From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Tue Mar 09 2004 - 21:24:51 MST
Talking about self and identity, I happened to read this review recently.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1118942,00.html
Tales of the unexpected
The idea of the self as something wholly constructed out of the narratives we create about our lives has become a staple across the humanities. But it's utter nonsense, says Galen Strawson, considering Making Stories by Jerome Bruner
<snip>
According to the distinguished psychologist and psychiatrist Jerry Bruner, "self is a perpetually rewritten story". We are all constantly engaged in "self-making narrative" and "in the end we become the autobiographical narratives by which we 'tell about' our lives".
The clinical neurologist Oliver Sacks agrees: each of us "constructs and lives a 'narrative'... this narrative is us, our identities". To have an identity as a person, says the philosopher Marya Schechtman, is "to have a narrative self-conception... to experience the events in one's life as interpreted through one's sense of one's own life story". Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Paul Ricoeur, Dan Dennett and many others swell the vast hymn of assent. Sartre puts it like this: "A man is always a teller of stories, he lives surrounded by his own stories and those of other people, he sees everything that happens to him in terms of these stories and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it."
We live in narrative, then. We are defined, constituted, by our narratives of ourselves. This isn't just the familiar, shifty claim that "the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates" (in the words of the psychoanalyst and author Thomas Szasz). The further claim is that we create or invent the self specifically by "writing" and "storying" it. This idea has come to dominate vast regions of the humanities and human sciences - in psychology, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, political theory, literary studies, religious studies and psychotherapy.
<snip>
[rhinoceros]
Then the reviewer wonders if any of this is true and rejects the idea, mostly by brushing it aside as (a) not true and (b) undesirable whenever true, and he concludes:
<snip>
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.
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