Towards a constitutive account of implicit narrativity

Fleur Jongepier

# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Abstract The standard reply to the critique that narrative theories of the self are eitherchauvinistic or trivial is to “go implicit”. Implicit narratives, it is argued, are necessaryfor diachronically structured self-experience (barring triviality), but do not require thatsuch narratives should be wholly articulable life stories (barring chauvinism). In thispaper I argue that the standard approach, which puts forward a phenomenologicalconception of implicit narratives, is ultimately unable to get out of the clutches of thedilemma. In its place, I offer an alternative approach that does avoid the dilemma, byconstruing implicit narrativity as an enabling condition for experiences, rather than assomething that is itself present in experience. According to this constitutive account, thecoherence and intelligibility of our experiences is due to the fact that they are anchoredin a larger, diachronic context. This context, I argue, takes a fundamentally embodiedand narrative dimension.

Keywords Narrativity . Embodiment . Self-consciousness . Subjectivity

1 Introduction

The current debate on the narrative nature of selves is primarily engaged withfinding an adequate way to answer a dilemma, presented in most explicit form byGalen Strawson (2004). The dilemma is this. Either the requirement that we havenarrative selves is too strong, or else it is too weak, i.e., the thesis is trivially true.The first horn of the dilemma, which I will refer to as the critique of chauvinism,holds that narrative claims about selves are really only contingently true of somehuman beings, and narrative theorists have mistakenly taken the nature of theirown mental lives as universally true of everyone. The validity of claims like “wemust see our lives in story” (Taylor 1989, 51), or that people who live non-narrative lives “are not persons” (Schechtman 1996, 101), are called into question.Claims like these, it is argued, are needlessly chauvinistic: they rule out alternativeconceptions of personhood, discriminate against those with different forms of self-

Phenom Cogn SciDOI 10.1007/s11097-014-9368-9

F. Jongepier (*)Radboud University Nijmegen, Postbus 9103, 6500 HD Nijmegen, Netherlandse-mail: f.jongepier@ftr.ru.nl

experience and disrespect non-narrative orientations toward the Good (e.g.Buddhism).1 Some people—psychologically healthy people, that is—cannot ‘con-nect’ to or empathize with who they once were at all, and experience their lives assequences of relatively unrelated events. For instance, in a recent interview withRolling Stone, an interviewer asks Bob Dylan about some event that took place inthe sixties. Bob Dylan responds by saying, “when you ask your questions you’reasking them to a person who’s long dead. You’re asking them to a person thatdoesn’t exist.”2 Bob Dylan, in other words, does not seem to think he is the kindof extended, diachronic self that narrativists would take him to be; he is an‘Episodic’ kind of person (Strawson 2004, 430). According to Strawson:

It’s just not true that there is only one good way for human beings to experiencetheir being in time. There are deeply non-Narrative people and there are goodways to live that are deeply non-Narrative (Strawson 1999, 429).

Thus, anti-narrativists argue that narrative accounts of the self are misleading(Lippitt 2007, 43), incomplete and chauvinistic (Plantikow 2008) and potentiallydangerous (Lamarque 2007). These critiques are all brought together in Strawson’sclaim that narrative accounts of the self are just plain false (Strawson 2004).

The second horn of the dilemma—the critique of triviality—arises once thenarrativists starts to tackle the first critique, namely, by working towards more minimal,and thus less chauvinistic, accounts of the self. On revised narrative accounts, the ideais that having a narrative self does not require consciously plotting one’s life story, oreven to think that one exists for long periods of time (compare Bob Dylan’s case). Itmerely requires having an “implicit narrative”. The problem with implicit narratives,Strawson explains, is this: if “making coffee is a narrative that involves Narrativity,because you have to think ahead, do things in the right order, and so on, and thateveryday life involves many such narratives, then I take it the claim is trivial”(Strawson 2004, 439). 3 This worry has also been articulated by others, such asChristman and Lippitt, who claim, respectively, that “the condition of narrativity forthe unity of selves, persons, and personalities is either implausible or otiose”(Christman 2004, 697) and that for the weaker narrative views, “the threat of emptinesslooms large” (Lippitt 2007, 58). The dilemma is thus that any substantial narrativethesis will beg the question against those who do not think their lives or selves areunified or coherent, while any version that doesn’t, turns out ‘otiose’ or trivially true.

The central aim of this paper is to resist the widespread assumption that if narrativistshave anything substantial to say about the nature of selves, then they would have toprovide an account of what Strawson calls the ‘psychological narrativity thesis’, whichhe describes as “a straightforwardly empirical, descriptive thesis about the way ordinaryhuman beings actually experience their lives” (2004, 428). He makes it explicit that it is

1 One might add utilitarianism as well. See e.g. Derek Parfit, responding to John Rawls, claiming that “aperson's life is less deeply integrated than most of us assume” (Parfit 1984, 335).2 www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bob-dylan-i-was-transfigured-in-the-sixties-20120918, last accessedMarch 21st 2014.3 Strawson uses the capital letter to “to denote a specifically psychological property or outlook” (Strawson2004, 428). As will become clear, I will argue that it is precisely the fascination for Narrativity with a capital‘N’ that has steered the debate in the wrong direction.

