Literature and the Narrative Self

Abstract

Philosophy 78 2003 93 1 I am grateful to John Cottingham, Galen Strawson, Bart Streumer and Douglas Farland for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 2 In what follows, I will use 'self' and 'identity' interchangeably to capture 'who we are'. up to the present but directing it into the future'. 3 There is therefore no innocent, brute experience or self-conception upon which a narrative is imposed. According to Charles Taylor, a 'basic condition of making sense of ourselves [is] that we grasp our lives in a narrative '. 4 Here then, narrative form is not just an essential condition of experiencing the world, but also of understanding our selves.Along with these factual claims, it is sometimes said that in order to live fully, to have a developed sense of self, or in order to be a person, we should think of ourselves in a narrative way; having a different self-conception from one that is narrative in form (assuming this is possible) is mistaken in a very significant way. Marya Schechtman, for example, writes that '[s]ome, but not all, individuals weave stories of their lives, and it is their doing so which makes them persons'. 5 My interest lies ultimately in this normative claim, although in exploring it, light will also be cast on the factual claim. If one finds the factual claim difficult to accept, it is tempting just to dig in one's heels and insist that here we have a fundamental confusion between life and art, or between a life and the attempt to understand that life. I think the issue does indeed come down to this, but it is usually less than helpful to dig in one's heels without any imaginative exploration of the other side. So, I will first explore the normative claims made by the narrative view: why should we think of ourselves and our experience in a narrative way if we do not already and what are the consequences of self-consciously, deliberately doing so? This question assumes what the factual claim would reject, that some of us do think in a non-narrative way. However, we can rephrase the question as follows: why should we think of ourselves and our experience in a narrative way if it seems to us that we do not, or if we do not self-consciously think in that way? Before we can answer this, we need to know what the narrative view comes down to and so how, exactly, we are to think of ourselves and our perception of the world beyond ourselves. IIIn order to be distinctive, the narrative view cannot be simply that the self and experience can only be properly described and Samantha Vice 94 3 Jerome Bruner, '

Whole Lives and Good Deaths

“…Many turn their attention to larger issues of meaning, or undergo existential or so-called spiritual crises, when death looms. Thinking about one's life as a story is, or has become, a familiar framework for thinking about one's life in its entirety, and the end of life is one occasion when both the freedom and the urgency to conceive of 6 For the term "narrative imperialism" see Phelan 2005; philosophical detractors include Strawson 2004, Christman 2004, and Vice 2003 Rigorous empirical study is lacking, but there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that the phenomenon is of a particular time (see Jurecic 2012, chap. 1)…”

“…For the term “narrative imperialism” see Phelan ; philosophical detractors include Strawson , Christman , and Vice .…”

Reading from the middle: Heidegger and the narrative self

“…153–154). Samantha Vice, less sympathetic, writes that “the view just seems obviously false—we are clearly not characters and our lives are not stories and it is a blatant category mistake to think so” (Vice, , pp. 100–101).…”

Apologia pro Vita‐Fabula Sua: Defending Narrativity and How We Make Sense of Our Lives

“…In this instance, the second‐order narrative informs the first‐order narrative. In distinguishing between first‐ and second‐order narratives, the narrative theorist allays the further worry that the narrative view might ‘mistake life for art’ (Vice, , p. 93). We can rely on fictional narratives to make sense of our lives, but not in all cases.…”