NOTE-383: Against Narrativity

Contribution

Before it, “the narrative self” was a near-consensus across philosophy, psychology and psychotherapy, usually stated with the descriptive and the ethical claims run together. The paper separates them, rejects both, and supplies the vocabulary later work uses to say what exactly is being claimed: Diachronic versus Episodic self-experience, and three separable components of Narrativity. It also makes a case for a temperament the narrative literature had treated as deficient.

Key insight

Knowing that you, the human being, have a long past is one thing; feeling that the self you now are was there for it is another. Narrative theories assume the second and then add story to it. Strip both away and a life can still be examined, loyal and good, because the past can shape the present “without being present or alive as the past”.

Assumptions

• There is self-experience as distinct from experience of oneself as a whole human being (§2). Taken for granted (“I’m going to take its viability for granted”), with Henry James as the example.
• Introspective reports of temporal temperament are reliable enough to classify people, including the author ([−R] is “the most vulnerable” claim, since one cannot notice one’s own revision).
• “I” may refer to an inner self, but nothing turns on whether it does* (n. 8). The paper’s claims are about the content of self-experience.
• The fundamentals of temporal temperament are genetically determined (§3). Asserted (“I take it”), not argued.

Key results

There are no formal results. The argument, in order:

• §1. Four combinations of the descriptive and normative theses. Sartre: descriptive true, normative false. Plutarch: the reverse. The academy: both true. Strawson: both false.
• §§2–3. The Diachronic/Episodic distinction ([D] and [E]); it is a matter of degree, may vary with age and health, and is an “individual difference variable” found “across all cultures”. Diachronics and Episodics misjudge each other. Rilke on memories “changed into our very blood” shows how the past can inform the present without being recalled.
• §4. If being Diachronic were necessary for being Narrative, Episodics could not be Narrative; Strawson is Episodic. His boat-falling memory is from the inside “visually … kinaesthetically, proprioceptively” but does not present as having happened to me*. The inference from emotional from-the-inside character to “happened to me*” “is simply not valid”.
• §5. Statements of the psychological thesis (Sartre’s Roquentin, Sacks, Bruner, Dennett) and of the ethical one (Schechtman, Taylor, Ricoeur, MacIntyre). Those who hold the ethical thesis “are really just talking about themselves”. Campbell’s “what I have made of my life” leaves him “bewildered”; Shaftesbury’s “twenty successive selfs” is his view.
• §§6–7. Narrative needs more than Diachronicity: a “form-finding tendency” [F]. Diachronicity and form-finding are independent (all four combinations are possible). Story-telling [S], fitting one’s life to a genre without necessarily fabricating, entails form-finding and is sufficient for Narrativity.
• §8. Revision [R], non-conscious falsification, is common but not required, and need not be self-serving or even “charged” by moral emotion (John Dean’s Watergate recall, flashbulb memories). So the ethical thesis survives the revision objection.
• §9. The grid applied: Dennett [+D +F +S +R], Sartre [+F +S +R], Schechtman [+D +F +S ±R], Strawson [−D −F −S −R]. Against Schechtman’s claim that unarticulated parts of one’s narrative are “only partially his”: every studied recall alters the memory (citing McCrone 2003 and Debiec, LeDoux and Nader 2002), so self-narration drifts from the truth. Psychotherapy needs “an assorted basketful of understandings, not a narrative”.
• §§10–11. A “stand off” with those who say he is unconsciously Narrative. Heidegger’s claim that self-understanding is constitutive is false as a universal claim. Montaigne, an Episodic with a bad memory, was “better at friendship than at anything else”. Diachronicity is not necessary for morality or responsibility.

Claims

id	claim	strength	support
C1	Many normal people are Episodic: they do not experience the self they are as having been there in the further past	moderate as testimony	the author’s case; literary examples (n. 7); no survey or measure
C2	A from-the-inside autobiographical memory need not present as having happened to me*	moderate	the boat example; an inference shown invalid, not a counterexample shown typical
C3	The remoter past did not happen to me*, “as a matter of metaphysical fact”	weak	stated; rests on the unargued metaphysics of the self in his earlier papers
C4	Diachronicity, form-finding, story-telling and revision are separable; story-telling is sufficient for Narrativity	strong as conceptual analysis	§§6–9; cases for each combination
C5	The psychological Narrativity thesis is false in any non-trivial version	moderate	C1 plus C4; trivial versions (making coffee) set aside
C6	The ethical Narrativity thesis is false: Episodic lives can be good, loyal and moral	moderate	Montaigne, Shaftesbury, the author; argued from examples
C7	Self-narration tends to falsify self-understanding	moderate	reconsolidation findings cited (McCrone, Debiec et al.); applied from memory research to self-understanding by inference
C8	Temporal temperament is genetically based and spread evenly across cultures	weak	asserted, “I take it”

