Page 320 - Contribution To Phenomenology

BIOGRAPHY AS A CULTURAL DISCIPLINE 313

of the integral, autonomous person, we possess few cultural archetypes
that actualize this possibility. "We strain for an unlivable identity. The
desired unity can at least be known vicariously, through the reading of
biographies.'^^
These considerations point to a sociological/poUtical lacunae that can
be addressed by posing questions such as: how do biographies function
in the public world, what is their role in shaping how we think, in the
building of a tradition, how they help to bind a community, etc? As
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl argues, biography is aptly suited for this task
since:

Biography in the twentieth century has taken over for people from all
kinds of backgrounds—religious backgrounds, ethical backgrounds—the
task of telling exemplary lives. It's a cultural task. But biographies don't
.
serve any particular ethnicities or religions . . . In a sense, biography
is cosmopolitan. It's concerned with a life in the world, not some
particular world—although the life may be lived in particular world. But
it should go beyond that particular world, like a kind of cultural
ambassadorship.^

One last view needs to be discussed in this section as it is an instance
of the attempt to combine the theoretical and practical uses the practice.
It concerns Sartre's post-war excursus into biography. Sartre's interest was
motivated primarily by methodological considerations since he viewed the
practice as providing an important local for the utilization, deployment
and assessment of historical, philosophical and literary techniques.
Although Sartre was concerned primarily in the freedom inherent in and
characterized by the existential subject, his reflections on the relationship
between the subject and the situation prompted him to reconceive the
individual as both "totalizer and totalized." He argued that "individual"
and "society" are "modern" as well as interdependent, interactive notions.
Hence, to understand the historical situation that characterizes the
cultural world and the notion of agency within it, we need to pay
attention to both.
Sartre, of course, was not alone in this endeavour. Sociologists,
especially those drawn to the interpretive side of the discipline and

^^ James Clifford, "Hang Up looking Glasses at Odd Corners," 44-45.
^ Gale Porter Mandell, Life in Art, 190.