What is self-narrative?

ABSTRACT

In recent years, philosophers of mind have explored the relationship between lived embodied experiences and self-narratives in bringing about a sense of self. This relationship has been vividly debated, with no consensus in the field. While some have argued that lived embodied experiences influence, but are not influenced by, self-narratives, others have maintained that lived embodied experiences and self-narratives influence each other across time. However, the very concept of ‘self-narrative’ and its scope of application has remained underspecified. The debate, I will argue, can only be resolved if we arrive at a better theoretical understanding of self-narrative. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual account of the notion of ‘self-narrative’ and a descriptive account of its scope of application. It will then be shown how these accounts can pave the way towards resolving the debate on the experience-narrative nexus.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-narrative
• narrative practices
• sense of self
• lived embodied experience

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to Jelle Bruineberg and Markus Pantsar for their very helpful feedback on an earlier version of this work and for their invaluable personal support. I would also like to thank Antonios Kaldas, Karin Kukkonen, Richard Menary, Katsunori Miyahara, Francesco Fanti Rovetta, and two anonymous reviewers for their very constructive comments, which helped me improve this paper. I also feel indebted to the audiences of the Cognition Academy at the Max Planck School of Cognition in Berlin in December 2021 and the Philosophy Departmental Seminar at the Australian National University in Canberra in October 2022 for helpful discussions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In what follows, self-narrative denotes a class of self-referential narrative configurations. Talk about a self-narrative or about self-narratives refers to a particular case or a collection of particular cases that are members of this class.

2 In the philosophy of narrative, it is widely assumed that narratives represent events (see, e.g. Lamarque 2004). However, self-narratives often represent experiences. I will use the notion of ‘represented event’, rather than ‘represented experience’ under the assumption that the latter is a special case of the former.

3 Dings (2019), for example, directly quotes Mackenzie’s (2014) working definition and endorses it without providing any clarificatory remarks or specifications.

4 Carroll (2010) applies Mackie’s (1980) work on INUS conditions to the narrative representation of causal connections (for a discussion, see Goldie 2012, 15–17). ‘An INUS condition’, Carroll specifies in an endnote, ‘is an insufficient but necessary part of a condition that itself is unnecessary but sufficient for an effect event’ (Carroll 2010, 409; italics in original).

5 There might be additional characteristics that are important for capturing the self-referentiality of self-narratives. For current purposes, however, I will focus on the relationship between the narrating ‘I’ and the narrated ‘I’ and the role of episodic memories for the narrative representation of lived embodied experiences.

6 Note that Smith and Watson’s (2010) account is concerned with the self-referentiality of self life writings, i.e. textual self-narrative (see Section 3.4). However, I assume that their considerations generalise to all kinds of self-narrative. For a similar distinction between I-as-narrator and I-as-narrated, see Hutto and Gallagher (2017).

7 Ultimately, it is reasonable to assume that the dependence relation between self-narrative and episodic memories is often bidirectional. It seems uncontroversial that the particular configuration of self-narratives is dependent upon episodic memories. More recently, empirically informed philosophical research has suggested that acts of self-narration can and often do influence episodic memories in important ways (Fabry 2023; Hutto 2017; Hutto and Myin 2017, chapter 9). For the ease of exposition, however, I will focus on the dependence of self-narratives on episodic memories.

8 The distinction between episodic and semantic memory may be gradual. For example, memories of events in the personal past can come to be remembered in an semantic, rather than episodic fashion, thereby losing their quasi-experiential quality (Michaelian and Sutton 2017).

9 This assumption is fully consistent with the possibility that episodic future thoughts, as conceptualised by Szpunar (2010) and others, can also contribute to self-referential narratives. In other words, while I assume that many component parts of self-narratives are retrospective in character, it is reasonable to assume that other component parts might be prospective in that they engage with future-oriented imaginings of lived embodied experiences. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.

10 Note that Schechtman (1996) does not clearly distinguish between the concepts of ‘personal identity’ and the ‘self’, as well as their extension. This shortcoming is acknowledged in subsequent work (Schechtman 2007).

11 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

12 It should be noted that spontaneous narratives can also unfold in phone conversations or in the context of online meetings using digital communication technologies (e.g. Skype, Zoom). However, a careful analysis of the commonalities and differences of face-to-face, phone, and digitally mediated conversations is beyond the scope of this paper.

13 It is reasonable to assume that textual self-narratives can also be communicated in other mediated forms, e.g. in letters, e-mails, or online blog entries. However, for current purposes, I will restrict my considerations to autobiography and memoir.

14 There are some literary texts that negotiate the distinction between autobiography and memoir on the one hand and fictional narratives on the other hand, i.e. cases of autofiction (Iversen 2020; Srikanth 2019). However, for current purposes, I will restrict my considerations to clear-cut cases of texts that can be classified as autobiography, memoir, or a combination thereof.

15 As indicated above, I allow for the possibility that structured, self-referential representations in other media, including non-linguistic and hybrid media, can also qualify as self-narrative in this sense. Like the kinds of self-narrative described in this section, non-linguistic and hybrid mediated representations would need to be described as social-communicative forms of self-referential engagement, not as products of some individually and internally realised thought processes or organising principles. However, it will be a task for future research to describe these phenomena and to compare them to spontaneous conversational and textual self-narrative.

16 I borrow the distinction between a permissive option and a restrictive option from Saarinen (2020), who introduces this distinction to explore the scope of application of the notion of ‘affective scaffolding’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number DE210100115].