Concepts

• psychological Narrativity thesis — people typically experience their lives as a narrative.
• ethical Narrativity thesis — doing so is essential to a good life and to full personhood.
• Diachronic [D] / Episodic [E] — one does / does not figure oneself, considered as a self, as having been there in the further past and going to be there in the further future.
• I* — “that which I now experience myself to be when I’m apprehending myself specifically as an inner mental presence or self”.
• form-finding [F] — a tendency to seek large-scale unity or pattern in one’s life.
• story-telling [S] — a form of form-finding that fits one’s life to a recognised narrative genre, not necessarily falsifying.
• revision [R] — non-conscious falsification in one’s apprehension of one’s life; “charged” when moved by moral emotions such as pride or shame.

Connections

• Dennett, “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity” (LIT-442, NOTE-364). Strawson quotes Dennett 1988 (TLS, “Why everyone is a novelist”, p. 1029) for the “virtuoso novelists” passage, and Dennett 1991, p. 418 (n. 43) for “concocting and controlling the story we tell others – and ourselves – about who we are”. The 1988 piece is, per LIT-442, a later version of the essay held here. Against Strawson’s grid: NOTE-364 reads Dennett’s self as an abstractum, a legitimate posit like a centre of gravity, and his Updike case as making a self more determinate, not falsifying it. So Dennett’s [+R] is Strawson’s attribution, resting on the 1991 “concocting”. Strawson also notes that Dennett’s story is “about who we are, rather than about our lives” (n. 43), which the essay bears out.
• Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves (LIT-468, Deferred). This paper is the only route by which the record has her words. It quotes pp. 93, 96, 117 and 119 and grants that p. 96 is a strong form with “usefully weaker forms”. It cites the book as 1997; the catalogue says 1996.
• Gallagher (LIT-453, NOTE-377). Gallagher’s review reports Strawson’s earlier minimal self, a “bare locus of consciousness” lasting as long as a period of experience. This paper is that view’s phenomenology and ethics. Gallagher’s own extended narrative self, “the sum total of its narratives” including “self-deceptions”, builds revision into the self, which is the [+R] Strawson counts against narrative views.
• Frankfurt and Velleman (LIT-293, NOTE-264; LIT-292, NOTE-268). Strawson’s Episodic still cares about “how I am now” and his “opinion” (Shaftesbury’s word: outlook, character, moral identity). That is identification with present motives rather than with a history, the shape of Frankfurt’s account, not of Schechtman’s. The pairing is mine.
• Parfit and Hume, filed in parallel. The Episodic’s “twenty successive selfs” is a lived version of what the SEP map (LIT-454) reports as Parfit’s view that identity is not what matters. Strawson does not argue from Parfit.

Bearing on the record

• The self cluster. The record held the narrative self (LIT-442) and self-models (LIT-432) without an objection to either. This paper is the objection to the first. It leaves the second untouched: Minsky’s self-models are tools a mind uses, not a story it must live by.
• Machines. Not discussed. A language model that has no memory across conversations is, in Strawson’s terms, Episodic by construction; whether that tells against its being a self depends on which side of this paper one takes. The application is mine, and it says nothing about consciousness (THEORY-023 is not engaged).
• No ML instruction. Nothing here belongs in the anthology.

Limitations

• The evidence is the author. The Episodic type is established by self-report and by classifying writers from their writings; no psychological measure is offered.
• The metaphysics is elsewhere. That the remoter past did not happen to me* is called a “fact about what I am” and referred to his earlier papers.
• Attributions are by quotation. The grid placements of Dennett and Schechtman are built from short quotations; Strawson himself flags weaker forms of Schechtman’s view.
• A missing reference. Note 43 cites Dennett “1991, p. 418”, but the reference list has only Dennett 1988. Gallagher’s review (LIT-453) cites Consciousness Explained (1991) p. 418 for a neighbouring sentence, so that is probably the work; I did not check.
• The memory-alteration claim is stretched. Reconsolidation findings about recalled memories are extended to “accurate self-understanding” without argument for the extension.

Open questions

• Is the Episodic/Diachronic difference a difference in self-experience or in how people describe it? The paper gives no way to tell.
• If revision is common (§8), does Dennett’s fiction-making self describe most people better than Schechtman’s accurate narrator? The paper’s grid allows the question but does not ask it.