Abstract
Narrative identity theory in some of its influential variants (A. MacIntyre or P. Ricœur) makes three fundamental assumptions. First, it focuses on personal identity primarily in terms of selfhood. Second, it argues that personal identity is to be understood as the unity of one’s life as it develops over time. And finally, it states that the unity of a life is articulated, by the very person itself, in the form of a story, be it explicit or implicit. The article focuses on different contemporary phenomenological appraisals of the narrative account (in the works of David Carr, Dan Zahavi and László Tengelyi). The survey of this partly critical debate is followed by concluding observations concerning a possible phenomenological theory of personal identity.
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Notes
Nevertheless, it may be misleading to appeal to radical change (discontinuity, interruption) as that which separates the sameness (incompatible with radical change) from selfhood (compatible with it). The entire conceptual background is different: what counts as change is in each case different. A difficult personal decision that opens up a new life period is not a change at all, as far as the sameness of the person is concerned. Thus not only two different concepts of identity (sameness and selfhood), but also two different concepts of change are required. If we draw on the Aristotelian vocabulary, we may say that a change that is relevant in the discussion on identity qua sameness is the “substantial” change of the “destruction” (phthora, something either is, or is not any longer). As far as identity qua selfhood is concerned, the change means more “becoming other,” “becoming different” (alloiôsis). Whereas the first kind of changes does not admit of degrees, and the identity question has to be settled by a “yes or no” answer, the second kind of changes does admit of degrees. I believe, this conceptual background is—implicitly—present behind some contemporary proposals, such as behind the suggestion to separate the “reidentification question” from the “characterization question” (see Schechtman 1996).
Many influential narrative accounts share the three assumptions, but not all of them. For instance Peter Goldie presents his account of the “narrative sense of self” as not being committed “to any particular theory of personal identity” (see 2012, 125).
See also the recent reprise of this exposition in D. Carr (2014), 108–113.
See also p. 61: “we are constantly striving, with more or less success, to occupy the story-teller’s position with respect to our own actions.”
What proves to be missing from Carr’s account of the narratives is that which makes narratives incomparable to plans: the plot or “intrigue” (Ricœur). A narrative without an intrigue is not a narrative any longer, at least not a narrative in the classical, Aristotelian sense. See also Kearney 2006, 479: even if we accept that planning our days and our lives involves the composing of stories and dramas we are going to undergo, “we might still want to ask if it is ‘story-telling’ as such”.
Blattner (2000) articulates a criticism of Carr focused on the notion of action: not all actions are to be analyzed in terms of means–end structure. Activities that articulate our “self-defining aspirations” (being a professor, being a father), are not constituted by goals, but by standards. Consequently, they are not closed in a sense in which a particular purposeful action is.
Consider also: “temporal grasp […] makes us both participants in and surveyors of the temporal flow, both characters and tellers of the stories constituted by it” (95).
There is an “original temporal coherence of the most basic phenomena” (44). Consider also his claim: “no elements enter our experience… unstoried or unnarativized” (68).
See the same argument in MacIntyre (2007, 214): “We agree [with Sartre/Roquentin] in identifying the intelligibility of an action with its place in a narrative sequence.”
In Subjectivity and Selfhood (2005, 130), he claims: “the phenomenological account [of the self] … […] could, ultimately, also have something to say concerning the conditions of persistency (the conditions required for x to remain the same from t1 to t2).” In Self and Other, at the end of the chapter on the diachronic unity of the self, he says: “Although I don’t think it makes sense to talk of a distinct problem of personal identity (in contrast to physical identity) unless there is, at least occasionally, a subject of experience, I am consequently less confident that the notion of an experiential self in and of itself will allow us to address or solve all relevant questions concerning diachronic persistency” (2014, 77).
Zahavi (2014, 83) speaks of a “personal ego,” which is a “person with abilities, dispositions, habits, interests, character traits, and convictions.”
Zahavi substantiates this primacy of our passive experience of time, and of our self-awareness, by pointing to the distinction between the sense of ownership (“sense that it is my body that is moving, that the experiences I am living through are given as mine”) and the sense of agency (“the sense of being the initiator or source of an action or thought”), as established by Shaun Gallagher. Zahavi continues: “In normal voluntary action, the sense of agency and ownership coincide. […] In cases of involuntary action, the two can come apart. […] The fact that ownership can persist without agency, but not vice versa, might suggest that the former is more fundamental than the latter” (2005, 143–144). Thus, passivity phenomena do not lack a “self”. What they lack is the initiative or the authorship of the self, not their belonging to a self, their “sense of ownership.”
We have seen that similar criticism is applicable also to Carr (see above, Sect. 3.1).
“A story necessarily curtails and impoverishes the experience it is designed to express: by unifying and homogenizing its multifarious shreds of sense, it deprives it of its ever changing ambiguity” (Ibid., 48). See also Drummond (2004, 119: “narratives […] impose more unity than life itself has manifested.”
Concerning the notion of action, Tengelyi runs the risk of committing a categorical mistake similar to the one he criticizes in his comments on MacIntyre. By focusing on action as the initiation of an unpredictable adventure, he attributes to action features that were supposed to characterize experience and clearly distinguish it from action. Does Tengelyi himself not collapse the action–experience distinction which he often takes to be clear cut? Whereas MacIntyre underestimates the experiential aspect that may be present in our actions (and thanks to which they deserve to be told in a story), Tengelyi downsizes the active aspect that makes our actions something we do rather than merely something that happens to us.
For a picture of a surprisingly clear-cut separation of “own” and “alien” (“other”) in the activity of storytelling, see Tengelyi (2004, 51–52).
Tengelyi associates the very question of self-identity with the egoistic perspective. He interprets Husserl, Heidegger and Ricœur as embracing this perspective—for different reasons and in different ways. The most important—negative—picture of the self as being appropriating and possessive is the idea of the “sense-bestowal” (Sinngebung) associated with Husserl (Tengelyi 2004, xx and xxxiii).
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This article is a part of a research program funded by Charles University in Prague (P13 - Rationality in Human Sciences). Its accomplishment was made possible thanks to the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program.
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Čapek, J. Narrative identity and phenomenology. Cont Philos Rev 50, 359–375 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9381-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9381-5