Inquiry, Vol. 48, No. 5, 413–435, October 2005
Narrative, Expression and Mental Substance ANTHONY RUDD St. Olaf College, USA
(Received 27 May 2005)
ABSTRACT This paper starts from the debate between proponents of a neo-Lockean psychological continuity view of personal identity, and defenders of the idea that we are simple mental substances. Each party has valid criticisms of the other; the impasse in the debate is traced to the Lockean assumption that substance is only externally related to its attributes. This suggests the possibility that we could develop a better account of mental substance if we thought of it as having an internal relation to its states. I suggest that we may be able to do this by relying on the notion of expression. In developing this idea I draw heavily on aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophical psychology, while also developing and criticizing Strawson’s account of persons and recent work by Lynne Baker. I conclude by arguing that mental substance, understood in this way, can only be grasped in narrative terms; substantialist and narrative accounts of personal identity, far from being opposed, are mutually supporting and require one another to be coherent.
In this paper I sketch a way of thinking about personal identity and selfhood that aims to avoid both the reductionist or constructivist views of the orthodox neo-Lockean tradition and the traditional Cartesian understanding of mental substance. I do offer a defence of the idea that the self is a substance; but the account of substance that I develop here is very different from the Cartesian one. I will argue that the notion of expression is crucial to an adequate understanding of the self as substance, and that this necessarily involves thinking of personal identity in terms of narrative. So Narrative and Substantialist conceptions of the self should not be thought of as opposed; rather they mutually presuppose one another. Correspondence Address: Anthony Rudd, Department of Philosophy, St. Olaf College, 1520 St. Olaf Avenue, Northfield, MN 55057, USA. Email:
[email protected] 0020-174X Print/ Online/05/050413–23 # 2005 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/00201740500241870
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I. In order to clarify what I am and am not intending to do here, I want to start by explaining four features of the kind of account I am going to offer. Firstly, my approach is a descriptive rather than a theory-building one. That is, I am not trying to develop a theory that involves positing something called ‘‘the Self’’ as the best explanation of some set of data. Rather, I am concerned to make explicit some aspects of our understanding of ourselves and of one another that are, I think, implicit in our ordinary social life. My main inspirations here – both methodologically and substantively – are, on the one hand Wittgenstein, and on the other, aspects of the Phenomenological tradition.1 Secondly (though relatedly) my account is intended to be a non-reductive one. The Self is not something that can be analysed into some more basic components. This does not, as I shall try to show, mean that we can say nothing about it, or that it is something apprehended in a wordless state of pure acquaintance. It does, however, mean that this paper will not issue in any definition or explication of the Self in terms of something that is supposed to be more fundamental. The third point is that I do not intend to argue at any length against alternative views; the problems with them are well-known, and I shall be reviewing some of these problems only as a way of establishing some desiderata for an alternative account, and so as to illuminate some of the pitfalls it needs to avoid. Those who are not dissatisfied with existing Lockean or Cartesian accounts may, I hope, still find something of interest in my attempt to formulate an alternative to them, but I am mainly concerned to address those who do feel the force of the familiar problems with such views. And finally, what I am offering here is a sketch for a way of thinking about these issues that I think is promising, and which opens up some new avenues for exploration. But there is much more to be said about everything I shall be mentioning here. This broad-brush approach obviously has its dangers, but I don’t think that we can do useful work on the details of an account before we have at least outlined a broad framework for our thinking. (Though in the course of doing the detailed work the framework itself may have to be radically altered.) So this paper is intended merely to outline a programme for a better way of thinking about the Self; it makes no claim to be a complete, fully worked out account. II. I want to start by reviewing a familiar stand off in recent discussions of personal identity, between neo-Lockean psychological continuity theorists, and neo-Cartesian mental substance theorists. (I should say that I am assuming here that the notion of the person or self is an essentially psychological one; and am therefore rejecting ‘‘animalist’’ accounts which
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offer, in Eric Olson’s words, a theory of ‘‘personal identity without psychology’’.2) The neo-Lockeans take particular mental states (or, in some cases, temporal person-stages or short-term selves) as primitive; a person can be said to exist if these more basic units can be shown to be associated together in certain ways.3 It is a natural enough consequence of the neoLockean view that personal identity becomes a matter of degree – since psychological connectedness is a matter of degree – and that therefore personal identity could become a matter for conventional decision.4 But while such conventionalism seems plausible enough for cases of nonpersonal identity, such as the Ship of Theseus, we cannot take this line with the strange puzzle-cases so beloved by philosophers of personal identity. As Swinburne in particular has argued, I cannot, from the first-person perspective, take the question ‘‘will this still be me?’’ as having no determinate answer.5 (Nor, I would add, can I so take the question, ‘‘will this still be you?’’, where you are someone I care about.)6 Once we know all the facts about how a ship was built, repaired, de-composed and recomposed, then there is no further fact, over and above all of that, about whether or not it is now the same ship that it originally was. But with a person, even if we knew all the physical and (objectively specified) psychological facts in a case of teleportation or split-brain transplant or whatever, the first-person question ‘‘Would this still be me?’’ does remain. I shan’t say anything more here in defence of this argument; whether or not one accepts it probably does come down to a basic divergence in intuitions at this point. What follows is premised on the assumption that there is something importantly right about the intuitions that Swinburne’s argument appeals to, that the first-person perspective makes the case of personal identity radically different from other cases of identity. So I think Geoffrey Madell is quite right when he complains that the ‘‘relentlessly third-personal approach’’ to personal identity – shared by both animalist and psychological continuity theorists – generates ‘‘solutions which stand no chance at all of working’’, because they are not even able to articulate the terms of the problem as it matters.7 However, something goes badly wrong when theorists such as Swinburne and Madell conclude that personal identity has simply to be taken as a primitive concept, not only irreducible, but incapable of further explication, and quite distinct from any concepts of mental states. For this doesn’t really seem to do justice to the first-person perspective either. By insisting that the question ‘‘who am I?’’ can be wholly divorced from considerations about the continuity of memories and so forth, they turn the self into a sort of extentionless metaphysical point, a ‘‘bare locus’’ of consciousness, which could stay the same however much its mental life changed.8 This view seems very vulnerable to the objection that, if you strip away all that is empirical you are left with nothing. Mark Johnston has argued that on Madell’s view we are left with unanswerable (and essentially Lockean) skeptical problems –
