A Life Is a Story

I am going to describe one person's life in a single sentence, and ask you whether it was a good one. You will find that you cannot answer. That is, in a way, the whole of tonight's episode: by the end we will know why the answer would not come, and that changes what we have been doing for the past month.

Here is the sentence. She left the city at thirty-eight, moved back to the town where she was born, and spent the next forty years running a small bakery on the main street. That is all of it. Was it a good life?

You do not know, and you cannot know. Consider carefully what is missing, because it is not a feeling and it is not a want. I have not told you whether she was happy — but suppose I add that she was perfectly content every morning; you still cannot answer. I have not told you whether she got what she wanted — but suppose I add that she wanted exactly this and got it; you are still no closer. What is missing is something else. It is where those forty years fall in the course of her life as a whole. Where does the bakery come? What preceded it, and what did she do instead of doing something else?

Take two versions of the same forty years — the same work, the same flour on the same hands. In the first, she had been failing in the city for a decade, in a life that was never really hers, and one day she went home, and the bakery was where she finally became herself: she fed three generations of a town, knew every order and every grief, and died having built the centre of a place. In the second, she had a rare talent — the kind that appears once in a generation — and in her thirties it began to demand more of her than she could bear, and she was afraid, and she went home, and the bakery was where she hid from that talent for forty years. Everyone loved her. No one ever told her what she had had. She died content, and something was wasted that no one in the town was even able to see.

The same bakery. The same contentment. The same forty years. In one account it is the best decision she ever made; in the other it is the quiet tragedy of her life — and not a single fact has changed between them. What changed is where those forty years fall in the story of the whole.

This is Philosophy for Us. Philosophy for everyone, no degree required. This is the fifth of eight episodes, still on the question that first occurred to you in the driveway.

Last time, we stopped treating the good life as something to be selected. We had already set feeling aside — you would not step into the experience machine. We had set wanting aside — the man who got precisely what he wanted and wasted his life all the same. And then the natural move was to reach for a theory of the good life, to compare the theories and adopt the soundest one. We declined to do that, on this ground: to choose the point of your life by which theory suits you is only the wanting again, in a more respectable form; you cannot select the very thing that is supposed to tell you what you should want. So we set aside the chooser's question — which good life do I pick — and found beneath it an older and stranger one, which in four weeks we had never actually asked: what is a life, that it could have a good at all?

Tonight we ask it, and we meet the first serious answer — the one the last episode warned was coming, the one that goes directly at the assumption you have stood on since the first episode: that your life is yours to author. It does not overturn that assumption tonight. It does something quieter, and in the end harder. It says a life is not a project you stand outside of and write; it is a story. And that single claim turns "is my life mine to author?" from a settled fact you never questioned into the open question the next two episodes are a dispute over. So let me say plainly the two things to hold onto, because they pull against each other. The first is that once you begin to see your life as a story, it is difficult to stop. The second is that I cannot prove the claim is true. Tonight you will feel the first of those happen. Do not let me skip past the second.

So we ask it. And the first thing to fail is not the largest question — not yet the question of whether you are the author of your life. It is something smaller and stranger, and it has to be felt before the rest will make sense.

Here it is. For four weeks I have been putting a question to you, and you have been trying to answer it, and tonight I have to say that the question may not be answerable in the form we have been asking it. The question was: is the smaller life a good life? Is this stretch — the ordinary Tuesday, the promotion handed back, the quiet and undemanding version — a good one? We reached for feeling to settle it, and we reached for wanting to settle it. But consider what kind of operation that is. We were holding up one part of a life and asking whether that part was good. And a life may not be the kind of thing of which that question can be asked.

Do not take it on my word; try it. Take a real stretch of your own life — a year, a job, a relationship, one that actually happened — and try to say, flatly, of that stretch alone: was it good? See what your mind does. It will not stay on the part; it looks to what came before and after. The year in which you were most miserable — was it a bad year, or was it the low point you had to reach, the year that changed everything, which you would now undo for nothing? You cannot answer without the years on either side of it. The relationship that ended — good, or bad? That depends entirely on what it turned out to be the beginning of, or the end of. The job you left; the city you left. In every case you reach forward to where it led and back to what it came out of, and only then does a verdict begin to form. A part of a life cannot be judged without the rest of the life around it.

