The Tacitly Situated Self: From Narration to Sedimentation and Projection

Abstract

Recent analytic-philosophical works in the field of situated cognition have proposed to conceptualize the self as deeply entwined with the environment, and even as constituted by it. A common move has been to characterize the self in narrative terms, and then to argue that the narrative self is partly constituted by narratives about the past that are scaffolded (shaped and maintained) by, or distributed over, a variety of objects that can rekindle episodic memories. While we are sympathetic to these approaches, here we propose a different strategy to situate the self—one which can be seen as complementing the narrative one, and which draws from concepts and ideas central to the phenomenological-existentialist tradition. We suggest, first, that the self has a sense of its past not just via narratives and episodic memories, but in virtue of being embodied and thus, importantly, sedimented (in other words, it has, or rather is, a body memory). Embodiment and sedimentation, in turn, always necessarily imply an environment or a situation, entailing that the self is also inherently situated. Second, we discuss the future-oriented dimension of selfhood, and argue that we understand ourselves as projected into the future, again not necessarily only narratively and reflectively, but also tacitly, in a bodily and inherently situated way.