Narrative Unity as a Condition of Personhood

r Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 35, No. 5, October 2004 0026-1068

NARRATIVE UNITY AS A CONDITION OF PERSONHOOD JOHN CHRISTMAN

Abstract: In this article I critically discuss a claim made by several writers in philosophy and the social sciences that for an individual to count as a person, a single personality, or the subject of a life, the experiences of the subject in question must take a narrative form. I argue that narrativity is a misleading and, in some ways of understanding it, implausible condition of what it is that adds unity to personhood and personality. I pursue this critique by considering canonical accounts of narrativity in philosophy and literary studies. I consider those connections between events that must hold for the sequence to be considered a narrative: causal, teleological, and thematic connections. I argue that for each of these, the condition that experiential sequences (for a given subject) must have this structure is empty: any life sequence that is reflected upon in an interpretive spirit can meet it. What the condition of narrativity amounts to, then, is the more basic requirement that the person must be able to look upon the factors and events of her life with a certain interpretive reflection, whether or not those factors and events have any particular narrative unity in a traditional sense. Keywords: self, persons, personal identity, narrative.

Narrative equals life; absence of narrative equals death.

FTzvetan Todorov

In numerous areas of philosophical and social-scientific research, theories of the self, the person, the conditions of a unified personality, and similar notions have included the claim that to be a self, the subject of a single life, personality (and so on), one’s experiences must have a specifically narrative form. These various accounts of the unity of the person, personality, and self-concept rest on the claim that the connection among disparate experiences, memories, and expectations of a given subject must take the form of a story or narrative for the subject in question to count as a single person, personality, or self. This requirement functions in accounts of personal identity over time, in views of what differentiates one personality from another (in cases of so-called multiple-personality disorder, for example), and in psychological models of the self-concept, among other areas. r Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

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The implication of these theories is that a subject reflecting on memories and experiences in a way that does not display narrativity would fail the test of being a single, unique, personality. One wonders, however, what this requirement of narrativity amounts to, as a separate characteristic of being a subject of experiences (of any sort), and whether it adds anything substantive to the conditions of personhood over and above the requirement that the subject reflect and interpret ‘‘her own’’ experiences. I will argue in this article that the concept of narrativity in these contexts must be unpacked, and that in many of the ways in which this idea can be understood (ways not specifically ruled out by the theorists in question), it is implausible to say that the subjective structure of the experiences of a person (self, personality, and so forth) must be of narrative form for those experiences to coalesce into a unity. Before beginning, we should note up front the ways in which the narrative conception of the self functions in various theoretical arenas. In philosophy, reference to the narrative structure of lives or personalities appears in a variety of settings: theories of personal identity, views about the nature of selves or the unity of consciousness, and social and political theories specifying the communitarian or socially embedded conditions of personhood (Schechtman 1996, Dennett 1988 and 1989, Flanagan 1996, MacIntyre 1981, and Taylor 1991). In these contexts, and in a variety of ways, the view is proffered that something called ‘‘narrativity’’ is an identifiable characteristic of the sequence of memories, reflections, actions, mental events or other such factors that marks them out as unified and individualized. Narrativity is meant to help explain what it means to be a unique, individualized subject of experiences, as opposed to a dissociated, disconnected series of selves. A similar idea can be found in accounts of the self or self-concept as presented in psychology and the social sciences. For example, some theories of self-concept use narrativity as a model for the factors that determine whether memories, self-reports, and experiences lie within the core of the person’s sense of self (see, for example, Bruner 1984, Kagan 1989, and Cohler 1982; for an overview of literature on the self-concept generally, see Ross 1992). In dealing with the so-called multiple-personality disorder, psychologists have claimed that the impressions, memories, personality traits, and the like that a subject experiences count as a single personality (within the person) when these experiences fit into an identifiable narrative structure (see Flanagan 1996 and Hacking 1995). Psychoanalytic theorists have also used the model of narrative unity in therapeutic settings as a template through which to construct a working conception of a person’s (perhaps suppressed) core ego (Spence 1984, Schafer 1981, and Freeman 1993). In these contexts, however, insufficient attention is given to the complexity and variability of the idea of a narrative, and without careful analysis of this concept, narrative theories will be at best incomplete and r Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

