INTRODUCTION

This book is about the relation between language and persons. More particularly, it concerns that form of language called narrative and the various ways in which narratives and narration give meaning to what we usually call the self. Its guiding hypothesis is that the self is given content, is delineated and embodied, primarily in narrative constructions or stories. If we can substantiate this claim, then the self is perhaps best construed as a character not unlike those we encounter almost every day in novels, plays, and other story media. Such a self arises out of signifying practices rather than existing prior to them as an autonomous or Cartesian agent. This conclusion would, in turn, explain the difficulty we encounter when we attempt to discover the self by, say, some form of introspective vision, for there would, on this narrative position, be no “spirit” haunting this particular body that I claim ownership of. If we believe so strongly in such an internal subject it is perhaps because we have imagined such an entity to exist; we have either told, or somehow been misled by, stories and theories that posit such an ethereal being. This is not to say, however, that the concept of self is therefore unimportant and of no practical value, to be relegated to the ash heap of history. On the contrary, the development of selves (and thereby of persons) in our narratives is one of the most characteristically human acts, acts that justifiably remain of central importance to both our personal and our communal existence.

This book was initially inspired many years ago by a reading of works by Paul Ricoeur. It was conceived as an attempt to unearth the various roles that language and narration play in what we could broadly call “the life of the mind.” This initial project is still maintained, but the focus is now on the self, that mysterious “entity” so central to the notion of mind. Accordingly, it is an investigation that will necessarily take us through a number of domains that traditionally belong to philosophy of mind (memory, imagination, and the like); but it will also venture into a number of related disciplines, such as literature, psychology, linguistics, and historiography. The reason for this diversity is precisely to give some indication of the interdisciplinary scope and importance of the investigation into narrative. But a further reason is simply that the recent philosophical interest in narrative receives its impetus primarily from a variety of sources outside philosophy. It is hoped, however, that the reader will discover in this diversity a sustained and coherent attempt to address many of the important questions that face us today concerning the nature of the self. The remainder of this introduction is intended to provide an overview of the general itinerary and a broad sketch of the main conclusions that will be worked out in greater detail in the chapters that follow.

An important factor that characterizes our present philosophical situation is its persistent concern with the nature and function of language. But this is no longer the old concern of how propositions relate or correspond to what has been called the “real world.” This traditional epistemological concern, along with its metaphysical underpinnings, has been largely superseded by a deeper recognition of and investigation into the ways in which language plays an integral, even constitutive, part in almost all of our dealings with a world. From its primarily epistemological starting point, then, the investigation into language has received a relatively new ontological twist. Stated in its most basic form, language is viewed not simply as a tool for communicating or mirroring back what we otherwise discover in our reality but is itself an important formative part of that reality, part of its very texture.

Already in the romantic strains of nineteenth-century philosophy and in early investigations into the origin of language (especially Herder’s), we see a rising interest in both language and expression as essential to the human subject. Later, with Nietzsche, language dramatically replaces this human subject with its own subtle web of metaphorical transformations. Simultaneously the systematization of hermeneutics by Wilhelm Dilthey places the question of language and textuality in the forefront of philosophical debate and enquiry. In our own century, Heidegger’s rethinking of the hermeneutic enterprise, in Being and Time and in the later essays inspired by his readings of poetry, inextricably binds language to the world. “Language,” says Heidegger in an often quoted phrase from the Letter on Humanism, “is the house of being.” This remark is echoed more recently in the work of Heidegger’s student Hans-Georg Gadamer: “Being that can be understood is language.” These are perhaps enigmatic pronouncements, but they nevertheless attest to a shift of emphasis in some contemporary considerations of the nature of language. In contemporary Europe this initial shift is especially associated with the hermeneutics of both Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, but the same story might also be told in the English-speaking world with the rise of conceptual analysis and the enormous influence on it of Frege, Wittgenstein, and speech act theory.

This story includes not only philosophers, however. Under the important influence of Ferdinand de Saussure linguistics claimed a similar stake in the rise to philosophical significance of language. This influence is felt all the way through structuralism into semiotics, psychoanalysis, the philosophical and deconstructive enterprise of Jacques Derrida, and important strains of contemporary literary theory. In their sometimes diverse ways all these views oppose the naivete that considers language to be simply a more or less neutral medium of communication for ideas—indeed, for communicating facets of an external reality that does not require language to be what it is.