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“this phenomenon of experiencing oneself as a self that concerns me” (2004, 429,emphases added).

In contrast, I want to suggest that even if the narrative approach towards theempirical, descriptive question of how we think and experience ourselves as selves isfalse, then a non-phenomenological approach towards the question of whether the selfis narrative, is still available. This alternative conception concerns a constitutive thesisconcerning the coherence and intelligibility of our experiences, which requires takinginto account our lives as embodied human beings.

The structure of the paper is as follows. In the first section, I describe thestandard implicit account of narrativity that aims to answer Strawson’s dilemma,and conclude that the account suffers from serious problems that seem to beintrinsic to the approach. In section two, I develop an alternative conception ofimplicit narrativity by building on a broadly neo-Kantian account of embodi-ment as a necessary condition for the intelligibility and coherence of experi-ence. In the third section, I develop the constitutive account further by claimingthat person’s narrative biography or history likewise forms a condition for theintelligibility of many of our experiences. In the fourth and final section Irespond to recent worries raised by Richard Menary (2008) and Diana Meyers(2014) who warn against construing the dimension of lived embodiment ashaving an (implicit) narrative structure.

2 Implicit narrativity 1.0

The challenge raised by the critique of chauvinism is that narrativists must finda way to grant the idea that some people do not see their lives as an unfoldingstory, or who have no sense of themselves as narrators or protagonists, or evenfail to identify themselves as the same self over longer periods of time, whilstholding onto the idea that the ‘self’ is ‘narrative’. The standard way ofanswering this challenge is to “go implicit” and to approach the relation wehave to our lives as diachronic beings in terms of an implicit, lived—ratherthan an explicit, and told—narrative (see e.g. Schechtman 2007; Rudd 2012;Davenport 2012; Stokes 2010). Anthony Rudd for instance claims that “normalhuman agents do have such a sense of themselves, though it may be in largemeasure implicit and unarticulated. Thus my sense of who I am includes asense (however shadowy and implicit) of the whole of my past life” (Rudd2012, p. 190, see also p. 196).

To rule out triviality, it is claimed that implicit narratives are not just possiblereconstructions of experience, but genuinely felt states. Implicit narratives, the ideagoes, mark themselves in the experiential lives of persons (whether in theirthoughts, their conscious experiences, or their general ‘mode of being’). PatrickStokes, for instance, develops “a phenomenal account of what it is to experienceco-identity with our former selves” (2010, 133). Rudd, on his turn, makes explicitthat, “what I am concerned with is Phenomenology—how we experience our-selves” (Rudd 2012, 198). John Davenport similarly casts his implicit narrativeaccount in phenomenological terms: “my status as a temporally continuing, self-aware intentional actor involves a narrative sense (however inchoate) of my entire

Towards a constitutive account of implicit narrativity

practical identity and the social relations with which it is bound up” (Davenport2012, 42).4

The phenomenological conception of implicit narrativity is not unproblematic. First,it remains mysterious how it is possible to have occurrent or synchronic experiences ofone’s diachronic self. My experiential life is currently made up of the perceptualexperience of pigeons on the windowpane, the noise of students in the hallway, andthe sensation of cold fingertips. But, echoing Hume, I do not find, amongst all theseexperiences, a diachronic experience of the whole of my past life, not even of ashadowy kind. On closer inspection, it is not clear what is meant by the commonphrase of having a sense of narrative self or “sense of oneself as a persisting individual”(Schechtman 1996, 159), other than as a metaphorical way of speaking. Of course, ifsomeone were to ask me whether I existed 5 years ago, I would answer positively. Butthis counterfactual reply should not be mistaken for a phenomenological reality that Iam reporting on.

Perhaps, one might say, the notion implicit narrativity is meant to explain the sensein which all of our experiences and thoughts contain something like a “sense ofmineness” (see e.g. Zahavi 2005; Gallagher and Zahavi 2008; Metzinger 2004).According to Metzinger, it concerns “the phenomenal experience of certainty aboutone’s own existence: I do exist, because I feel myself.” (Metzinger 2004, 292). Zahavisimilarly claims that the quality of mineness involves “the fact that the experiences arecharacterized by first-personal givenness. That is, the experience is given (at leasttacitly) as my experience, as an experience I am undergoing or living through.”(2005, 16).

Intuitive as the minimal self account may be as a characterization of everydayexperience, it contains a paradox. How could a minimal self be at the same time partof one’s conscious experiences, while it is at the same time separate from all theseexperiences? While phenomenologists like Zahavi and others want to steer clear of the‘empty’ formalist conception of a transcendental ego, the alternative of there being “atranscendence in the immanence” (Zahavi 2005, 131) does not help get past theparadox. It is not clear why we should explain “mineness” in terms of some phenom-enological quality, rather than in more coherentist terms by saying that mineness resultsfrom its being co-conscious with many other bodily, emotional and biographical states(Dainton 2008).5

Second, even if implicit narrativity involves a particular phenomenological quality ofmineness, then it is not clear what role, if any, narrativity would play. In other words,the critique of triviality seems to be making its reappearance through the back door.One might respond by saying that the sense of mineness only emerges once we havemastered language and have become narratively competent. But this seems to have

4 Marya Schechtman’s view is more complex. In her response to Strawson (2007), she distinguishes between‘self-narratives’ and ‘person-narratives’. The reason to include her account here is because, followingStrawson, she defines selves in an explicitly phenomenological way. And though she defines persons (orperson-narratives) in terms of certain forensic and moral capacities they endow the person with, she later onargues that it is desirable for selves and persons to be integrated in such a way as to form an “extended self”(2007, 177). The latter suggests that selves and persons are, or at least can be, cut from the same cloth. In thenext section I shall suggest a way in which we might resist a phenomenological rending of person-narratives.5 Dainton, however, only considers synchronic states and experiences, and does not consider the diachronicand biographical dimension. For an alternative, see Slors and Jongepier (in press).

