strossen is saying here, that don't worry about if your role makes sense to you as a story because you are not hearing the whole story. So it is, in a sense, a narrativity thesis, but the narrative is grander than your individual life.

8:14So narrative.

8:16Narrative would go along with the existentialists concept of essence, right? I'm a certain type of person. Mm hmm. And that that seems to be the idea here of the suggestion with Marcus Aurelius. I'm not sure Marcus Aurelius did. You know, he does in his meditations, he expresses there's a lot of places where he expresses gratitude. And one of the things he's grateful for is.

8:46Marcus Aurelius, not becoming too much of a rhetorician, not becoming a philosopher, not being into books, oddly enough, as if he could have been right. That's one can become too excessive about that. I don't know if that's related to this idea that really Aurelius rejects the narrative. Maybe that's a stretch. But anyway. Second and contrary wise, one may think that the descriptive thesis false and the norm of

9:19one true. One may grant that we are not all naturally narrative in our thinking, but insist that we should be and need to be in order to live a good life. There are versions of this view in Plutarch and a host of present day writings. Can you think of any offhand that we want to have on the table here? I don't I don't know the Plutarch well enough to. Well, I mean, I recently yeah, I recently read the life of Caesar and the life of Brutus and the life of Mark Antony from Plutarch just because I was doing Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

9:54and Shakespeare draws heavily on those Plutarch lives. I mean, it's it's it's pretty amazing how yeah, how heavily Shakespeare is drawing on on that sort of background material, but it's a huge volume. And I didn't I didn't know that Plutarch makes a claim somewhere that we that we ought to be narrative, even if we're not naturally. He's not giving any page references, is he? No. See, yes. See 100 C.

10:26E 2014 to 2017, 473 B to 474 B. So whatever the standard Plutarch page numbering is, there is something we could look up and find what he's talking about. I don't care enough about this for this moment, although maybe Plutarch is let's let's let's bookmark this and perhaps we can deal with it on a future close reads. But the I think Nisha's living your life as an art might be at least adjacent to this idea

10:59that you should construct your life as a coherent, you know, building of values. So live according to strictures, rules, disciplines that you develop yourself. So that that seems like it again, I share your trepidation about the term narrative and what this actually entails. Like, does it mean just a coherent life? Try to live according to some rules or does it mean something, you know, like beginning

11:32a middle in a day, new ma such that you your life can be understood when you are dead, you know, in a two sentence synopsis. Yeah, it looks like what he's referring to is from Plutarch's Moralia. That's not the lives. It's and there's something called on the train on tranquility of mind. So it sounds like a good one for us. Yeah.

12:03All right. Third, one may think both the theses are true. One may think that all non-pathological human beings are naturally narrative and also that narrativity is crucial to a good life. This is the dominant view of the academy today, followed by the second view. It does not entail that everything is as it should be. It leaves plenty of room for the idea that many of us would profit from being more narrative than we are and the idea that we can get our self narratives wrong in one way or another.

12:34Finally, one may think that both or both theses are false. This is my view. I think the current widespread acceptance of the third view is regrettable. It's just not true that there is only one good way for human beings to experience their being in time. There are deeply non-narrative people and there are good ways to live that are deeply non-narrative. I think the second and third views hinder human self-understanding, close down important avenues of thought, impoverish our grasp of ethical possibilities, needlessly and wrongly

13:09distress those who do not fit their model and are potentially destructive in psychotherapeutic contexts. You know, I think Pete Hegseth was saying something very similar this morning. All right, so we have a very short section two here. The first thing I want to put in place is the distinction between one's experience of oneself when one is considering oneself principally as a human being taken as a whole and one's experience of oneself when one is considering oneself principally as an inner mental entity

13:41or self of some sort. I'll call this one's self-experience. When Henry James says of one of his early books, I think of the masterpiece in question as the work of quite another person than myself, a rich relation, say, who suffers me still to claim a shy fourth cousinship. He has no doubt that he is the same human being as the author of that book, but he does not feel that he is the same self or person as the author of that book. It is this phenomenon of experiencing oneself as a self that concerns me here.

14:13One of the most important ways in which people tend to think of themselves, quite independently of religious belief, is as things whose persistence conditions are not obviously or automatically the same as the persistence conditions of a human being considered as a whole. Petrarch, Proust, Parfit, and thousands of others have given this idea vivid expression. I'm going to take its viability for granted and set up another distinction between episodic and diachronic self-experience and diachronic self-experience in terms of it.