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how do I know that my psychological characteristics aren’t passed from one such bare characterless self to a new one every five minutes?9 Madell thinks Occam’s Razor gives him an adequate reply to this; we have no reason to suppose that such soul-swapping occurs, and it is much simpler to assume that it does not.10 But hasn’t something gone badly wrong if it becomes a mere hypothesis (however plausible) that I am the same self I was before? The bare locus account, then, fails as much as the psychological continuity account to capture what it is we could be concerned about when we ask ‘‘would that still be me?’’ (Or you.) Why should it matter that the same bare locus has survived? What is fundamental to being a person – what I care about when I care about a person (myself or someone else) – is not a bare, abstract locus that could, so far, be anybody, but a distinct personality with his or her own unique character, history, way of being. It seems, then, if we accept this criticism of Madell but remain sympathetic to the Swinburne argument mentioned above, that we are faced with a serious dilemma. We can’t make sense of ourselves without supposing that there is a Self of which our fleeting mental states are all states; but nor can we make any more sense of ourselves by postulating such a Self. The impasse in the debate between ‘‘bare locus’’ and psychological continuity theorists can be traced back to Locke himself. He defines the Self in terms of psychological connectedness (essentially the connection of memory between states across time) and notes that such a succession of conscious states could be imagined to move between different bodies, or for that matter, between different souls. Locke does not deny that there could be (and indeed probably is) an immaterial substance in which our mental states adhere; but it is not in the sameness of that substance that our personal identity consists. (Locke himself therefore accepts the (probable) existence of a ‘‘bare locus’’, but rightly rejects the idea that it could be important for personal identity.) It is worth noting that Locke’s treatment of the soul is only a special case of his account of substance in general as being only externally related to its attributes. For, at least on the standard reading, Locke reduces substance (whether mental or physical) to an unknowable substratum, which somehow supports or underlies the particular qualities, which are all that is given to us in perception. ‘‘[W]e have as clear a perception and notion of immaterial substance as we have of material…For our idea of substance is equally obscure, or none at all, in both; it is but a supposed, I know not what, to support those ideas we call accidents.’’11 That this is less than satisfactory is obvious enough; it is hard to see how substance could matter much on this view of it, and it is hardly surprising that Locke’s empiricist successors ended up rejecting the notion altogether. But by doing so they reduced things to bundles of qualities (and selves to bundles of ideas), and this too seems deeply problematic. So part of what we need for an adequate account of personal identity is something that is arguably needed in metaphysics generally – an account of
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substance that neither reduces it to a bundle of qualities, nor leaves it as a bare substratum. We need an account which recognizes that the mental states which the Lockean tradition takes as primitive – sensations, thoughts, memories, whatever – have no independent ontological standing, but can only be understood as attributes of a substance. (While also recognizing that such a substance must itself be understood as more than just whatever has those attributes.) But in the case of personal identity there is the unique problem that mental states need not only to be understood abstractly as attributes of a substance, but concretely as episodes in the mental life of a person, states which that person can recognize from his/her own perspective as being mine. (As Butler argued against Locke, one cannot define the self in terms of memories, because memories, to be relevant, have to be memories of my doing such and such.)12 One might, then, suppose that we should adopt a two-stage approach; start by giving an adequate account of substance in general, and then work up to explaining how the first-person perspective complicates matters in the case of persons. But I think this would be a mistake. It is, I shall argue, only by concentrating on the firstperson perspective that we can develop a better account of the relation between the Self (considered as a substance) and its particular states. We cannot understand that relation independently, as a first step, prior to understanding the importance of the first person. In the following section I shall try to show this through an examination of P.F. Strawson’s classic account of the concept of a person, and of Lynne Baker’s more recent proposal. (How we should think of the relation between non-personal substances and their attributes remains an important problem; but it is not one that I shall consider further in this paper.)13 III. The notion that the self or person is a substance is one that is often associated with Cartesian dualism.14 Strawson’s account has the merit of showing that this can be avoided by taking a person to be a unitary substance to which both material and psychological (M and P respectively) predicates can be properly attributed. ‘‘The concept of a person is to be understood as the concept of a type of entity such that both predicates ascribing states of consciousness and predicates ascribing corporeal characteristics, a physical situation etc, are equally applicable to an individual entity of that type.’’15 This does fit well with ordinary usage – when I say, e.g. that Jones is overweight and dishonest, I seem to be ascribing these characteristics to one and the same being: Jones. But, although it is a good starting point for an account of personhood, Strawson’s view is only a starting point. A familiar problem with it is that the mere possession of mental attributes does not distinguish persons from sub-personal animals. As Frankfurt has pointed out, what is distinctive
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about personhood is not simply the possession of mental states, or of consciousness in the sense of mere sentience, but self-consciousness, the possession of a first-person perspective, from which I can think of myself as myself, and of my mental states as mine.16 A somewhat similar criticism is developed by Ricoeur: Strawson doesn’t really give any central role in his thinking to the fact that a person is someone who is not merely a thing to which certain states are ascribed, but is him or her self an ascriber – that is, a rational subject.17 This might seem unfair to Strawson, in that his whole argument starts from the fact that we ascribe experiences to ourselves, and aims to show that the condition for the possibility of our so doing is our being able to ascribe experiences to others also.18 However, this only makes it more striking that, when he comes to define personhood, Strawson doesn’t even mention self-consciousness. Ricoeur’s criticism is not that Strawson is simply oblivious to self-ascription, nor does Ricoeur have a quarrel with Strawson’s anti-Cartesian strategy as such (indeed, he describes it as ‘‘masterful’’).19 His problem is that Strawson, with his emphasis on the person as a public object of ascription, doesn’t take enough account of the person as an ascriber, and that this is responsible for the obvious inadequacy of Strawson’s definition of ‘‘person’’ as merely a thing to which such and such properties are ascribed. Now Strawson was more interested in undermining the Cartesian conception of mind, and the other-minds scepticism that it makes possible, than in providing a full analysis of the concept of a person. But if we are concerned to give a satisfactory account of personhood, we need to go beyond Strawson’s minimalist sketch. And it isn’t simply a matter of adding something to an account that is incomplete but adequate as far as it goes, for lacking as it does an explicit focus on self-consciousness, Strawson’s account of the concept of a person is seriously inadequate in at least two respects. Firstly, Strawson cannot properly explain how the mental states ascribed by the P predicates all relate to the subject whose states they are (and thus to one another), for the problem is ultimately the first-person one of how I grasp those states as being mine. (When I attribute such states to you, I am still attributing them as essentially first-person states, that is, as states which you from your first-person perspective grasp as being yours.) Strawson does, to be fair, explicitly reject the ‘‘no ownership’’ view – according to which mental properties are not ascribed to any subject at all, and are only associated through their all being causally linked to a specific body.20 But he does little to indicate how I as a subject relate to the mental properties that both others and I ascribe to me. The second problem has to do with the relation between M and P predicates. While Strawson’s attempt to avoid both materialism and dualism is attractive, it won’t be fully convincing until it can be shown how a single substance could posses such, on the face of it, radically different attributes as those ascribed by M and by P predicates. Ricoeur goes on to note that
