Two senses of narrative unification

Abstract

In this paper I seek to clarify the role of narrative in personal unity. Examining the narrative self-constitution view developed by Marya Schechtman, I use a case of radical personal change to identify a tension in the account. The tension arises because a narrative can be regarded either to capture a continuing agent with a loosely coherent, consistent self-conception – or to unify over change and inconsistency. Two possible ways of responding, by distinguishing senses of identity or distinguishing identity and autonomy, are examined, but I argue that neither precisely maps this tension. I then develop a distinction between two ways in which narrative can unify: through “bottom-up” processes related to the connection between agency and self-conception; and “top-down” processes related to self-interpretative activity. The account provides ways to resolve some criticisms of narrative theories of identity, in particular in better accounting for the role of repudiated characteristics in narrative identity.

Keywords:

• narrative identity
• narrative unity
• self-constitution
• repudiation

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Catriona Mackenzie for extensive discussions on this topic and detailed feedback on previous versions of some of this material during my doctoral study, and to participants at a Monash University staff seminar who provided comments and feedback on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Mary Jean Walker is a Research Fellow at Monash University in Melbourne. She completed her doctoral study, which focused on personal and narrative identity, at Macquarie University in 2010. She has also published on a number of topics in bioethics and philosophy of medicine, in various journals including Hypatia, the Journal of Applied Philosophy, and the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy.

ORCID

Mary Jean Walker http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8823-9651

Notes

1 This has led some to back away from using the notion at all, notably Marya Schechtman (2014, 108). While I will not engage directly with the question of whether the term is necessary for capturing the thoughts unpacked by narrative approaches to identity, one motivation for my discussion is that some of the insights of the approach have, I think, been overlooked as a result.

2 Given my focus on clarifying what narrative, in particular, could have to do with personal unity, I do not engage with Schechtman’s more recent work which avoids this term (2014).

3 Exactly what sorts of connections between events are necessary for narrative has been the subject of debate (see, e.g. Carroll 2001; Currie 2007; Velleman 2003). While I cannot provide a full discussion here, the basic similarity between narrative and characterisation identity seems to require of narrative only that it is a way of connecting events such that they make sense in light of each other (see Velleman 2003).

4 This is not explicitly noted as a constraint in Schechtman (1996), but it plays a role in her discussion of the articulation constraint and reformulation of the notion of “co-consciousness”.

5 I will not engage with all aspects of Strawson’s critique of narrativity. For a discussion see Mackenzie and Poltera (2010, 34–39).

6 In saying this I am not disagreeing with Mackenzie and Poltera’s analysis. Rather, in applying it to the conversion case I seek to identify some modifications that could usefully be made to the narrative view, which I take to be consistent with and to build on their suggestions.

7 The reason to consider these two kinds of unification that can apply to one “unity”, rather than distinct unitary things, is discussed in Section 5.

8 This point is sometimes presented as a critique of the narrative view (e.g. Christman 2004; Vice 2003). Once the two senses of unification are acknowledged, it should be clear why this is not problematic for a narrative approach to identity.

9 Recognising this kind of unification as distinct could also provide a response to Christman’s critique that the notion of narrative does not really add to our understanding of personal unity if “narrative unity” is merely a way of referring to the capacity for self-interpretation (Christman 2004, 702) or “patterns of action and habit that make sense of a person’s character” (2004, 709). While Christman does refer to each of these as involved in narrative unity, he does not explicitly recognise the difference between them, apparently taking them to have one “organizing principle” (2004, 709). See also Lamarque (2004).

10 A potential problem for the account is the implication that someone who fails to engage in sufficient reflection and self-interpretation is thereby not unified. It is important to distinguish here between a lack of self-interpretation and an explicit claim along the lines of “I am no longer the same person”. Such explicit claims, I would argue, are themselves part of self-interpretative practices. In making such a claim a person is implicitly referencing their former self, indicating that it is part of their history. The claim should be taken as utilising a metaphorical sense of personhood to explain disunity – within personhood. If the claim is instead that a person may simply stop thinking about their former characteristics and not undertake self-interpretation that unifies them over change, this could be taken to mean that the person is less unified than they might be. It is unlikely, perhaps impossible, that any real person (that is, barring science-fiction scenarios) with a continuing body and ongoing interactions with others in the world could achieve enough of a break with their past to become a truly different person in this sense. A narrative account with such commitments is, however, open to another of Strawson’s (2004) critiques: that they rely on normative claims about the value of self-unification. However, I shall not attempt to deal with this here.

11 Perhaps the sense of self Strawson describes is not unrelated to the sense or senses that are narratively analysable. The narrative self-constitution view proposed that narrative provides a way to understand how a person relates to their various characteristics, such that those characteristics, and how they hang together, form a “lens through which we filter our experience and plan for actions” (Schechtman 1996, 113). This “lens” represents the idea that narrative form is implicated in the nature and quality of subjective experience, such that present experience can be globally affected by our characteristics even when these are not explicitly called to mind. This is actually of a piece with Strawson’s statement that in episodic self-experience,

the past can be present or alive in the present without being present or alive as the past. The past can be alive […] in the present simply in so far as it has helped to shape the way one is in the present. (2004, 432)

If the notion of narrative helps us understand how the past informs present experience, an experience of strong identification with a particular temporally distinct self might be understood to result from specific features of one’s subjective perspective at those different moments, and the narrative form of the connections between them – even though the phenomenological unity indicated in these experiences is not itself narrative in form.

12 For discussion of different senses of “self” and how narrative can help understand their interconnections, while avoiding conflations, see Velleman (2005a; 2005b); Mackenzie (2007). Pluralistic understanding of the reference of this term is also discussed by Schechtman (2014), though without using the notion of narrative.