Page 318 - Contribution To Phenomenology

BIOGRAPHY AS A CULTURAL DISCIPLINE 311

The biography represents the most fundamental historical fact clearly,
fully, and in its reality. Only the historian who, so to speak, builds
history from these life-units, who seeks, through the concepts of type and
representation, to interpret social classes, associations, and historical
periods, and who links together individual lives through the concept of
generations, only he will be able to apprehend the reality of a historical
whole in contrast to the lifeless abstractions which are usually drawn
from the archives.^

While the use of biography for nomothetic purposes is widespread, it
is by no mean ubiquitous. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt
argues for the relevance of biography in its own right as a means of
embodying and preserving individual uniqueness. As she points out:

The chief characteristic of this specifically human life whose appearance
and disappearance constitute worldly events, is that it is itself always full
of events which ultimately can be told as a story . . . establish a biogra-
phy . . . . For speech and action . . . are indeed the two activities
whose end result will always be a story with enough coherence to be
told, no matter how accidental or haphazard the single events and their
causation may appear to be.^^

Arendt was a consistent champion of human plurality and resolute in
her affirmation of the proposition that "men, not man, inhabit the world."
As such, to garner an understanding of the public/political world it was
a methodological error to aim solely towards an understanding of an
abstract, universal individual or citizen. Wary of attempts to ignore or
dissolve this irreducible plurality, she argued that one ought to confront
and account for the diversity and isonomy that characterizes the public
cultural realm.
For Arendt, the modern attempt, in mimicking the natural scientific
impulse to generate generalizable laws about human life, hobbled its
ability to appreciate, confront and account for the freedom of the
individual. For example, arguing against the sociological view of the early
Marx, she claimed that Marx had cavalierly dismissed this biographical

^ Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol 1. Edited by Rudolf A. Makkreel and
Frithjof Rodi (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989), 85.
^^ Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1958), 97.