14:46Okay. So this becomes a problem of personal identity and the extent to which we are wholes and what it means that we are composed of parts and how tightly the parts are composed, right? How integrated we are. So the William James example is meant to illustrate the fact that, right, we call ourselves whole persons or the same, we can call ourselves the same person by virtue of having the same body,

15:22for instance, the same continuous embodied experience. And to some extent, I suppose that, right, the criterion of memory for, you know, for Locke, for personal identity, and for Parfit, to some extent, are supposed to count as making us the same person. But in this case, it's, right, it's clear, and probably most of us have this experience of thinking, well, maybe I'm several different people depending on my phase of life or my mood

15:58or whatever context I'm in, what people I'm with. I'm actually more complicated than that. And maybe at a narrative level, I'm kind of inscrutable, which maybe is why he's referencing psychotherapeutic contexts, right? Maybe there's so much about myself that I don't know, that trying to fit it into a neat narrative doesn't make sense. I should treat myself more as a mystery to be investigated.

16:29I don't know. Yeah, this sounds like that Marcus Aurelius thing, where I was saying, you know, we are part of a grand drama that we could tell as a narrative, but we don't know enough of it. And so we shouldn't expect our conscious lives to express that. And I like that this fits well with how you were characterizing Strassen's view of free will here, that we don't have any, that we are machines, which you would think that if we are machines that, you know, are obeying strict causal laws and every instant of our

17:04behavior stems from the last instant and from the different physiological and psychological qualities that we have, that it should be very coherent. We should be able to tell a story about it, but it's not going to be a story in the sense of something interesting in the sense of something, you know, it's, it's, if you're describing the typical operations of machine and the way that it might start breaking down as it ages, that's not going to be a narrative in anything like the traditional sense.

17:35Right. I suppose, surprised he hasn't told us what a narrative is exactly, but it, you know, we would need, I think causality is an important part of it. You know, maybe we would look to something like Aristotle's poetics for criteria of what a narrative is, but it can't just be one thing after another. Sure. Sure. It's kind of the famous distinction. There's got to be a connection for the events, between events, and maybe we have to think

18:06of it in terms of evolution or devolution, right? Someone's narrative arc, for instance, for a protagonist is often one of, of growth in a story. We think of there as being plot points, significant events that drive the protagonist on to the next phase of the story is often an antagonist of some sort, whether it's another person or just life obstacles to be overcome. And so narratives are often about, hey, I'm facing all sorts of struggle problems and life

18:42is difficult, but X, Y, and Z happened and I overcame them and I grew as a person and everything's going to be all right, which of course is often just not the case. It's, it's just, it's a bullshit that we tell ourselves to get through life and it doesn't turn out that way. Yes. Sorry to be a pessimist, but yeah. Well, I think that this is, you know, coincidentally, I, on philosophy versus improv was just a recording with, with Mary about her off and on interest about astrology.

19:15And we had gotten a book submission from somebody who wanted to be on PEL who wrote a book that says astrology, astrology is crap. And it's not only just scientifically, you know, been thoroughly shown to be false, but it is bad for you to even play with it that, you know, it opens you to being manipulated and stuff. But I was thinking about the way in which you might play with the idea of synchronicity, right? The Jungian idea. And there's some loose philosophical, right?

19:48Jung is sort of a philosopher. Ways in which, and certainly William James played with this, where you could think that, that there's some truth to things like when God closes the door, he opens a window, right? Even if you don't believe in God, you could still, you could still see your life as I think in some ways it helps protect you that if you put all of your energy into this one pursuit, you know, and you want to, you want it to be the story of your great success as

20:18a philosopher say, and then that doesn't work out well, then tell the story a different way to, you know, make it so that you don't have to kill yourself from, because you're completely put into this. So, so believing that the universe will provide what you need, you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find you get what you need. These are the sort of, you might even find you don't get what you need. I think getting what the idea that you get, what you need is another narrative. Yes, exactly.

