A holistic view of human development that rejects the conventional
stages of childhood, adulthood, and old age When we talk about
human development, we tend to characterize it as proceeding through
a series of stages in which we are first children, then
adolescents, and finally, adults. But as James Bernard Murphy
observes, growth is not limited to the young nor is decline limited
to the aged. We are never trapped within the horizon of a
particular life stage: children anticipate adulthood and adults
recapture childhood. According to Murphy, the very idea of stages
of life undermines our ability to see our lives as a whole. In Your
Whole Life, Murphy asks: what accounts for the unity of a human
life over time? He advocates for an unconventional, developmental
story of human nature based on a nested hierarchy of three
powers-first, each person's unique human genome insures biological
identity over time; second, each person's powers of imagination and
memory insure psychological identity over time; and, third, each
person's ability to tell his or her own life story insures
narrative identity over time. Just as imagination and memory rely
upon our biological identity, so our autobiographical stories rest
upon our psychological identity. Narrative is not the foundation of
personal identity, as many argue, but its capstone. Engaging with
the work of Aristotle, Augustine, Jesus, and Rousseau, as well as
with the contributions of contemporary evolutionary biologists and
psychologists, Murphy challenges the widely shared assumptions in
Western thinking about personhood and its development through
discrete stages of childhood, adulthood, and old age. He offers,
instead, a holistic view in which we are always growing and
declining, always learning and forgetting, and always living and
dying, and finds that only in relation to one's whole life does the
passing of time obtain meaning.
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