This is not merely a quirk of memory. It tells us something about what a life is. It is what happened with the bakery: I gave you the stretch in full, every fact of it, and you could not judge it, because a stretch of a life is not something that can be judged on its own. It means what it means by where it stands in the whole.

That word — whole — is the one everything now hangs on. Here is the thing we passed without noticing. The question "is this a good life?" assumes that a life is a whole: a single thing, with a shape, that can be good or bad taken all together. We never checked that assumption. We simply helped ourselves to it. And it is not a small one.

Recall the question I left you with about Susan Wolf — and I am not reopening her; her answer stands where we left it. But recall the difficulty at its very edge. She held that the good life is active engagement in projects of worth. And I asked: a project is an afternoon, a season, a stretch of effort on something worthwhile — and a life will contain many of those, one after another. Does the sum of them make a good life? Here is where the difficulty shows itself, because a sum of parts is not a whole. You may have a thousand worthwhile afternoons, each one good in itself, and that no more adds up to a good life than a thousand good sentences add up to a good novel. A thousand fine sentences may still be no book at all — no story, nothing that goes anywhere. The good of a life is the good of the whole of it, over and above the good of its parts. "Is it good?" is a question about a whole. It can only be asked of something that has a whole.

So what has happened here? We came in to ask whether your life is good, and we have found, standing in front of that question, a prior one we must answer first — and it is a genuinely strange one. Not "is your life good?" but: is a life even a whole at all? Is it the kind of thing that has a shape — a beginning, a direction, an end, all of it holding together into one thing that could be called good or bad? Or is it simply one thing after another, a succession of episodes that happened, over which "the whole" is a comforting frame we lay across the top, with nothing really behind it?

That is the question. And there is a philosopher who has given one of the most serious answers anyone has offered to it — and his answer is not merely that a life is a whole. It is stranger than that. He says a life is a whole of one particular kind; and the moment he names the kind, you will recognise it, because you already apply it to every life but your own.

His name is Alasdair MacIntyre, and he is writing in 1981, in a book called After Virtue. The sentence on which all of this depends is his: a human being, he says, is essentially a story-telling animal. Hear that precisely, because it is easy to shrink it. He does not mean that we are fond of stories. He means something much larger: that a human life itself has the form of a story. A life is the kind of thing that has a beginning you did not write, a middle you are at present in, and a direction — it is going somewhere; it does not merely unfold, it moves toward something. A story is not a heap of events. It is events that add up, that point somewhere, in which the later ones answer the earlier ones. And MacIntyre's claim is that a life is exactly that, whether or not you have noticed.

That one claim accounts for a great deal — and that is the sign that it is more than a pleasing figure of speech. Why could you not judge the bakery? Because a story cannot be judged one scene at a time; a scene means what it means by where it stands in the whole. Why does a sum of good afternoons not make a good life? Because a story is not a stack of scenes; it is scenes that lead somewhere. Why did the man in the boat trouble you, though he got precisely what he wanted? Because "I wanted a thing and I got the thing" has the form of a completed transaction — and a life is not assessed as a transaction is; it is assessed as a story is, and a whole life spent closing a single transaction is a story in which nothing was ever at stake, in which no earlier thing was ever answered.

And here is the part that matters most: you already know how to do this. You do it constantly — for everyone except yourself. When someone you love dies, what happens at the funeral? A person stands and tries to say what the whole of that life was: not that she had many pleasant afternoons, but what her life was about, what it was directed toward, what it amounted to. That is a eulogy. It is the most ordinary thing in the world, and it is MacIntyre's claim in practice — it treats a life as a story whose meaning one can try to name. You have never once doubted that a human life is the kind of thing of which that can be asked. You have simply never turned it on your own life, because the question what do I want cannot take in a whole life; it concerns only the next thing.

You met the near edge of this once before, some time ago, when we asked whether you are even the same person across the years of a life — and the answer that kept returning was that the self is something like a story told across time, holding the scattered moments into a single "you." Tonight is the harder and sharper form of that thought. It is not only that the story holds you together. It is that the story is going somewhere — that it has a point. And whether you are the one steering it is precisely the dispute we are walking into. Keep that in view; it is two episodes of difficulty.

Consider what the story-claim does to our question. If a life is a story, then it has the one thing every story has and a mere sequence of events never does: a point toward which it moves. A telos — we named the word last week — the end at which the whole thing is aimed, what makes it this story and not simply a record of things that occurred. Which means the good life was never the best-felt life; we set that aside. Nor the best-wanted life; we set that aside too. On this account the good life is the well-told one — the life that is a good story, that goes somewhere, that is directed at something genuinely worth being directed at.