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unacceptable implications, given that we have every reason to assume that infantsbefore the age of four or five are capable of having temporally-structured self-experiences (see also Hutto, this issue).6

Third, if implicit narrativity is cast in phenomenological terms, e.g. as ashadowy sense of our whole life, we might wonder whether this picture trulywelcomes episodic people on board, or whether a certain degree of chauvinismisn’t still luring in the background. The claim, on the phenomenological model,is not just that all self-experience is essentially narrative; the claim is that thosewho do not experience themselves narratively must therefore be mistaken abouttheir own self-experience. If Strawson reports not having any kind of feeling ofhis whole life, or of all of his past and future selves being present in hissynchronic self-experience, then—if implicit narrativity is supposed to be nec-essary and not contingent—Strawson has simply got it wrong about his ownself-experience. In other words, the underlying claim seems to be that episodicpeople are simply not very good at introspecting or experiencing themselves,and that they deny a certain type mode of experience that is actually there.

The reason why standard accounts fail to provide a satisfactory account ofselfhood in terms of implicit narratives is, I think, due to a deep-rootedintuition—shared both by defenders and critics of narrativity—that any trulynarrative account must be able to answer the question of how we experience orthink of ourselves as selves. In this respect, the current debate seems to bedeeply inspired by the Lockean insight that a person “can consider itself asitself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places” (Locke (1690)).This idea seems to be at the root of Strawson’s depiction of the narrativitythesis as an “empirical, descriptive thesis about the way ordinary human beingsactually experience their lives” (Strawson 2004, 428), and also lies at the heartof many narrativists’ responses to the dilemma.

In the next section, I suggest that an alternative, non-trivial, conception of implicitnarrativity is available, but only reveals itself once we stop looking for narrativity inconscious, first-personal experiences.

3 Implicit narrativity 2.0

Concerning the narrative nature of selves, we might be interested in either of twoquestions. First, we might ask the phenomenological question of how we experienceourselves as selves. This, it seems, is the question that has received most interest in thedebate up till now. However, we might also focus on the constitutive question of whatmakes our experiences intelligible and coherent in the first place. My goal in thissection is to examine the role of embodiment as performing a constitutive role forexperience.

The basic framework for the account of implicit narrativity can be derived from abroadly Kantian line of thinking. Kant famously draws a distinction between ‘empir-ical’ or experiential accounts of the self on the one hand, and the self as a necessarycondition for unified experience on the other. The latter, Kant points out, though not

6 I will discuss the relevance of this objection for the constitutive account in the final section.

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itself present ‘in’ experience, is nonetheless present as a condition that makes experi-ence possible.7 The neo-Kantian twist I will explore is to understand this type of unityas anchored in our embodiment, or in other words, to see the conditions that makeexperience possible as empirical conditions pertaining to the human body (seeespecially P.F. Strawson 1966; Evans 1982; McDowell 1994; McDowell 1997;Cassam 1999; Slors 2001). The body and its sense organs provides us with visualperceptions of things around us; tastes and sounds; proprioceptive inputs of thewhereabouts of our limbs; interoceptive feelings of hunger, thirst, and so forth, whichtogether yield what Peter Strawson refers to as a “potential autobiography” (1996, 193),that is, a very minimal, diachronic type of unity that is essentially embodied.

So how exactly does this work? A good place to start is John McDowell’s (1994;1997) account, where he sets out an account of how consciousness is anchored in ourlives as embodied beings. To understand his view, it is important to first briefly touchon the context within which he develops it, namely, the debate of personal identity, andDerek Parfit’s (1984) reductionist account in particular. Parfit defends a reductionistview about personal identity; one that sees mental states as only contingently related tothe embodied person who has them. According to Parfit, we could “redescribe anyperson’s life in impersonal terms,” mentioning persons only in the descriptions of thecontent of their thoughts and experiences, rather than the subjects or thinkers of thosestates (Parfit 1984, 223–234). On the reductionist view, the idea that experiencesbelong to a subject—the person—is merely an optional extra, or what Parfit calls a“separable belief” (Parfit 1984, 221). On Parfit’s view, mental states are a lot like Legoblocks: we can take a red block out of a house we’ve built and use it to build somethingelse—the block itself remains the same irrespective of the construction it happens to bea part of. All that we need for the having of an experience, thought or memory, on thereductionist view, is merely that there be some causal relation between a personseeming to have a memory, and a person who actually experienced the event. It istherefore a conceptual possibility, on the reductionist view, that we might, in somepossible world, be implanted with other people’s memories and would have experi-ences that are not ‘our own’.8

