Corporeal selfhood, self-interpretation, and narrative selfhood

Abstract

Ever since Freud pioneered the “talking cure”, psychologists of various stripes have explored how autobiographical narrative bears on self-understanding and psychic well-being. Recently, philosophers have taken up the question of whether autobiographical narrative plays an essential or important role in the constitution of agentic selves. However, embodiment has received little attention from philosophers who defend some version of the narrative self. Catriona Mackenzie is an important exception to this pattern of neglect, and this paper explores Mackenzie's work on embodiment and self-narrative with the aim of better understanding the adequacy of autobiographical narrative as an account of the agentic self. I argue that Mackenzie's narrative account of embodied subjectivity and agency is incomplete, for it over-estimates the reach of narrative and underestimates the cognitive and agentic powers of the lived body.

Keywords:

• agency
• embodiment
• Merleau-Ponty
• narrative
• self

Acknowledgements

I thank Hanne Jacobs and the participants in the Conference on Diachronic Agency, University of Bern (October 2010) for comments on this paper.

Notes on contributor

Diana Tietjens Meyers is Emerita Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. She has held the Ignacio Ellacuría Chair of Social Ethics at Loyola University, Chicago and the Laurie Chair in Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She works in three main areas of philosophy – philosophy of action, feminist ethics, and human rights theory. Her monographs are Inalienable Rights: A Defense (1985, Columbia University Press), Self, Society, and Personal Choice (1989, Columbia University Press); Subjection and Subjectivity: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Moral Philosophy (1994, Routledge), and Gender in the Mirror: Cultural Imagery and Women's Agency (2002, Oxford University Press; also available through Oxford Scholarship Online). Being Yourself: Essays on Identity, Action, and Social Life is a collection of her (mostly) previously published essays (2004, Rowman and Littlefield). She has edited seven collections and two special journal issues and published many journal articles and chapters in books. She is currently writing a monograph, Victims' Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights, and editing a collection, Poverty, Agency, and Human Rights.

Notes

1. Goldie's (2012) final view of the contribution of narrative to selfhood and agency is weaker than the views of Taylor and Schechtman but stronger than those of Velleman and Westlund. On the one hand, he distances himself from Schechtman's narrative self-constitution view and offers instead “person narratives”, which “express the narrative sense of self” (130). On the other hand, he holds that the narrative sense of self is nothing more than “the sense that one has of oneself in narrative thinking, as having a past, present, and future” (118). Pulling back from potent metaphysical claims connecting narrative to selfhood, Goldie nevertheless privileges the contribution of narrative to leading a human life.

2. For related discussion, see Sheets-Johnstone's (2003, 74) discussion of writing your name as a kinesthetic melody that is responsive to the tools at hand as well as the social significance of the signature.

3. Although Robinson (2005, 45) maintains that affective appraisals are noncognitive because they “occur without any conscious deliberation or awareness” and “do not involve any complex information processing”, I regard her reasons for denying these appraisals cognitive standing as unduly restrictive. If there is such a thing as nonconceptual or nonpropositional knowledge, and I think there is, then there is no reason not to count “affective appraisals” as cognitive. That feeling need not have a cognitive dimension does not entail that it never does.

4. For work on emotion that complements Robinson's account in important ways, but that argues against the role of conceptual or propositional participation in the constitution of emotion, see Prinz (2004, 57). Other work that complements Robinson's account but that argues for less separation between bodily appraisal and arousal on neurological grounds includes Colombetti and Thompson (2005, 2008) and Colombetti (2007).

5. Elsewhere I defend an account of affective bodily feelings, understood as distinct from full-blown emotions, as nonconceptual practical interpretations (unpublished manuscript).

6. Wilson (2002, 632–635) provides a helpful review of the evidence supporting the bodily basis of various types of off-line cognition.

7. For relevant discussion, see Taylor (1989a, 15; 1995, 171).

8. I introduced the term psychocorporeal to underscore the ways in which phenomena, such as emotion, cognition, and knowledge, that are commonly classified as psychological and hence mental also take somatic forms (Meyers 2004, chapter 4). As I understand it, meaning-receptive, meaning-imbued, practically intelligent corporeity constitutes the psychocorporeal body.

9. This distinction seems to get lost in Mackenzie's treatments of the bodily perspective.

10. Menary helpfully characterizes embodied experiences as “pre-narrative fodder for narratives” (2008, 70).

11. In Schechtman's (2007, 170) view, embodiment is relegated to the role of reidentification – that is, to our need as social animals to recognize other individuals after interrupted perceptions of them. For incisive critique of this part of Schechtman's position, see Mackenzie (2009, 112–119).

12. To be fair, Strawson treats this conception of the self as stipulative. He goes on to say that he has no objection to various other conceptions of the self, including the embodied self (1999, 100).

13. For critiques of the mentalist self, see Taylor (1989b, 1995); James (2000); Mackenzie (2001, 2007, 2009); Meyers (2004, 2005a, 2005b, 2013, Forthcoming); Gallagher (2005); Menary (2008).