20:49Yeah. So are these narratives just nice little psychological things that can help you focus and decide what to do next, or are these actively unhealthy and self-deceptive? Yeah. They might be somewhat self-deceptive, but, but to a good end as well. That's another possibility is like we need them. We need them to get through life, even if they're inaccurate. Yes. That's Jung's whole thing specifically about like, should you believe in God? Well, isn't it better if you're living in a house to believe that that house is not about

21:23to fall down? So to believe that you're, that death is not going to just be the end of everything. I don't care if it's true or not psychologically, like sort of a, a psychological version of Pascal's wager, right? That you're going to get psychological benefits. James's will, will to believe. Yeah. Same thing. Yeah. Against this, uh, interpretation of, of against narrative as being about the determinism here. I am also wondering if we can read some Sartre, you know, just from his reference to Sartre

21:59before, uh, nausea, uh, bad faith here that if you think that the universe is guiding you that, you know, the next step is laid before you, something like that, such that you can follow the narrative and, uh, know what to do, then you are in bad faith about your freedom that you really should see yourself as able to, and don't even worry about, you know, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds to throw in some Emerson there, uh, taking

22:31a sharp left turn, doing something in narrative narratively makes no sense. This is, this is, this is just from the article that I recall is, you know, why we're doing this might be where he's going that you, yeah. So let's, let's see what the, what, uh, cause he, episodic and diachronic, right? Episodic. Sartre and thing seems to be in tension though, with his being against the idea of free will, right? Sorry, Sartre is all about freedom and, but maybe we'll find out the basic form of diachronic self-experience is that D one naturally figures oneself considered as a self, as something

23:08that was there in the further past and will be there in the further future. He has further in parentheses. So there in the past or further past and there in the future or further future, something that has relatively long-term diachronic continuity, something that persists over a long stretch of time, perhaps a life. I take it that there, that many people are naturally diachronic and that many who are diachronic are also narrative in their outlook on life.

23:40Okay. Do we understand the diachronic idea? Well, we hadn't brought up, uh, you know, in terms of his many references to other figures, uh, Parfit before, right? That isn't it Parfit's whole anti-Lockean take on personal identity is that there really is no personal identity, that he's closer to the Humean Buddhist idea, right? Yeah, because we can, you know, those thought experiments, we, right. The Lockean criterion of identity is memory and Parfit gives a more formalized definition

24:14of the way that might work. And it has something to do with the commonality between what's in one's memory now and experiences in the past, but yeah, you can do thought teleportation and other types of thought experiments that show that that's not enough. You could have twins branching off from the same person with the same memories and they, because they're numerically distinct, they would be two different people. So there's a problem in trying to define personal identity in simply formal structural terms,

24:48which was what memory tries to do, because we also think of personal identity in terms of just simple numerical distinctness, you know, between two different peoples and people in two different bodies. But then, yeah. So, but question here is to what extent we should or can think of ourselves, well, yeah, as having diachronic continuity, which I think is, is very, as you say, very, must, must be very much

25:18like the Lockean idea involving continuity by way of memory. And I see what he means by some people are just personality wise, more likely to identify with their past selves. As a musician who interacts with a lot of other musicians, I find there's a lot of different attitudes people have toward their early music or, you know, any artistic creations as this Henry James thing points out that I still really identify and can get back in the emotional

25:53space of me at age 17, being angsty about some person that I'm no longer in any contact with and should have no, feel no real relation to. And I should just focus on, you know, the lower level of skill and the terrible recording quality and the, you know, the other things that as an artist, I have completely outgrown, but I just, I feel like I, I, I retain a lot of connectivity to my earlier self in a way that, so that when I, then I hear other people not wanting to do that, I feel like they're

26:25in bad faith, but maybe we're both in bad faith. You're also bringing up something important here, which I think is that we can think of diachronicity in terms of not just memory, as I was saying, but in terms of identity or character, even if you didn't have any memories from the past, one might think that as a, in terms of character, it's not necessarily that you're the same character that you were, but perhaps that there's a lot of overlap.

26:57You're very much like that character, or even if there's no overlap, that there's some important causal relationship between who you are now and who you are then, where one is a kind of evolutionary causal product of the other. And so what you were back then tells you a lot about who you are now. So I think that, yeah, there's a lot of probably different ways we could think of what it means to have diachronic continuity, even if we didn't want to talk about memory. If one is episodic, by contrast, E, one does not figure oneself considered as a self as

27:33something that was there in the further past and will be there in the further future. One has little or no sense that the self that one is was there in the further past and will be there in the future, although one is perfectly well aware that one has long-term continuity considered as a whole human being. Episodics are likely to have no particular tendency to see their life in narrative terms.

28:01And he gives a footnote here. The episodic diachronic distinction is not the same thing as the narrative non-narrative distinction as will emerge. There are marked correlations between them. Okay. All right. Yeah. So we wouldn't challenge continuity in terms of our being whole human beings, right? I'm definitely continuous with the person who was, you know, born several years ago. I'm not going to say how many.

