Schechtman's The Constitution of Selves can be seen (and not uncharitably) as an attempt to work out the details of two provocative paragraphs of After Virtue, where MacIntyre briefly comments on the relation between his account of the self as essentially narrative in character and psychological accounts of identity from Locke onwards (AV, 216-217). I start from her later version, however, because an examination of her struggle to make a narrative notion of the self cohere with an unelaborated but commonsensical realist worldview will reveal it as necessary for narrativists to embrace a more radical ontological context (which will in turn lead us back to and finally beyond MacIntyre).
Schechtman summarizes her original view as follows:
I call the narrative view I endorse the “narrative self-constitution view.” Its most basic claim is that we constitute ourselves as persons by forming a narrative self-conception according to which we experience and organize our lives. This self-conception and its operation are largely implicit and automatic. As we are socialized into human culture, we are taught to operate with a
background conception of ourselves as continuing individuals, leading the lives of persons. What this means more specifically is that we experience the present in the context of a larger life-narrative. In order to have a narrative self-conception in the relevant sense, the experienced past and anticipated future must condition the character and significance of present experiences and
actions. When I have a self-constituting narrative, what happens to me is not interpreted as an isolated incident, but as part of an ongoing story. (NUP, 162)
What we are depends on the sense in which the question is asked, for Schechtman. Our status as biological entities precedes any narrative activity on our part. So much is encapsulated in the verb “constitute” and the claim that we are “socialized into” such self-constituting abilities. We are things of one sort, but we make ourselves into
something else through the use of narrative. Speaking with the utmost care, however, it might be more accurate to say that there are things (human animals) that make
themselves into us: “we” aren't strictly there prior to this self-constitution. Personhood is honorific for Schechtman, and it is achieved only as a result of this activity. We might wonder if Schechtman's account is thus a fair candidate for Vice's search for a
distinctively literal claim about the self's narrativity (as we'll see, pressure from
objections has actually led Schechtman to a more literal view). Schechtman's account, in maintaining a distinction between what we are prior and posterior to narrative
constitution appears to satisfy Goldie's call to hold apart narrative and narrated as well.
And with Goldie (2003B, 301), she maintains that our narratives might remain implicit—
one of the major claims guiding her account is that our narratives might not be explicit, though she requires that they must in principle be capable of being made so: “The articulation constraint requires that a person be able to articulate her narrative locally when appropriate” (NUP, 163).4 Thus it's not clear that she can be taken, any more than Goldie, to sanction the notion that our lives are narratives. Rather her claim seems to be that we are biological things that achieve the higher order of personhood through
narrating our lives. But this remains dependent on our prior and more basic status as biological things.
Of course, without saying more, it would look crazy not to affirm our status as
4 See CS, 114-119 for the full details.
biological beings as basic. What else might we be made of if not cells, matter? Words?
Stories? Endlessly slipping chains of signifiers?5 Hence Goldie's worry that the strong narrative claim is a postmodern exaggeration. But exactly the attempt to avoid this exaggeration and remain within an unquestioned and commonsensical ontological context opens Schechtman to an apparently crippling objection. If we maintain a distinction between narrative and narrated, and my personhood, though formed through autobiographical narration, is ultimately reliant on my more basic status as a biological being, why shouldn't we think that the narratives I tell about myself are false? If my life is not a narrative, but only something that can be narrated, shouldn't we worry that bridging that gap in representation will be falsifying? Schechtman attempts to answer this objection with her second constraint. “The reality constraint requires that a person's narrative conform to what we are generally accepted to know about the basic character of reality and about the nature of persons,” she writes (NUP, 163).6 My self-narrative will be false if I think I'm 500 years old, or that I simultaneously exist in two places, for example. My self-narrative is constrained in its specifics by material evidence as well. If my self-constituting autobiographical story says I grew up in Paris, but I'm confronted by endless photographic evidence and witnesses' accounts that I grew up in St. Louis, then my own story is revealed to be a delusion.
