HAYONG, Bernardus Subang (2021) Knowing persons through narrative: A critical engagement with second-person experience in the philosophy of Eleonore Stump. Doctoral thesis, Pontifical Universitas Thomas Aquinas - Roma, Italia.
![[img]](http://repository.iftkledalero.ac.id/style/images/fileicons/text.png) |
Text
THESIS FOR PUBLICATION.pdf Restricted to Registered users only Download (2MB) |
Abstract
GENERAL INTRODUCTION Narrative connectedness contributes to the understanding of the other as a person. It can be simultaneously a source and a method of understanding. This role of narrative is revealed in human second-person relationship. In this way, narrative connectedness is a significant form of reasoning, a medium for understanding, and an instrument for self-expression. In storytelling one communicates an experience, understanding, intention, interpretation, emotion, etc. Even though this is a subjective perspective, the significance of telling a story highlights the relational understanding of others. The connectedness between two persons urges them to share life. Further, in telling a story in a direct, interpersonal, and mutually conscious way, two persons are interweaving with each other as persons. In such activity, the human connectedness is strengthened. Even though human life is non-narrative at all, in a second-person experience the hermeneutical understanding is communicated. In this way, the human cognition, emotion, and ethical praxis are enhanced. Understanding others through narrative is a model of connectedness, through which one can identify oneself with others, to have the insight about them, to feel with others, and to respect others as persons. 1. Eleonore Stump, Narrative, and Second-person Experience This dissertation is an investigation of Eleonore Stump’s insight in Wandering in Darkness. Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (hereafter Wandering in Darkness). Stump’s works actually is about the problem of suffering, and not about narrative and second-person experience. However, in relating a story (of suffering for example), it is crucial to have the skill for grasping the other. In the philosophical reflection on suffering, Stump asserts that the problem of suffering is better be drawn with the help of a story. A story, she contends, helps an audience of having a similar emotion to the characters in the story. The presenting of second-person experience in a story thus constitutes second-person account. Stump gives to her readers access to “a side reality that can be captured better in narrative.” A lot of human details can be discovered in a story than in expository. A philosopher, according to Stump, must expand her horizons and apply her skills not only to symbolised arguments, but also narrative. Stump considers un-expository prose as a locus for second-person experience. This format enables two persons to interact directly, interpersonally and consciously. Stump’s example of an encounter between Mary and her mother affirms an exceptional moment in Mary’s life where she is conscious of her mothers’ presence. Such an encounter breaks down Mary’s isolated experience of first- and third-person experience. The moment of having a new knowledge and a renewed awareness becomes possible in a second-person experience. What we garner from the story about Mary and her mother is Mary’s reaction at the moment of encountering. In her face-to-face encounters her mother, Mary feels how deep the mother loves her. She gets a new and different awareness from what she had before. Such reaction helps us to see how and why narrative effects and gives impression to someone. For Stump, this is the kind of non-propositional knowledge of a person gained from personal interaction, inter-subjective relation, and the sharing of life. In Stump’s term, narrative communicates second-person experience and second-person knowledge. Narrative, therefore, is a means of acknowledging others. This is the main concept should hold in mind in considering Stump’s approach on narrative and second-person experience. At the surface, one may notice that Stump tends to give the important role to the interpersonal and intuitive aspects in knowing others than cognitive (epistemic) aspect. Or others may consider that Stump forgets that narrative has its own structure since it correlates with characters, agents, contexts, etc. But as one goes deeper in the consideration of her work, one realizes that the knowledge of persons through narrative is more significant. Unlike a cognitive elaboration in which sensory information is based upon a logical proposition, in engagement with others immediately and interpersonally (second-person experience), one presents to each other as a ‘you’ person. From here the knowledge of a person is generated. 