28:31Um, but am I psychologically continuous or am I continuous in terms of identity or some other criterion, which doesn't include the whole, you know, which isn't simply about the whole embodied human being. That's a more complicated question. He, he's saying here that we have little or no sense that the one that was there in the past is here or, or will be there in the future. So I, that's a claim I expect to hear him justifying.

29:03All right. The episode and diachronic styles of temporal being are radically opposed and they are not absolute or exceptionless. Predominantly episodic individuals may sometimes connect to charged events in their pasts in such a way that they feel that those events happened to them. Embarrassing memories are a good example and anticipate events and their futures in such a way that they think those events are going to happen to them. Thoughts of future death can be a good example. So two predominantly diachronic individuals may sometimes experience an episodic lack of

29:36linkage with well-remembered parts of their past. It may be that the basic episode episodic disposition is less common in human beings than the basic diachronic disposition. I suspect the fundamentals of temporal temperament are genetically determined and that we have here to do with a deep individual difference variable to put it in the language of experimental psychology.

30:07If this is right, individual variation in time style, episodic or diachronic narrative or non-narrative will be found across all cultures so that the same general spread will be found in so-called revenge culture with its essentially diachronic emphasis as in a more happy-go-lucky culture compatibly with that one's exact position in the episodic diachronic narrative non-narrative state space. All right.

30:37So we have four different variables here may vary significantly over time, according to what one is doing or thinking about one state of health and so on. And it may change markedly with increasing age. And there was a footnote saying a culture could in theory exert significant selective pressure on a psychological trait.

31:01So he wants to say it's probably genetic. But to me, pretty obviously, it's probably a cultural style as to whether, you know, the very tradition oriented cultures are not only saying. Gee, was it, was it, oh yeah, Royce that we read on PEL and on this podcast recently that was, we're saying some cultures, you know, you, you not only identify with your early experiences, but could identify with early experiences of the group like that.

31:35And, and Royce saw that as a natural extension. So being super diachronic, seeing yourself, not just as this is the story of my life, but my life only, I can only tell that story in terms of me being an Adam in this culture, right? The whole, uh, Hegel that we're doing now seems to argue against either of these individually, uh, characterized. Narrativity levels in favor of spirit being the primary thing that you would tell a story

32:06about. But yeah, so his argument, and I don't, you know, this seems to me to be the sort of empirical problem of whether he's, he's correct about this or not, is that we'll get a lot of individual variation between people and all the, you know, in whether they're episodic or diachronic or narrative or non-narrative. And we'll get that variation even in things like revenge cultures, which seem to be at a cultural level, very diachronic in their emphasis.

32:38So it may not matter, you know, it may be true that some cultures are more diachronic than others, but we, you know, it may not, it, that may pale in comparison to the amount of individual variation we see in those traits. But let's see, I just want to go back up to the top real quick. So, so what he's thinking about with, with episodic individuals is that when they think about past events, it's like, oh, well, that's, that happened to me. So when I was, um, diachronic, sorry, that's what I meant to say.

33:13Yeah. So, so when I was, um, going to Paris, when I was five years old, an event that I barely remember, and of course, as a child, a very, very different person, I think, oh yeah, that, that happened to me. Or I might think, well, that person is so unlike me that it's, yeah, I have the memory of that, but it really kind of happened to someone else. That would be the more episodic, I think, approach to that, to that memory. One would expect that these, uh, chronically diachronic people who yet are episodic about

33:47certain things that it's because they want to disavow those certain things that they feel guilty about being the sort of person who said those, you know, had those racist beliefs or whatever the thing is that they don't want to, so that even though, oh, I, I feel like it was just yesterday that I was, uh, out on the, on the pond, uh, skipping rocks with my, my brother. Uh, but yet, uh, when I was out, uh, uh, kicking the English ass as part of the IRA, that, that

34:20I want to just to go with the, the accent I arbitrarily picked. Uh, I want to disavow that. I'm not, I'm not sure about that. I mean, what, that seems like an overly simplified psychological explanation. Like, does it really work? Can you really say, oh, those things I didn't like those, that was somebody else. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm kind of inclined towards that idea, but you know, if you do have a bad case of diocronia, you can just take some tempo, tempo bismol and you're, you're cured

34:56of it. You become episodic, regular once again. All right. I'm sorry. Just flush it all out. Get it.