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this problem too ultimately arises from Strawson’s lack of interest in the first-person perspective, the perspective from which I can think of my body and my bodily states, as well as my mental states, as being mine. The question of our own body returns to the forefront, no longer simply in terms of our belonging to a single spatiotemporal schema, but in terms of the relation of our body to the objective world of bodies. In a strictly referential problematic, without explicit selfdesignation, there is not actually any problem of the lived body. 21 For Ricoeur, following Marcel and Merleau-Ponty, my subjectivity is itself bodily – I am a ‘‘body-subject’’ – but this embodiedness cannot be adequately grasped in terms of an objective, third-person notion of the physical.22 For Strawson, by contrast, the M predicates that one ascribes to a person are precisely the same sorts of predicates that one also ascribes to inanimate objects.23 But then they seem so radically unlike the P predicates as to leave it wholly mysterious how they could all characterize a unitary being. The problems with Strawson’s account derive from his having submerged the question of the self in a logico-metaphysical framework designed to handle questions of sameness and substance in a quite general way. (And this is true of most of the contemporary philosophers who discuss personal identity.) But as a result, Strawson’s notion of the substance that a person is ends up still looking far too much like the Lockean model of a metaphysical pincushion – the mere logical subject to which the various attributes are ascribed. There is no attempt to provide an intelligible account of the relation between M and P predicates, or between the P predicates themselves; and this is ultimately due to the lack of any serious account of what the person is – beyond simply being that to which the M and P predicates are ascribed. The inadequacies of Strawson’s account, which stem from his failure to depart more radically than he does from a Lockean understanding of substance, can only be remedied by taking more seriously the idea of self-consciousness, of the subject that can ‘‘consider itself as itself’’,24 and therefore reflect on itself as the possessor of the various states and qualities which make up its mental life – and also its life as an embodied being. It is only, then, by taking the first-person perspective as fundamental, that we can start to understand the particular kind of unity that characterizes the Self, that justifies us in thinking of it as a substance rather than a mere bundle of qualities. One might then respond to these problems by modifying Strawson’s account so as to make the concept of a person be that of a substance that possesses a first-person perspective as well as physical characteristics. Something along these lines is in fact attempted by Lynne Baker. Baker tries to retain Strawson’s genuine insights by giving an account of the relation
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between a person and her body that is neither reductive nor dualistic, while improving on Strawson’s account by insisting on the centrality of the first personal perspective.25 ‘‘What marks persons off from everything else in the world…is that a person has a complex mental property: a first-person perspective that enables one to conceive of one’s body and mental states as one’s own.’’26 Having – or at least having the capacity for – a first-person perspective is both necessary and sufficient for being a person. This is a major improvement over Strawson’s account – and indeed over most of the analytic literature on personal identity. But although Baker is sensitive to the first-person relation that we have to our own bodies,27 she does not really think through the question of embodiment from the first-person perspective as I suggested above we must do. Instead, she tries to understand the person-body relationship in terms of a quite general and objective notion of ‘‘constitution’’ which has nothing specifically to do with self-consciousness. On this view, the (human) person is not reducible to the body, but is also not a separate and distinct entity from it. Rather, the person is constituted by her body in the same way that a statue is constituted by a lump of brass or marble, or a $10 bill is constituted by some inked paper. Baker presents it as a virtue of her view that it presents the relation of a person to her body as a special case of a more general relation of Constitution. But it is precisely because of its generality that the notion fails to throw any light on what is specifically puzzling about the person-body relation. Baker herself admits: Consideration of the general nature of constitution can take us only so far in understanding the relation between persons and bodies. For the person/body relation differs from other constitution relations in that a person has an inner aspect…that a statue or other nonpersonal object lacks. This inner aspect is, I believe, the defining characteristic of persons. Its basis…is the first-person perspective…28 Since, on Baker’s own view, this ‘‘inner aspect’’ is essential for personhood, and since there is nothing analogous to it in other cases of Constitution, then it would seem that the person-body relation is in fact fundamentally different from e.g. the statue-marble relation. In which case, I can’t see how ‘‘consideration of the general nature of constitution’’ can really help us to elucidate what is uniquely puzzling about the connection of self-consciousness to a body; especially if that body is conceived of simply as an element of the ‘‘objective order’’. So Baker, like Strawson, cannot fully explain what is unique about personal identity because, despite her recognition of the unique importance of the first-person, she still tries to handle personal identity within a metaphysical framework designed to cope with questions of identity in general. She does say that the issue of the first person makes the problem of personal identity, ‘‘even more intractable than other
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questions of identity, for example, the identity of ships or cats.’’29 But, as that remark itself indicates, she seems to see the difference between the questions as merely one of degree. Baker makes an important distinction between the notion of personhood, with which she is concerned, and the richer notion of selfhood.30 To have a first-person perspective – and thus to be a person – is simply to be capable of asking the question, ‘‘Who am I?’’ To be a Self is to have some kind of answer to that question, ‘‘a coherent and comprehensive story of [one’s] life, of which [one is] the subject.’’31 Though sufficient for a bare sense of personal identity, the first-person perspective, i.e. the ability to think of these experiences as all being mine, is necessary but not sufficient for full selfhood. This is a valuable distinction, but we should be clear that it does not imply that bare personhood is literally one thing, and selfhood another.32 For the first-person perspective is in normal cases that of a Self which is aware of itself as such; only in pathological cases (such as that of the brain-damaged patient that Baker refers to33) is there an ‘‘I without a Self’’, a mere first-person perspective. One can conceptually distinguish between the I and the Self, but an actual distinction exists only in rare and abnormal cases. A Self is not a bare I plus some extra ingredient; a bare I is a drastically diminished Self, and even then, it is characterized precisely by its search for integrity, for Selfhood. To be a person is to be in search of an answer to the question of who one is, and it is only in very exceptional cases that there is no answer already present. (Although, significantly, the extent of the answer, the extent of selfhood, may vary considerably.) It follows, though, that to fully understand even bare personhood involves some understanding of the Selfhood that is its telos. Strawson was right to see the person as both mental and physical; Baker was right to see the first-person perspective as essential for personhood. And my criticisms of them have suggested that it is only from the first-person perspective that we can make sense both of embodiment and of the substantiality of the Self. In the remainder of this paper I want to develop in more detail (though still only sketchily) a model for thinking about selfhood that includes these insights. IV. In the previous section I argued that we can only think of the Self as a substance in terms of its subjectivity, its first-person perspective on itself. In this section I will approach the problem from a slightly different angle – though without losing sight of the central importance of the first-person. I will continue to be guided by the need to avoid both reductionism and the bare locus view. The apparent need to choose between these alternatives derives from Locke’s view of substance as only externally related to its properties, and this suggests that we may make progress by trying to
