Page 324 - Contribution To Phenomenology

BIOGRAPHY AS A CULTURAL DISCIPLINE 317

Since the practice is situated within a larger cultural horizon that tries to
dialectically understand the past through the particular lives of individ-
uals, a study that locates itself within the terrain of the cultural world
"that does not come back to the problem of biography, of history and
of their interactions within a society has completed its intellectual jour-
ney."^^

III. Conclusion

This attempt to explore and canvass aspects of the biographical enterprise
was to subject the practice to a philosophical examination and explication
of its terrain and contours. Since the achievements of the biographer's
subject is located in the same cultural space as the biography com-
memorating that achievement, reflection on the enterprise was directed
at two levels: the biographical practice as a cultural object, and the
biography as a product which is also an object that performs an
assortment of functions in the cultural world.
The analysis offered in this essay was necessarily sketchy but, if
persuasive, provides a set of pathways, distinctions and classifications that
can provide a methodological and substantive basis for a more detailed
examination of the subject matter at hand. As Edel puts it, "[a] biogra-
pher is like a grinder of lenses. His aim is to make us see."^ The prob-
lem faced by the philosopher is to determine the adequacy of the lenses,
to recognize its capacity to distort, magnify, and clarify, and ultimately to
determine the value of the lenses. This task is fraught with theoretical
pitfalls but the promise of theoretical and practical rewards is great.
Hence, the theorist of biography, argues Woolf, is well advised to "go
ahead of the rest of us, like the miner's canary, testing the atmosphere,
detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions.'**^

^^ C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1959), 6.
^ Leon Edel, "Biography: A Manifesto," 3.
^^ Woolf, "The Art of Biography," 169.