McDowell aims to show the intuition that such a scenario is conceivable rests on aCartesian mistake. The mistake is to think that mental states, such as memories, canhave their content simply in virtue of appearing in one’s stream of consciousness. This,McDowell says, is proof of an ‘isolated’ conception of consciousness, according towhich the subjective dimension of consciousness (the thinking of thoughts, etc.) is onlycontingently related to the objective existence of the human being. On Parfit’s account,we only need to look at mental states that one is (or could become) conscious of. Thecritique against Parfit, then, is that one’s stream of consciousness cannot exist inisolation, as a disembodied cluster of states, and it would be a deep mistake to startdeveloping a theory of the self that is based purely on its experiential aspects. AsMcDowell explains:

7 See e.g. Kant ((1781) 1999, A107), “But what is to be presented necessarily as numerically identical cannotbe thought as such through empirical data. A condition that is to validate such a transcendental presuppositionmust be one that precedes all experience and that makes experience itself possible.”8 Parfit and Shoemaker (1970) refer to this as having a “quasi-memory”. The having of quasi-memories isonly possible in science-fiction, of course, but the point of interest here is that Parfit and other reductioniststake this to be only a practical—and thus not a conceptual—obstacle.

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[C]ontinuous ‘consciousness’ is intelligible (even ‘from within’) only as a sub-jective angle on something that has more to it than the subjective angle revea1s:namely, the career of an objective continuant. (McDowell 1997, 233 s emphasesadded).

In other words, the subjective life of the first person is the life of anobjective, traceable ‘third person’, a flesh-and-blood human being. We mustrealize that “the first person is also a third person, an element in the objectiveworld” (McDowell 1997, 134).

The idea that we must look beyond the first person perspective in order to explainthe first person perspective, is central to the conception of implicit narrativity that Iwant to consider. With McDowell in mind, we are now in a position to say that thesubjective experience of ourselves as selves is intimately bound up with the objectiveexistence of our bodies tracing a path through time and space. This is not just about the(trivial) fact that consciousness happens to be embodied—a claim to which Parfitwould happily agree. More interesting is the extent to which our embodiment affectsthe very content of (many of) our experiences and shapes our mental lives in a verydirect way. Take, for instance, the perceptual and auditory experiences involved whenwalking towards an ice cream stand. The fact that the ice cream stand grow larger as Iapproach it, is inextricably tied to the path that is traced by my body as I walk towardsit. Likewise, it is a fact of my embodiment that sounds usually do not get louder if Imove away from what produces them, that I cannot be at two places at once; and that Icannot, in ordinary circumstances, look at the ceiling and see my shoes (see also Slors2001). The point of these examples is that our sensory experiences all have their ‘place’in a particular diachronic context, provided for by the continuity of our bodies throughtime and space.

It is crucial to note that this type of embodied continuity is not itself part of thecontent of consciousness, or of our experience of ourselves as selves, but is what makesour (self-) experiences possible. The body, I want to claim, thereby provides thebackground for further experiences, thoughts and other mental states, telling the ‘story’of the spatiotemporal whereabouts of the body.9

Of course, this neo-Kantian account of how our experiences are constitutedby the shape, speed, and place of our bodies through time, does not yet give usa very comprehensive account of experience: there seems to be a sense inwhich many of our experiences require more than just the context of a body inspace and time. While narrativists rarely approach embodiment as playing aconstitutive for first personal experience (but see e.g. Mackenzie 2009), wecould likewise say that McDowell does not consider a diachronic context whichis not directly perceptual, and hence cannot be exhaustively explained in termsof the context of an objective body. To expand McDowell’s account, then, wemust turn to the narrative paradigm.

9 One might object that the notion of a ‘story’ here is only metaphorical; in any case it does not seem muchmore narrative than, say, the story of a rat’s body running through a maze. Though this may be true, I willargue that once language, communication and self-interpretation come in play, the entire lived dimension ofembodiment changes to such a degree that talk of an implicit narrative becomes justifiable.

Towards a constitutive account of implicit narrativity

4 Embedding embodiment

Like McDowell, narrativists have argued fervently against the reductionist account ofselves, and have criticized the atomistic conception of experiences as isolated states thatare intelligible by themselves. Narrativists have emphasized that the nature of experi-ences is necessarily diachronic and holistic (Taylor 1985; Wollheim 1986; Schechtman1990; Bruner 1990; Slors 2001; Thornton 2003; Rudd 2012). Schechtman for instanceclaims that “facts about whose memory a given memory is are an integral part of itsqualitative content” (1990, 84), and argues against the view that sees “psychologicalstates as atomic, isolable, and in principle independent of the subject who experiencesthem” (Schechtman 1990, 89). According to the general narrativist framework, we donot ‘have’ memories, feelings and beliefs in the same way that we ‘have’ cars orphones. Whereas phones and cars remain what they are irrespective of their owner, wecannot say the same of memories, intentions and experiences. It is an important featureof our memories, John Campbell says, that “they are organized autobiographically asthe memories of the thoughts and deeds of a single person, as the memories of ‘what Ithought and did.’” (Campbell 1995, 187).