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at worst implausible on their face. It is true that the theorists who rely on narrativity to account for unified consciousness or personhood in this way give some account of what they mean by this notion. But as I will point out in what follows, the idea of narrativity gives rise to many interpretations, several of which would be unwelcome in the theoretical contexts in question. Indeed, I want to argue that under most interpretations of the idea of narrativity culled from linguistics, literary theory, and philosophy, the condition of narrativity for the unity of selves, persons, and personalities is either implausible or otiose.1 I will close with a set of suggestions for what ‘‘narrativity’’ should be taken to mean if that concept is intended as a necessary condition for such a unity. 1. The Narrativity Condition The claim that narrative unity is something over and above reflective (self-) interpretation and that this unity plausibly picks out a unique entity (a self, a person, a personality) is a claim that occurs in numerous forms in these various settings.2 Marya Schechtman, for example, has developed a theory of personal identity in which she argues that the unifying element of a person’s life is the narrative form of experience (Schechtman 1996). She uses this observation as a way of constructing a theory of identity that answers the ‘‘characterization question’’Fthe question of what characterizes a person over timeFrather than the ‘‘reidentification question’’Fthe question of how to reidentify a person over time (arguing that the former question speaks more directly to the concerns that we expect personal identity to answer, such concerns as survival, moral responsibility, self-interested concern, and compensation). Persons can be distinguished from merely conscious, sentient individuals because of the narrative structure of their experiences. Schechtman writes that ‘‘individuals constitute themselves as persons by coming to think of themselves as persisting subjects who have had experience in the past and will continue to have experience in the future, taking certain experiences as theirs. . . . [Persons] weave stories of their lives’’ (1996, 94). By way of example, she contrasts a ‘‘person’’ in her sense with a Buddhist who has achieved a satori-like dissolution of the self, where each person time slice recognizes itself as a separate existence, without regard to future or past. 1 These questions are not intended as a full-fledged criticism of any of the views I describe; indeed, I do not explicate any of these views in enough detail to criticize them legitimately. Rather, my intentions are more general and friendlier, in that I want to insist, as a necessary extension of those views, that the condition of narrativity must be unpacked and that many of its typical meanings are inadequate to the theoretical projects in question. 2 The claim I am discussing comes in a variety of forms, at times concerning the nature of ‘‘persons,’’ ‘‘selves,’’ ‘‘individuals,’’ ‘‘lives,’’ or ‘‘personalities.’’ Since I want to paint with this broad critical brush, I will use these terms interchangeably to refer to the array of theories in question.

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What is lacking in such a case is a linear connection among the events experienced by the subject, a connection that conforms to the structure of familiar narratives.3 For Schechtman, a narrative has the ‘‘form and the logic of a story . . . where ‘story’ is understood as a conventional, linear narrative’’ (1996, 96). She quotes Jerome Bruner to elaborate: ‘‘A narrative is composed of a unique sequence of events, mental states, happenings involving human beings as characters or actors. These are its constituents. . . .Their meaning is given by their place in the overall configuration of the sequence as a wholeFits plot or fabula’’ (Bruner 1990, 43–44). In spelling out what she means by narrativity in her theory, Schechtman clearly relies on the idea of classical, linear, stories, though she points out that such narratives can take many forms. Nevertheless, the form that such narratives take must be socially recognizable in a culture for these sequences to count as a unity: ‘‘To be identity-defining an individual’s self-narrative must conform in certain crucial respects to the narrative others tell of his life’’ (1996, 96). She claims, though, that to the extent that nonstandard narratives organize a person’s life, that individual’s ‘‘personhood’’ is therefore nonstandard (relative to a culture): A family of mostly overlapping narrative forms and the practices that go with them count, for our purposes, as standard life stories, and so as the kind of narratives that unproblematically constitute a person in our sense of the word. Narrative styles outside this family or group which retain certain of its most basic features also constitute persons, but persons unlike us. When a selfconception becomes wildly different in form from those standard in our cultureFfor example, a self-conception that is not even in narrative formFthe narrative self-constitution view does not consider it identity constituting at all, nor those who organize their experience this way as persons. [1996, 194–95]

Schechtman also adds constraints on the kind of narratives that count as person constituting: an articulation constraintFa person must be able to give an explanation of her acts by virtue of past or present actions or traitsFand a reality constraint, requiring that the narrative not contain egregious factual or interpretive errors. So for Schechtman a person can be identified over time only when (among other things) the experiences and memories of the subject are narrative in form. This means that the discrete experiences have a linear, culturally recognizable form in which each ‘‘event’’ in the sequence gains its meaning in reference to the other events, and such sequences could be articulated by the subject without undue errors of fact. 3 Schechtman, 1996, 100–01, citing Derek Parfit as a source of the Buddhist example. It may not be clear how that argument is meant to work, however, since we are to imagine an individual who no longer maintains a continuous consciousness in order to show that narrativity is necessary for personhood. But this argument does not establish that narrativity is anything over and above continuous consciousness.

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Psychologists Kenneth and Mary Gergen construct a theory of the selfconcept that also crucially involves narrative structures (Gergen and Gergen 1997, 161–84). They reject mechanistic and synchronic accounts of the self-concept, since these ignore (in the former case) the individual’s ability to shape her own ongoing self-conception and (in the latter) the individual’s self-understanding as a historically emergent being. As a replacement, they adopt an account utilizing the idea of a ‘‘self-narrative,’’ which they define as ‘‘the individual’s account of the relationships among self-relevant events across time. In developing a self-narrative the individual attempts to establish coherent connections among life events’’ (1997, 162). The essential aspect of narrative form, for Gergen and Gergen, is ‘‘directionality’’ among events, in which they can be seen to move over time in an orderly way toward a given end.4 Following Northrop Frye, they describe the four basic forms of narrative: comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony/satire (Frye 1957). At a more abstract level, these forms (except satire) involve ‘‘shifts in the evaluative character of events over time’’ (1997, 165). Combining this observation with the Frye subdivisions, they claim that the basic forms of narrative sequences are the ‘‘stability narrative’’ (in which the subject remains evaluatively unchanged) and ‘‘progressive/regressive’’ narratives (involving evaluative shifts in positive or negative directions). Narrative structures can be mapped by using these dimensions; for instance, ‘‘tragic’’ structures involve a severe regressive evaluative shift. For Gergen and Gergen, narratives are not objective structures defining a person’s life; rather, they are wholly constructed by the person herself. That is, they are not reconstituted forms already present in the world of art, though it is clear that people are affected by narrative forms present in their culture (1997, 168). The kind of ‘‘dramatic engagement’’ that is involved in constructing such a self-narrative involves the capacity to create feelings of drama or emotion, which in turn alters or accelerates the evaluative ‘‘slope’’ of the event sequence making up the dramatic structure. Such engagement and the narrative forms or self-conceptions it produces operate in a person’s daily life by aiding the dynamics of social interactions. Others know what to expect of us as they refer to the narrative forms our actions and characters suggest to them. These social functions, however, delimit the range of narrative structures available to the person. The necessities of repeated social interaction, for example, require a stability narrative, while progressive narratives aid one’s sense (and the predictability for others) of one’s self-improvement. Further, the

