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Overview
When we talk about human development, we tend to characterize it as proceeding through a series of stages in which we are first children, then adolescents, and finally, adults. But as James Bernard Murphy observes, growth is not limited to the young nor is decline limited to the aged. We are never trapped within the horizon of a particular life stage: children anticipate adulthood and adults recapture childhood. According to Murphy, the very idea of stages of life undermines our ability to see our lives as a whole.
In Your Whole Life, Murphy asks: what accounts for the unity of a human life over time? He advocates for an unconventional, developmental story of human nature based on a nested hierarchy of three powers—first, each person's unique human genome insures biological identity over time; second, each person's powers of imagination and memory insure psychological identity over time; and, third, each person's ability to tell his or her own life story insures narrative identity over time. Just as imagination and memory rely upon our biological identity, so our autobiographical stories rest upon our psychological identity. Narrative is not the foundation of personal identity, as many argue, but its capstone.
Engaging with the work of Aristotle, Augustine, Jesus, and Rousseau, as well as with the contributions of contemporary evolutionary biologists and psychologists, Murphy challenges the widely shared assumptions in Western thinking about personhood and its development through discrete stages of childhood, adulthood, and old age. He offers, instead, a holistic view in which we are always growing and declining, always learning and forgetting, and always living and dying, and finds that only in relation to one's whole life does the passing of time obtain meaning.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780812252231 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/22/2020 |
| Series: | Haney Foundation Series |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
The Story of Your Life
A full understanding of a human person, it is often said, would tell us how she is like every other person, how she is like some other people, and how she is like no other person. This book is focused entirely on how each of us is like every other person—by virtue of our shared human identity.
Today we celebrate many particular racial, ethnic, sexual, ideological, and religious identities; we are suspicious of allegedly universal identities. Yet, in a world of particular identities we need, more than ever, to be reminded of our common human identity. For even though the affirmation of particular identities has often promoted healthy self-respect, affirming these identities also creates a great deal of conflict, setting Jew against Arab, white against black, woman against man, Christian against Muslim, straight against gay. If the affirmation of particular identities is to lead to a world of greater tolerance, justice, and harmony, then we must learn also to affirm our common humanity.
To claim a unique and important human identity is widely regarded as an arbitrary preference for our own species. Should not we honor intelligence and altruism in whatever animal they appear? What is so special about human beings? A proper understanding of human nature does not disparage other species. Quite the opposite: we share many of our biological and psychological powers with other animals, especially mammals and primates. What makes human beings unique is that, so far as we know, only human beings possess a biological basis for rational and moral agency; that is, only human beings are by nature persons. Personhood is worthy of reverence in whatever creature it might appear.
Who am I? Many of us attempt to answer this question by looking at our family tree. When asked about his lineage, Napoleon famously retorted: "I am my ancestors." The view that "I am my ancestors" explains the widespread appeal of evolutionary theories of human nature. Virtually all of the myriad scientific and philosophical studies of human nature during the past century take it for granted that we must focus on our family tree. Since humans have descended from primate ancestors, we assume that we have inherited their traits. In this book, by contrast, I shall be looking not at ancestors but at children—not at the family tree but at the baby pictures.
Who am I? I am the person who developed from a microscopic embryo into an adult human being. This book is about how we develop, not how we evolved—about how we grow up from infancy, not how we descended from other primates. To be sure, evolutionary and developmental processes can be distinguished but not wholly separated. Human development has itself evolved over time and evolution works largely through changes in the timing of development. Nonetheless, developmental biology has its own explanatory principles which are quite distinct from those of evolutionary biology. Developmental biology stems from Aristotle while evolutionary biology stems from Darwin. What this means is that developmental biology is more goal-directed (that is, teleological) than is evolutionary biology. True, local evolutionary adaptation is partly goal-directed, but evolution as a whole has no goal. Development does have a goal, and developmental processes are unintelligible apart from that goal. Developmental biology offers a unique window on human nature. We shall explore four basic stories of human development as elaborated by Aristotle, Jesus of Nazareth, Augustine, and Rousseau.
This book will fundamentally change the way you think about your own life. Instead of assuming that you were once a child but are now an adult, I will show that you have always been a child, adolescent, and adult—all at the same time. What are called stages of life are not temporal phases that we occupy one at a time; they are parts or facets of a whole human life. As children we prepare for adulthood and as adults we attempt to recapture our childhood. We are never stuck within the horizon of any one stage of life; rather, through the powers of imagination and memory, we always live in relation to the whole of our lives. The whole of a life is fundamentally prior to these temporal stages. Just as an organ apart from an organism is merely a clump of tissue, there is no childhood or adulthood apart from the whole of a life. I defend a developmental and holistic view of human life in which we are always growing and always declining, always learning and always forgetting, always living and always dying. A human life is of a piece.