The idea I want to pursue here is that our present experiences have their meaningonly in virtue of a diachronic web of earlier thoughts, memories and emotions as wellas future-directed states such as intentions and long-term ambitions. Importantly, thisdiachronic background does not merely consist of the immediately prior experiences ofour bodies in a certain place at a certain time, but crucially concern our values,emotions, desires and beliefs—in short, our lives as persons.

The strategy is to make use of a narrative niche that seems to have escapedStrawson’s attention, which concerns precisely the life of ourselves as human per-sons—rather than phenomenological selves—over time. Recall Strawson’s distinction:

The first thing I want to put in place is a distinction between one’s experience ofoneself when one is considering oneself principally as a human being taken as awhole, and one’s experience of oneself when one is considering oneself princi-pally as an inner mental entity or ‘self’ of some sort – I’ll call this one’s self-experience (Strawson 2004, 429).

First of all, though Strawson himself is only concerned with “this phenomenon ofexperiencing oneself as a self” (2004, 429), it would not be fair to think that narrativistsmust also be concerned with the same phenomenon, as Strawson seems to assume.Second, in so far as our lives as human beings are concerned, Strawson talks merely ofthe experience one has of oneself considered principally as a human being. Thisinvolves e.g. the question of how I think about my life as a human being, and whetheror not I think that human being is me (compare the case of Bob Dylan). But therelevance of our lives as human beings is not exhausted by our personal viewsconcerning our identity through time.

To see this, it is helpful to look at Schechtman’s notion of what she calls a person-narrative (see esp. Schechtman 2007). As Schechtman puts it, having a person-narrative is not about having a story about one’s current, inner-most self, nor does itneed to have “a moral or a theme”, it is rather “an explanatory account of how actionsand events lead to other actions and events, how we come to be in the position we are in

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and where that position is likely to lead us” (Schechtman 2007, 172 emphases added).The ‘explanatory’ aspect involves having some awareness of one’s own past actionsand experiences, where “what one considers one’s own actions and experiences in thisweaker sense will have to correspond for the most part to what is in one’s humanhistory.” (2007, 170, emphases added). For instance, even though Bob Dylan does notthink he is the same self who wrote the Song to Woody back in the sixties, he is wellaware that he is the same person10; and even though he does not feel that it was himwho once sang all those protests songs, we should still expect that he is the one toreceive the royalties. For Schechtman, then, having a person-narrative takes a funda-mentally forensic dimension: “one must recognize oneself as continuing, see pastactions and experiences as having implications for one’s current rights and responsi-bilities, and recognize a future that will be impacted by the past and present”(Schechtman 2007, 170).11

Whereas Schechtman is interested in the forensic dimension of what having aperson-narrative involves, my interest here concerns the constitutive function of this‘personal’ or ‘biographical’ background. Think for instance of Bob Dylan’s activity ofpicking up a guitar and knowing how to play it; his memories of Woody Guthrie orbeing called Robert Zimmerman; the memories of the civil rights and anti-war move-ments. These are all central elements of his “human history” or his person-narrative,even though he might not identify with them. I want to claim that, just as the bodyforms a diachronic context for our experiences, our lives as persons over time fulfils asimilar role: many (though not all) of our experiences acquire their intelligibility onlyagainst the background of our personal biographies. This is not a phenomenologicalthesis about how we experience ourselves as selves, neither is it a metaphysical accountof our identity as human beings, but rather a constitutive thesis about the very nature ofmental states, and what is required for them to be experienced by us as ‘our own’.

Suppose someone, let’s call him Frank, is remembering a sailing trip with hisfriends. He remembers the good times he spent with his friends, but also remembersthe fights he got into with his girlfriend which eventually led to their break up. In such acase, many of Frank’s other memories and experiences (including memories of monthsbefore the trip) play a constitutive role for his current memory. To see why this broaderpersonal context matters, try to imagine what would happen if someone else were to be‘implanted’with Frank’s memory. At best, this other person would only have a seemingmemory of a bunch of good-humoured, young people on deck of a boat—but not amemory of having a good time with friends—or a seeming memory of being in a fightwith some stranger—not a memory of what in turned out to be their last argument as acouple (see also Schechtman 1990).

The question is: why call this an implicit narrative? Explicit narratives are oftenunderstood as ‘normalizing’ explanations (Pettit and McDowell 1986, 49; Bruner 1990,40; Hutto 2004). Narratives, Daniel Hutto explains, allow us to “cope with ‘unusual’ or‘eccentric’ actions either by helping us to see them as familiar or by making them so,”for instance “by fleshing out a larger context such that we come to find it acceptable”

10 I am here using Schechtman’s notion of a “person” and Strawson’s notion of a “human being”interchangeably.11 Cf. Locke, according to whom “person” is “a forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit; and sobelongs only to intelligent agents, capable of a law, and happiness, and misery” (Locke (1690), chapter xxvii,sec. 26).

Towards a constitutive account of implicit narrativity

(Hutto 2004, 560). The need for explicit narratives naturally arises in many of our folkpsychological practices, when we are confronted with a type of behaviour we cannotimmediately make sense of. The question is therefore whether any narrativity is goingon when there is no need for explicitly fleshing out a broader, normalizing context.