And here — this is the part that should be surprising — this is what the wellness industry has been selling a lifeless copy of. "Flourishing." "Eudaimonia." "Living your best life." These are not new words. They are ancient, and they did not used to mean feeling good. They meant something very close to this: a whole life, lived well, directed somewhere worth going. Somewhere between the Greeks and the present the idea was hollowed out into a mood and a brand of scented candle. And I cannot show you how far it was hollowed out, or what that has cost you, until I show you where it came from. So let me do that — it is the most useful thing we will do tonight, and it is a habit of thought you can keep.

Here is the puzzle. Why does "a good life is a story that goes somewhere, aimed at a point" sound exotic — almost mystical, almost like a sales pitch — while "a good life is whatever feels right to me" sounds like plain common sense? It has not always been so. In fact it is very nearly the reverse of how people thought for most of Western history. Watch the word change its meaning.

Go back to Aristotle, some twenty-three centuries ago. "The good life" — his word was eudaimonia — did not mean my good life, the one I would choose. It meant something objective, something about which one could be simply wrong. He held that everything of a given kind has a characteristic activity that it is for — an eye is for seeing, a knife for cutting, and a good eye or a good knife is one that performs that activity well. Then he asked the question with no easy answer: what is a human being for? What is the activity of which a human life is the doing-well? And whatever the answer, notice the structure of it: the good life is the life that does well the thing a human life is for — not the life that feels a particular way. One could feel excellent and be living badly; one could feel wretched and be living well. The measure stood outside how the life felt from within. And the point of it — the telos — came with being the kind of creature one is, and with one's place in a polis, the community one belonged to. It was not selected from a menu to suit oneself. The later traditions, the Stoics and those after them, only widened the frame: one's telos was one's place in an ordered cosmos, a universe that itself had a point, and a life went well when it played its part well.

Now here is what happened — and this is MacIntyre's central claim about how we came to be as we are. The modern world, and the Enlightenment in particular, removed the structure from beneath all of that. It ceased to believe there was any shared, given account of what a human being is for. But — and this is the whole of it — it kept the vocabulary. We still say good; we still say virtue; we still say ought; we still say flourishing; we still say the good life. We simply demolished the one thing beneath those words that gave them their meaning: the telos, the shared end to which a human life was answerable. And once there is no end a life is for — no larger story it is part of — the word "good" has nowhere left to point but inward. "The good life" can only collapse into "the life that is good for me, as I judge it." There is nothing else left for it to mean. Eudaimonia is mistranslated as "happiness," and "happiness" is reduced further to "how satisfied I am with my life," a private measure only I can read. The whole, the point, the community it answered to — all discarded. What remains is a feeling and a preference.

And the final stage in that long decline is the very thing that put you in the driveway. The soft-life feed, the wellness industry, the whole apparatus that granted you permission to rest — it keeps the word. "Flourishing." "Living well." It keeps the appearance: the good linen, the considered morning. And it discards the one thing that ever made the old idea a demand on you — that the good is the good of a whole life with a point one answers to, whether or not one feels like it. What is left after that final removal is "the good life is the one that feels good and asks little of you" — sold, very conveniently, by an industry whose entire product is your ease. And the conclusion is worth the whole history: "do what feels good, choose your smaller life" is exactly what remains of "the good life" once you strip out the telos, the whole, and the community it was always answerable to. And stripping those three things out is precisely what leaves "what I want" as the sole guide to a question it was never equipped to answer.

Now stop, because what we have just done is worth keeping. We took a phrase you were sure was obvious — the good life means my good life — and showed that it is the broken-off fragment of a much older and larger idea, an idea in which a life had a point it did not get to choose. And recovering the larger idea showed us, at once, what the fragment costs. That operation — that exact operation — has a name, and a tradition behind it, and a philosopher whose life's work it is. I will not give you any of those tonight; we will come back, later in the series, and name them properly. For now, simply notice that you did it, and that you can do it. The next time the culture hands you a polished word — "wellness," "self-care," "your best life" — as though its meaning were too obvious to question, you now have the method: ask what older and costlier thing it is the leftover of, and what was thrown away to shrink it to a mood and a product.