2. Statement of the Problem One fundamental philosophical theme in Stump’s thought is the account of second-person experience communicating in narrative. Direct interaction in which one recounts and listens to personal narratives is one to the kind of knowing that is neither introspective self-knowledge nor an interpretation of others information, but rather an immediate awareness of others presence. Stump then connects second-person experience to storytelling and narrative for knowing others. This is crucial in her philosophy. However, if narrative is a means of understanding what will happen if the character of a story is manipulated by a storyteller? What will occur if the description is different from one’s experience with the story character? Do we already need second-person experience for reliable knowing? Can absence be a metaphor for understanding? How does absence determine what is present? Do a Christian faithful who only takes disposition as a reader of biblical narrative has no second-person experience with God when she reads the story in the Holy Bible as the Word of God? These research questions are the focal point of an investigation that guides the entire research process. This chain of questions attempts to understand how Stump conceives narrative communicates second-person experience, its nature and its role to attain to second-person knowledge. It argues that in narrative one does not merely follow and listen to the sequence of events, but also communicates a second-person experience immediately and in a conscious way of interrelations. The capacity for joint attention, being emphatic with others, reading their minds, being more sensitive to their state of beings can be delivered in second-person experience. In this way, the shared-knowledge and the transmission of its understanding happen. In this respect, further questions arise: What kind of knowledge do we attain from narrative that communicated in second-person experience? What is basic principle as kind of measure to value and trust narrative as a source and a method of understanding? Why does this knowledge occupy an important place in Stump’s philosophical insight of knowing others as persons? 3. Significance of the Inquiry The above questions stem from the narrative study which tend to situate narrative in a fragment. From the epistemological dimension, for example, there is a claim that the study of narrative is a “universal cultural device” that sometimes opposes to another claim that narrative is “ontologically indifferent to reality.” The epistemological status of narrative is limited to the order of events. Louis Mink, for instance, argues that “stories are not lived but told,” since life in itself “has no beginnings, middles, or ends.” In line with this, Hayden Whyte asserts that the value of narrative is just the representation of real events that stem from human desire and imagination to display and connect with real events. These arguments point to the limits of the form of knowledge that based upon narrative. There are essential aspects of human life and experiences that are non-narrative in character. Such different perspectives raise the question whether narrative can be a vehicle for human understanding, self-identity, and understanding other as a person. From the ontological approach, there is a tendency to elucidate narrative in connection to cognitive and neuroscientific theory. If narrative is only mind construction (as asserted by Hayden White, Jerome Bruner and Mark Freeman), the disorder of reality will not be grasped ontologically. In other words, the ontological assumption is that since narrative has its own order, the explanation or interpretation of reality in terms of a story is an abstraction from its order. The nature of reality is non-narrative. This ontological assumption is close to what Strawson asserts before, “The more you recall, retell, narrate yourself, the further you risk moving away from accurate self-understanding, from the truth of your being.” However, is it always true? How about the re-telling of Jesus’ story? From the ethical perspective, narrative is a cultural construction. The context, social value, common order, society, symbolic system, for example, are elements that structure human narrative. The subjective perspective cannot be eschewed in retelling a story. Strawson’s ethical narrativity holds that human’s life is essential to living well, to true or full personhood. It can be determined by the subjective perspective concerning experience of life in a given context. Narrativization of experiences, therefore, is non-narrative. One of the main concerns of the recent narrative theory, which came up in the third of the European Narratology Network (ENN) in Paris (2013), was the desire to consolidate the broader domain of narrative studies and to acknowledge the importance of specific research. Even though narrative studies nowadays are trans-medial and multidisciplinary, the study of narrative cannot remain a fragmented territory. Narrative must be integrated as a discipline into the body of knowledge. Such integration helps to discover the epistemological and ontological states of different methods and the analytical way toward narrative. The consolidation as the third ENN’s orientation is a possibility of grasping the richness of narrative for life in a method to interpret and systemise reality. Stump, an American analytic philosopher presents the rational reason how narrative study can be integrated in life by exposing account of second-person experience. A considerable portion of her approach is that narrative communicates second-person experience and second-person knowledge of others as persons. The knowledge of a person is interpersonal and intuitive. Accordingly, it is irreducible to knowledge of propositional (knowing that). This deep conviction leads us to the sort of connectedness that interweaves two persons in sharing experience (story), and in their interpersonal relations. Two persons will open mind to each other if they have interpersonal relations, but also true that their true narrative (shared experience) help them to construct their connectedness. This is the task of this dissertation to demonstrate narrative connectedness that bind human understanding of other as a person. This is a kind of epistemology of relational. The significance of this inquiry, therefore, lies in exploring the epistemology of relational based on storytelling as a way to integrate the values of narrative for human life. By undertaking this inquiry on epistemology of relation or narrative connectedness we hope to understand there is a manner of integrating narrative in human life based upon sharing experience in second-person experience. 