Schechtman's reality constraint is too narrow and answers only specific problems of falsification, however. It can't answer the overarching worry that our lives are often, usually, or perhaps even always and necessarily too episodic and unstructured to be described accurately by narrative at all. That is, the reality constraint can only answer the worry that my story falsifies some particular fact or facts about my life. It can't answer the worry that narrative, categorically, fails to represent the way our lives actually are. In
5 See Roth 2012, where I suggest, through a discussion of Paul de Man's reading of Rousseau's Confessions, that this language is more useful than it might appear.
6 See CS, 119-130 for the full details.
the terms that the recent literature has developed, narrative is generally regarded to be form-finding, revealing of coherence, unity, and patterns.7 But—it's said in the next breath—our lives aren't (especially necessarily) well-formed in these ways. This should, I think, be thought of as the master objection against all narrative views of the self. If narrative is characterized essentially by its unifying, form-finding function, then it will always misrepresent the randomness and banality of most of our day-to-day activities.8 And any view which holds narrative and narrated apart and admits something below narrative as basic will fall to it, because an act of representation will always be
incomplete, adequate only to some purposes or in some context. Any representational view will thus retreat into metaphor. If my or any other narrative of my life is but one possible account of more basic, prior, actual, and merely described events, then it might be good enough within a particular context that there's no reason to call it false. But it can't be that such a narrative just is my life itself. Consider the competing accounts that can be given of a domestic argument. What “gets things right” from the various
standpoints of a police officer taking a report, a psychiatrist treating one of the people involved, and a confidant of the other will vary widely, each leaving out details relevant to the others. Unless one challenges the conception of narrative as a re-presentation, whatever it is that's there prior won't be exhausted, and thus it will seemingly be falsified.
At first blush, the quantitative way I've articulated this objection will seem
misguided. We talk of stories as true (or at least not false) even though they don't include every detail which they possibly could. The term “verisimilitude” designates the illusion of a complete world behind a limited description. So while it's unanswerable what Anna Karenina ate for breakfast on her thirteenth birthday, and, knowing that it's unanswerable, we all understand that it's a silly question, Tolstoy's novel (often thought of as among the
7 By Strawson's definition (AN, 441). I've translated it away from his more psychological handling.
8 See Christman, 702-703.
most realistic) succeeds in creating the illusion of a world where Anna would in fact have eaten something that morning. Literary critics have long understood that “naturalistic” or
“realistic” fiction relies, perhaps even more heavily than other forms, on all kinds of artifice and convention.9 And of course Anna Karenina represents a fictional world, one which doesn't exist prior to the text. But a work of history, or even an anecdotal relating of an event that occurred earlier during the course of one's day, can achieve or fail to achieve verisimilitude. Such narrative representations of actual events don't exhaustively detail their objects either, however.
So isn't it misguided to require any supposed narrative of my life to exhaust its events? If my life is a narrative, if that narrative has ontological status, I don't think it is.
If my life is a narrative, if this is its most basic status, then it seemingly must contain the details of all of my activities. Otherwise, what other account would? How could any higher-order account spin these details out of nowhere? Vice's charge of categorical error is perhaps looking better and better as we try to cash out in literal terms the metaphor that lives are stories. I'll return to these worries at the end of this chapter, but I won't answer them fully until my conclusion, where I interpret Heidegger's conception of Dasein as world-disclosing as akin to the selective telling of a story. Only if I can eventually
answer the master objection will I have succeeded in motivating, even as a possibility, the literal acceptance that our lives are narratives. Now, however, we should turn to the specific objections that Schechtman sees as crippling to her original view.
