The self-understanding of persons beyond narrativity

Abstract

Some narrative approaches assume a tight relation between narrative and selfhood. They hold that the self-understanding of persons as individuals possessing a set of particular character traits is above all narratively structured for it is constituted by stories persons tell or can tell about their lives. Against this view, it is argued that self-understanding is also characterized by certain non-narrative and invariant mental features. In order to show this, a non-narrative awareness of self-identity over time will be analyzed. It will be argued that this basic form of awareness plays a fundamental role for the possibility of a richer form of self-understanding.

Keywords:

• self
• self-identity
• self-understanding
• narrativity
• episodic memory

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jens Eder, the discussants who took part in my lectures at LMU Munich, University of Hamburg, HHU Düsseldorf and Charles University Prague as well as two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Katja Crone is Professor of Philosophy at TU Dortmund University, Germany. She has received her Ph.D. from University of Hamburg, and she took her Habilitation at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She mainly works on topics of philosophy of mind. Her research focuses on self-consciousness, personal identity, social cognition, and collective intentionality.

ORCID

Katja Crone http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5778-2072

Notes

1 The approaches called “narrative” here are by no means a homogenous type of theory. See section 2 for further distinctions.

2 It should be noted that the expressions “self” and “selfhood” are ambiguous. Within the framework of a philosophical topic the expressions may refer to the metaphysical question of what constitutes a certain type of individual - namely a “self”. They may yet also refer to the particular way persons conceive of themselves while remaining neutral on the metaphysical question. The following considerations make use of the latter meaning of selfhood.

3 Further types of approaches can be found in interdisciplinary narrative studies, for instance, the so-called “narrative hermeneutics” view. This view offers a rich exploration of narrative understood as a culturally mediated practice of interpreting experiences and thereby bestowing meaning to them (e.g., Brockmeier and Meretoja 2014; Meretoja 2018). Although these approaches have a broader scope than the approaches on narrative selfhood I am here concerned with, narrative hermeneutics touch at some important aspects I will discuss below. I owe this reference to an anonymous reviewer.

4 It is worth noting that the approaches in question still differ from each other in other respects, for instance, in terms of what they consider to be sufficient for a narrative sense of self. While MacIntyre (1981), Taylor (1994) and Rudd (2009) emphasize that self-narratives must be unified by an overarching theme, Dennett (1991) and Schechtman (1996) do not see this as a requirement and allow for smaller narratives that for example explain certain actions.

5 This basic insight can be found in various versions of SN. Rudd, for instance, holds that “to understand someone - myself or anyone else - is to be able to tell a coherent story about him or her” (Rudd 2012, 1). According to Ricoeur, “the narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of a story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.” (Ricoeur 1992, 148). MacIntyre's concept of selfhood consists in "the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life" (MacIntyre 1981, 203). Schechtman emphasizes: “To say that a person's self-conception is narrative is to say that she understands her own life in this way - interpreting the individual episodes in terms of their place in the unfolding story” (Schechtman 1996, 97). Dennett hold that “a self […] is an abstraction defined by the myriads of attributions and interpretations (including self-attributions and self-interpretations) that have composed the biography of the living body whose Center of Narrative Gravity it is” (Dennett 1991, 426–427).

6 Note that some of the features of narratives which are mentioned in this section may be shared by other narrative approaches drawing a weaker link between narrative and selfhood.

7 SN approaches hardly ever refer to definitions of “narrative” from narratology or narrative studies. However, the concept of narrative underlying SN as sketched above accords with a minimal - event-centred - definition of “narration” from the field of narratology in literary and media studies. According to this definition, narrations are complex representations of events and actions linked with one another causally; they have a beginning and an end, and there are climaxes and turning points, conflicts and their resolutions (e.g. Richardson 2000; see also Hutto 2007, 1; Hutto 2009, 11). Note that in narratology and narrative studies definitions of "narrative" or "narration" are controversial (for an overview see Abbott 2014). For instance, Fludernik's approach especially stresses the relation between experiences and representations of experiences (such as actions, intentions and feelings) (e.g., Fludernik 1996). Hogan explores the relation between the structure of events and emotional experiences (Hogan 2011).

8 Schechtman points out that the construction of self-narratives is restricted by certain “reality constraints” (Schechtman 1996, 119 ff.), which for her are basic facts about humans and their environment. One could object here that these do not mean very much for the individual history of an individual person. However, it should also be noted that the target of the present argument – a structural analysis of the self-understanding of persons – does not concern the question of under what conditions the propositions of a self-narrative are true.

