Self-Narrative, Literary Narrative, and Self-Understanding

In the innovative and engaging Philosophy, Literature and Understanding, Jukka Mikkonen investigates a range of developments in multiple disciplines that have complicated traditional debates between cognitivists and non-cognitivists about literature. To avoid the extremes this debate has fallen into, Mikkonen develops a middle course that grounds the cognitive value of literature in its contributions to cultural and self-understanding. As part of this argument, Mikkonen offers an account of how literature can contribute to self-understanding via its narrative form despite what he sees as deep differences between real-life and literary narratives. He concludes that literature can (obliquely) aid our understanding of emotions like grief due to their shared processual nature, and self-understanding generally through its artificiality, the awareness of which allows us to recognize and correct fictionalizing narrative tendencies in our life-narratives. While I agree with Mikkonen's conclusions, I believe they are too modest and that he provides the resources to claim even greater cognitive benefits from literature. Focusing on what it means to 'have a self-narrative' and describing narrative work as it occurs both unreflectively and through self-conscious reflection, this paper argues that that the selectivity, interpretation, and revision said to fictionalize life-narratives are in fact critical to self-understanding, which requires imaginative engagement of the sort Mikkonen sees as characteristic of the practice of literature. This suggests additional and more direct potential cognitive benefits of literature for self-understanding than Mikkonen describes, strengthening and supporting his broader position.