This video lecture is part of the Identity and Selfhood course on Substack. You can find the reading list here. Links to readings and access to the full lectures as video and audio are provided to subscribers, with low-income and student learner discounts available on my homepage.
We constantly tell ourselves and others stories about who we are. What was our upbringing like? How have our individual and collective pasts shaped our presents? What are our personalities like, and what are our hopes and dreams? Being a self is, for a group of twentieth-century and contemporary philosophers who espouse narrative identity theory, in no small part a matter of these stories. We are both main character and narrator of our lives, and others can be narrators of our lives, too.
For French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, narrative theory highlights the ethical dimensions of being a self. Picking up on some key themes addressed in the earlier video lecture on existential theories of the self, Ricoeur thinks the self is both a what and a who, but that philosophy has by and large focused on the former at the expense of the latter. Narrative identity theory is uniquely poised to address the latter.
Australian philosopher Catriona MacKenzie is concerned with self-definition, or how we define ourselves via integrating various features of our identity. What matters to us is an especially important feature, and honing in on it requires that we imagine who we might be in different scenarios. She also emphasizes that self-definition is deeply shaped by our social and political contexts. When I taught a course at Pitzer College in Spring 2020 (that was a time!) called History of the Self, this was one of my students’ favorite readings!
And American philosopher Susan Brison considers how narrative can help reconstruct a sense of self in the aftermath of trauma (content warning: the video discusses sexual assault starting at 17:10). After Brison went through an unimaginable experience of self-shattering, she felt powerless and found that her relationship to her body and time were transformed. Brison gives an account of remaking the self through crafting a narrative that others take seriously, and taking issue along the way with existing philosophies of the self, such as that of John Locke.
As you read and watch the video (or listen—see audio file below), consider:
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