Schechtman's narrative self-constitution view says essentially that we are formed by the true stories that we do (or at least could) tell about ourselves. As I've noted, the referential character of “true” (apparently correspondence, given no further gloss) and
“about” in such a definition should in and of itself lead us to ask whether Schechtman
9 For one particularly relevant take on this, see David Foster Wallace's comments in Lipsky, 36f. I'll return to these issues in chapter seven.
doesn't suppose that we are really something more basic below such storytelling. This supposition becomes explicit in her more recent work, where she exposes her original view to scrutiny. Emerging somewhat indirectly from the work of Eric Olson,10 Schechtman worries how, if our lives and selves are constituted by the stories we tell about ourselves, they can encompass our entire lives. Specifically, how can periods at the margins of life when we are incapable of autobiographical storytelling—in utero
existence and infancy on the one side, possibly a vegetative state on the other—be part of our lives? If we accept the basic dichotomy in theories of identity between psychological (which would include narrative views) and biological/material/corporeal ones, then surely a biological theory will here succeed in encapsulating an entire life, whereas a
psychological theory will counterintuitively suggest that a person exists only for a certain phase of high functioning in the life of each human animal, a phase which necessarily won't include its beginning and possibly not its end.11 Rather, the narrative view suggests that a person comes into existence only as certain capacities are developed, that it goes out of existence when these capacities are lost, and that the gaining and losing of such capacities needn't correspond with birth and death (in fact almost certainly won't).
Schechtman avoids a number of easy responses. She wants, for example, to be able to sanction the “truism that each of us was once a fetus who grew into an infant, and eventually an adult” (2009, 13). I'm not sure why we should think that such ordinary
10 For Schechtman, the objection is driven by certain metaphysical arguments Olson makes based on (in his own words) “the assumption that each concrete particular, each thing, belongs essentially to exactly one kind,” and that this “substance concept” of each thing is what it cannot cease to be without ceasing completely to be what it is. Olson then argues that “person” based on psychological continuity is not a viable candidate for our substance concept, while “human animal” based on biological continuity is. I see no reason why we should accept the metaphysical assumption that each thing has a substance concept, and Olson himself presents it as only an assumption necessary to limit the argumentative terrain (1997, 28). I thus try to articulate the objection in a more straightforward and compelling way.
Schechtman seems to want to make the same move, though she does so only after having taken the metaphysical arguments seriously (2009, 18). Quotes from this lecture should be taken provisionally as they remain unpublished. I'm primarily interested here in what Schechtman is struggling with, not her conclusions. Her forthcoming book Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life will, I expect, include her worked-out views on these matters.
11 Even setting aside possible vegetative states, this is necessarily a problem at life's end if we take seriously Heidegger's worries about the hermeneutic problems of grasping one's own death and thus one's life as a whole. See SZ, §46ff and my discussion in part two.
language is doing any metaphysical heavy lifting, however. Perhaps we do indeed want to say that this is true, but surely what we really want to say, especially in a philosophical context, is that such a claim requires more discussion. Is it more accurate to say that I was a fetus who grew into a person or to say that a fetus grew into me? The specific grammar of various formulations encodes competing assumptions, none of which we need blindly sanction. Is “me” really the broader category that includes as sub-parts
“fetus” and “adult”? Likewise, the claim that a person ceases to exist when suffering a stroke and falling into a permanent vegetative state might indeed be problematic if it's said to entail that “a new entity, a vegetative human, pops into existence” (2009, 13). But isn't that a rather strange, overly rhetorical way of skewing the debate? If Olson takes the weight of his objections to be based on detailed metaphysical arguments and frequently moves to reject our intuitions (which lead most of us to associate identity with
psychological rather than biological continuity in memory transplant thought experiments, for example12), then we shouldn't allow him to use ordinary language intuitions to frame the debate.13 Finally, Schechtman seems to reject the rebuttal that we might simply be talking about different things here. Olson argues that “psychological theorists conflate ethical and metaphysical questions” and that questions of personhood are ethical, while questions of our identity as things, human animals, are metaphysical (2009, 12). Schechtman might respond that this is exactly right, but that the latter isn't what interests her (or, indeed, anyone other than metaphysicians).14 I note this potential
12 As made famous by Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book 2, Chapter 27, Section 15; Bernard Williams in “The Self and the Future”; and Derek Parfit in “Personal Identity.” All three are collected in Perry, ed.