I think there is. Let’s consider the following classic passage from AlasdairMacIntyre:

I am standing waiting for a bus and the young man standing next to me suddenlysays: ‘The name of the common wild duck is Histrionicus histrionicushistrionicus.’ There is no problem as to the meaning of the sentence he uttered:the problem is, how to answer the question, what was he doing in uttering it?Suppose he just uttered such sentences at random intervals; this would be onepossible form of madness. We would render his action of utterance intelligible ifone of the following turned out to be true. He has mistaken me for someone whoyesterday had approached him in the library and asked: ‘Do you by any chanceknow the Latin name of the common wild duck?’ Or he has just come from asession with his psychotherapist who has urged him to break down his shyness bytalking to strangers. ‘But what shall I say?’ ‘Oh, anything at all.’ Or he is a Sovietspy waiting at a prearranged rendez-vous and uttering the ill-chosen code sen-tence which will identify him to his contact. In each case the act of utterancebecome intelligible by finding its place in a narrative (MacIntyre 1981, 210).

MacIntyre’s point is that to understand the utterance of the young man requiresconstructing an explicit narrative that makes sense of his (verbal) behaviour. But beingthe young man, on the other hand, does not seem require having any such narrative.The young man does not need to hypothesize about why he said what he did. From hisperspective, there is no need for normalizing explanations. Hence, we might say, giventhat coherence does not need to be restored, there is no place for implicit narratives.

It is this last inference—from the claim concerning ‘normality’ or ‘coherence’towards the conclusion that there is no narrativity at work—that I want to resist. It isimplicitly narrative not because there is something like an articulable narrative that youcan, if needed, express and make public; it is implicitly narrative because yourcapacities for narrative self-interpretation have become an integral part of your(occurrent) experiential life. We do not have conscious experiences with a narrativebackground somehow ‘attached’ to them, ready to be made public were the need toarise. Rather, I will claim that our conscious experiences themselves are alreadynarrative to a significant degree, in so far as being capable of narrative self-interpretation suffuses one’s mental life (I will return to this in the subsequent section).

Importantly, on the constitutive view I am defending, it is not the biography or thecontext itself that forms the implicit narrative, but rather the contextual coherencewhich creates an implicit narratable structure of experience. This kind of coherence,however, does not come for free. Suppose you wake up in the middle of the night,confused about where you are, what day it is, what you need to get done in themorning, etcetera. Experiences like these sometimes happen to us, but do not last forvery long: after a little while it all ‘locks’ back into place, as it were. But during a fewseconds, there was a degree of incoherence: experiences were unintelligible, due to thefact that they failed to line up with, or be part of, a diachronic context. This, I want to

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suggest, is a case of where implicit narrativity has been temporarily disturbed (andrestored).

But in contrast to phenomenological accounts of implicit narrativity, according towhich there is some sort of a “sense” of my whole life accompanying my experiences,the current model claims the opposite is the case, phenomenologically speaking. In thenormal case of having a coherent experiential life, we precisely do not have an experienceof a life-narrative, or an experience of ourselves as protagonists in a plot. Implicitnarrativity, rather, is marked by an absence of such self-directed thoughts, as it is normallyconstitutive of them. It is only in abnormal cases, such as hyperreflexivity or thoughtinsertion symptoms in schizophrenia, that the (narrative) self marks itself in experience.

If we understand explicit narratives as restoring coherence by helping us to “tamethe extraordinary” (Hutto 2008, 7), then, I suggest, we should understand implicitnarratives as their counterpart; as enabling us to ‘understand the ordinary’. To put thepoint differently, the relevant difference is between what we may call narrative self-interpretation and narrative self-understanding; between a case where coherence needsto be restored, and a case where such coherence has its normal place. And though thetype of narrativity that is at work in such cases is not the type of narrativity thatresembles e.g. written novels, or even the type of stories we find in gossip, itnonetheless concerns a background that is best described as a history or biography,which cannot be defined in purely causal terms, but requires taking into considerationthe person’s own beliefs, emotions, values and his or her ability for self-interpretation.

Let me end this section by turning to the question: isn’t all of this simply trivial? Thereare two reasons why it is not, one practical, one theoretical. The practical answer is thatnumerous cases exist in which implicit narrativity is absent, such as in cases of severedementia, psychosis and/or thought insertion symptoms in schizophrenia. Mackenzie andPoltera’s (2010) article on narrative integration is particularly helpful here. They cite apassage from Elyn Saks’ memoir, who describes her first psychotic episode:

Random moments of time follow one another. Sights, sounds, thoughts and feelingsdon’t go together. No organizing principle takes successive moments of time and putsthem together in a coherent way from which sense can be made. And it’s all takingplace in slow motion (Saks 2007, 12 in Mackenzie and Poltera 2010, 31).

The fact that some people seem to lack a biographical context which provides theirexperiences with a sense of mineness and coherence, suggests that implicit narrativity isall but trivial.12

From a theoretical perspective, it seems that the constitutive thesis is nottrivial either, at least as long as reductionism and atomism about the nature ofmental states continues to be a live option in the philosophy of mind.