35:07Certainly poor memory has nothing to do with episodicity. In his autobiography, John Updike, a man with a powerful memory and a highly consistent character says of himself, I have the persistent sensation in my life and art that I am just beginning.

35:24I'm just looking at the footnote. I have the same sensation. And I think Updike accurately describes how things are for many people when it comes to their experience of being in time. And in particular, their sense of themselves as selves, but he shows by his own memory, memory, Memorious, Memorious case. There's a, there's a dash in the middle of it. That was confusing me in Memorious case that this experience of always beginning has essentially has nothing essentially to do with having a poor autobiographical memory, let alone one

35:55that almost never impinges spontaneously on one's current life. Have you read much Updike? A little bit. So he had the rabbit series, right? And I read the first one of those, which I believe is about run rabbit run. Like it's about a man abandoning his family. So being the kind of fuckhead that could abandon his family, whether he actually did that in real life, I don't know anything about his autobiography, but he certainly wrote in a very understanding way about this person who just could, could escape his life in this way.

36:32So that seems like episodicity. Oh, that was, that was somebody else who has those kids. I don't, you know, I'm not going to take responsibility for them, but that is not that, that diachronicity seems to be an ethical virtue, right? This is the, the position he's arguing against. Let's read the footnote here.

36:57The sense of perpetual beginning is not at all a sense of perpetual inchoateness or incompleteness. That which is always launching may well be strongly formed and may be felt to be. Updike also talks in a narrative fashion of our religious persistence against all the powerful post-Copernican, post-Arwinian evidence that we are in significant accidents within a vast, uncaused churning and feeling that our life is a story with a pattern and a moral and, and an inevitability.

37:29And although this has no resonance for some, it fulfills a powerful psychological need in many and is common. Yeah. I mean, that's exactly what synchronicity, the stuff I was talking about earlier. Yep.

37:43Yeah. So Updike feels that he's perpetually beginning.

37:50That's not the same thing as having a poor autobiographical memory. And it's also not the same thing as feeling incomplete or not fully formed. All right. In one respect, I think that the sense of being always just beginning is nothing more than an accurate reflection or surfacing in consciousness of the actual nature of conscious being in time, at least in the human case. I love the way analytic philosophers have to like cordon off all possible exceptions, right?

38:24There may be some alien or animal out there who doesn't just have an ordinary stream of consciousness. All right. I think it may also be an ever present feature of ordinary everyday experience that is accessible to everyone, but rarely attended to. Right. Sartre describes this as being divided from your past by a nothingness. So, yes, maybe narrativity, but the free will means you can just radically break from what

38:55like there's nothing in your past, even if you're an addict or something that just forces you to do the next thing. But this view may simply reflect my own experience. And if there is any respect in which the experience of being always just beginning is universal, then this at least cannot be part of what distinguishes episodics from diachronics. Okay. So maybe the experience of just always being beginning is just, it's universal for those

39:25of us who pay attention to the stream of consciousness. But then if so, it's not a good criterion for distinguishing episodics from diachronics. So I assume we're going to get better criteria going forward. Right. And I guess we're getting an example of why episodic versus diachronic is different than narrative versus non-narrative, because within narrativity, you could see yourself as one story or as a series of stories. And so I'm the short story writer of their own lives still is very narrative, even if

40:01he's episodic.

40:03All right, go ahead. It may be said that the sense of perpetual beginning is simply more salient or vivid for episodics, but it need not be. An episodic considering the character of her present experience may feel that consciousness is a flowing stream and have no particular positive experience of perpetual re-beginning, while lacking any significant sense that there was in the further past, that she was there in the further past and will be there in the future. A diachronic may experience consciousness as something that is always re-engaging or always

40:34setting out without feeling that this undercuts his sense that he was there in the past and will be there in the further future. Episodics may well have a general tendency to experience things more in one way than the other, and so too diachronics, but there are perhaps no necessary linkages between the diachronic and episodic dispositions and these sorts of phenomenological particularities. The key defining difference is simply as stated. It is the difference between those who do and those who do not naturally figure or experience themselves considered as selves or subjects as things that were there in the further past

41:08or will and will be there in the further future.

41:13Okay.

41:15Is that clear? I think so. Right. So if you are against the idea of consistency, consistency being the hobgoblet of the little minds, you're against seeing yourself as the same, then whether you are episodic or diachronic is one of the many character traits that could rapidly change. So is he arguing that here in part that, okay, you know, some people are more like this,

41:45some people are more like the others, but we're not consistent about it because he wants to be able to have people to have the flexibility to, even in this case, even in, in their reflection on their own lives as, as a narrative or not, he wants them to not have to be consistent about that.

42:02Yeah. So we can, we can have a sense of re-beginning all the time, whether we're episodic or diachronic, right? That's one point. So why bring it up? If he, yeah, because it's also red hair and then, but then we also get the distinction between narrative and well, no, he just, he brings us back to the criterion of being there in the, in the past versus being there in the future. I mean, whatever, however he puts it.

42:33I know you hate dialogues, but I feel like this would, this might work well as a dialogue. Like, do you, yeah. Oh, I feel a re-beginning every day. That's my new theory of, of, and then the Plato shows him why that one doesn't work. Let's move on to the next option.

42:49Diachronics and episodics are likely to misunderstand one another badly. Diachronics may feel that there is something chilling, empty, and deficient about the episodic life. They may fear it, although it is no less full or emotionally articulated than the diachronic life, no less thoughtful or sensitive, no less open to friendship, love, and loyalty. Certainly the two forms of life differ significantly in their ethical and emotional form, but it would be a great mistake to think that the episodic life is bound to be less vital or in some

43:20way less engaged or less humane or less humanly fulfilled. If Heideggerians think that episodics are necessarily inauthentic in their experience of being in time, so much the worse for their notion of authenticity. If episodics are moved to respond by casting aspersions on the diachronic life, finding it somehow macerated or clogged, say, or excessively self-concerned in authentically second order, they too will be mistaken if they think it an essentially inferior form of life.

43:51All right. All right. Defending neurodiversity, I think, is what I had interviewed, read the biography and interviewed the drummer from the Talking Heads, Chris Franz, who with his wife, Tina Weymouth, the bass player, were sort of on one side of this thing versus David Byrne, the lead singer who is aspers, who's on the spectrum for sure, David Byrne is. And at least before, I know they've sort of gotten back together for some talks or whatever

44:26in public. But in this biography, they just do not understand. In fact, he talks about how David Byrne was at some award ceremony and was just like, yeah, I'm not going to go home with my wife tonight because we're done. And it's such that like he, you know, other people had to inform his wife that, oh, yeah, David has actually just left you because that was that was the sense of episodic character. And and the these members of the Talking Heads were just like, I don't understand why he doesn't

44:58love us, why he doesn't care about this time that we spent together that, you know, made him the world famous person that he is, that he can just be so ever, ever beginning anew. All right. But, you know, that's just neurodiversity. He's he's the genius. Maybe you guys with your normal human emotions should just shut the fuck up. I don't know. Can you have a conscience with that kind of existence? I mean, it says here that there's no less loyalty and friendship and things like that.

45:31But that that example doesn't sound like that in the Byrne case. Yeah.

45:35All right. It's your turn. There is one sense in which the in which episodics are by definition, definition more located in the present than diachronics so far as their self-experience is concerned. But it does not follow. And it is not true that diachronics are less present in the present moment than episodics any more than it follows. Or is true that the present is somehow less informed by or responsible to the past and the episodic life than it is in the diachronic life. What is true is that the informing and the responsiveness have different characteristics

46:09and different experiential consequences in the two cases. Faced with skeptical diachronics who insist that episodics are essentially dysfunctional in the way they relate to their own past, episodics will reply, the past can be present or alive in the present without being present or alive as the past. The past can be alive, arguably more genuinely alive in the present simply insofar as it has helped to shape the way one is in the present. Just as musicians playing can incorporate and body forth their past practice without being

46:42mediated by any explicit memory of it. What goes for musical development goes equally for ethical development. And Rilke's remarks on poetry and memory, which have a natural application to the ethical case, suggest one way in which the episodic attitude to the past may have an advantage over the diachronic. And here he's quoting Rilke here. For the sake of a single poem, he writes, you must have many memories, yet it is not enough to have memories, for the memories themselves are not important. They give rise to a good poem only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance

47:16and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves. All right. So this is why I brought up the concept of character as a potential source of continuity, right? It may be the case that even if we don't explicitly remember things in the past, that they're still important in the presence in the sense of having given shape to the present and given shape to who it is we are now, to our character.

