Full text loading...
‘Enchantment as a life story’s catalyst: Ricoeur’s second naivety and narrative identity’
This paper builds on Ricoeur’s narrative theory, which points to the importance of life stories as a crucial basis for the narrative identity that human beings create for themselves, overcoming the discomfort of contingency by weaving a poetic common thread through their lives in the stories they tell about themselves. Unfortunately, this comes with the risk of self-deceit and manipulability, a challenge Ricoeur acknowledged but was never able to refute in a satisfying way. I wish to expand his narrative theory by focusing on a specific experience that helps preventing a life story from becoming arbitrary or random. It is the experience of enchantment, which – in the words of modern philosopher Jane Bennett – is both captivating and disturbing. It divides life in a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. I find illustration and corroboration of my analysis by diving into Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’. This literary monument was already touched upon by Ricoeur himself in ‘Time and Narrative’, but this paper follows a more idiosyncratic path. I conclude that the experience of re-enchantment combines the virtue of keeping a more critical distance (disenchantment) with an attitude of a ‘second naivety’, leading to a life story that is all but arbitrary. It is reflected, with a certain inevitability and it can therefore become the bearer of profound meaning.