12 Perhaps one might worry that the “threat of emptiness” still looms large because on the proposed accountEpisodics, too, have an “implicit self”, at least in the constitutive sense. (Thanks to an anonymous referee forpointing this out.) In response, I would say that the critique of triviality in this case would lose much of itsoriginal appeal. The initial critique was directed at the idea that narrativity tells us nothing about the nature of(self)-experience. By pointing to the significance of the embodied and narrative dimensions of our lives ashuman beings, I have tried to show that narrativity, constitutively construed, does tell us something about thenature of experience. If one finds this trivial, then I will take this as an indication of being in good company.

Towards a constitutive account of implicit narrativity

Interestingly, Strawson himself seems to be more or less on the narrativist sidewith respect to the constitutive question:

I’m well aware that my past is mine in so far as I am a human being, and I fullyaccept that there’s a sense in which it has special relevance to me* now, includingspecial emotional and moral relevance. (Strawson 2004, 434).

It is quite clear from Strawson’s writing that the type of continuity ofhimself as the same human being over time has significant consequences forhis experiential life.13 What he wants to resist is saying it must have conse-quences for the Lockean thesis of how we think or experience ourselves asselves. The central difference between narrativists and Strawson is thatStrawson is interested in describing the nature of mental experience, and isnot too concerned with the sense in which our lives as persisting human beingshave “special relevance” to who we are now. Narrativists, by contrast, havemade an attempt to explain what this special relevance actually consists in.

5 Embodied narrativity: towards an integrative view

In this section I turn to recent worries raised by Richard Menary (2008) and DianaMeyers (2014) concerning the relation between embodiment and narrativity, and inparticular their advice to keep the two conceptually distinct. In response, I explore analternative conception of “embodied narratives” by looking at the transformativefunction of narrative practices.

The central worry is that the view according to which our ordinary, embod-ied way of being in the world is taken to have a narrative structure, as I haveclaimed, “over-estimates the reach of narrative and underestimates the cognitiveand agentic powers of the lived body” (Meyers 2014). The critique is thatnarrativists approach embodiment as somehow impoverished, which is why itneeds to be ‘supplemented’ with narrativity. To respect embodiment as anautonomous and inherently meaningful dimension of agency, we had betterleave intact the distinction between narrativity and embodiment, and say thatembodied experiences are the ‘pre-narrative fodder’ that merely ‘lend them-selves’ to narration (Menary 2008, 76). Take the following example by DianaMeyers:

I can tell my story of rushing headlong up Fifth Avenue towards my gym,tripping on a protruding piece of sidewalk scaffolding, and smashing down onthe pavement. If anyone were interested, I could fill in lots of detail about how allof this felt at the time. Inasmuch as I can produce this story, (…) I suppose youcould infer that my lived bodily experience that afternoon must have had animplicit narrative form. But if so, saying that the lived body possesses an implicitnarrative form amounts to nothing more than saying that lived bodily experienceis susceptible to being narrated as a part of the life of a person (Meyers 2014).

13 See esp. his discussion of having experiences ‘from the inside’ (Strawson 2004, 433–434).

F. Jongepier

OnMeyers view, explaining how lived embodiment lends itself to narration can onlybe done in terms of reconstruction, that is, by conjuring up a story after the fact, in case‘anyone were interested’. Menary similarly claims that narratives “arise directly fromthe lived experience of the embodied subject” and that such narratives can be“embellished and reflected upon if we need to find a meaningful form or structure inthat sequence of experiences” (Menary 2008, 76, emphasis added). Menary cites Huttowho describes experiences as being “ripe for narration” and Kerby, according to whomembodied experiences have a pre-narrative quality that constitutes “a demand fornarrative” (Menary 2008, 63). On these views view, then, a narrative is, at best, a posthoc reconstruction of embodied experience (see also Mackenzie 2014). Lived embodi-ment is structured such that we can tell narratives about it, but it does not genuinelyhave a narrative structure in and of itself.

What seems to be doing the real work in saying that our embodied experiencescannot be narrative is a particular conception of ‘narrativity’. Menary, for instance,claims that “a narrative is only properly a narrative if it is in linguistic form” (Menary2008, 65), and cites Lamarque according to whom “there can be no narrative withoutnarration” (Lamarque 2004, 394). I suspect people like Meyers and Hutto will havesimilar standards in mind for what could count as ‘narrative’, and what could not. Inany case, with this notion of narrativity in mind it is rather obvious that we “shouldn’texpect to find narratives in our more basic embodied engagements with the world”(Menary 2008, 66).

Though I think we could be more tolerant about what may or may not count as anarrative—I am thinking of art, movies, but also a vividly commentated soccermatch—my real concern here is with the underlying assumption that if implicitnarrativity were to exist, it would have to structurally resemble its explicit siblings.Not only the critics of implicit narrativity make this assumption, but it is also presente.g. in Rudd’s phenomenological account, and Schechtman similarly speaks of a“person’s implicit narrative” (see Schechtman 1996, 114–118), as if implicit narrativesare stories that we “have” and are just waiting to be reflected upon. But I don’t think weneed to see implicit narrativity as structurally similar to explicit narratives. Consider, forinstance, our ordinary way of talking about “implicit” and “explicit” events, such as,“there was implicit criticism in his voice” or “the angry tone was implicit in your e-mail”. Although we have good reason to resist saying the criticism or the angry tonewas literally present (just as we have good reason to resist thinking that narratives areliterally present in experience) it seems equally clear that it makes a great deal of senseto talk of ‘criticism’ or ‘the angry tone’ as something that existed even before havingbeen made explicit.

