Part II

Abstract

Part II works from the point of view of the reader of autobiography, and asks: what should we learn from autobiography? It argues for a lesson about selfhood and the good life, and specifically about the roles of narrative and of self-realization in those targets of human self-knowledge. This investigation addresses four questions: given that autobiographies are narratives, should we learn something from them about the importance of narrative in human life? Could our narration of our lives explain how their parts relate to them as wholes? Could it retrospectively unify them and thereby make them good for us? Could it create self-knowledge by interpretatively making the self? In each case it answers: no. The lesson we should learn here is instead about the centrality of self-realization to selfhood and the good life. To make that case, this part argues for pluralist realism about self-knowledge: autobiographies of self-discovery, martial life, and solitude show that the ‘self’ which is created and known by self-interpretation is, at best, one part of what we can know about ourselves, and not the most interesting part. These modes of self-discovery reveal a self that is unchosen, initially opaque to itself, and seedlike, which could not be a self-interpretation, and whose good is its realization.