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ABSTRACT
Self-narrative plays an important role in the constitution of the self, but it is unclear what role exactly. Some argue that personal identity is constituted by narrative, while others hold that narrative is a significant factor in shaping the self, but itself depends on the prior possession of a self. In this article, I provide an account of self-narrative that accommodates the best insights of both sides by drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between personal and pre-personal existence. This distinction allows me to argue that personal identity can be constituted by self-narrative, even while the latter is founded on the pre-personal cohesion of a life. In conclusion, I draw on Judith Butler’s analysis of self-narrative in Giving an Account of Oneself to argue that my account of self-narrative avoids impossible and potentially harmful views about the self to which some accounts of narrative are implicitly committed.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Peter Antich is an instructor at the University of Kentucky, where he completed his PhD in philosophy in 2017. His research focuses on phenomenology and epistemology, and his dissertation ‘Motivation and the Primacy of Perception’ examines contributions that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology can make to epistemology. Peter is also interested in phenomenological accounts of the self, in particular the role narrative plays in constituting the self.
Notes
1. See, e.g., Dennett (Citation1991), Ricoeur (Citation1992), Schechtman (Citation1996), Williams (Citation2007), Rudd (Citation2012).
2. A central aspect of Schechtman’s account is her distinction between what she calls the ‘reidentification’ question – namely, the question about what it means for a person at one time to be the same person at another time – and the ‘characterisation’ question – namely, the question of self-knowledge, of what makes a particular characteristic belong to a person. It is only the latter question that Schechtman suggests can be answered by our self-narratives. However, I will argue that even the characterisation question cannot be sufficiently answered by narrative alone.
3. See, e.g., Hutto (Citation2016) for a good overview of the differences between strong and moderate narrativists.
4. For more on how Merleau-Ponty can inform the study of self-narrative, see, e.g., Muldoon and Wood (Citation1997) and Meyers (Citation2014).
5. Of course, strong narrativists don’t claim that our narratives are infallible, but it doesn’t seem to me that they can genuinely accommodate this insight. For example, Schechtman points out that self-narratives can be mistaken (Citation1996, 94), and thus argues that only those narratives that meet certain constraints are capable of establishing personal identity. One such constraint she calls the ‘Reality Constraint’, which requires that any identity-establishing narrative cohere with reality, both factually and interpretatively (Citation1996, 119). Yet this kind of reality constraint alone does not give Schechtman what she needs. For what norms our narratives is not just that they can be mistaken about matters of fact, or in their interpretation of facts, but in the interpretation of the personal meaning of those facts, i.e. in how they fit within one’s self-conception. Only an account of pre-narrative cohesion can account for this kind of normativity. One might think that the ‘interpretative’ part of the reality constraint addresses this problem, but the examples considered by Schechtman – for example, the interpretation of a stranger’s glance as accidental or as an indication that I am being tailed by the CIA – suggest she is in fact describing the interpretation of objective facts, not of personal meanings (Citation1996, 126).
6. My explanation will, out of necessity, be brief. For more complete accounts of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of personal identity, see Marratto (Citation2012) and Morris and Maclaren (Citation2015).
7. Strong narrativists have some ground to object at this point that I misunderstand their position. I am claiming that narrative is in some essential respect explicit, but most strong narrativists think narrative can be implicit – they do not think that our lives are guided by stories we explicitly tell. For example, Schechtman writes, ‘Having an autobiographical narrative does not involve actually articulating the story of one’s life to oneself or anyone else, but only organising experience according to an implicit narrative’ (Citation1996, 114). It seems to me, though, that this response overlooks the transformative power of narrative. Consider my claim that the narrative decision, ‘I love you’, does not merely read off a pre-given meaning of the relationship, but is actually creative. For example, notice the retroactive effect these words have on the past of a relationship. With these words, if they are authentic, the whole past of the relationship is snapped up into an ongoing future: suddenly, the first encounter becomes ‘the story of how we met’ and not just yet another chance romantic encounter. Of course, this forgets the actual character of this first encounter, in which the meaning of this event was indeterminate: at the time, one could not tell whether the relationship was the beginning of a future or was merely a passing moment. Thus, narrative transforms the temporality of life. The question is whether implicit narrative is supposed to be transformative in this manner. Either it is, in which case it does not characterise the actual temporality of life, or it isn’t, in which case it is unclear why it should be called narrative at all. The strong narrativist move of ‘going implicit’ only seems compelling if we forget the transformative power of narrative. See Hutto’s (Citation2016, 36–8) criticism of Rudd for a more substantial criticism of the notion of implicit narrative.
8. Consider here Schechtman’s claim that ‘perhaps the most salient feature of narrative form in general is that the individual incidents and episodes in a narrative take their meaning from the broader context of the story in which they occur’ (Schechtman Citation1996, 96). While Schechtman is right that narrative has this form, I am attributing a similar form to pre-narrative existence. Indeed, it is only because pre-narrative existence takes such a form that it can subsequently be given narrative form, i.e. only if pre-narrative life has a coherent sense in virtue of which each particular episode of that life has a meaning can our narratives be normed by our lives, as I suggest they are.
9. For more on Merleau-Ponty’s concept of style, see Singer (Citation1981) and Matherne (Citation2017).
10. Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘Just like the unity of the world, the unity of the I is invoked rather than experienced each time I perform an act of perception … , and the universal I is the background against which these brilliant figures stand out … ’ (Citation2012, 429).
11. Narrative, in other words, is oriented toward a conception of the good. While I haven’t touched upon the normative orientation of narrative in my discussion above, note that normativity is a common feature of many accounts of narrative, especially those with Kierkegaardian influences, such as Rudd’s, Davenport’s, and Korsgaard’s.