Back in formality – Autobiography

For the past few posts (especially the last three) I have largely been stuffing around, sharing my personal quirks, ideals and dreams on this blog. Today Buddha Warrior comes back in full form, all guns blazing, back to its original intent: the discussion of all matters deep and meaningful. I am probably going to write slightly less frequent posts than before, but my intention is to “fill up” my entries with far more meaning and knowledge that is the hallmark of academic quality. Hopefully such knowledge will be deemed worthy by you guys, because I wouldn’t waste my time writing paragraphs about useless things (unless it was about cartoons or comics).

I have been doing a course at uni called “Identity and Self-Knowledge: Philosophy through Autobiography”. Thanks to this course I have gained a deeper appreciation of what people might not expect to be in a philosophy course. Namely, things like philosophy of art and autobiographical philosophy. Note that it is easy for someone to appreciate, or depreciate, something as straightforward as autobiography. Looking back on your life either matters, or it doesn’t, end of story. Even I understand that this first step is quite simple. The philosophy behind it, however, is far more complex than a simple apologia, justification, consolation or confession that is typical of the modern autobiography. Now I find many modern autobiographies not as interesting as those of old Europe. Autobiography is known as a “Western” tradition, in that it was set in stone as a specific literary genre (and one that was of no small significance, seeing that even the most ignorant person, with just an introduction to autobiography, recognizes that there is something fine and sacred about a person’s writings of his or her own life). The first Western autobiography is probably traced back to St. Augustine’s Confessions, which was an attempt to break through the subjectivity of the human experience of time, into the “stretching out” of eternity, beside God who views all history as one all-pervasive present.

Among the diverse masterpieces that can be found besides Augustine are Rousseau’s Confessions, Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, Chateaubriand’s Memoires d’outre tombe, and Newman’s Apologia, among many others (Georges Gusdorf). My personal favourites come from those of the “old world”, and by that I mean the ones that succeed Augustine past the Middle Ages and into the Enlightenment period, and the ones whose active tradition essentially ends where the Romantics’ begin. Depending on your area of interest and bias, you will find either modern autobiographies like Bill Clinton’s My Life being better than Montaigne’s Essais, or the reverse. I think Montaigne is a great read. Lucid, skeptical, often sardonic, compassionate, in the tradition of the Greeks and Romans – I cannot find anything to dislike about Montaigne’s “revealing of the self” through his essays. They are also unique because they are disorganized, the following subject often has no connection to the former, and the context in which he writes of a certain topic such as death has sweepingly different implications than some other subjective, like experience. To me Montaigne’s writing is among the highest in autobiographical technique: kicking back to the past, yet refreshingly modern, friendly and open to the reader, a living text that wishes little more than to share something worthwhile with the reader: “I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff: Each man bears the entire form of the human condition.” Such affinity! What an identity Montaigne shares with someone who reads his work!

I have come to realize (something that I think I have always known), and that is that every life is unique. Georges Gusdorf, in his Conditions and Limits of Autobiography, opened his essay with the assertion that, “Many great men, and even some not so great – heads of government or generals, ministers of state, explorers, businessmen – have devoted their leisure time or old age to editing ‘Memoirs’, which have found an attentive reading public from generation to generation” (pg. 29). By this he is implying that often it is only these kinds of men who find within themselves the mettle to write something as hallowed as autobiography. I disagree. I think that anyone who is a thinker deserves a chance to write about their life, because where there is experience and a consequent forming of opinion from that experience, there is potential for a “looking back”. And bear in mind that to me the greatest personalities in history are men like the Buddha, Montaigne, Rousseau – almost anyone who did not emphasize politics or state, economics or power. They might have written about them, they might even have enjoyed the position – but they were unlike an exiled Napoleon style of biography, a looking back on life as a set of victories or defeats. Admittedly St. Helena is a good place to settle down and write your memoirs, but in the modern world, the Information Age, there has never been a better time to express the meaning your experiences have given you. I can say with confidence that when I have time in my middle/old age, I will set about the task. I might not be a soldier or a politician, but I am a thinker, in the tradition of Philosophers. And to me every person who is a thinker can easily become a Philosopher, just by thinking a bit more. It’s just a matter of how much thinking you want to do.

For your interest, check out my recent entry, “My journey so far” (should be a few posts down this one). It is an extremely short philosophical autobiography (ah, the limits of online blogging), by that I mean it is an explanation of why I am at the philosophical position that I am today.