When attempting to explain something as multifaceted as a whole human life, there is an understandable impulse to divide and conquer, that is, to analyze a life into discrete stages. If a whole life is too difficult to grasp, then perhaps we might attempt to understand infancy, then childhood, then adolescence, then adulthood, and finally senescence. This explains why hundreds of books are published each year about particular stages of life. But we cannot possibly grasp a human life by summing up a series of stages, because, as we shall see, the whole of a life is prior to each stage. Only in light of the whole does any stage have meaning. When it comes to a human life, truly we murder to dissect.
What accounts for the unity of a human life over time? I offer a developmental story of human nature based on a nested hierarchy of three powers. First, each person's unique human genome ensures biological identity over time; second, each person's powers of imagination and memory ensure psychological identity over time; third, each person's ability to tell his own life story ensures narrative identity over time. Just as imagination and memory rest on our biological identity, so our autobiographical stories rest on our psychological identity. We are storytelling animals, but our autobiographical powers rest on our psychological and biological powers. Narrative is not the foundation of personal identity but its capstone.
Why does it matter that we live our lives in relation to the whole? Because practical wisdom depends on the ability to bring the perspective of our whole life to bear on each present moment. What appears good to me as a child or as an adult may well differ from what appears good to me in relation to my whole life. Through the power of narrative, we gather up the time of our lives to be fully present in every moment.
In this book, I will be defending the substantial unity of a human person whose life endures through time. Because a human being is an irreducible whole (including biological, psychological, and narrative powers), our lives can have personal coherence over time. The whole temporal expanse of a life is prior to any of its stages, just as a whole human person is prior to any of her organs or powers. We can tell stories about our past, present, and future only because we possess a certain kind of complex unity at any one time. What we are as human beings makes it possible for us to lead the life of a human person.
Philosophers will notice that, although I am often critical of Aristotle, my philosophical perspective is thoroughly Aristotelian. Aristotle is the only great philosopher who was also a biologist, and his biological understanding of development is what makes him the essential guide to human life. I agree with philosopher Peter Hacker: it has been a major misfortune that no great modern philosopher was also a biologist, meaning that there is no worthy modern successor to Aristotle. We are fortunate that Wittgenstein and his students have articulated many of Aristotle's insights about the unity of biological humanity and psychological personhood in a modern idiom.
The focus of my scholarship has always been to elaborate Aristotle's nested hierarchy of development. According to Aristotle, to become a good and excellent person, we need to inherit the right natural endowment, acquire the right habits, and reflectively adjust those habits through right reason. In this nested hierarchy, our habits rest on our biological nature while reason rests on our habits. Aristotle also extended this story to political development, in which we begin with natural resources, develop social customs, and then revise those customs through rational law. In my first book (The Moral Economy of Labor: Aristotelian Themes in Economic Theory), I explored the nested hierarchy of the natural, customary, and stipulated division of labor. Specialization in work begins with natural aptitudes; these natural aptitudes lead to various customary divisions of labor; finally, legislators and managers create deliberately stipulated divisions of labor within a society or firm. I then turned to the development of law, from natural law to customary law to positive law in my books The Philosophy of Positive Law and The Philosophy of Customary Law. By natural reason, human beings grasp, inchoately, rules of conduct; these rules are then fleshed out through particular social customs; finally, reflection on these customs leads to the deliberate stipulation of positive law. In Your Whole Life, I explore a nested hierarchy of human development from biological growth, to psychological awareness, to autobiographical narrative.
The study of a human life is intrinsically multidisciplinary. Although this book is framed by basic philosophical questions and arguments, I have drawn illustrative material from biology, psychology, political science, sociology, linguistics, biblical exegesis, anthropology, and literary theory. I have attempted to refer to studies reflecting major currents of scholarship in those fields. The questions we shall consider about the shape of a human life are timeless ones, but the empirical illustrations are undoubtedly time bound. This book is thus perched between timeless questions and transient answers, which is the story of every human life.
Table of Contents
Introduction. The Story of Your LifePart I. Stories of Development
Chapter 1. Human Nature from a Developmental Perspective
Chapter 2. Development as the Recapitulation of Nature in Aristotle
Chapter 3. Development as Preformation in Augustine's Confessions
Chapter 4. Development as the Recapitulation of History in Rousseau
Chapter 5. Development as Juvenilization in the Synoptic Gospels
Part II. Unifying the Whole
Chapter 6. All of Me: Stages and the Whole of Life
Chapter 7. What Am I? Human Beings and Human Persons
Chapter 8. Who Am I? A Storybook Life
Conclusion. A Practical Guide to Life Writing
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments