Galen Strawson’s I am not a Story is an article that quite honestly, I don’t I completely agree with. Strawson goes on through his article to talk about how he defines himself as an “anti-narrative”. In other words, he sees his life as one that does not follow a story based on his past, or future. As he continues throughout the paper, he makes it seems as though he is this monotone guy who doesn’t really look forward to anything. He just lives in the present ultimately. He doesn’t believe that anything in his life has influenced him in any way. WHAT?! I personally cannot see how events from someone’s past would not have an impact on who they are today. Whether we notice it or not, something happened to us, and it was something so important that it changed our point of view. This leads to another point in Strawson’s article that I did not totally agree with, He provided examples from other individuals on how memories are never fully 100%. They pretty much just talked about how they don’t have great memories which have impacted their relationships. More importantly, they discussed how because of their poor memories there was no possible way their past could influence them, nor their future. I disagree though. Sure you can have a bad memory, but, that doesn’t mean that events that happened in your past didn’t shape you into the person you are today. The one thing that I found myself agreeing with was how looking at our lives as this chronologically ordered list was negative. Nowadays, kids are told to go to school, graduate, get a job, get married, and have kids. We have our minds on this singular path and don’t let our peripheral vision come into play. It’s as if we are blinded by the road we’ve been told to choose our whole lives. Ultimately, this stress has lead to a delay in overall happiness and understanding of life.
I also found myself saying WHAT?! many times throughout this essay. I like how you brought up that Strawson seems to be a monotone guy because that is exactly how I perceived him as well. Your point that you agreed with him on helped me find an area in this essay that I could also agree with. I struggled to connect at all while reading this but the chronological order life being seen as a negative is the one thing I could get on board with.
I agree! I love this descriptive and metaphorical word “monotone.” I think there’s a lot to explore there!
I agree with your initial statement when you say you felt disconnected with what Strawson said in this article. I was also kind of angry while reading this because most of his responses were based off faulty reasoning. Your blog really did help to shed a lot more light on his central argument and what he was trying to get at.
You build a strong argument against Strawson. Well done, Rachel!