Writing the Life of the Mind

This chapter focuses on the relation between philosophy, biography, and autobiography, as a way of tracking how the ascetic ideal informs our thinking about our relation to ourselves, and so about selfhood in general. Certain ascetic ideas about the possibility of self-identity and truthful self-characterization are shown to crop up throughout modern treatments of autobiographical theory and practice, and to generate opposition and criticism. The work of MacIntyre, Sartre, and Heidegger provides a general framework for navigating this part of the territory of life-writing; and the recent autobiographical trilogy by J. M. Coetzee is examined as a site within which ascetic practices of confession are developed, criticized, and then turned against themselves.