Narrative Necessity

Abstrakt

In the paper we argue that narrative structure is a necessary condition for meaningfulness. That is, it is necessary for a life to have meaning that there is a sufficient degree of coherence between the different actions, events, and attitudes in an agent’s life, and that these can be understood in terms of a narrative. Furthermore, we suggest why having such narrative structure is important for meaningfulness: where someone’s life is meaningful this seems to be in virtue of her being appropriately related to some meaning-providing feature. Finally, we try to show that what we have argued sheds light on why various suggestions that have sometimes been made by philosophers about what having a meaningful life consists in often strike us as implausible or overly abstract.