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articulate a view of the self as a substance which is internally related to its properties. Internal relations are relations that are constitutive of their relata, so on such a model, the properties cannot be thought of as possibly moving, without loss of identity, from substance to substance; nor can the substance be thought of as a characterless locus which might indifferently support any properties. In the remainder of the paper I will try to sketch an account of the Self as internally related to its properties in this way. I want to start by returning to the issue of embodiment. I have referred to the French phenomenological tradition of thought about the ‘‘lived body’’, but I want to develop this theme rather differently, by looking at the way Wittgenstein dealt with the problem of scepticism about Other Minds.34 This, I will argue, not only helps us better understand the person-body relation, but also gives us a model for thinking about the relation of the self to its mental states. To overcome other mind scepticism it was necessary to find a way of thinking about mental states that neither reduced them to behaviour, nor related them to behaviour only in an external causal fashion. (The structural parallel to the problem of the Self should be apparent.) Wittgenstein did this by giving us, not another philosophical theory, but a series of reminders of the ways in which we experience people’s behaviour as expressive of their mental states. So, for instance, pain is not crying, but neither is it a purely inner state that as a matter of contingent causal fact happens to bring about that behavioural effect. There is an internal relation between the pain and the crying – it is a state that finds a natural expression in that behaviour. To respond spontaneously with pity to someone’s crying is to know their inner state as it makes itself manifest to us. The crucial notion here is that of expression. When I recognize that you are amused or upset, this is not – at least, not usually – something that I infer from your laughing or crying; I simply see those states as expressive of your feelings. This should not be confused with any behaviouristic reduction of inner states to outer behaviour. The feelings are not the behaviour. But nor is their relation to the behaviour a merely external causal one. What do psychologists record?– What do they observe? Isn’t it the behaviour of human beings, in particular their utterances? But these are not about behaviour. ‘I noticed that he was out of humour.’ Is this a report about his behaviour or his state of mind?…Both; not side-by-side, but about the one via the other.35 So a person’s subjective states are manifested in the behaviour, gestures etc of the body. But this involves understanding the body not primarily from the objective, third-person perspective of the natural sciences, but from the first (and second) person perspective. I cannot, if I start from the purely third-person, objective, scientific understanding of the body, have any
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reasonable basis for inferring that it is somehow associated with a mind. Once the ‘‘problem of other minds’’ has been posed in those terms, there is no answer to the sceptic. But starting from the second-person stance of ordinary social interaction, of course I see the other person’s body expressing her mind, in gestures, tone of voice, in the blink of an eye. ‘‘Consciousness in another’s face. Look into someone else’s face and see the consciousness in it, and a particular shade of consciousness. You see on it, in it, joy, indifference, interest, torpor and so on. The light in other people’s faces.’’36 I have skated very briefly over some very large issues here. But my main concern here is to suggest that we can take Wittgenstein’s expressive account of our knowledge of other minds as a model for considering the relation of the Self to the particular mental states that constitute it. It seems natural, given my stress on the importance of the first-person perspective so far, to pose the question: How do I relate to the particular mental states that make up my mental life? What basis do I have for thinking of myself as an enduring self, and not merely as a bundle of mental states – or perhaps a series of short-term selves?37 Despite this, I want to start instead with the problem of how we recognise other people as Selves. This approach will allow us to develop more straightforwardly the parallels with Wittgenstein’s account of other minds, but I am not only adopting it for methodological convenience. Focusing purely on my knowledge of myself can lead the discussion of personal identity dangerously astray. The problem of Selfknowledge with which I am concerned is not one to be addressed in solipsistic isolation; it includes the knowledge of other Selves, and it is as well to have this aspect made prominent. However, I should make it clear at the outset that this knowledge of other Selves is not something to be gained by the sort of ‘‘relentlessly third person’’ approach that Madell rightly condemned. It is second-person knowledge (I-Thou, rather than I-It, if you like) – recognition of the other as someone who has a unique first-person perspective of his or her own. The first-person remains crucial. And I will be returning to the issue of how I know myself (my Self) later in this section. If we start by trying to understand the relation between someone else’s mental states and the Self whose states they all are, the relation to Wittgenstein’s work should be apparent. He concentrates for the most part on cases in which we experience a particular mental state – a sensation or emotion – expressed in someone’s behaviour. However, we do not experience another’s body as expressing distinct mental states independently from one another. We (normally, at least) experience the behaviour of another human body as expressing a continuous and reasonably coherent mental life, in which particular sensations and feelings are merely episodes. Someone’s mental states express themselves in the patterns of her behaviour; but the pattern of those mental states is expressive of the person she is – of her Self. We do, I think, in daily life, normally perceive a person’s particular
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actions, feelings and thoughts in this way as expressive of a coherent character, a particular way of being which is neither reducible to nor yet wholly distinct from, those manifestations. This idea can be further elaborated by noting that these expressive relations are hierarchically structured. An emotion, such as fear, is normally expressed in the way someone behaves, talks, looks. But emotions themselves can be expressive of character traits, dispositions. Anyone may feel fear if the circumstances seem frightening enough, but if I regularly feel fear in circumstances that really are not very fearful, then this pattern of recurrent emotion itself is serving to express my longer-term disposition of timidity.38 Again, we have an internal relation; the disposition is not simply reducible to the emotions; but nor is it something wholly distinct from them and only related to them in some external, causal way. To recognise the existence of a disposition involves assessing a pattern of emotions and actions over time, and someone else may easily be better at thus understanding my dispositions than I am. There is, then, a hierarchy of expression: my behaviour expresses my fear, but that fear itself expresses my timidity.39 This expressive, hierachical model can, I think, suggest a way we can think about the Self and its relation to particular mental states. The Self, I would suggest, is at the top of the hierarchy. Just as behaviour can express emotions, and those emotions express dispositions, so too dispositions, long-term character traits, express the Self, whose dispositions they all are. I would suggest that this is how we do in fact experience one another, and indeed, ourselves. We do not think of the Self as a ‘‘bare locus’’ which might indifferently sustain all or any kinds of mental state, but nor do we think of people as simply Humean or Parfitean agglomerations of more or less closely connected psychological atoms. When we get to know people, we get to know their dispositions, their characteristic ways of being. And what we expect to find is a certain coherence and consistency amongst those traits. They form a pattern, in and through which we recognise the person whose traits they are. The Self is not some isolatable thing, independent of all those characteristics; it is what is made manifest in the common style or manner of being in the world that they express. The biographer Richard Holmes puts it this way: The biographer sees every act as part of a constantly unfolding pattern…Above all, he sees repetition and the emergence of significant behaviour over an entire lifetime. As a result, I have become convinced of the integrity of human character. Even a man’s failings, sudden lapses, contradictory reactions, hidden caprices, seem in the long run to fall within a pattern of character. One could say, paradoxically, that people even act out of character in a certain way.40 As Holmes makes clear, one can maintain a belief in the ‘‘integrity of character’’ without supposing that everyone acts in a rigidly predictable