Contrary to the reconstructive view, I want to suggest that we should take the rolethat narrativity can play for the constitution of experience more seriously. The strictdistinction between embodiment and narrativity might work when we are focussing onrather simple experiences such as physical pain; there does not seem to be much roomfor narrativity once we are being hit by a cricket ball, for instance (Menary 2008, 73).But consider the experience of being in a wheelchair after an accident, or the experienceof tremors in the first stages of Parkinson’s disease. Or on a happier side, what about theexperience of reaching for the phone to call the person you were on a first date with, orthe scent of his or her perfume on your coat? These experiences, I would suggest, have

Towards a constitutive account of implicit narrativity

both a lived embodied as well as a narrative dimension. To say that the experience ofbeing in a wheelchair (or the scent of someone’s perfume) is an embodied experiencethat can be reconstructed in terms of stories, does no justice to the nature of theseexperiences. This makes it seem as if these experiences are made up of two separatecomponents, e.g. the embodied, proprioceptive feeling of the wheelchair ‘plus’ thenarrative background knowledge of the accident. The only way to properly make senseof the nature of these experiences is to say that a person’s narrative self-conception hasbecome an integral part of one’s embodied consciousness.

At this point it is important to warn against a possible reading of such an integrativeapproach, namely, that this would have the implication that we would only havediachronically structured experiences after we have developed certain narrative capac-ities (see Hutto, this volume). I agree that it is wildly implausible to think that childrenwould not be able to plan, anticipate, and so on, before having mastered certainnarrative capacities. What I disagree with is the widely held assumption that onceone has become narratively competent, the dimension of lived embodiment is leftunchanged. Or, as Hutto puts it, that non-narrative ways of experiencing the world,acquired in early childhood, would “not cease when narrative capacities for reflectingupon and understanding the wider significance of my doings and actions are acquired”(this volume). Though I don’t think these ways of experiencing the world ceasealtogether, I do think it is a mistake to conceive of the dimension of embodiment assomething that remains invariant throughout time, as something that is unaffected byour developing capacities for language, folk psychology and self-knowledge.

The capacity for language and self-interpretation, bluntly formulated, is not addedon top of our experiences, as a useful tool that we can fall back on if necessary, butchanges the nature of many of these experiences themselves. This idea is present in thework of e.g. Christine Korsgaard (2009) according to whom the capacity for self-reflection that is characteristic of beings persons suffuses our activities and interactionsas human animals. But similar ideas can also be found in Charles Taylor’s earlierwritings. As he puts it, “for us language-animals our language is constitutive of ouremotions, not just because de facto we have articulated some of them, but also de jureas the medium in which all our emotions, articulate and inarticulate, are experienced”(Taylor 1985, 74). The point being: once we have become competent language-users, incontrast to toddlers and baboons, “our pre-articulate sense of our feelings is notlanguage-independent” (Taylor 1985, 74 emphases in original; see also Jaynes 1976;Dennett 1986).14

This is obviously only a very rough sketch of how one might proceed to construct anintegrative account of embodiment and narrativity, and it is in need of further elabo-ration. The main point is that narrativity goes a lot deeper than mere availability forarticulation. Embodiment and narrativity, I suggest, are not two separate components,but are integrated into one unified first person perspective, which is why many of ourexperiences are genuinely, rather than merely superficially, embodied narratives.

14 Interestingly, Richard Menary’s work on ‘enculturated cognition’ and ‘cognitive integration’ might providea useful way of further developing the idea of what is actually narrative about “embodied narratives”.

F. Jongepier

6 Conclusion

In this paper I have sketched an alternative view of implicit narrativity, one that is not aphenomenological or psychological account of how we experience or think of our-selves, but rather a constitutive account of what makes our experiences possible andintelligible in the first place. I have argued that the coherence and intelligibility of ourexperiences is due to the fact that they are anchored in a larger, diachronic context,which I have suggested takes an importantly embodied as well as a narrative dimen-sion. Implicit narrativity, as I have described it, is not marked by a certain sense of ‘mylife as a whole’, not even of a shadowy kind, but rather by an absence of self-directedexperiences. This alternative model of implicit narrativity is compatible with an‘episodic’ account of selves, avoiding the chauvinist charge, given that it is not an“empirical, descriptive thesis about the way ordinary human beings actually experiencetheir lives” (Strawson 2004, 428) in the first place. Finally, implicit narrativity is all buttrivial, so long as reductionism remains to be a live option in the philosophy of mind. Inthis regard, as Strawson himself mentions, sometimes triviality is a “very good place tobe” (1999, 14).

Acknowledgments I wish to thank Marc Slors, Jan Bransen, Sem de Maagt, the participants of theworkshop ‘Narrativity, interpretation and responsibility’ and three anonymous referees for their helpfulcomments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. This research was made possible by TheNetherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (research project 322-20-003).

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