Summarizing Your Philosophy in an Autobiography

Is it important, when writing your autobiography, to summarize your philosophy in an early chapter? I think that the answer to this question depends on how each person will organize his or her autobiography. If you place a summary of your philosophy in the first chapter, then, that might probably mean that you are going to spend some time in your autobiography describing life experiences that took you to develop or adopt that manner of thinking. Another reason of placing this type of summary in the beginning of your book would be that the person might want to compare his old way of thought with experiences that took him or her to change their way of thinking, and develop their narrative describing how they formed the new way of thought throughout his or her autobiography. You could also take the decision of summarizing your philosophy in early lines of the book to let the reader comprehend why you took certain decisions in your life.

However, maybe the person will simply not organize the book in this way and place the description of their ideals somewhere else in the autobiography or maybe they will never want to write their philosophy in their autobiography and allow the reader to figure it out, of course, the author would have to leave some things implicit in their autobiography and be coherent with their thoughts and actions that the reader may come to a satisfactory conclusion, unless they did something that was plain stupid or incoherent and they choose to describe it in their life’s book.

In any case, the importance of summarizing your philosophy in the beginning of your autobiography is determined by the person who is writing the book. Nevertheless, it is always important to keep in mind the reader, which includes your targeted audience, the need to be coherent with your thoughts, words, and actions, not contradict yourself all the time, like Henry David Thoreau did in his autobiography, and try to include details that will let the reader understand you and feel related to you in some way at all, if that includes your philosophy, then do not hesitate in writing about it.