Life as Narrative: Time, Answerability, and the Unfinalizable Self Narrative Identity, Antenarrative, and the Meaning of a Human Life in the Philosophy of Life

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 PhD Candidate, Department of Management, College of Economics and Management. University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran.

2 Emeritus Professor,, Department of Management, NewMexico State University, Las Cruces, NM 88003, USA. Visiting Professor, Fisk University, Nashville, TN. USA.

Abstract

This paper defends a philosophically precise version of the thesis that human life is constituted, understood, and made meaningful in a narrative form, and argues that this thesis belongs at the centre of the philosophy of life. It grounds the thesis in the classical aporia of time — Augustine's distentio animi and Aristotle's muthos — and in Ricoeur's demonstration that narrative accomplishes in poetics what speculation cannot accomplish in the aporetics of time: through the threefold mimesis it configures the discordance of lived time into the "concordant discordance" of a followable story, and so yields narrative identity as the mediation of sameness (idem) and selfhood (ipse). Situated against both the substance theory of the self and the Lockean–Parfitian reductive view, narrative identity is shown to answer the "characterization" question that the personal-identity debate leaves open. The paper then reconstructs the philosophy-of-life lineage of the thesis (Dilthey, Bergson, Nietzsche) and its phenomenology of temporality, embodiment, and the life-world (Husserl, Heidegger, Bakhtin), before confronting its two strongest objections: Strawson's "Against Narrativity," which distinguishes Episodic from Diachronic selfhood and warns that narrative coherence falsifies a life, and the phenomenological claim (Zahavi, Gallagher) that a pre-narrative minimal self is more basic than any storied one. Conceding the force of both against strong narrativity, the paper develops an alternative position drawn from dialogism and organizational storytelling: the self as an answerable, unfinalizable, antenarrative process. Uniting Bakhtin's non-alibi in Being and unfinalizability with Boje's concept of antenarrative — the fragmentary, forward-"bet" story that precedes closure — it argues that a life is neither a finished plot nor a mere sequence of episodes but an open, prospective, co-authored storying-in-becoming. This position preserves the narrative constitution of meaning while dissolving the worry about false coherence, and it reframes the meaning of life, authenticity, and self-creation as achievements of an authorship that remains answerable and is never complete

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Journal of Philosophical Investigations
Volume 20, Issue 56 - Serial Number 56
Articles
Issue 56, Autumn 2026
October 2026
Pages 783-798

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