An exquisite Oliver Sacks essay summarizes current approaches to the problem of consciousness and the emerging consensus that it represents the melding of a “collection of moments”, in both a personal and a physiological sense, into an illusion of continuity. —The New York Review of Books
Related? What has been described as the ‘narrativist orthodoxy’, that the self is constructed out of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, is disputed by philosopher Galen Strawson in a review of preeminent cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner’s Making Stories.
“Is the narrativity view a profound and universal insight into the human condition? It’s a partial truth at best, true enough for some, completely false for others. There is a deep divide in our species. On one side, the narrators: those who are indeed intensely narrative, self-storying, Homeric, in their sense of life and self, whether they look to the past or the future. On the other side, the non-narrators: those who live life in a fundamentally non-storytelling fashion, who may have little sense of, or interest in, their own history, nor any wish to give their life a certain narrative shape. In between lies the great continuum of mixed cases.” —Guardian.UK
He suspects that only ‘narrative types’ believe in the ‘narrativist orthodoxy. As a psychotherapist (although also, I concede, obviously a narrative type), I doubt it. The premise of the work I do every day depends on helping people reshape the stories they tell about themselves and in turn the notion that ‘narrative truth’ is different than ‘historical truth’ about one’s life (if, in fact, one can ascertain what the ‘historical truth’ is, which I profoundly doubt). Strawson has a distorted notion of ‘the narrativity view’, characterizing it as “the ethical-psychological hypothesis that we are, and ought to be, constantly engaged in making a tale out of ourselves and our lives.” But the idea that our identity is a product of the stories we tell about who we are does not demand constant or conscious engagement in the process! Even those who have no interest in their history or in giving their lives a certain narrative shape are bound by the stories they tell to constitute themselves; only they are not conscious of it, of the contingent nature of their beliefs about who they are, as the ‘narrators’ are. If Strawson claims that this is not so, he will have to mount a more far-reaching challenge to the notion of the unconscious itself, which he has not done. Even if Freud was wrong about the nature of the dynamics that underlies unconscious process, the discovery of the unconscious is arguably what has made self-reflection possible and is the basis for all self-reflective efforts to reshape onself. There are several frames of reference — the Buddhist, the orthdox behaviorist, and the neurocentric — in which self-consciousness is either an illusion or an epiphenomenon, but except for radical adherents of such paradigms, ‘narrators’ and ‘non-narrators’ alike have a remarkably similar commonsense notion of the ‘self’ at the core of their identity.
It becomes clear late in the essay why Strawson is afraid of the unconscious. He seems profoundly alarmed at the prospect that the truth about one’s life may inevitably be relative, as this concluding passage from the essay shows:
It is well known that telling and retelling one’s past leads to changes, smoothings, enhancements, shifts away from the facts; and recent research has shown that this is not just a human foible but a neurophysiological inevitability. Every conscious recall brings an alteration, and the implication is plain: the more you recall, retell, narrate yourself, the further you risk moving away from accurate self-understanding, from the truth of your being. Sartre is wrong to say that storying oneself is a universal trait, but he’s right that it is extremely common, and he is surely right, contrary to the tide of current opinion in the humanities, that the less you do it the better.
He has little to offer in the face of this profound alarm except unreasoned faith that there must be a non-narrative truth about our lives if we only we will refrain from departing from that truth by reshaping it. You would think that a philosopher would have greater tolerance for a notion such as the impossibility of objectivity, and something more reasoned to offer in the face of such a threat.
