David Egan Philosophy

Almost exactly two years ago (on May 12, 2024, to be exact), I made one of the most momentous decisions of my life to date. I accepted an offer of employment from Koç University and started making plans to move my life from Vancouver to Istanbul.

The weeks ahead of that decision involved a lot of difficult deliberation. I’d been living in British Columbia since the start of 2020 and had been deepening my relationship with a place that still feels like, and will probably always feel like, my true home. I’d come to peace with the idea of not continuing an academic career and I’d found joy in the off-ramp I’d discovered of teaching online philosophy classes for the public. This life had its own challenges and anxieties—I wouldn’t have taken the job at Koç if it didn’t seem preferable to the alternatives—but there was a clear story I could tell about how my life had led me back to British Columbia, and why.

What’s the story of this life I’m leading in Istanbul? I’m still trying to figure that one out. Am I here for the short term or the long term? What do I want from my time here? How does this new home, culture, and language fit into my understanding of who I am? And how does this move change the relationship I thought I was building with Canada’s west coast?

We live and we tell stories about our lives. What relation do the stories have to the lives? This is the central question I’ve been exploring this semester in my course on life and narrative. Really, it’s a thinly-disguised exercise in what academics sometimes call “me-search.” Thinking about the relation between lives and stories is a way of helping me think about the strange twist my own life story has taken of late.

Telling stories is one way of making sense of experience. A story is a linked sequence of events where each event in the sequence pertains to all the others. Irrelevant incidents have no place in a well told story. Red herrings in detective fiction are the exception that proves the rule: a red herring misleads us precisely because we assume that every element of a story is relevant so that an irrelevant detail wrong-foots us by creating an expectation of relevance.

Life doesn’t work like that. Events follow one after another but they make no promise of significant connection. Sometimes life can feel like a purposeless succession of one damn thing after another. Is this experience of purposeless succession truer to life as lived than the stories we tell about it?

Antoine Roquentin, the narrator of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 novel Nausea, thinks so. A story structure is a false frame we put on events to give them the appearance of significance, he says. Life is lived beginning to end but stories start at the end. The beginning of a story only feels like a beginning because you know there’s an ending waiting for it.

“The day started like any other.” You can imagine a story beginning like this. But if it’s the start of a story, you know that the day won’t be like any other. After all, why are we telling a story about it? The promise of significant incident and an ending that ties it all together is implied in that innocuous opening. We can give the events of our lives a significant shape in telling about them but we can’t give them that shape while living them. “You might as well try and catch time by the tail,” Sartre/Roquentin writes.

These reflections lead Roquentin to conclude that stories necessarily falsify the lives they tell about. “[P]eople talk about true stories,” he writes. “As if there could possibly be true stories.”

Normally we distinguish true stories from false stories based on their content. I could tell you a true story about the events and deliberations that led me from what I thought was a settled life in Vancouver to a job teaching in Istanbul but the story would be false if I told you that the real reason I’d moved to Istanbul was to work as a spy (or would it be?!).

But Roquentin would have you believe that that first story—the story about moving to Istanbul that makes no mention of spycraft—is false too. Not on account of any falsity in its content but because of an essential falsity in its form. The telling of the story is shaped by a knowledge of how things turned out and which incidents are relevant to that outcome whereas the experience at the time had no such retrospective structuring.

As the philosopher Richard Moran points out, there’s something fishy about saying that the form of a story is itself false. I illustrated this point by drawing a quick sketch portrait of one of my students on the whiteboard. There’s an obvious sense in which this is a bad picture: I’m a terrible artist and the picture doesn’t remotely resemble my student. But what if we were to say that there’s another way in which the picture is a bad representation of the student: it’s a two-dimensional image in black-and-white whereas my student is three-dimensional and coloured. Even if I were a much better artist than I am, my picture couldn’t overcome those shortcomings.

So are all pen-and-ink drawings false? No. Someone who raises that objection doesn’t understand what a picture is. Likewise, if Roquentin says that all stories are false, he seems not to understand what a story is. No form of representation is meant to be an exact copy of what it represents. The form of a story is neither true nor false: it’s the form within which true or false things can be said.