4 In footnote 10 they claim further that mature narrative requires the elaboration of a center or core situation; shifts in sequential events thus clarify, extend, or modify new aspects of the central theme. Cf. Applebee 1978.

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social element implies that self-construction is, in part, a dialogic rather than a monologic process. On this account of the self, then, a self is a human being whose ‘‘selfrelevant events’’ take on a narrative structure; this means that they are ordered in a way that is coherent to the subject and surrounding others and that manifests identifiable evaluative shifts from good to bad. This counts as a narrative when such sequences can function in social settings to allow communication and comprehensible interaction. Finally, Owen Flanagan constructs a theory of what he calls the ‘‘multiplex self,’’ where he claims that narrativity essentially captures the structure of selves and individual personalities (Flanagan 1996, 67; see also 1991, 148–58). He develops this view, in part, as a means to help delineate separate personalities for those suffering from multiple-personality disorder (however that disorder is understood). But more generally, he claims that narrativity is the ‘‘natural’’ organizing characteristic of selves. He gives several reasons why narrativity serves this organizing purpose: first, human life is lived in time, with beginnings, middles, and ends; second, memory is an important operator in our reflective lives and demands that events experienced be ‘‘appropriative’’ of what has gone before; finally, we are intentional beings who care about how our lives go, and as social beings we need to understand others’ actions as steps in a coherent pattern. For Flanagan, the requirement of narrativity is meant as something stronger than mere psychological continuity: only when lives are lived according to a ‘‘contentful story that involves an unfolding rationale’’ are personalities unified (Flanagan 1996, 67)Fthough he stresses that this is a mere necessary condition for a flourishing life and that great flexibility must be recognized in the forms of narrative being considered. These theorists have said much to flesh out the condition of narrativity central to their views, but more must be said. A common idea in these accounts is that a narrative is a sequence of events or experiences ordered in a such a way that they are socially recognized as such, and each element of the sequence gains its meaning in relation to the others. But the authors also rely a great deal on the pretheoretic understanding we all have of what a ‘‘story’’ is. They use the concept of ‘‘narrative’’ to refer to the standard linear forms, while noting in passing that there are certainly nonstandard examples of narrative. So a fuller account is needed, for these and the several other related views that utilize a condition of narrativity in this way, of what is meant by claiming that, as a necessary condition of the unity of the self, a reflecting, self-interpreting, psychologically continuous individual must understand her experiences (and be understood by others) as having a narrative structure. In pursuing this project here, I will undertake an analysis of ‘‘narrative’’ in order to suggest that in most standard accounts of that notion the claim just noted is not plausible. What is needed, then, is a noncircular, nonempty account r Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

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of ‘‘narrative’’ that will distinguish plausibly those lives or personalities that meet the condition from those that do not. 2. What Makes an Event Sequence a Narrative? There is voluminous work in literary theory, linguistics, and anthropology setting out the structural conditions of narratives. Such analyses are especially prominent in structuralist linguistics and narrative semiotics (see Todorov 1997, Frye 1957, and Greimas 1987; cf. also Barthes 1982 and Ricoeur 1985; for general discussion see Prince 1995). Much of this work is relevant here, though in large part it provides theoretical analysis of what are already taken to be narrativesFmyths, novels, legends, folktalesFrather than providing necessary conditions of narrativity in a way that would distinguish such structures from nonnarrative sequences (see Leitch 1986). While a full airing of the issue might include a survey of this work, I hope in what follows to cut across the various theories of narrative at a level of abstraction that conveys the full range of possibilities for such models. What is needed for the condition of narrativity to pick out unique structures are conditions that distinguish random-event sequences (or whatever nonnarrative structure we imagine) from stories. Theorists who utilize narrativity as a condition of selves often write as if ‘‘narrative’’ refers to those canonical story structures, such as tragedies, comedies, satires, and the like, familiar from the world of fiction (as do Schechtman and Gergen and Gergen, though in different ways). But in some cases these categorizations are understood so generally that virtually any event sequence can be brought under their rubric (a completely dissociated personality can be considered an example of a tragedy, for example). Or, if the categories are given traditional and narrow definitions (a tragedy is where a hero with a tragic flaw suffers a final fateful misfortune, for example), then the condition of narrativity will be too demanding to account adequately for the variety of lives that real people tend to live. As will be made clear below, selves and personalities are more variable and complex than this view implies; we are not all fortunate enough to live lives that are the stuff of legends. What is needed, then, is a more general discussion of the nature of narrativity in order to determine if that model applies plausibly (and generally) to persons. To do this, let us consider three kinds of relations holding among events (or descriptions of events) that would characterize an event combination as a narrative.5 These are relations of causality, of function or teleology, and of theme. I will suggest that in each case, 5 For simplicity of exposition, I do not distinguish between reference to factors or events themselves and to the representationsFtexts, discourses, significations, mental representationsFof those events. We will see, however, that the assumed distinction between narrativity applied to events and narrativity applied to discourse (about events) is hardly an innocent one.

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whether or not the condition considered picks out adequately (all and only) narratives, it is nevertheless implausible as a requirement for unified selves, persons, or personalities. Causal Connectivity Causal narrative connections exemplify the classical, linear stories with which we are all familiar. Sequences of events unfold in a causal ordering in which earlier events explain later ones. But causal connectivity is not a plausible general condition of all narratives. Even leaving aside recent modern (not to mention postmodern) fiction, many classical and traditional stories include events that are separated in time and place. In many stories and novels, for example, event sequences are told in parallel form, related only very distantly, if at all, by causal connections.6 In other stories, major events occur accidentally or randomly; although they begin causal sequences of significance to the story, they do not themselves occur as a result of earlier narrated events, even if we consider the first event reported in the story as the plausible beginning of that causal chain.7 This is important because, as we will see, many of the experiences and events that constitute a person’s life are accidental, unplanned, and uncaused by an ongoing pattern of events begun at the person’s birth. Therefore not all events in a narrative form a complete causal chain. But even if causal connectedness were a plausible condition of narrative structure, it would not adequately characterize a necessary condition for the unity of the self. For the experiences of a life do not fall into neat causal chains (or do so only triviallyFsee below); and many of the most central elements of a person’s identity are not caused by other elements of the self or by previously experienced events. Many sequences of a person’s life proceed quite independently of each other; plans and projects in one area of experience remain quite separate (in time as well as space) from other plans and projects. Of course, it is true in a trivial sense that all events of an individual’s life are causally connected: the individual herself is at the (causal) center of them all. But this fact is captured by the requirement that person-constituting events all be experienced by the same physical subject, making otiose the claim that those events must be connected in a narrative fashion. Causal connectivity will also be overinclusive as an aspect of personhood or of selves. We are the subjects of countless life events during the 6 In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, for example, events take place in the (relative) present that parallel, but do not causally interact with, events that took place in the distant past. 7 Consider Proust’s narrator Marcel in Remembrance of Things Past, whose memories and reflections make up the entire novel but are themselves caused by the accidental occurrence of eating a piece of madeleine cake or stepping on a paving stone. For discussion of time and perspective in Proust, see Ricoeur 1985, 130–52.

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course of a typical day, most of them trivial and quickly forgotten (if noticed at all).8 Self-conception involves reflection on those events that seem significant to us; and this significance cannot be given by objective aspects of our life course, at least not always. I may focus on the development of certain talents or character traits when reflecting on myself at one moment, whereas at another time I may look to relationships and emotional attachments in telling (to myself) my life story. Moreover, at no time will self-conceptions include the limitless details of my entire causal nexusFthe number of air molecules bouncing against my foot, for example. Self-interpretive activity, which forms the core of the self in narrative theories, is selective and partial, leaving out of account most of the causal sequences in which we figure. Also, as indicated above, many of the events that become crucial parts of our life histories are not part of a causal chain of which we are antecedently aware. We experience tragedies or bursts of good fortune that could not be foreseen and which were not planned. After the fact we may come to internalize these events and make them a part of the components of our life, but their occurrence itself is, from our point of view, random. This means that not all events in a life are part of a deterministic causal pattern made up of other events in a life. Hence, the narrativity that is meant to comprise life histories cannot be comprised of a single, causally connected, chain of events.9

Teleological Connectivity The second possible connection among events that makes them narratives is a ‘‘functional’’ or ‘‘teleological’’ connection, where events are explained by their contribution to later culminating experiences or events (see, for example, Greimas 1983). This is picked out by the idea of the ‘‘quest’’ sometimes mentioned in certain theories of the self (see, for example, MacIntyre 1997). Fictional narratives tend to meet this condition without fail (though the novels of James Joyce, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, among others, might provide counterexamples). For the most part, all such stories have a ‘‘point,’’ a denouement to which all described events lead. 8 This way of understanding the issue was brought to my attention by Valerie Gray Hardcastle. 9 In discussing a short story by O. Henry where three unconnected lines of plot action are described independently of each other, Thomas Leitch claims that ‘‘since the connection among the three parts [of the story] is thematic rather than causal, and the stories in their composite form display thematic points about fate and social climbing rather than the teleology of a single action, none of the individual sections is truly independent . . . only the conjunction of the three episodes makes them retrospectively tellable by endowing them with thematic unity’’ (1986, 47–8)

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However, even as a requirement for narrativity itself, this condition must be questioned. As Thomas Leitch puts it, ‘‘The teleological principle will give only limited help in answering this question [of what a story is], in part because it cannot always distinguish between tellable stories and alternative versions of those stories which are inadequate even though they project the same teleology, in part because it cannot account for the specifically anti-teleological tendency of narratives like Pickwick Papers’’ (Leitch 1986, 63). Also, some stories do not have endings at all: consider soap operas. But even if we accept the view that events in stories are unified by a telos toward which they aim, do lives have such a telos that explains all of their fitful meanderings? Perhaps some doFexemplified by the person who says, ‘‘This was the task I was born to do.’’ But clearly many do not have such a telos, at least not any single culminating purpose. In creative reinterpretations of our own existence or that of others, one can certainly postulate a variety of raisons d’eˆtre, or final purposes to which all our training and experiences inexorably lead. But these are (mostly) the stuff of fanciful biographers rather than plausible structural accounts of everyday lives. Most people undertake entirely separable projects and goals, which, though each has an internal organizing aim, fail to interconnect in a grand scheme. The events that culminated in my teaching at a university, for instance, are in a functional sequence different from that which leads to my working in my garden (indeed, the latter is experienced as a distinct alternative to the former). So, clearly events of a life cannot be related by their functional contribution to some single end. What about the suggestion that a person’s experiences must lead to any one of a variety of ends, so long as each serves some functional role or other? This approach certainly provides a more accurate picture of a typical life, but unless it is specified how many such goals can be pursued, the condition of narrativity, so construed, will be trivially met by all individuals, no matter what level of unity or coherence their lives manifest. Each intentional action will have a goal to which it is a contributing factor, no matter how disconnected those particular sequences become. An individual who performs an infinite series of (intentional) basic actions with no connection among them will meet this condition. Certainly, teleology can be mapped onto many sequences of events as a framework within which to evaluate the sequence, motivating the question of whether the actions have led to anything meaningful in the end. But this use of teleology will be plausible in picking out at best only flourishing lives, ones that have succeeded according to this normative overlay. But as a general characterization of a life’s experiences or events as such, one that is meant to separate the unified sequences from the dissociative ones (selves from nonselves), this condition will not succeed. r Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

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Thematic Connectivity This leads us to the third construal of narrative connectedness, that of ‘‘thematic’’ unity among described events. In many ways, this is the most plausible as a characterization of narratives themselves, if only because it is the most flexible. Narratives bring together descriptions and representations that are connected under some, perhaps quite general and suggestive, idea. Novels and stories portraying events that neither lead to some single purpose nor causally interact in a linear fashion come to mind. At some level, however, they all present those events in a way that is suggestive of a general idea, value, or moral. So, while many narratives may lack a linear, causal, story line, they nevertheless are meaningful relative to an overarching thematic structure.10 This can be understood as a hermeneutic account of narrative, in that each event in the sequence gains its meaning in reference to its (thematic) connection to the others, and it is this account that comes close to some of the views of the narrative theorists discussed earlier (Schechtman, for example). But it is also important to see how broadly this condition can be construed, for any idea can provide a meaningful schema within which event sequences can be understood. Thematic unity can be established for just about any set of distant and unconnected events. Consider the following (very short) short story: At noon on that afternoon, the 13th, a woman of about thirty waits for a bus on a sunny street corner in Milwaukee. The bus comes; she steps absentmindedly onto it and sits down, sitting, as she always does, toward the front of the bus. Also at noon on the 13th a man in Istanbul climbs onto a rickety old bus that lumbers away from the corner on his way home from the market. When the bus stops, the man gets off, thinking idly of the transience of things.

Now this is a very simple (and simplistic) story. The two events are told in a way that makes clear that there is no causal connection between them and that they have no common purpose. Yet we can imagine (especially if I were a better writer) all sorts of thematic suggestions arising from the telling of the story, ideas having to do with transience, travel, directionlessness, and the like.11 Thematic unity is possible whenever there is an interpreter who is able to look upon the event sequences and impose (or find) common symbolic elements suggestive of a unifying idea. 10 Mark Turner discusses the general use of ‘‘parable’’ to portray events or understand experiences. See Turner 1996. Parables are understandable, however, only as representations of events whose meaning is given in the parable’s theme or moral. 11 The filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski (The Double Life of Veronique, Blue, White, Red) makes much use of this technique, where characters’ lives cross incidentally and in ways that the characters are not even aware of, but in a manner strongly suggestive of a variety of themes.

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But even if thematic unity functions adequately to pick out stories, it does not seem adequate to pick out selves. If what is meant here is that there must be some single idea that provides the lens through which the experiences of a life can be understood, then this will fail as a necessary condition of the unity of lives. For clearly most lives do not have ‘‘themes’’ in this sense, just as most of us do not aim at a single telos by virtue of which all our actions are understood. Indeed, as I mentioned, many factors that crucially define the path of our lives were unplanned and random, making no sense at all except in that we responded to them and built our subsequent life around them. Lives may have themes (plural)Forganizing ideas through which certain projects and periods can be understoodFbut few lives have one single theme. Moreover, in the case of a single subject of experiences, there is always an ‘‘interpreter’’ available to make as much sense as possible of the events she experiences. That interpreter is, of course, the person herself. If one grants that the individual in question is a conscious reflecting interpreter of experiences, then thematic unity of this sort will be achieved whenever the interpreting subject can make minimal sense of her experiences, where ‘‘sense’’ is not specified in advance. The further insistence that the experiences of which she is a subject be narrative in form adds nothing to the analysis.12 We will return to this issue of interpretation in a moment. So, even if thematic unity is a plausible condition of narratives in a way that is applicable to models of the self, this condition will always be met by anyone who successfully undertakes the project of (self-)interpretation of experiences. It is not that the result necessarily resembles a ‘‘story’’ in any separably specifiable sense, for whatever results from such a reflective, interpretive construction will meet the condition of thematic unity we are considering. It will, trivially speaking, be the story of that person’s life unified under the theme of ‘‘her autobiography.’’ Indeed, a person suffering from multiple-personality disorder can see all of her separate personalities as unified into the story of her life, but (as Flanagan uses it), narrativity is meant to help pick out single personalities themselves. It is not that people do not think in narrative form or that the ability to understand stories is not an important skill in the development of a person (see Applebee 1978). But when the idea of narrativity is unpacked, we see the deeper condition lying beneath it. What is truly necessary for a unified life in these theories is the capacity for reflection on events (one’s 12 Although associated with the narrative camp, Daniel Dennett comes close to this very point when he talks about how ‘‘selves’’ are created by the interpretive operations of our own self-reflections, whether or not what we are interpreting is structured sensibly or not: ‘‘It does seem that we are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behavior, more or less unified, but sometimes disunified, and we always put the best ‘faces’ on if we can. We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography’’ (1988, 1029). For discussion, see Flanagan 1996, 72–4.

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own and those of others) in a spirit that attempts to render the events coherent within the categories of meaning available to the subject. I cannot claim that this brief overview of accounts of narrativity has been exhaustive. But I have attempted a general survey of such accounts in order to show how, in the standard ways that narrativity can be understood, problems emerge in applying that concept to the idea of a unified self (as a necessary condition of that unity). What we are left with is that selves are individuals who reflect on experiences and events in a way that gives meaning to them. But more must be said, for clearly many of the things that I reflect upon and can make sense of include the acts and events of others that are external to my ‘‘self.’’ Although narrative theorists have pointed us in a certain direction, we must go further in specifying what is meant by this condition. 3. Fleshing Out (or Moving Beyond) the Narrativity Condition A general complication in utilizing narrativity as a structural condition of persons is that narratives cannot be specified independently of a context of discourse, where a settled semantics is operative and there exists an audience interpreting the events in question. Leitch, for example, surveys the variety of ways that narratives could be characterized but concludes that the essence of stories are their ‘‘tellability,’’ the degree to which they will make sense to a certain kind of audience. Leitch claims that in narrative theory ‘‘the whole concept of story depends on a context which involves not only a particular discursive mode and selection of states of affairs but also the particular circumstances governing the storytelling transaction’’ (1986, 25). Moreover, narrativity involves an interplay between discourse and active interpretation (narrative construction) by an audience: ‘‘The audience’s narrativity should be active enough to recover a given story according to the cues the discourse provides but not so active that it transgresses that discourse’s guidance’’ (1986, 40). Narrative is a transaction between discursive sequences and the constructive activities of audiences. This transaction involves revelation of contingencies, trading on expectation and satisfaction, and interpretive projections (filling in missing information, since no discourses give complete accounts of events). So, narrativity is culturally relative, contextual, and highly contingent upon a variety of interpersonal dynamics. Hence narrative theorists must explain (in a way, the narrativity condition often obfuscates) how mental autobiographies are constructed with merely an implied audience and, presumably, across contexts throughout a life span. Now it could be claimed that in saying this I have merely defined the condition of narrativity as ‘‘having the capacity for socially-mediated selfreflection’’ rather than argued against the condition of narrative unity as such. I have, however, shifted the focus in an important way from the r Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

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purported characteristics of event sequences themselves (that they have a narrative structure) to a capacity of a certain sort, one that can be analyzed in much greater detail from a psychological, linguistic, and interpersonal perspective. But even if this is mere substitution, I hope to have accomplished something significant in forcing a crucial clarification in the use of the term narrativity in these various contexts. For it is often not noticed that this condition either refers to an unduly narrow range of possible structures (traditional canonical stories or myths) or is so general as to be redundant in relation to the other conditions of personhood given by the theories. This would be a clarification of an important sort, I think. This point is echoed in the work of someone who has put narrativity at the center of theories both of persons and of historical explanation, Paul Ricoeur (1986, 1987, 1992). For Ricoeur, narrative unity is the structure that provides a bridge between the purely descriptive conceptions of the self found in (analytic) theories of mind, identity, and action (where firstperson, phenomenological aspects of selves are crucially omitted, he claims) and prescriptive accounts of agency and character. However, a purely structural (atemporal and ahistorical) account of narratives that focuses solely on their syntactic relationsFwhat Ricoeur calls the ‘‘logicization’’ of narrativeFwill fail, for narrative inevitably depends on readers’ understandings of narrative traditions. Narrativity, on Ricoeur’s view, is not a fixed structure but an ongoing construction of interpretation engaged by a person in communication and interaction with the world (embedded in a particular historical context): ‘‘Selfunderstanding is an interpretation; interpretation of the self, in turn, finds in the narrative, among other signs and symbols, a privileged form of mediation; the latter borrows from history as well as from fiction, making a life story a fictional history or, if one prefers, a historical fiction, interweaving the historiographic style of biographies with the novelistic style of imaginary autobiographies’’ (1992, 114n.).13 Ricoeur utilizes these observations in building a theory of personal identity, one that distinguishes between identity as sameness (idem) and identity as selfhood (ipse) (in a way that parallels Schechtman’s views). What a theory of personal identity must do, he claims, is to establish a basis for the permanence of the person over time. One of the central elements establishing such a basis is character, a set of lasting dispositions by which a person is recognized. But the specification of character must make reference to habits: such habits cannot be seen as fixed rules of behavior mechanically reacting to environments but must be a set of 13 Also, for Ricoeur no purely structural analysis of narrative will suffice, because it is essential to understand the narratives of persons (as well as fictional narratives) in terms of the ‘‘characters’’ or ‘‘roles’’ that are their center. On the other hand, theories of narrative that center wholly on character or role are themselves incomplete without reference to how a character profile becomes a story. In the end, accounts of narrativity must make essential reference to historically embedded traditions of storytelling. See Ricoeur 1992, 119–22.