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fashion. The patterns of character may be very subtle, it may not be immediately obvious how certain ways of behaving do cohere. But it is also worth noting that when we do find apparently large inconsistencies in people’s dispositions and actions, we tend to be puzzled, disturbed; we want to see what is really going on. We look then for some commonality that we have missed, some way in which a common style is still being manifested, though in seemingly very different ways, due to the difference of the circumstances. If we cannot find it, we may conclude that the person in question is simply weak-willed and easily influenced, and therefore tends to take on the mood of whatever group he or she is currently in. But this itself is a distinctive type of personality. If the differences in someone’s way of being in different times and circumstances are too great, we may find ourselves talking about ‘‘Multiple Personality’’. If there is no discernable coherence at all, we would recognize some more drastic form of mental breakdown. But in many cases of mental disturbance, it is still the coherence and continuity of character that is striking – it may indeed be exaggerated to an artificial rigidity. I have talked about patterns of dispositions as what manifest the Self. But of course, they are themselves manifested in particular patterns of feeling that are in turn manifested in patterns of action. And so we may find a single action somehow crystallising, making apparent, someone’s character. A particular act may show with a perhaps previously unavailable clarity the style or individual flavour that one can now see as having been present in a whole series of previous actions. I have deliberately started by examining how we recognize other people as Selves. However, it is still important to turn to how one recognises oneself as a Self. This has, of course, been a major historical crux. Hume attempted to locate the Self by an act of introspection and, having of course failed, announced it to be a fiction. But one may not even be able to locate an emotion reliably by an act of introspection, and certainly not a disposition. And the particular character of my Self as expressed in its various dispositions and traits may be something I am painfully blind to. (Selfknowledge is not easy.) In this sense, the Self is not something directly introspectable. Nevertheless, there is still something right in the idea that I am in some way acquainted with my Self; it is not something merely inferred by me. This is in part to do with the minimal sense of personal identity established by the continuance of this particular first-person perspective. Hume couldn’t even have attempted to search among his impressions and ideas for the Self, unless he could stand back from them and recognize them as all being his. As Kant pointed out, the capacity to reflect on my ideas presupposes, if not a Self, at least an I that can take all these ideas as mine and which therefore cannot be identified with any of the particular ideas.41 Hume had to be more than just a bundle of ideas in order to be able to consider whether he was more than just such a bundle.
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Kant and (as we saw above) Baker were right to distinguish between the minimum conditions necessary for personal identity and the much richer idea of a Self. But we need to go further than the cautious Kantian notion of the ‘‘I think’’ that must be able to accompany all my representations (though we still need to stop short of the Cartesian idea of the substantial Self standing transparent to its inner gaze). For I am more to myself than simply a neutral impersonal centre of consciousness to which various passing states are all brought. Deluded as I might be about my character traits, I am still the subject experiencing the emotions, sensations and thoughts which I have, and experiencing them not just as impersonal psychological contents being brought to a common centre, but as my states, cohering together in familiar ways, constituting together the state of mind in which I greet the world. We are back to Butler’s point: the notion of the Self is prior to that of its constituent states. They are modalities or expressions of the Self’s way of being and are experienced as such by the Self. I may fail to recognize my vanity; but I am still the one who experiences the world around me vainly, in terms of whose vanity the world appears to me as it does. And we can now better understand the priority of the Self to its constituent states. Particular mental states (thoughts, emotions) arise only because I am committed to certain projects, to certain relationships, and have certain values. Without that background, without the Self whose projects, relationships and values these all are, there simply could not be any particular states such as distress or triumph, because there would (logically) be nothing to be distressed or triumphant about. But equally, there is no ‘‘pure’’ Self which makes Sartrean self-defining commitments from an initial neutral stance, and only thus becomes subject to the emotions that they make possible. The Self is ‘‘always already’’ committed to some pattern of actions and values, and thus cannot be separated from the traits and feelings which express (and in expressing, at least partially constitute) it. This expressive model of Selfhood is, I would claim, a way to think about the Self as a substance; a way that avoids both the ‘‘bare locus’’ and the reductive view. The Self is neither reducible to the states, mental and physical, that express it, nor wholly distinct from them. The relation is, rather, an internal one. V. This expressive model of Selfhood has the merit of taking the first-person perspective seriously, avoiding both reductionism and the bare locus view. But as sketched so far, the model is still quite vague. How, more concretely, does it enable us to give an account of our identity across time? In answering this question, I want to show that on the expressive view the Self can only be understood through narrative. But I also want to argue that narrative
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models of selfhood are not an alternative to substantialist ones; the kind of expressive substantialism I am exploring here is itself a necessary presupposition for an adequate narrative account of personal identity. Let us return to the impasse from which we started, but now thinking of it in more explicitly temporal terms. Reductionist philosophers like Hume and Parfit stress the constantly changing, variable nature of our psychological life. Against them, philosophers such as Butler and Madell argue that such changes must be regarded as episodes in the life of a simple substance which remains essentially unchanging. The former approach seems to disintegrate the self, the latter to reduce it to an empty, characterless point. But both approaches agree in taking change to be a threat to selfhood. The paradigm for identity is thought of as unchanging self-presence. Against this, Ricoeur has insisted on the importance of distinguishing, … two major meanings of ‘‘identity’’…depending on whether one understands by ‘‘identical’’ the equivalent of the Latin ipse or idem….[For] identity in the sense of idem…permanence in time constitutes the highest order, to which will be opposed that which differs, in the sense of changing or variable. Our assertion throughout will be that identity in the sense of ipse implies no assertion concerning some unchanging core of the personality. And this will be true, even when selfhood adds its own peculiar modalities of identity…42 For Ricoeur, then, the dilemma posed by Locke and Butler can be resolved by developing an understanding of the self as a properly temporal being; one whose identity isn’t compromised by change. So he, like MacIntyre and others, has argued that we need to think of the identity of the self across time in terms of narrative.43 This narrative approach may seem to involve a stepping aside from the traditional debate about personal identity, a refusal to get involved with the old conundrums about body-swaps and memory transfers. Marya Schechtman has argued that the narrative model is best seen as a response to a question – ‘‘The Characterization Problem’’ – which is quite different from, though frequently confused with, the ‘‘Reidentification Problem’’ – with which she takes most of the analytic debate to be really concerned.44 I don’t, however, think these problems can be distinguished so sharply; the narrative account is not simply an answer to a different question to those pursued in the traditional debate.45 For, as I shall argue in this section, the narrative conception is not only compatible with the idea of the self as a substance, which I have just outlined; it both requires that notion and is required by it. The substantiality of the Self – the constancy of character and personality – cannot be understood in isolation from the development of a plot in which that character is involved. But neither can such a plot make sense without presupposing something like the expressive model of the substantial Self.