4. Scope and Limits of the Investigation The subject matter of this inquiry is the account of second-person experience and second-person knowledge communicated in narrative. This is a part of Stump’s concern in Wandering of Darkness. The essential of Stump’s investigation lies in the power of encountering others under the inter-subjective conditions. People can know others not merely by logical reason but also through feelings. The knowledge of the heart, therefore, is valid. In unfolding the discussion of this dissertation, it is necessary to trace Stump’s historic of thoughts and locate the notion of second-person experience with the broader spectrum of other philosophical interests. Stump expounds the notion of second-person experience in an essay “Faith and the Problem of Evil” that was given at Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary (2001). In her Wandering in Darkness (2010), again Stump considers the problem of suffering in the context of narrative especially biblical narrative. And in Atonement (2018), she sharpens more the concept of second-person experience concerning union in love and indwelling. This dissertation takes these works as the primary text to be studied. It also takes into consideration other works and writings of Stump. This study will examine narrative not in the sense of literary or historical narrative but in the epistemological sense that also correlates to ontological and ethical values in acquiring a second-person knowledge through a critical engagement with the philosophy of Stump. To put it differently, it studies about how Stump creates narrative as a way to communicate philosophical idea. There are two main scopes of this study: (1) To analyse what is the kind of “understanding” or “knowing” of others we attain through narrative. (2) How the narrative analysis mediated second-person experience contributes both to the self-understanding and others that characterises human identity. 5. Objectives and Method of the Inquiry The reasons cited above are weighty enough to embark on a research to understand that when a story is recounted, it is not only about fact or event. It is more about meaning and understanding including others as persons. Knowing others is not limited to perceive them. The principal theme of this dissertation is Stump’s approach of narrative communicates second-person experience for knowing others as persons. This notion can be expounded with some definite objectives in mind. Firstly, this inquiry shall provide the backgrounds of Stump’s notion of second-person experience. Secondly, it shall track down the main concept of Stump’s account of second-person experience and how it works in telling a story. Thirdly, it shall lay the dialectic between second-person experience, narrative, and understanding others as persons. In this research, I argue for an approach to social knowing particularly understanding others as persons based on direct interaction and emotional engagement between people in narrative way. There is a motivation to navigate experience, to reflect it, and to analyse it in a second-person encounter. This study employs a combination of the expository, analytical and critical method. It is expository because it attempts to lay out the ground for Stump’s approach, to map out the key areas where her insight intersects, and to learn how she explores the variant variable to seek the explanation and meaning of human interaction. It also analyses the different standpoints of second-person experience and narrative in philosophical discourse to situate Stump’s theory. The critical investigation aims to introduce the methodological concept in dealing with Stump thought and to demonstrate in which sense Stump’s approach is arguable or not. 6. Structure of the Dissertation Based upon the general theme and specific objectives, this study consists of four chapters. Chapter one threshes out the major strands of philosophical considerations of second-person perspective. Chapter two offers the concept of narrative and its variant approaches to the epistemology of others. Chapter three basically delves into Stump’s account of second-person experience communicated in narrative. This investigation will situate Wandering in Darkness in the context of Stump’s works. Also, it will bring her thought into dialogue with the epistemological, ontological, and ethical approaches in the philosophy of second-person experience and narrative considered at the previous chapters. Chapter four is the principal part of the entire investigation. This is a critical assessment of Stump’s account of the epistemology of narrative and the second-person perspective. A general conclusion is presented at the end of the discussions. It culminates this study by restating the problem under study and reaffirming the core findings of the investigation.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | 100 - Filsafat dan Psikologi > 100 Filsafat > 100 Filsafat dan psikologi 100 - Filsafat dan Psikologi > 120 Epistemologi > 121 Epistemologi |
| Divisions: | 75201 Ilmu Filsafat |
| Depositing User: | Mr Bernardus S. Hayong |
| Date Deposited: | 27 Sep 2023 13:28 |
| Last Modified: | 27 Sep 2023 13:28 |
| URI: | http://repository.iftkledalero.ac.id/id/eprint/1792 |
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |