Narrativity, Self, and Self-Representation

Abstract

In the December 2004 issue of Ratio, Galen Strawson published an important essay in which he mounted a groundbreaking attack against what has become virtu ally the standard view of how we construe our lives: the identity thesis, which insists that our identity is a function of the story that we construct about our selves. Specifically, he forcefully challenges both the descriptive and normative as pects of the thesis, the judgment, on the one hand, that, in Oliver Sacks's words, of us constructs and lives a narrative (105), and the judgment, on the other, that, as Marya Schechtman puts it, we ought to construct our lives narratively, that, indeed, we must do so to achieve full personhood (119). The overall argument of Strawson's piece divides into two major sections, each of which has two parts: (1) a defense of what he calls an Episodic approach to self-experience, in which the self, considered as self, is a now phenomenon disconnected from the past and the future, and an attack against what he calls the prevailing Diachronie approach to self experience, in which the self, considered as a self, is understood to persist in time from the past into the future; and (2) a defense of a non-Narrative form of self-repre sentation and an attack against the dominance of the Narrative form of self-represen tation. The aim of Strawson's case at large is to reconfigure the terms and the conditions of the discussion of the relations obtaining between the self and its repre sentation. In my view, one cannot read this piece without being impressed by its icon oclastic turn, by its temerity in facing down the almost universal endorsement of the identity thesis, and by its unflinching insistence that the Episodic/non Narrative approach to self-representation has equal standing with the Diachronie/ Narrative approach, that in point of fact it just might be, primus inter pares.