Authors |
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Abstract |
I argue against two popular claims. The first is a descriptive, empiri- cal thesis about the nature of ordinary human experience: ‘each of us constructs and lives a “narrative” . . . this narrative is us, our identities’ (Oliver Sacks); ‘self is a perpetually rewritten story . . . in the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives’ (Jerry Bruner); ‘we are all virtuoso novelists. . . . We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional char- acter . . . of that autobiography is one’s self’ (Dan Dennett). The second is a normative, ethical claim: we ought to live our lives narratively, or as a story; a ‘basic condition of making sense of ourselves is that we grasp our lives in a narrative’ and have an understanding of our lives ‘as an unfolding story’ (Charles Taylor). A person ‘creates his identity [only] by forming an autobiograph- ical narrative – a story of his life’, and must be in possession of a full and ‘explicit narrative [of his life] to develop fully as a person’ (Marya Schechtman).
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Keywords | Autobiography Ethics Language Narrative Narrativity |
Categories | (categorize this paper) |
Reprint years | 2004 |
DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9329.2004.00264.x |
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References found in this work BETA
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity.Charles Taylor - 1989 - Harvard University Press.
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity.Charles Taylor - 1989 - Cambridge University Press.
View all 18 references / Add more references
Citations of this work BETA
Narrative Niche Construction: Memory Ecologies and Distributed Narrative Identities.Richard Heersmink - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (5):1-23.
Self-Concept Through the Diagnostic Looking Glass: Narratives and Mental Disorder.Şerife Tekin - 2011 - Philosophical Psychology 24 (3):357-380.
Intervening in the Brain: Changing Psyche and Society.Dirk Hartmann, Gerard Boer, Jörg Fegert, Thorsten Galert, Reinhard Merkel, Bart Nuttin & Steffen Rosahl - 2007 - Springer.
View all 195 citations / Add more citations
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