Narrative and Identity

Humanities Bulletin, 2022

The following paper offers an account of Paul Ricoeur's "narrative identity" which proposes that the identity of human persons (or selves) is constituted through narratives about oneself. This account of personal identity is then further formulated through replies to the main objection raised against it, namely, that narrative identity reveals a division in the self: it shows there must be-the objectors argue-a more originary experiential self prior to the self-interpreted narrative self. The replies to the objection offer, first, with the help of Jan Patočka's conception of "movement", a way to conceive a kind of being that is constituted through its self-narration; secondly, with the help of Judith Butler, a way to understanding how an apparent division in the self when one lies about oneself is bridged in an understanding of our own human limitations and fragility.

Balkan Journal of Philosophy

Humans tend to seek their identity as entities existing over a period of time by making narratives. The paper argues that seeking diachronic self-identity through narratives or stories results in the self-experience being one of separation or alienation from the real world. This happens because language is primarily a form of secondary representation, and the means by which we attempt to find identity often appear in the form of narratives. The dominance of the metaphor of life as a journey shows this. The remedy is to reduce the hold of narrativity by making selfexperience fundamentally episodic.

Sociological Quarterly, 1998

This article argues for a synthesis of George Herbert Mead's conception of the temporal and intersubjective nature of the self with Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic theory of narrative identity. Combining the insights of Ricoeur's philosophical analysis with Mead's social-psychological orientation provides a subtle, sophisticated, and potent explanation of self-identity. A narrative conception of identity implies that subjectivity is neither a philosophical illusion nor an impermeable substance. Rather, a narrative identity provides a subjective sense of self-continuity as it symbolically integrates the events of lived experience in the plot of the story a person tells about his or her life. The utility of this conception of identity is illustrated through a rereading of Erving Goffman's study of the experience of mental patients. This example underlines the social sources of the self-concept and the role of power and politics in the construction of narrative identities.

European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences, 2020

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported License, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Balkan Journal of Philosophy, 2021

The paper seeks to argue that different ways in which the self is understood, even if radically distinct from one another, are cases of different narratives. This is done by appealing to conceptual metaphor theory. The paper begins by briefly explaining the difference between the minimal and narrative self and then argues that even radically different ways of understanding the self are cases of different narratives arising out of a metaphorical understanding of abstract concepts.

2019

The focus of this dissertation is narrative identity theory, i.e. the proposition that our sense of self is structured like a story. The imputed advantage of narrativity identity is that it enables great coherence and guidance to our complex lives composed of multiple and often conflicting inner impulses and social demands. The manner in which this is accomplished is that narrativity functions metaphorically as a tacit, formative operation, which transfers the intelligibility inherent in the familiar domain of stories to the more elusive domain of personal identity. Narrativity is an epistemically efficient kind of discourse which can synthesize a multitude of elements into a unity called plot. A plot gives unity to the whole of a story and confers significance to its parts. Both narrativity and metaphoricity are the more recognizable products of an underlying mechanism both share, i.e. productive imagination. This faculty pervasively and continually configures the whole field of ou...

Synthesis Philosophica, 2011

The need to narrate is according to P. Ricœur the very core of creating the knowledge of self. The process of identification through narration does not lead us to be focused on our own narration. We always find other people’s narrations first and then start telling the narration of our life. Through narration, as understood by Ricœur, we can simultaneously learn ethics as well as morals. To show this the author compares philosophic view of identity by Ricœur with Frisch’s literary experiment in the novel I’m Not Stiller. Both of them are a hermeneutic intertwining that brings to natural identity. In this hermeneutic process we can rediscover ourselves in a world, in which we will respect our own identity by being fully open to its creative transformation.

European Journal of Medicine and Natural Sciences

Over the past years, a multi-disciplinary literature on the significance of personal narratives in autobiography and identity has emerged. This subject has been of interest to authors in the fields of humanities, psychology, and medicine alike. In this paper, we are proposing the term Identity Narrative (IdN) to define a cognitive and emotional framework that serves as an implicit (unconscious) scaffolding of memory on which to build human autobiography. The authors first classify narratives into external (universal history, the humanities, culture) and internal (autobiography, based on personal experiences, both directly and indirectly, through identification and education). All philosophy and social commentary has utilized history for the purposes of prediction and meaning-making. Personalities including Aristotle, St. Augustine, Rousseau, Freud, Marx, Spengler, and Benjamin Franklin have reread history to gain insight about human nature. History has inspired the enlightenment and...

Over the last two decades, self and identity have moved into the center-stage of the social sciences. Publications with ‘self’ or ‘identity’ in their titles, including mono- graphs, edited volumes, and even new journals (Identity – first published in the year 2000, Self & Identity – first published in 2001) have sprung up in a number of disciplines. However, what exactly these terms denote has remained somewhat ambiguous. While it seems to be commonly agreed upon that neither ‘self’ nor ‘identity’ should be mere synonyms for ‘person’ and ‘personality’ (as suggested by Leary, 2004), it is debatable whether the terms self and identity should be pre- served to refer to processes that are organized within a (coherent) self-system (as suggested by Morf, 2005). And while metaphors of self that view the self “as-know- er”, “as-known”, or “as-decision-maker and doer” (see Leary, 2004) have a wider appeal, they leave out a vision of the self “as-speaker/narrator”, a view that has be- come increasingly popular under the headers of the ‘narrative’ and ‘discursive turn’. And although discourse-based approaches to self and identity have resulted in an explosion of recent books and special issues, they by no means represent a unified and harmonious field.