9 This is also pointed out by proponents of narrative hermeneutics. Meretoja, for instance, holds that some experiences are not narrative by nature but can be narrativized - interpreted - retrospectively (Meretoja 2018, 60). Brockmeier points to subtle structures of some experiences that are beyond the domain of narrative (Brockmeier 2015, 105). While I agree with these descriptions on experiences in a broad sense, I will further below focus on phenomenal aspects of subjectivity as a fundamental structure.

10 Studies from developmental psychology speak in favor of this observation showing that children form narrative capacities and the capacity for reflective self-understanding at the same time: gradually from the age of three to five years (e.g., Nelson 2003).

11 The meaning of identity just outlined seems to echoe what Ricouer means by “ipse-identity”: the term refers to “selfhood” and is linked to the question “Who am I?” (Ricoeur 1992, 121–122).

12 This corresponds to Ricoeur's notion of “idem-identity”, by which he means something that stays the same through time, which resists change and can be identified and reidentified at different times (Ricoeur 1992, 121–122); this suggests that Ricouer is also dealing with the metaphysical question of persistence (see footnote 2). He moreover assumes a dialectic between ipse- and idem-identity which is mediated by self-narrative. Contrary to this view, I will argue below that a basic awareness of diachronic unity grounds narrative self-understanding.

13 For an early overview of standard arguments, which are still prevalent in more recent debates, see Noonan (1989).

14 For instance, Schechtman attempts to provide an answer to the persistence question, which she sees split up into the reidentification and the characterization question, with the help of the narrative constitution view (Schechtman 1996, 68–69; see especially 2001). Ricoeur, although he carefully distinguishes between two features of narrative identity, namely remaining the same (idem) and being a self (ipse) that requires constant reinterpretation, argues that the persistence question is to be answered within a framework of narrative identity (Ricoeur 1992, 134). According to Carr, the key to the question of persistence is narrative selfhood (Carr 1991, 73).

15 To avoid possible misunderstandings, I would like to emphasize here that I am by no means of the opinion that the persistence of persons can be founded in the awareness of persistence or numerical identity over time. It would take us too far away from the main idea of this paper to pursue this question of the conditions of persistence any further here. However, arguments in this direction can be found for instance in Dainton and Bayne (2005) who argue that phenomenal continuity is constitutive for the persistence of persons. For a similar view see Fuchs (2016).

16 Unlike first-person givenness of mental states (which is the core of Zahavi's notion of minimal selfhood), the target phenomenon of my argument has a particular diachronic structure, which is moreover tightly related to certain qualitative states as well as bodily experiences, as will become more clear further down.

17 It should now be more clear in what sense my approach differs from narrative hermeneutics: I am here concerned with a form of diachronic phenomenal subjectivity playing a fundamental role - for a more demanding form of narrative self-reference but also for experiences which I self-ascribe as mine and which I may retrospectively narrativize (cf. Meretoja 2018, 60).

18 Gustafsson argues that the stream of consciousness, the continuity of one’s experience, even persists in phases of dreamless sleep and under general anesthetic (Gustafsson 2011). I find this description to be implausible. However, empirical support would be needed to decide what would be an adequate description. Fuchs (2016) holds a similar view.

19 See, for instance, Züst et al. who explore the interplay between conscious and unconscious episodic memories (Züst et al. 2015).

20 I hold the position that all types of mental states have a specific felt quality – hence cognitive and volitional states and not just sensory states. However, there is no consensus about this in the corresponding debates.

21 Hence it is plausible that patients with retrograde amnesia are capable of judgments about their own persistence, but however in a reflective, inferential manner.

22 In Human Knowledge (1948) Russell offers a description that – at least at first glance – resembles Tulving’s: for Russell memories are marked by a typical quality that makes them subjectively distinguishable from other mental states and that can vary in intensity (Russell 2009, 190). This is first and foremost merely a phenomenological description. However, Russell connects it with the strong and problematic claim that this qualitative property is the epistemic basis for our ability to put past episodes into a temporal order. Hence for Russell the qualitative component does not just make memory judgments possible, but is moreover the epistemic basis for meta-judgments about temporal sequence of past events. This position strikes me as untenable due to our factual susceptibility to deceptive memories.