But what now of the subject who is, in some sense, the source of language? If on one hand language cannot be separated from the world as we know it, then on the other hand we surely cannot extricate ourselves from language. It is this other dimension, that of the human subject or language user, that particularly needs to be investigated today and that we shall pursue here, for why should we exempt ourselves from the very critique that we so readily apply to the world around us? We might now wonder: who or what is the speaking subject, the author of utterances? And what is meant or referred to by the little word I that proliferates in our discourse? These are the sorts of questions that must be asked, and asked from the linguistic paradigm in which we presently find ourselves.

The concern with language has, in recent years, begun to encompass what is undoubtedly a highly significant genre of language usage: narration. Studies ranging through sociology, psychology, philosophy, semiotics, literary theory, and historiography have taken up this interest in narrative, and it has become increasingly evident to numerous influential theorists and practitioners that narratives are a primary embodiment of our understanding of the world, of experience, and ultimately of ourselves. Narrative emplotment appears to yield a form of understanding of human experience, both individual and collective, that is not directly amenable to other forms of exposition or analysis. It is generally acknowledged, for example, that our understanding of other cultures and persons is primarily gained from, and in the form of, narratives and stories about and by those peoples.

The reason for this has to do with the way narratives articulate not just isolated acts but whole sequences of events or episodes, thereby placing particular events within a framing context or history. This form of contextualizing has, especially since Dilthey’s hermeneutics and also gestalt theory, been recognized as crucial to any form of understanding. In hermeneutics this circular dialectic (which need not be construed as a vicious circle) is seen as one of parts and wholes: the parts can be understood only in relation to the whole they comprise, and vice versa. In light of this insight we are perhaps justified in concluding that it is especially through the unifying action of narration that temporal expanses are given meaning. In other words, isolated events need to be placed within a developing network of further acts if their broader significance is to be grasped. What I take to be the major revelation afforded by the investigation into narrative, then, is that it is precisely the privileged medium for understanding human experience, an experience that is paradigmatically a temporal and hence historical reality. Stated another way, it is in and through various forms of narrative emplotment that our lives—and thereby, as I hope to show, our very selves—attain meaning.

The guiding purpose of this book is to take the above narrative position seriously and draw out its consequences with regard to the nature and status of the human subject. What, for example, is the relation between language and the self, or between one’s life story and the subject of that story? Such questions prompted me to develop a consistent view of self and self-identity from a primarily linguistic basis. Accordingly, what is offered here is a model of the human subject that takes acts of self-narration not only as descriptive of the self but, more importantly, as fundamental to the emergence and reality of that subject. This position will entail the related contention that “persons” are primarily the result of ascribing subject status or selfhood to those sites of narration and expression that we call human bodies. The person is thereby conceived of as an embodied subject. But this is not the embodied subject found in scholasticism or Cartesian modernism, a subject that retains in some way a metaphysical and problematic mind-body dichotomy. Perhaps we would do better to dispense with the concept of mind altogether; it is hoped that the present work opens up new avenues in this direction.¹

On a narrative account, the self is to be construed not as a prelinguistic given that merely employs language, much as we might employ a tool, but rather as a product of language—what might be called the implied subject of self-referring utterances.² The self, or subject, then becomes a result of discursive praxis rather than either a substantial entity having ontological priority over praxis or a self with epistemological priority, an originator of meaning. Let me explain some of these points.

By self I mean the distinct individual that we usually take ourselves to be, an individual, therefore, that also knows itself to be.³ Associated with this selfhood are modes of address such as I, me, myself, we. Selfhood also traditionally entails a degree of identity, of self-identity over time.⁴ This self-identity involves believing or otherwise experiencing oneself to be, at least roughly, the same throughout a temporal span. I do not doubt that some such identity does or at least can exist.

One way to begin accounting for this identity is by positing some form of substantial self or agent that exists ontologically prior to the particular acts of the human subject (including linguistic acts). Such an underlying self can then serve as the basis or ground of an identity that persists throughout differing acts and other attributes; this is a fairly common belief. There are numerous sophisticated forms of this position, ranging from a religiously motivated soul substance to an idealistic transcendental subject. For many people, however, no real support is given for an underlying self other than the uncritical conviction people tend to harbor concerning their own abiding identity. Such views, if examined, tend to be metaphysical-theological or speculative in nature; they aim at explaining the identity that seems evidenced in our everyday experience by resorting to an underlying self-identical substance.

All such positions cannot be refuted, for their purely speculative nature may preclude this. But I do think that alternate and perhaps more fruitful descriptions (and explanations) of the self and of the person can be had, descriptions that put us on a somewhat different tack than looking for a specifically foundational and abiding subject.⁵ The search for a foundational subject, as history teaches, tends to lead either to a mysticism wherein the existence of the self is assumed but cannot be demonstrated or to scepticism concerning the whole enterprise. I shall try to avoid both of these options and the foundational thought that gives rise to them. The position developed here aims at elucidating the constitutive role of language in self-formation and self-understanding, and seeks to answer all related questions from that basis.