47:47So if some important event happened to me in the past that I, and I don't remember it all, it at all, but it's made me the person I am today and manifests itself in my disposition to a certain type of behavior, for instance, then it's still with me in the sense of it's manifested in my character trait and manifested perhaps even in the behavior, even if I don't remember the event at all. All right.

48:18Read the, read the giant name droppy paragraph that is next.

48:23In an earlier published version of this paper, I classify Joseph Conrad as narrative. And this was cogently questioned by John Atridge in the letters column of the times literary supplement in his personal remembrance of Conrad Ford. Maddox Ford observes that Conrad had very strongly the idea of the career, a career for him was for him something a little sacred, any career, a frame of mind, a conception of life, according to which a man did not take the stock of the results of his actions upon himself, as it were at long range, was

48:57something that he had never contemplated. It seems though that this was an effort that Conrad made something that did not flow from any natural narrativity, something learned like the neatness of sailors to which Ford compares it at Ridge notes Conrad's youthful indifference to the overall plot of his existence and quotes Conrad's judgment of his youthful self as not having any notion of life as an enterprise that could be mismanaged. All right. So you confused me for a second because you jumped to the footnote, which is a footnote to a paragraph

49:31that we have not yet read. Oh, shit. So, well, let me, but it's fine. Actually, it did feel like it was the right footnote, but yeah. Right. The footnote for Rilke is just telling you what, what, what work he was quoting from Rilke. But, but the paragraph after that is just a name dump. And then Conrad is added as an additional name here. Among those whose writings show them to be markedly episodic. I propose Michel de Montaigne, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Lawrence Sterne, Coleridge, Stendhal, Hazlitt, Ford, Maddox Ford, Virginia Wolfe, Jorge Luis Borges, Fernando Pessoa, Iris Murdoch, a strongly episodic person who is a natural storyteller.

50:15Freddie Ayer, which I just looked up. That is A.J. Ayer. I don't know why he's calling him Freddie. If he's a first. He's a good friend. Bob Dylan. Proust is another candidate for all his remembrance, which may be inspired by his episodicity. And also Emily Dickinson. Diachronicity stands out less clearly because I take it as the norm, the unmarked position. But one may begin with Plato, St. Augustine, Heidegger, Wordsworth, Dostoevsky, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and all the champions of narrativity in the current ethico-philosophical debate.

50:50Psychological. Ethico-psychological debate. I find it easy to classify my friends, many of whom are intensely diachronic, unlike my parents, who are on the episodic side. And then is the thing about Conrad. So, yeah, I have no idea why these different writers fall under those different categories. I mean, Bob Dylan seems very unsentimental about his past. I know that much. I mean, he wrote a whole, you know, recent autobiography about his early days, but just about, like, being that person who was, I don't know.

51:26Again, I see these as a, hey, watch out. When you think somebody is just being on the spectrum, it could be that we should better characterize this as they're being episodic. They're just having a different attitude toward their past than perhaps is the norm. I mean, what is, what is the criterion again? It's not re-beginning again. Are you? It's just the key difference, just to restate it. Sure. Is between those who do and do not naturally figure experience themselves considered as cells or subjects as things that were there in the further past and will be there in the future or further future.

52:09Okay. Okay. That actually is quite vague now that I think about it. I'm not sure that I know what it means exactly, but much less why these writers would fall. Because it's not about, it's not, oh, Virginia Woolf was stream of consciousness. Therefore, she's in the opposite episodic category because he already told us that's not the criterion. And it's not like, oh, stream of consciousness makes, makes one episodic. So while I carefully curate and I put on Bandcamp all of my old music, not, not the very oldest, the worst sounding, but that's just because I haven't gotten around to it.

52:47But some pretty old and bad sounding stuff from college, somebody that I worked with for a few years was just, you know, as soon as we finished the album we did together was just like, like, unless I can use this right now to forward my business interest, I do not give a shit about it. Once, you know, once it was, the art was out there, it's just, it's just a thing out there in the world. Maybe other people can enjoy it, but like, what can I get out of it? Like he just, he saw no joy in retreading this or listening to his own work or anything like that.

53:22Like explicitly said, the past does not matter. And so that it really might boggles my mind when I run into musicians who, you know, might have a big catalog, but they do not care about it at all. Like if you're not going to curate your own museum, certainly nobody else is going to do it for you. But I guess you figure like, well, if I was that good, if I was Lou Reed and then I died, you know, I know I interviewed one of the guys who was, who was going through Lou Reed's old manuscripts that like, okay, fine. If, if the world deems me a genius and wants to go through my litter and, and museum catalog, every little thought I ever had, then that's great.

