Source
Strawson (2004), “Against Narrativity”, Ratio 17(4): 428–452, LIT-452, read in full in NOTE-383.
What was actually shown
Two theses. The psychological Narrativity thesis is “a straightforwardly empirical, descriptive thesis”: people experience their lives as a narrative. The ethical Narrativity thesis is that a “richly Narrative outlook is essential to a well-lived life, to true or full personhood” (§1). Sartre holds the first and not the second, Plutarch the reverse, the academy both, Strawson neither.
Diachronic and Episodic (§§2–3). A Diachronic “naturally figures oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future”. An Episodic does not, while knowing perfectly well that the human being persists. It is a matter of degree, may vary with age and health, and is called “one normal, non-pathological form of life”.
The memory that is not mine (§4).* Strawson remembers falling out of a boat from the inside, visually, kinaesthetically and proprioceptively, and it does not present as having happened to “me*”, the self he now experiences himself to be. The inference from a memory’s from-the-inside character to “happened to me*” “is simply not valid”.
The components (§§6–9). Form-finding, a tendency to seek unity or pattern in one’s life; story-telling, fitting one’s life to a recognised genre, which entails form-finding and suffices for Narrativity; and revision, non-conscious falsification, common but not required. Diachronicity and form-finding are independent: all four combinations are possible. The grid then places Dennett ”[+D +F +S +R]”, Schechtman ”[+D +F +S ±R]” and Strawson ”[−D −F −S −R]”.
The ethical claim (§§9–11). Every studied recall alters the memory, so “the more you recall, retell, narrate yourself, the further you risk moving away from accurate self-understanding”. Montaigne, Episodic with a bad memory, was “better at friendship than at anything else”. Diachronicity is not needed for morality or responsibility, and the past can shape the present “without being present or alive as the past”.
What could have come out otherwise. The four components could have turned out to entail each other, so that any self-experience over time was already a narrative. The cases for each combination show they do not.
What this does not say
- That the Episodic type is established. It rests on the author’s self-report and on classifying writers from their writings. No psychological measure is offered, and the reading’s open question is whether the difference is in self-experience or in how people describe it.
- That the remoter past did not happen to the human being. The claim is about me*, the self. That it did not happen to me* “as a matter of metaphysical fact” is stated and referred to earlier papers (C3, weak).
- That narration falsifies self-understanding. Reconsolidation findings about recalled memories are extended to self-understanding without argument for the extension.
- That temperament is genetic and spread evenly across cultures. Asserted: “I take it” (C8, weak).
- That the opponents hold what the grid says. The placements are built from short quotations. Strawson flags weaker forms of Schechtman’s view, and NOTE-364 reads Dennett’s self as made more determinate, not falsified, so his “+R” is Strawson’s attribution.
Connections
- QUESTION-043 asks whether a life story, whose content changes, could be the coherence measure conserved when a person persists. This account constrains the answer: if some normal people do not experience their lives as narratives and persist all the same, a life story cannot be that measure for everyone, and the measure must differ across persons or be something else.
- THEORY-060 holds that a life story is “the form a person’s diachronic identity takes”. That is the psychological Narrativity thesis in developmental form, and the two cannot both hold in general. THEORY-060 calls universality its weakest point and cites this paper against it. The two are rivals.
- Dennett (THEORY-691) is this paper’s main example of the psychological thesis. Gallagher (THEORY-458), as NOTE-377 reports, builds self-deception into the narrative self by design, which is the revision Strawson counts against narrative views. Gallagher also reports Strawson’s earlier minimal self, “a bare locus of consciousness” lasting as long as a period of experience; the Episodic is what that view is like from the inside.
- Diachronic self-governance (THEORY-076) is constituted by cross-temporal intention, “not by narrative unity”. It is a second route by which a life can hang together over time without a story.
- Parfit (THEORY-447). Strawson’s Shaftesbury, content to “be twenty successive selfs”, is close to the view that identity is not what matters. Strawson does not argue from Parfit; the pairing is NOTE-383’s.