‘Narrababble: on the use of the notion of narrative in ethics & psychology’ 1 Galen Strawson ——————————————————————————————————— Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it (Woolf 1931: 205) A man’s road back to himself is a return from his spiritual exile, for that is what a personal history amounts to—exile (Bellow 1997: 2) ——————————————————————————————————— 1 Introduction The theoretical use of the word ‘narrative’ is reasonably clear in its home domain, the study of the arts. Things are much less clear when we consider its theoretical use in other domains. I’m going to argue that almost all claims made using the term ‘narrative’ in ethics and psychology are either false or truistic, trivially true, and so empty in a sense I’ll explain. I’ll start with a definition, and a remark about memory. Then I’ll provide some data— examples of the use of terms like ‘narrative’ or ‘story’ in ethics and psychology. Then I’ll set down four theses that are very often in play when it comes to applications of the term ‘narrative’ in ethics and psychology, and comment on them. Then I’ll list eight platitudes about human life in order to argue that the central narrativist thesis is trivially true if true at all, and otherwise false. I’ll end with a few further thoughts. 2 Definition I’m going to use the words ‘narrative’ and ‘narrativity’ to denote a psychological trait when applied to people. Here is an initial definition. If one is narrative one experiences or conceives of one’s life, one’s existence, in a narrative way, as having the form of a story, or perhaps a collection of stories, and—in some manner—one lives in and experiences oneself through this conception. Many of us have a sense that this could be a plausible description of a human being, even if it seems considerably less clear when we begin to reflect about what exactly it says. In the same way, I think, we can grasp the idea that someone might be non-narrative, and not naturally experience themselves or their life in this way. I think, furthermore, that some people are anti-narrative. They don't simply lack any natural tendency to think of themselves and their life in a narrative or storylike way. Their 1 The is a slightly expanded version of ‘On the use of the notion of narrative in ethics and psychology’, in The Natural Method: Essays in Honor of Owen Flanagan, edited by E. Nahmias et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020).