Do It for the Plot: Making Sense of the Narrative Self

Abstract: The idea that the self is somehow narrative in form has been expressed in multiple academic disciplines and throughout popular culture.  It has also been widely disparaged.  Supporters argue that having a self-narrative is necessary for agency, autonomy, and full-blown personhood.  Detractors argue that narrative self-conceptions are epistemically suspect and morally harmful.  Unsurprisingly, there is some truth on both sides.  Narrative approaches to the self take many forms, and arguments about the viability of such approaches often talk past one another.  In this talk I argue that the standard objections to narrative conceptions of self assume a particularly weak version of the view.  Using insights from cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology I outline an alternative version according to which we constitute ourselves as mature human selves by developing a self-narrative within socio-cultural constraints.  While this alternative avoids most of the specific criticisms raised against narrative views, it also reveals an issue of genuine concern which I think underlies them.  To avoid the epistemic worries about self-narrative, this account gives socio-cultural norms and schemas an important role in constraining the narratives that make us who we are.  This makes us vulnerable to oppression and other moral harms.  I see this not as a defect of the view, however, but as an accurate description of the situation social beings like us find themselves in.  The solution, I argue, is not to reject narrative approaches to the self, but to address the objectionable social structures directly – something we are able to do precisely because we are self-narrators.