So the recovery is done. We have pulled the original idea — that a good life is a whole life, a story, aimed at a telos — back out of the wellness fragment it had been reduced to. And I think you feel its pull. I think it explains more than anything we have held in four weeks. Which is the moment at which I must be more careful with you than at any point in the series. Because a claim can explain everything you have and still not be true. And there is a philosopher who thinks this compelling idea is, in the end, an illusion.

So let me be plain about where we actually stand, because the easiest thing to do now would be to let you leave believing we have arrived somewhere solid. We have not. We have found a claim — one of the most serious claims anyone has made about what a life is, that it is a story, a whole, aimed at a point — and it is the most gripping thing we have held in four weeks, and I am not going to prove it to you. Not out of coyness. Because it cannot be proven; and the moment I pretend that it can, I am doing to you exactly what the wellness feed did — handing you a satisfying answer and concealing the question beneath it. MacIntyre may well be right. I think there is something very large here. But "I think there is something very large here" is not "this is settled," and you have been misled enough this month.

Stay with the claim a moment longer and a question should begin to trouble you. Does my life have to be a story? On whose authority? And there is a philosopher with precisely that objection — Galen Strawson, in an essay called "Against Narrativity," published in the journal Ratio in 2004 — and he is coming, two episodes from now, at full stretch, so tonight I will let him make only a single objection. Here it is. Strawson holds that "a life is a narrative" is not a deep truth MacIntyre uncovered; it is a fashionable dogma, and a distorting one. Some people, he says, simply do not experience their lives as a single unfolding story — there is no plotted self reaching from a childhood toward an ending, no arc, no quest. He calls such people Episodic, and his point is that they are neither broken nor shallow: they live fully and well, from morning to morning, and the absence of a connecting thread does not trouble them, because for them there is no thread. And the demand that they must narrate their lives — find the "unity," name the "quest," make it all "add up" — Strawson thinks that demand can be its own kind of falsehood, one more burden sold to people who would have been perfectly well without it. Perhaps your life is not a badly told story. Perhaps it was never a story at all — only today, lived well or badly, and then tomorrow.

I will leave his objection there, unanswered, because he earns his full hearing later and I will not cheat him by answering quickly. But I raised him tonight for one reason: so that you cannot leave believing I have proven that a life is a story. I have not. MacIntyre asserts it, and asserts it seriously. Strawson, who is no fool, denies it. You are in the middle of a live dispute, not at the end of a settled one. That is the honest account, and it is the only thing I will hand you.

Now suppose — simply suppose — that MacIntyre is right, and a life really is a story, a whole with a point toward which it moves. Then a further question arises directly out of that one, and it is the one the whole month has been leading toward, and I am going to open it tonight and take it up next time, because everything turns on it. If your life is a story with a point, where does the point come from? Do you write it? Or do you find it?

Do not pass over how different those two lives are. If you write it, then you were the author all along; the story is yours, the point is whatever you make it, and the authoring self you have relied on since the first episode survives the whole examination, merely better equipped than "what I want." But if you find it — if the point of your story is in some sense already there, set, waiting to be read rather than written — then the thing you have assumed since the first Tuesday, and never once stopped to test, is about to come apart. These are not two versions of one answer. They are two different conditions in which to be a person. And I will tell you now which way the man whose idea this is turns, so that you come prepared: MacIntyre does not think you are the author.

The work I leave you with is not consolation; it is a task. For four weeks you have been trying to judge the stretch — is this season good, am I happy now, did I choose rightly. Stop. Tonight, once, try the other thing. Try to say what the whole has been about. Not whether this year was good, but what the story is, so far — what your life has been directed toward, if it has been directed at anything at all. One of two things will happen, and you do not get to choose which. Either you will begin, haltingly, to be able to say it — and if you can, you have touched something what do I want was never once going to show you. Or you will reach for it and find nothing there — no thread, no point, only a row of episodes that happened — and you will not be able to tell, standing there, whether that is because there is no thread, or because you have spent your whole life asking what you wanted and never once asked what you were for. You do not get to resolve that tonight. You have only to find out which of those two it is.

Next time, we take up that further question — where the point of a story comes from. I have told you MacIntyre does not think you write it. Next time you find out what that costs; and it is the most uncomfortable answer in the series, because it takes the one thing you were sure had survived all of this — that this life, whatever else is true, is yours to author — and asks whether you were ever its author at all. Everything in you will rise to fight that. Good. Come ready to.

Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.