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The expressive model of the self-as-substance developed above is a temporal model. The expressive relation, in all the cases I considered above, is one that involves an unfolding in time. It is a pattern of expressive behaviour, not simply a single gesture, that makes manifest a state of mind. A single instance of fear – even inappropriate fear – does not establish a timid disposition. (This does not contradict my claim above that a single incident may sometimes be experienced as revelatory of a whole set of characteristics; it does that precisely by enabling us to see a whole previous pattern of activity in a new light. If it did not do that, it would simply be puzzling, a freak occurrence – though also a stimulus for us to search for a wider context in which it would make sense.) As with the notion of the Self, the personality expresses itself in and through a pattern of feelings, dispositions, thoughts and actions. We may see a great constancy and consistency in someone’s behaviour; all these actions, thoughts and feelings are so clearly expressive of the person that he or she is. But it is only in a temporally extended pattern that one can see constancy. If the Self is essentially what expresses itself in and through someone’s mental and physical states, then it is essentially something that unfolds in time. And this unfolding is something that can only be captured by narrative. For a coherent selfhood is not expressed by a random sequence of disjointed events, but by an intelligible pattern of events – the intelligibility being precisely what narrative, as opposed to mere chronicle, captures. It is only through narrative that the Self can be seen as a substance in the expressive sense outlined above. It is worth noting that this expressive unfolding of the Self should not be thought of on the model of a Leibnizian monad simply making manifest what was already implicitly contained within itself all along. The monad, for Leibniz, is pre-programmed with all that it will do or be – all that is contained in its complete concept, which from God’s perspective, establishes what it is. But the narrative history of a Self is not simply the working out of the potentialities present within that Self; it is in large measure a series of responses to the challenges that the social and physical environment throw at it. This is why no one’s narrative is self-contained, why a biographer has to narrate aspects of many lives in telling the story of any one life. And, for the same reason, the Self cannot be thought of as simply free and unconstrained in developing its narrative. Leibnizian determinism and radical libertarianism alike fail to recognize that Selfhood must be understood as essentially involving relations to what is outside the Self. The Self, as conceived on the expressive model above, can only be understood in narrative form. But the dependence runs two ways. A narrative involving persons presupposes that those persons have a certain coherence; a story, if it is to be a story, needs to be about persons whose interactions are comprehensible in terms of the selves that they are. A narrative involves a certain kind of intelligibility and an evaluative stance
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that presuppose the reality of a more-than-Humean Self; one that can stand back from the flux of events and take a stance towards it. This can be seen by considering a number of fundamental features of narrative. (It should be noted, though, that the concept of narrative unity is a very rich and complex one and that I am making no attempt at even a comprehensive sketch of what it involves here.)46 (1)
(2)
A narrative has a certain kind of intelligibility; it is not just a record of a jumble of facts, even if they are linked by (contingent) causal chains. How one person responds to another in a dramatic narrative may be unexpected, but it has to be appropriate, or humanly intelligible. To make sense of what someone is doing now is to situate it against a background of past actions and decisions, and of goals or objectives that he or she is aiming to bring about in the future. To understand even a simple action is to provide a temporal context. This is partly a matter of causality – I am doing6now because I decided to do so earlier – but it is also a matter of intelligibility. To explain why you made that decision you need to explain the goal that the action was meant to achieve, and why you wanted to achieve that goal. And that will involve reference to your beliefs, desires, values, and then further questions can be raised as to why you have those beliefs, etc. Ultimately, if we ask about the intelligibility of a person’s action, we are led back to the demand to find that person intelligible. A narrative of a person’s actions will only make sense if we can see how these actions – and emotions, relationships, etc. – can all be taken to express a consistent character. Someone’s narrative will typically revolve around certain projects, patterns of intelligible activity pursued over time. And these projects are themselves framed by larger projects (writing a chapter, writing a book, being an author.) It is these projects that give a sense of meaning and purpose to people’s lives – I am doing this now for the sake of my wider project. However, to pursue a project across time involves the development of certain virtues. Different projects will require specific virtues of their own, but to pursue any project at all such dispositions as courage, tenacity, patience, self-control, practical rationality and fairness will be needed. Virtues are not passing moods; they are stable dispositions, and thus give a stability and constancy to a person’s character. A virtuous person cannot be understood simply as an agglomeration of dispositions, but must be seen as a coherent personality structured by those virtues and their interrelation (hence the ‘‘unity of the virtues’’.) Furthermore, the projects we pursue are typically social. (e.g. a marriage, the raising of children, friendships, a career, political activism, the pursuit of science and scholarship; team sports.) The standard metaphysical options examined at the start of
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(4)
A. Rudd this paper tend to ignore the social setting of selfhood. But my sense of who I am is inescapably bound up with the sense of what others can legitimately expect of me – and, perhaps, with resentment at illegitimate expectations. But a self which can be relied on by others has to be a self possessed of a certain coherence and constancy. Narration involves evaluation – especially in narrating my own history. A narration, even if not explicitly ‘‘moral’’, is a narration of success or failure, of rise or decline. Projects are chosen as being worthy, meaningful, or they are rejected – or recognized in disillusionment – as not so being. To leave out the evaluative element would be to reduce a narrative to an unintelligible mass of factual detail, with no basis for making the judgments of relevance necessary for an organized narrative.47 And to consider the growth of the virtues or vices that are necessarily connected with the pursuit of projects is, of course, itself an evaluative matter. But such evaluation is necessarily the work of a Self that can bring together different experiences and consider them in the light of principles that it sees itself as trying to live by. Evaluation presupposes an evaluator; a self-conscious being, one who has a perspective beyond the particular incidents of his or her life and which makes possible such evaluation of them. Not only can we look back and tell stories – about ourselves or about others – we also live our lives forwards in narrative mode. That is, as I act I do so with some grasp, explicitly or implicitly, of who I am, why I am acting as I do, what I want to bring about in the future and why my past life has made it the case that I am trying to bring that about now. I only understand what I am trying to achieve now in terms of my continuing self-narrative. And this too is essentially evaluative; to understand myself in this way is to think of the things I am doing as worthwhile (or as degraded), as changing things for the better (or worse). Implicit evaluations are always being made, even by those who pride themselves on not doing so. So to live a narrative in this way is to be an evaluator and, as I noted above, this requires as a necessary condition self-consciousness – the first-person perspective that Baker discusses. But it requires more than just that; it requires a grasp of one’s past as establishing a (relatively) coherent trajectory for one’s future, and a capacity to judge and to try to change that trajectory in the light of one’s ambitions and ideals.
