阅读很有趣，尤其是叙事小说——每个人都喜欢好的故事。但也许还有更多的原因。也许每个人都是，或者至少试图成为一个好故事。也许我们的个人身份建立在我们对自己的叙述上，这些叙述赋予我们的生活意义、连续性和连贯性。年轻一代的时尚生活是否会基于电脑游戏中的混乱和暴力，而不是伟大小说中精心构建的生活?或者这只是一个老派主持人的抱怨?John and Ken swap stories with Joshua Landy, co-director of the Literature and Philosophy Initiative at Stanford University, for a program recorded in front of a live audience at Congregation Beth Shalom in San Francisco.
肯以一个古老的问题开始:“到底什么是自我?”哲学家们倾向于认为自我不仅仅是心理学上特定于某个人的一束属性。他们声称，在这些属性背后存在着一个主体，它构建了我们每天看到的外部自我。但这种“构造”听起来很像叙事!我们都是自己人生故事的讲述者吗?我们都是其中的主角吗?我们是在叙述中构建自我吗?如果是这样，阅读通过教会我们叙事的艺术，教会我们创造自我吗?
Joshua Landy, Director of the Philosophy and Literature Program at Stanford, joins the conversation once again, this time to help us sort out the relationship between narrative and the self. A good place to start: What is a narrative? Josh tells us that the minimal narrative contains a beginning, an end, and an action by agents. Ken and John seem unsure: Does narrative require an agent? Is the narrative of Moby Dick merely the series of events depicted in the novel? Or does the reader/critic themselves bring an essential element to the narrative, relativized to their experience? Josh refuses to allow narrative to be a "mere" sequence of events. He argues that it requires something more to make a narrative, perhaps a causal chain that knits the events together. He mentions a quote: "History is just one damned thing after another." So, Josh argues, perhaps we impose narrative on history when we fit its events into a causal structure of our choosing.
Ken questions Josh on the relationship between truth and narrative: Can we create a self-narrative that utterly fails to capture the actual events of our lives? John claims everyone is missing the point, that life is simply "one damned thing after another," that our narrative perception of that life may have nothing to do with our actual selves. But why, then, do we read stories? Josh disagrees with John, arguing that tales teach us to be aesthetic appreciators of our own lives. Narrative appears to give us a certain sort of inalienable autonomy, the right to narrate our own lives. John is unsure whether good lives are necessarily interesting. The well-lived life might have little aesthetic content.
This launches the discussion into the importance of aesthetic values in self-narrative. Josh believes that aesthetic virtues are among the most important in any narrative, including our own. John scoffs, arguing that the most wonderful lives, such as his own, have little to no aesthetic value, since they are just plain boring. Ken argues that we can’t escape aesthetic values, even in a life as boring as John’s. But, as always, the conversation continues.