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dispositions that make sense in a flow of reactions. The model of such a set of dispositions is a narrative character, a principal around which a story is told (Ricoeur 1992, 119–22). In this way, Ricoeur’s theory of personal identity rests on a conception of narrativity. But notice that narrativity here merely refers to the patterns of action and habit that make sense of a person’s character, where ‘‘sense’’ is given by common understandings operative in the person’s social setting. Again, narrativity becomes a placeholder for whatever organizing principle describes the pattern of experience and action produced by the person and interpreted by her with the use of socially produced and embedded rules of meaning. The concept of narrativity, then, can be jettisoned in favor of this more nuanced descriptor and, what is more important, in favor of a detailed analysis of what constitutes socially mediated self-reflection for a typical person. So, what must be directly investigated by theorists of the self are the various dimensions of ‘‘making sense’’ of the particularities of lives. Perhaps ‘‘narrative’’ is merely the name of whatever results from this process. But it is a misleading name, for it strongly suggests that there is an independent condition of linear (or some such) connectedness that experiences must conform to in order to constitute a self. While ‘‘tellability’’ indicates that the sense made of life-event sequences must be shaped by surrounding standards of meaningfulness, the process of interpreting itself will be the activity that personsFand only personsF can undertake. More must be said, then, about the capacity for selfunderstanding and interpretation that lies beneath the purported narrativity of selves’ experiences, leaving behind the view that the result of such reflection must have some particular form or other. If I am correct that ‘‘thematic unity’’ and ‘‘tellability’’ are the most plausible desiderata for narratives, the condition of narrativity will be met whenever a reflecting subject is able to interpret the events, memories, and impressions she experiences and make some sense of these according to socially mediated semantic rules. And so narrativity collapses into the capacity for self-interpretation, where the latter is manifested whenever the conscious, psychologically connected personality can turn her attention to the experiences of which she was the subject and find them meaningful. Hence the critical analysis of narrativity has motivated the view that meaningfulness within an established context is the mark of narrative unity, collapsing the condition of thematic unity into the ‘‘tellability’’ referred to by Leitch and, indirectly, by Ricoeur. What narrativity amounts to, then, is whatever results from the capacity for self-interpretation mediated by socially embedded rules of meaning. Therefore, what unifies a self is the capacity for self-interpretation by way of socially mediated norms. r Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

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‘‘Social mediation’’ here operates at two levels. The first is the use of cognitive structures and semantic rules to formulate the terms in which self-reflection takes place. When an individual reflects on her personal characteristics, actions, memories, and the like, she must use concepts gleaned from the language(s) she speaks and the subtleties of meaning provided by the social world within which that language is developed. Second, the degree to which that self-interpretation is unified or meaningful turns on the degree of understanding achieved in one’s interaction with actual and potential ‘‘interpreters’’ of that account. As I have argued, stories are not set out apart from a community of interpreters; hence the internalized biographies that unify selves are similarly not insulated from such a community. What is required for unified personhood is that the subject of that life be a reflecting subject whose self-interpretations make enough sense of those events that a consistent character can be seen at their center. But what are the constraining conditions of self-interpretative reflexivity necessary for a unified self or personality, beyond what has been said by narrative theorists themselves? First, the process of making sense of our experiences is more flexible than the narrative theorists suggest. Constraints on the ‘‘sense making’’ that is involved in the realization of people’s self-concept are obviously socially relative, but they are also individually relative: dream stories often make perfect narrative sense to their subjects, even if they are boringly disconnected to the rest of us. Also, reflection on the events of a life has a particular phenomenological character, and purported ‘‘experiences’’ that a person cannot make full sense of will be ones from which she is in a strong sense ‘‘alienated.’’ That is, reflection upon them will not issue in the usual affective and intentional responses appropriate to authentic self-reflectionFa sense of internal memory with attendant proprioceptive sensations; feelings of regret, pride, embarrassment, and the like, will be lacking. The events and experiences will also lack certain motivational concomitants of authentic first-person memories, motivations connected with responsibility or regret, for example. They will feel external and foreign. And they will not make sense as part of a collection of other experiences with a common theme (cf. Strawson 1999; for commentary, see Johnstone 1999). Finally, self-interpretation must serve the pragmatic purpose mentioned by Gergen and Gergen and others. While it is important to note the segmented nature of much of self-interpretation (few of us have woven an overarching model of our entire lives), each component of this interpretation must serve the purposes of interacting with, and explaining ourselves to, surrounding others. Providing reasons for actions, explaining judgments and decisions, will utilize self-interpretations in ways that are constrained by norms governing the adequacy of such reasons and explanations. Without a full-blown theory of action, one has to be extremely abstract r Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

