Diary: Clare Carlisle, Writing a Whole Life
A biographer's subject matter is typically a whole life. What is that?
A biography’s subject matter is typically a whole life. One whole human life, from birth to death—that’s a lot. Not just a lot of time, but a lot happening. And, for a philosopher, a lot to think about. This subject has special ethical weight: people often say that a human life is precious, even sacred. According to Aristotle, ethics is concerned with whole lives, because happiness or flourishing “requires a complete life.” If you believe in God, you might imagine how he will judge your life as a whole, once it is finished. So the concept of a whole life is on the horizon of ethics, and on the horizon, I think, of our day-to-day experience. This concept seems ready and waiting to spring into thoughts like, What am I doing with my life? or, Oh my God I’m at least halfway through my life.
Yet being on the horizon also means that it is elusive. It is very hard, if not impossible, to pick out the entity captured by the concept of one whole life. Right now, for each of us, our whole life is a mystery. Perhaps biographies, like fictional life stories, appeal to such a wide reading public because they offer the chance to move at lightning speed through a life that has clearer contours than our own, and thereby gain some sense of a wholeness that usually eludes us—a metaphysical impulse, spurred on by love of gossip. Moreover, and this troubles a philosopher, the very concept of a life is difficult to pin down. It seems somewhat different from adjacent concepts such as person, individual or self—unless you think, like Leibniz, that the concept of a person includes everything that has happened and will ever happen to him, as well as all the ways he was, is and will be connected to other things, so that each human soul contains “traces of everything that happens in the universe, even though God alone could recognize them all.”