VI. I want to conclude by considering two objections that may be made to the view that I have sketched. Firstly: In living my narrative, I am
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fashioning my own life, trying to become a certain person. In this sense Selfhood can be regarded as an ideal; to be a coherently unified Self, the subject of a well-ordered narrative, is something towards which I am striving. It is not something that is simply given at the outset, and the degree of psychological continuity and integrity in people’s lives may vary considerably – as, indeed, may the desire for such unity. This may lead us to suppose, contrary to what I have been urging here, that the Self exits (if at all) only as a goal to be achieved, perhaps as a mere regulative ideal; not in any case as a given substance which we simply and unproblematically are. But such a view is paradoxical; how can there be an ethical project of becoming a Self unless there is already a Self to take on that project? Too radically constructivist an account of the Self is, I think, ultimately incoherent; for if I am to assess the degree of unity in my life and decide to strive towards increasing (or even – and here, again, paradoxically – decreasing) that unity, I must already be in some degree a unified Self. Selfhood regarded as a task presupposes an existing Self to take on that task. The second objection involves a certain scepticism as to whether narrative can really arrive at the truth about a person’s life. This line of argument may start by pointing out that our narratives are not constructed once and for all. As new events occur the significance of past ones alters. My story is constantly being re-written. (This continuing re-evaluation also goes on in reading a novel, where our estimation of the significance of earlier episodes is changed in the light of later ones. The difference is that the future course of the story told in the novel already exists, as yet unread and – at least in a traditional novel – provides some degree of closure.) Different people can and do tell very different stories about the same person’s actions. And one can suddenly come to see someone’s – perhaps one’s own – behaviour in a radically new light, one which then shows up the whole pattern of events to that point in a new way. Furthermore, the construction of narratives is subject to self-deception. We are constantly tempted to tell stories about our lives that make them seem nobler, more impressive, more successful than they really are.48 These considerations have led some thinkers to a suspicion that narratives inevitably falsify, by imposing a pattern on events that are not intrinsically patterned. That we need to be alert for falsifications of narrative is certainly correct. And even apart from self-deception, there is the simple fact that our memories are finite and that our narratives – still unfolding as we tell them – cannot be brought to a closure that guarantees that we have correctly grasped the significance even of the events we do clearly remember. So, as Marcel notes, ‘‘Probably…it is impossible (the impossibility being implied in the very notion of narration) for me to tell the story of my life just as I have lived it.’’49 But to go beyond these points and claim that narrative necessarily falsifies runs into the same problems that beset epistemological claims that the
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conceptualization of our experience necessarily involves falsification. We have to ask: ‘‘falsifies what?’’ In the epistemological case the traditional answer is, the sensory given. But we can give no account of what that is without describing it, using concepts, and so defiling its supposed preconceptual purity. Similarly, we can only justify the claim that a particular narrative falsifies by giving a better narrative. One can’t simply point to a pure array of events, for the only sense we can make of an event is as an episode in a narrative;50 and what even counts as an event will alter as the narrative alters.51 This does not mean that there is no external constraint on the stories that we tell. In epistemology, the rejection of the Myth of the Given should not lead us to a radical idealism or pragmatism, but simply to the recognition that we cannot factor out our conceptualizations and interpretations from the impingements on us of external reality.52 Similarly, the impress of the facts, the ‘‘real events’’ makes itself felt as we try to construct our narratives, but those facts cannot be set out as they are in themselves as a standard against which we can compare the narratives. To recognize that our narratives are constrained by the impress of reality means recognizing the constraint of factors external to the Self in telling stories about the Self. But it also means that those stories are constrained by the nature of the Self. This is why we should avoid the sort of radical narrativism that would make the Self nothing more than a construction of narrative.53 As I have argued, my access to the reality of the Self – to myself or to another – is only through the way that Self expresses itself, and that this can only be grasped in narrative terms. But the Self is not thereby reduced to its expressions. An epistemological recognition that our access to reality is always a mediated one should not be confused with an ontological nihilism which would deny that there is a reality beyond our constructions. This Kantian point holds quite generally, but it is important to recognize its application to self-knowledge. Indeed, the position I have put forward in this paper should now be recognizable as a Kantian one in a quite precise sense. Kant argued that we cannot know ourselves as we are in ourselves, but only as we can be manifest to ourselves in the form of ‘‘inner sense’’ – i.e. time. This is an insight easily distorted, as in the interpretation that Kant is supposing the existence of two Selves – noumenal and phenomenal. But for Kant quite generally there are not ‘‘Two Worlds’’. In knowing phenomena I am knowing noumena – but I am doing so under the aspect of their appearance to me.54 So for Kant I know my own Self under the aspect of time. My suggestion here has been that narrative is the mode by which the Self can appear to itself as a temporal being – it is the way that time is ‘‘schematized’’ as personal time. My Self is not a mere figment of the stories I tell about myself, but it is only through narrative that I have the partial and limited access that I do to who I am.55
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Notes 1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6. 7.
8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
13.
14. 15. 16. 17.
Taking that broadly so as to include thinkers such as Gabriel Marcel, who did not think of himself specifically as a Phenomenologist, and Paul Ricoeur, who has developed Phenomenology in a distinctively hermeneutical direction. This is the sub-title of Olson’s book, The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). In fact it would be more accurate to say that Olson offers a theory of our identity which isn’t really about personal identity at all. See e.g. S. Shoemaker’s contributions to S. Shoemaker and R. Swinburne, Personal Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), Pt 3; H. Noonan, Personal Identity (London: Routledge, 1991). See e.g. R. Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981), Part 1; Shoemaker in Shoemaker and Swinburne, Personal Identity (op cit), pp. 115–121. See Swinburne in Shoemaker and Swinburne, Personal Identity, pp. 17–20 and pp. 133– 35; also Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed, 1997), Ch 9. So although it is the first-person perspective that is crucial, I can be concerned (taking a second-person approach) about the persistence of your first-person perspective. G. Madell, ‘‘Personal identity and the idea of a human being’’, in Human Beings, D. Cockburn (ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 127–142, at p. 127. Things don’t seem to have improved very much since he wrote that. See Madell, The Identity of the Self (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981). See also Swinburne’s contributions to Shoemaker and Swinburne, Personal Identity (op cit). M. Johnston, ‘‘Human beings’’, in Journal of Philosophy, 84.2, 1987, pp. 59–83. G. Madell, ‘‘Personal identity and the idea of a human being’’, pp. 136–8. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk 2, Ch 23, sec 15. See J. Butler, ‘‘Of personal identity’’, in Personal Identity, D. Parry (ed.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, pp. 99–105. The standard neo-Lockean reply, relying on the notion of q-memories (see e.g. Parfit, Reasons and Persons, pp. 219–23) is effectively criticized by McDowell; see his ‘‘Reductionism and the third person’’ in J. McDowell, Mind, Value and Reality (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 359–382, at pp. 370–77. Though see M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, C. Smith (trans.) London: Routledge, 1962, Part 2, Ch 3, for a fascinating discussion of substance which takes something like the expressive understanding of the Self which I shall be developing here as a model for thinking about substance in general. For some discussion of this see A. Rudd, Expressing the World: Skepticism, Wittgenstein and Heidegger (Chicago and La Salle IL: Open Court, 2003), pp. 192–201. As it is by Swinburne; see Shoemaker and Swinburne, Personal Identity, pp. 23–34. P.F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959), p. 101. See H. Frankfurt, ‘‘Freedom of the will and the concept of a person’’, in Journal of Philosophy, 68.1, 1971, pp. 5–20. ‘‘The person therefore remains on the side of the things about which we speak rather than on the side of the speakers themselves, who designate themselves in speaking….By placing its main emphasis not on the who of the one speaking, but on the what of the particulars about which one speaks, including persons, the entire analysis of the person as a basic particular is placed on the public level of locating things in relation to the spatiotemporal schema that contains it.’’ P. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, K. Blamey (trans), Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 32.