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here of course, but the important point is that self-reflective activity serves the additional purpose of explaining actions and decisions and hence is further constrained by norms operative in those settings. A full theory of self-interpretation is of course beyond the scope of this article; when it is developed it will have to make much use of psychological (and social-psychological) theories of the self. But unpacking the narrativity condition in the way I have done should refocus theoretical attention on the process of self-reflective meaning making, rather than on its structure or organization.14 The process of sense making is, as the narrative theorists attest, an essential element of constructing the selfconcept. But there is clearly a multidimensional interplay among a variety of dynamic elements that form parts of this process, and the question of whether such a process is one of retrieval, interpretation, or pure construction is left to be answered by analyses that take up where my criticisms leave off. In this article, however, I hope at least to have moved that analysis in a more fruitful direction.15 Department of Philosophy Penn State University 240 Sparks Building University Park, PA 16802 USA [email protected] References Applebee, A. 1978. The Child’s Concept of Story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barthes, Roland. 1982. ‘‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives.’’ In A Barthes Reader, edited by Susan Sontag, 251–95. New York: Hill and Wang. Bruner, Jerome. 1984. In Search of Mind: Essays in Autobiography. New York: Harper and Row. FFF. 1990. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Cohler, Bertram J. 1982. ‘‘Personal Narrative and Life Course.’’ Life Span Development and Behavior 4:205–41. 14 For an example of work that attempts to flesh out the psychological underpinnings of self-interpretation, see Turner 1996. However, Turner makes much use of the concept of narrativity without unpacking the notion in the manner I here urge. Also, self-interpretation has much to do with memory, and there is much variation in the accuracy as well as the cogency of autobiographical memories. On the accuracy of self-reports, see Neisser 1994, 5– 7; also cf. Hacking 1995, 218. 15 An earlier version of this article was read at the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, Los Angeles, 1998. I am grateful to Nina Rosenstand for comments on that version. I am also grateful to Valerie Gray Hardcastle and Diana T. Meyers for comments on earlier drafts.

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Dennett, Daniel. 1988. ‘‘Why Everyone Is a Novelist.’’ Times Literary Supplement (September 16–22): 1016–22. FFF. 1989. ‘‘The Origins of Selves.’’ Cogito 21:163–73. Flanagan, Owen. 1991. Varieties of Moral Personality. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. FFF. 1996. ‘‘Multiple Identity, Character Transformation, and SelfReclamation.’’ In Self Expressions, 65–87. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freeman, Mark. 1993. Rewriting the Self. New York: Routledge. Frye, Northrop. 1957. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gergen, Kenneth J., and Mary M. Gergen. 1997. ‘‘Narratives of the Self.’’ In Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences, edited by Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, 161–84. Albany: SUNY Press. Greimas, A.-J. 1983. Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method. Translated by Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Veilie. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press. FFF. 1987. ‘‘Elements of a Narrative Grammar.’’ In Twentieth-Century Literary Theory, edited by Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller, 304–28. Albany: SUNY Press. Hacking, Ian. 1995. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kagan, Jerome. 1989. Unstable Ideas: Temperament, Cognition, and Self. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Leitch, Thomas. 1986. What Stories Are: Narrative Theory and Interpretation. University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. FFF. 1997. ‘‘The Virtues, the Unity of Human Life, and the Concept of a Tradition.’’ In Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences, edited by Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, 241–63. Albany: SUNY Press. Neisser, Ulric. 1994. ‘‘Self-Narratives: True and False.’’ In The Remembering, Self, edited by Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush, 1–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prince, Gerald. 1995. ‘‘Narratology.’’ In The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, volume 8, edited by Raman Selden, 110–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative. Volume 1. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. FFF. 1985. Time and Narrative. Volume 2. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. r Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

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FFF. 1986. Time and Narrative. Volume 3. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. FFF. 1992. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ross, Allan O. 1992. The Sense of Self: Research and Theory. New York: Springer. Schafer, Roy. 1981. ‘‘Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue.’’ In On Narrative, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schechtman, Marya. 1996. The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 1999. ‘‘Phenomenology and Agency: Methodological and Theoretical Issues.’’ In Models of the Self. edited by Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Shear, 231–52. Thorverton, U.K.: Academic. Spence, Donald. 1984. Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton. Strawson, Galen. 1999. ‘‘The Self.’’ In Models of the Self, edited by Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Shear, 1–19. Thorverton, U.K.: Academic. Taylor, Charles. 1991. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1977. The Poetics of Prose. Translated by Richard Howard. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Turner, Mark. 1996. The Literary Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.

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