Page 306 - Contribution To Phenomenology

BIOGRAPHY AS A CULTURAL DISCIPLINE 299

practice of biography is at the same time that of the socio-historical-
cultural lived world. The biographer proceeds on the assumption that the
biographee possesses a "personal life-history," which is a cultural rather
than a 'natural' or biological concept. Only animate beings endowed with
a historical consciousness and a sense of temporal continuity can have
a life history that they, and others, can recognize as a unique and
irreducible destiny. While we sometimes speak of a concept, a work of
art, or even an institution, such as the judiciary system, as having a life-
history, such usage is analogical, metaphorical or derivative. In fact, the
biographical subject is the cultural object par excellence; that is, a
product of a historical, cultural situation who nevertheless has an
important say in how that life is to be lived. Accordingly, by reflecting
on the procedures adopted and adapted for the study of persons, we are
better able to appreciate and delineate the compass of the cultural world
and the adequacy and limitations of inquiry directed at it.
The situation, however, is not totally bleak. The literary biographer
Leon Edel has heralded the challenge of making biography "declare itself
and its principles"^; that is, to confront, reform and transform the practice
so that it may be made theoretically rigorous and methodologically fec-
und. Although Edel was focussed primarily on the practice of literary
biography, he believed that the consequences of his analyses extended to
other forms of the practice.^ Edel's call for reform has been heeded.
There is even an interdisciplinary quarterly. Biography, devoted to the
subject that is published out of Hawaii. Even so, few philosophers have
entered the fray.
My aim in this essay is to step into the breach and I see my task as
two-fold. First, by reflecting on the practice, as practiced, I hope to
delineate some of its distinctive features as well as to isolate and discuss
some of the key assumptions that inform its aims and strategies.
Accordingly, in the first section of this essay, I rehearse some of the
salient methodological and practical difficulties that are encountered in
the practice as well a number of the strategies offered to overcome or

^ Leon Edel, "Biography and the Sciences of Man," in New Directions in
Biography, edited by Anthony M. Friedson, (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press,
1981), 5.
^ Leon Edel, Literary Biography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973),
2 and Leon Edel, "The Biographer and Psycho-Analysis," New World Writing, edited
by Stewart Richardson and Corlies M. Smith (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott
Company), 52.