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18. 19. 20. 21. 22.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this journal for raising this criticism. Oneself as Another, p. 31. See Individuals, pp. 95–103. Oneself as Another, p. 34. See G. Marcel, ‘‘Incarnate being’’ in his Creative Fidelity, R. Rosthal (trans), New York: Farrar, Straus and Co, 1964, pp. 11–37, and The Mystery of Being, Vol 1, G.S. Fraser (trans) Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1978, esp Chs. 5 and 6; M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (op cit) esp. Part 1. Strawson, Individuals, pp. 89, 104. The phrase is Locke’s – see the Essay, Bk. II, Ch 27, sec 9 – and suggests a better insight than his ‘‘official’’ doctrine was able to articulate. By putting it this way, I don’t mean to suggest that Baker arrived at her own position by explicitly starting from, and attempting to remedy, the weaknesses of Strawson’s. L.R. Baker, Persons and Bodies: a Constitution View (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 4. See Ibid, pp. 92–5; also her ‘‘Materialism with a human face’’, in K. Corcoran (ed) Soul, Body and Survival: Essays on the Metaphysics of Human Persons (Ithica, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 159–180, at p. 166. But she does not directly engage with the issues raised in the Phenomenological literature on the lived body that I have alluded to here. Baker, Persons and Bodies, p. 21. Ibid, p. 146. See also p. 131. ‘‘The idea of a self is much richer than the idea of a first-person perspective.’’ (Baker, Persons and Bodies, p. 87) I haven’t so far tried to distinguish between the notions of ‘‘self’’ and ‘‘person’’, as the terms are not used with consistently different senses in most of the literature. In the remainder of the paper, though, I will follow Baker’s usage, in order to make the important distinction that she introduces here. Persons and Bodies, p. 88. I am not, incidentally, suggesting that Baker thinks this. Persons and Bodies, p. 88. The case Baker refers to is that written up by A.R. Luria in his The Man With a Shattered World (New York: Basic Books, 1972). I can only do so very briefly here. For a detailed discussion of other mind scepticism and Wittgenstein’s expressive response to it, see A. Rudd, Expressing the World: Skepticism, Wittgenstein and Heidegger (Op cit) Part Two. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M. Anscombe (trans.) Oxford: Blackwell, 1958, II, p. 179. L. Wittgenstein, Zettel, G.E.M. Anscombe (trans.) Oxford: Blackwell, 1981, #220. For this suggestion, see G. Strawson, ‘‘The self’’, in Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4.5–6, 1997, pp. 405–28. For an interesting account which distinguishes emotions from dispositions on the one hand and ‘‘emotional episodes’’ on the other, see P. Goldie, The Emotions: a Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), pp. 12–16. A fuller account would make more detailed distinctions than are needed for present purposes; see Rudd, Expressing the World: Skepticism, Wittgenstein and Heidegger (op cit), pp. 131–37. Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), p. 174. ‘‘It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations, for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me.’’ (Critique of Pure Reason, N. Kemp Smith (trans.) London: Macmillan, 1933, B 131–2.
23. 24. 25. 26. 27.
28. 29. 30.
31. 32. 33. 34.
35. 36. 37. 38.
39.
40. 41.
Narrative, Expression and Mental Substance 42. 43.
44.
45.
46. 47. 48. 49. 50.
51.
52. 53.
54. 55.
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Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (op cit) p. 2. See A. MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981) esp. Ch 15; R. Wollheim, The Thread of Life (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984); M. Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), esp. Ch 5. See Schechtman (op cit) esp. Chs 1 and 4. The problem according to Schechtman is that analytic philosophers have not made this distinction and have therefore expected that an answer to the Reidentification question will solve problems that only really arise when we are concerned with the Characterization question. One point to note is that both narrative and Lockean accounts are concerned with psychological continuity and thus both give a crucial role to memory. The difference is that, on the narrative model, to remember my past is to posses the ability to tell my own story. It is not to bring out some atomistic – and ultimately impersonal – mental snapshots that I have filed away, as it is for Parfit (See, e.g. D. Parfit, Reasons and Persons (op cit) pp. 220–21, which makes quite clear his understanding of memories as impersonal psychological atoms, which we can coherently imagine simply being transferred between different consciousnesses. And this impersonal understanding is of course required of neo-Lockean theorists if they are to escape Butler’s charge of circularity.) For more detail see the works mentioned in note #43, above. See C. Talyor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Part One. Or in some cases, stories that make them seem more degraded, wretched, unsuccessful than they really are. G. Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Vol 1 (Op cit) p. 155. See MacIntyre, After Virtue, pp. 194–6, where he argues that ‘‘intelligible action’’ is a more fundamental concept that ‘‘action;’’ a ‘‘mere’’ action is a failed candidate for the status of intelligible action. And intelligibility is provided precisely by narrative. This is true at least in the human sphere, and I suspect it is also true of events involving inanimate objects. However, that claim would raise issues that are not strictly relevant to my argument here. See J. McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994). As is suggested by some of the more outre´ forms of post-modernism; also, in a different idiom (though not in all respects as different as one might have supposed) by Dennett; see his Consciousness Explained (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), Ch 13. See H. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, revised and expanded edition, 2004). Earlier drafts of this paper have been given to colloquia at the University of Hertfordshire (UK) in October 2003 and at St. Olaf College, Minnesota in October 2004. I am grateful to all the participants in these discussions for their very helpful comments, and for subsequent valuable discussions with or comments from, Dan Hutto, John Lippitt, Brendan Lavour, Kim Atkins, Jeanine Grenberg, Charles Talliaferro, Fred Stoutland and Lynne Baker.