That said, I think Roquentin has caught onto something significant, even if I don’t buy into his diagnosis. When I tell a story about my life, I’m both the narrator of that story and the protagonist. Because both of these people—narrator and protagonist—are me, it’s easy to confuse the roles. But Roquentin is right to think that the narrator has a different perspective on events than the protagonist has—indeed, than the protagonist could have.

The living of a life and the telling of it happen at different times. You don’t recount events as they’re unfolding unless you’re a sports commentator (“he shoots, he scores!”). That means the narrator of the story has a different perspective on events than the protagonist of the story, even if they’re the same person.

As narrator, I can take a range of attitudes toward my past self that differ from the attitudes I had at the time. I can feel ashamed of actions I felt proud of at the time. I can also feel proud of actions I felt ashamed of at the time, admiring the courage in my younger self’s failures now that the sting of failure has faded. I can also take a perspective on myself from outside of myself, cringing in embarrassment, say, as I see myself as others must have seen me when I was shooting my mouth off like that.

I can also know things that I didn’t know at the time—things I couldn’t even possibly have known at the time. “When I walked into that room, I saw my future wife for the first time.” That sentence may be part of a true story but it couldn’t have been known to be true by anyone at the time at which it happened. Arthur Danto calls sentences like that—sentences that make essential reference to events that lie in the future of what’s being narrated—“narrative sentences.” They show that there’s a form of historical knowledge that’s different from just knowledge of what was true at the time. We may be more removed from the events when we look back on them, but our retrospective posture allows us to know things that were inaccessible to us when they happened.

Telling stories about ourselves gives us a certain ironic distance from ourselves, then, where we can see patterns of meaning that differ from the patterns we saw at the time. That distance, in turn, should teach us humility about our present. Don’t suppose you really understand what’s going on. There will be other perspectives from which all this might appear under a very different light.

There’s a strand of thinking we’ve looked at in my course on life and narrative that makes storytelling out to be constitutive of the people that we are. On this view, the stories I tell about myself define who I am. But I’m inclined to think that self-narratives are less about defining who I am and more about exploring who I am. What stories can I tell about what brought me here and what sorts of futures do they point me to? What alternative stories are there that might make a different sense of my circumstances? Do I recognize the protagonist of the story I tell about my life and what do I make of this person?

Roquentin is right about one other thing. A storyteller begins a story knowing where it will end but in life we don’t know where things will end. The stories I tell about myself are always necessarily provisional and incomplete. If my life is a story, it’s less a polished narrative and more a constantly revised and updated draft. 

1. King James I of England (aka King James VI of Scotland) coined the words “Anglican,” “Highlander,” and “anorexia.” (source)
2. The Greek verb graphein, which means “to write,” and from which we get “graphic” and all our “-graphy” words, derives originally from a word for the mark left on the body when an arrow pierces it. (source)
3. White noise inhibits the perception of sweet, salty, and sour flavours but not umami or savoury flavours. Tomato juice is the rare beverage with significant umami flavouring so drinking it on a plane will result in a richer taste experience than drinking most other beverages. (source)
4. I may be exposing my ignorance by admitting that this is something I only just learned this month, but locusts are grasshoppers. More specifically, certain species of grasshoppers will either remain grasshoppers or turn into locusts depending on how crowded they are. When these grasshoppers are in physical contact with other grasshoppers, their serotonin levels increase, which can set off a feedback loop, prompting a series of physiological changes that turn solitary grasshoppers into swarming locusts. (source)
5. Helium is useful for a lot more than just party balloons and making your voice funny. It has all sorts of technical uses, notably as a coolant and as a way of detecting gas leaks. Its unique chemical properties mean that there’s no known substitute in many of these industrial applications. Helium is produced as a by-product of natural gas extraction. Qatar is responsible for about a third of the world’s helium production and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz is causing a severe helium shortage. (source)
6. Urban birds in Europe are more afraid of women than men. A study consistently found that men can approach closer to a bird than women can before the bird flies away. It’s not clear why. (source)