This book addresses the challenge of understanding human life. It
compares our life experience with the attempts to grasp it by
astrologers, eugenicists, psychologists, neuroscientists, social
scientists, and philosophers. The main opposition among these
specialties lies between understanding and misunderstanding. The book
also addresses the central methodological difficulty of capturing a
human life.
It is first examined how certain approaches may lead to a
misunderstanding of human life. The book contrasts the example of
astrology--an accepted practice in ancient civilizations, but now
classified among the pseudosciences--with astronomy, a full-fledged
science since Galileo's time. Another, more recent approach regards
human life as predetermined by genes: the methods used by eugenicists,
and later by political regimes under the name of hereditarianism, came
to compete with genetics. A broader analysis shows how astrology and
eugenicism are not truly scientific approaches.
Next, the book looks at the ways of capturing an imaginary or real human
life story. A comprehensive approach will try to fully understand their
complexity, while a more explanatory approach considers only certain
specific phenomena of human life. For example, demography studies only
births, deaths, and migration. Another crucial factor in the collection
of life histories is memory and its transmission. Psychology and
psychoanalysis have developed different schools to try to explain them.
The book concludes with a detailed discussion of the concepts and tools
that have been proposed in more recent times for understanding the
various aspects of life stories: mechanisms, systems, hermeneutics, and
autonomy.