13 The last entailment (of a new entity popping into existence) in particular can't even be motivated by ordinary language intuitions, but rather only given his questionable metaphysical assumptions.
14 In the terms of The Constitution of Selves, it looks like this is the response that Schechtman should make. There she distinguishes between two questions relating to personal identity: the “reidentification question,” or “what makes a person at time t2 the same as a person at t1” and the “characterization question,” or “which beliefs, values, desires, and other psychological features make someone the person she is” (CS, 1-3). The importance of the reidentification question has been, she claims, vastly
overstated. Interestingly, Olson seems to have moved in the same direction. His more recent book begins from the distinction (which he credits to Judith Jarvis Thomson) between personal identity and personal ontology and the thought that the latter has been woefully neglected (2007, v).
response here because I think it is close to the move we'll see MacIntyre make.
According to one description, that of ourselves as complicated social beings, as people, our identities are narrative in form. According to another description, that of ourselves as biological things, narrative is irrelevant. Schechtman's refusal of this rebuttal is
important. Radical claims about the narrativity of the self are easier to make if they're restricted to a fairly high-order ethical context where, given the non-systematicity of contemporary philosophical practice, ontological entailments are rarely spelled out. But I suspect that most of us don't think, philosophically, that our ethical identities and
metaphysical ones are wholly unrelated.15 At the very least, we probably hope that these two realms of philosophical inquiry can be made to cohere. So philosophers like Vice and Strawson are right to ask (if often only implicitly) how narrativists might bridge such a gap. They're wrong to think narrativists can't (even obviously can't, according to Vice).
Schechtman notes the general form of the objection:
Our brute existence is a metaphysical fact for Olson, and our literal persistence rests on relations quite distinct from whatever story is told about us, and is presupposed in any story that is told. In this respect, Olson's view holds that the narrative of a life is an overlay and imposition on a more basic continuation, and so the most fundamental form of a human life is not narrative. (2009, 16)
I've suggested that Schechtman herself originally held such a view, at least implicitly.
Indeed this seems to be why she takes the challenge raised by Olson so seriously. She attempts to respond not then in anything like the terms I've suggested above, but instead by accepting the basic contours of such a commonsensical (and materialist) realism. This has the effect of transforming her view into a literal one.
If one accepts the general charge that a gap between biological reality and narrative selfhood means narrativity is of secondary importance, then one must push to close this gap such that one can assert the reality of our narrative selves. This is just what Schechtman seeks to do. First, she extends self-constituting narrative activity from each
15 Schechtman comes close to this claim in distinguishing between “selves” and “persons” while insisting that they can't be kept ultimately apart (NUP, 175-178).
self to others. While I as an infant and I as comatose can't narrate (and thus constitute) my self, other people—family, friends, and so forth—can narrate my life during these stretches, connecting them to the normal case where I provide my own story. This raises an obvious objection, however. The notion that our self-narratives are real is more palatable if each of us has exactly one. Schechtman's reality constraint was necessary, in part, for this reason: one of the things that we know about persons in general is
presumably that the principle of non-contradiction holds, so I can't without delusion think myself both heroic and cowardly in the same sense at the same time. The very fact that Schechtman's original view was one of self-constitution now looks overwhelmingly important. We might ask why my own story about myself has authority versus the stories other people tell about me in determining what I in fact am. But by granting ownership to each of us over our own stories, the original view at least had a structural mechanism
presumably that the principle of non-contradiction holds, so I can't without delusion think myself both heroic and cowardly in the same sense at the same time. The very fact that Schechtman's original view was one of self-constitution now looks overwhelmingly important. We might ask why my own story about myself has authority versus the stories other people tell about me in determining what I in fact am. But by granting ownership to each of us over our own stories, the original view at least had a structural mechanism