54:02But I'm not the one to make that decision. And it's sort of out of my hands. I don't, I, I'm not self-obsessed. Right. So, so he would probably say that I am self-obsessed, that I am narcissistic and wanting to listen to my own music. What the hell? Don't you sort of feel, don't we, I feel like we have a little difference about that, about even listening to our previous podcasts. Right. That you don't like to listen to yourself. Yeah. No, I don't like to, but that's just a matter of being embarrassed by hearing yourself, you know?

54:35Okay. So I guess if you didn't think it was you, then you wouldn't feel embarrassed. You wouldn't feel either way. You would be indifferent. But here, the criterion is just, you know, do we think we were there in the past or with someone else in the past? So you don't think that's related to the level of affection you have for this person in the past or this world of the past? Yeah. Dwelling in the past, the glory days, to quote a Springsteen song, you know, the people who are stuck in there just reliving their high school days because they see this, you know, that's, that's a particular pathology of the entire hollowness of your current life.

55:18How would I, yeah. Well, the question is, how would I take pride in anything if I don't see myself as the same person? I mean, you don't. Accomplish the deed. Yeah. Are people who are episodic, are they people without pride?

55:39Well, there are no bullshit about it, right? It's a bit confusing to me. If you feel sentimental, if you feel proud about the past things you've done, if you dwell in the past in any way, in a certain way, you are being irrational, right? Because the past literally doesn't matter, except insofar as you have been built up by those experiences to be able to do things now. Well, you're articulating the normative position as opposed to just the psychological habit. As a matter of fact, I don't think that there are people who are not proud, even if they're not consciously proud.

56:13So, it complicates matters. I mean, there's probably lots of little things like that that complicate it because it seems like we do, unless I'm misunderstanding it, we have to have some diachronicity in order to feel proud. Because, you know, as Hume points out, right, it's an emotion that's intimately connected to our self, our relationship to ourselves. It's got to be cross-temporal, right? Because the thing I did that I might feel humble about, right, to use Hume's terminology or something like it, or proud of, I've got to say, well, that's mine.

56:51It's not someone else. It's me. So, this is a great place to stop.

Conclusion and Next Steps

56:56We've reached the end of a section. I definitely want to continue on this. Hopefully, it is not four episodes, which is the current case that we're going at. We'll have to speed up less commentary. But it is, you know, bringing to mind a lot of things that we can actually relate to. Just to connect this one more time to, and maybe before next time, I'll try to listen to the episode on free will again to get more clear about what his position was. But if you think that Galen Strawson's position on free will was, I don't believe in free will.

57:29I think all this revenge culture, all this punish someone because they have chosen and they did something and they should be like being episodic goes along with that deterministic view of human nature that, you know, someone committed a crime because of, yes, some causal mechanism that there was a continuity in that causal mechanism. But that doesn't mean there's a continuity in their emotional life, in their ethical integrity such that you should hold anybody responsible for the actions they did in the past in the way that Sartre definitely wants to say you're responsible not just for your past choices, but your past spontaneous choices that were not deliberative at all.

58:14Just the kind of person that you are responsible for, just the kind of person that you are, your character, you are responsible for in this strong way that is the opposite of Galen Strawson.

58:25So do we think that he's eventually, I mean, has he telegraphed to us? He's definitely, he's definitely, right, the whole thing is against narrativity, but is it pro-episodicity or are they both mistaken in different ways? Yeah, I don't know. All right, well, we'll find out maybe next time. Do you agree that this is interesting enough? Yeah. All right, thanks.

58:57Yes, as usual, I think the headquarters for this is patreon.com slash close reads philosophy because you can get ad free all the public episodes there without paying us even a cent. So I know it takes, you know, a couple clicks to set up that feed, that free feed in your Apple podcast app or whatever beyond, you know, where you probably found this just searching Apple podcasts or your podcast app.

59:28But it's worth it to get rid of the pre-roll and the post-roll ads. And if you do then want to pay us a little money, then you will for sure get part two, part three, whatever we did, the other things that we do on this. This is an every week publication. But if you're not paying us any money, you wouldn't know that. You might think that we do these once a month, but we are we are dedicated folks. So I hope you hope you join us on the full journey. Again, that's patreon.com slash close reads philosophy.

59:58Thanks. Bye. Bye.

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