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What is a Narrative view of self - Coggle Diagram
What is a Narrative view of self
draws a link b/w narrative and selfhood
Strongest connection is that selves are inherently narrative in nature
our sense of self must be narrative
live soft self must be in narrative structure
Hermeneutical view of Self
1) Selves are inherently narrative entities (either our sense of self is narrative or the lives of selves are narrative in structure).
2) Leading the life of a self is taken inherently to involve understanding one’s life as a narrative and enacting the narrative one sees as one’s life”.
3) This approach draws strong connections between selfhood, narrative, and agency
4) Most prominent philosophers of the hermeneutical approach: Alisdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Paul Ricoeur.
5) Macintyre: Understanding the behavior of an agent requires understanding their primary intentions. To know this, we need to contextualize the behavior in the framework of intersecting stories (stories about household and domestic arrangements, about the cycles of the seasons, and the story of the actor’s life).
6) Actions are intelligible and must be aimed at an end (telos). Thus, narrative must include normative or evaluative dimensions.“To lead a life is to search for and aim toward the goo
7) Taylor: Selfhood and the good are “inextricably intertwined themes…this intertwining means that the self must be narrative in form”. Also supports the idea of human life as a quest and describes this quest in terms of frameworks (“background traditions which define the fundamental terms by which we evaluate our lives and our world”
8) Ricoeur: Our lives must be narrative in form if we are to make sense of human agency. Also endorses the view of our lives as a quest narrative, but emphasizes discontinuities between life and literature.
Daniel Dennett's Approach
1) Characterizes the self as a ‘center of narrative gravity’. The self is a useful fiction like the notion of a center of gravity in physics. There is no such thing as a center of gravity but it serves a necessary role within physics; “it can be used to explain and predict and to manipulate objects”.
2) The self has a similar ontological status. “Selves, as he conceives them, are characters in the narratives we humans spin.”
3) Distinguishes between the entity that “generates an autobiographical narrative and the protagonist depicted within it.”
4) The narrating brain and the human organism within it are real things but not selves, they are the author to the self of the character. Ex. story of a novel writing machine (a computer that generates novels) and cases of Multiple Personality Disorde
5) Similar to the Hermeneutics, Dennet believes that the self is constituted through human narration. But this idea of narration does not necessarily include evaluation or a quest for good, “it is more a matter of keeping track of the history of the body in which the narrating brain resides”.
The Narrative Self‐Constitution View (NSC
1) In‐between the Hermeneutical view and Dennett's. The NSCV says that “we constitute ourselves as selves by understanding our lives as narrative in form and living accordingly. This view does not demand that we explicitly formulate our narratives … but rather that we experience and interpret our present experiences not as isolated moments but as part of an ongoing story”.
2) The experience of winning the lottery will be different for a wealthy vs poor person. “The difference is the difference in the background narrative against which winning is interpreted. Having a narrative, and so being a self, on this view is primarily a matter of keeping track of this background and responding accordingly”
3) Similar to the Hermeneutical view in seeing the self as real and constituted by a narrative. Also similar to Dennett's in lack of emphasis on agency as strongly as the former. Additionally, does not “insist on an overall ethical orientation or thematic unity to the life of a self”.
Evolutionary and developmental psychology
1) Links selfhood to the capacity to think in narrative terms and to offer narrative explanations”.
2) Basic narrative competency is a significant developmental milestone. Narrative ability supports the development of autobiographical memory, understanding one’s self diachronically, distinguishing between self and other, and the cognitive processes that characterize the human selve
3) A new level of consciousness emerges in early childhood along with a sense of self in time and space (socially). This level of consciousness moreover includes a developed sense of past and possible future, and then later on an understanding of others’ selv
4) Interested in the emergence of self and the threshold that must be crossed in order for full‐blown selfhood to begin to develop.
David Vellem
1) A reply to Dennett's thought experiment.
2) The self is not an idle fiction
3) Difference between his view of self and Dennett’s: “Dennett conceives of a self‐narrative as trying to unify an entire life—making ‘all of our material cohere into a single good story’ (Dennett 1992: 114). Velleman, on the other hand, thinks of narratives as extremely local. In his view ‘we tell many small, disconnected stories about ourselves—short episodes that do not get incorporated into our life‐stories’ (Velleman 2006: 222)