In claiming that the self is a product, an implicate, of action, we are thereby removing epistemological priority from the human subject. That is, there simply is no self serving as the originator of meaning, something or someone to whom we might appeal in matters concerning the meaning or truth of his or her utterances as though these were prefigured in some nonlinguistic interiority of consciousness. Persons only “know” themselves after the fact of expression. This approach necessarily places considerable emphasis on both habit (as support for identity) and the relevance of context (for the meaning of acts), and goes against all forms of intuitive self-evidence or introspection that claims an epistemic transparency of the self to itself. The self is, we might say, decentered or displaced, removed from the epistemically central position given it by modern philosophy (particularly the philosophy deriving from Descartes). Correlative to this decentering is a loss of causal efficacy for the self and a stress on the subject’s social setting, habitual structures, and, of course, language.

The subject’s understanding of itself is, as contemporary hermeneutics teaches, mediated primarily through language, where language is taken to be the social medium par excellence. I shall therefore devote considerable space to the way the human subject finds expression for itself in its use of language. Of importance here is the way language prefigures a place for the subject in grammatical forms such as personal pronouns and adverbs of location (here, now, then, etc.). But what becomes especially significant within this linguistic view is the narrational nature of the subject’s self-knowledge. The self, as implied subject, appears to be inseparable from the narrative or life story it constructs for itself or otherwise inherits. The important point is that it is from this story that a sense of self is generated.

At this juncture it is sufficient to consider narrative on the model of storytelling. Much of our self-narrating is equivalent to telling the story of our lives (or parts of it) from the perspective of a first-person narrator. Such narrating generally seeks closure (totality) by framing the story within a beginning, middle, end structure. Closure of this sort, I contend, is not only a literary device but is a fundamental way (perhaps the fundamental way) in which human events are understood. Failing this structure of closure, narrative at least aspires to followability, that is, to plotting a meaningful or “logical” development for our lives—which is not to say that it imposes linearity or simplicity on life.

Though I shall deal primarily with first-person narration, it should be clear that such narratives are considerably influenced by the social milieu in which the human subject functions. The stories we tell of ourselves are determined not only by how other people narrate us but also by our language and the genres of storytelling inherited from our traditions. Indeed, much of our self-narrating is a matter of becoming conscious of the narratives that we already live with and in—for example, our roles in the family and in the broader sociopolitical arena. It seems true to say that we have already been narrated from a third-person perspective prior to our even gaining the competence for self-narration. Such external narratives will understandably set up expectations and constraints on our personal self-descriptions, and they significantly contribute to the material from which our own narratives are derived.⁶

Self-understanding and self-identity will be dependent, in certain important respects, upon the coherence and continuity of one’s personal narrative. Understanding, after all, is facilitated by a clear presentation and development of material, and identity implies a certain continuity over time. It should immediately be pointed out, however, that selfhood and identity, on our linguistic model, are not all-or-nothing matters. One’s identity may be or become fragmented into many different and discontinuous narratives. That is, one may take oneself to be a different character at different times (as, in the extreme case, with multiple personality disorders), and this is perhaps more common than is often supposed. It should also be made clear here that my goal is principally descriptive and not prescriptive. I am not proposing that self-scrutiny and self-narration ought to be a primary and ongoing concern for human subjects; forgetfulness of self is also very valuable and in many cases necessary. I only hope to describe how the self in fact arises, in various degrees, out of our linguistic behavior.

For much of our lives a concern with self-identity may be marginal at best. Questions of identity and self-understanding arise primarily in crisis situations and at certain turning points in our routine behavior. Such events often call for self-appraisal. That we have, at any moment, the belief in a continuous and relatively unchanging identity is itself often little more than one story we have learned to tell ourselves—though it is, as we shall see, a very important story. Understanding the how and why of such narrational acts is a primary concern throughout this work. Let us now consider our narrative position in a little more detail.

Human existence is temporal—we grow older—but if we are to get at the more personal aspect of human existence we must see this temporality as a history. We indeed find ourselves, collectively and individually, embedded in an ongoing history.⁷ When asked by others who we are, more often than not we are forced to give some account of our past life, and this will be predominantly narrative in form. Loss of this ability to narrate one’s past is tantamount to a form of amnesia, with a resultant diminishing of one’s sense of self.⁸ Why should this be so? The answer, broadly stated, is that our history constitutes a drama in which we are a leading character, and the meaning of this role is to be found only through the recollective and imaginative configuring of that history in autobiographical acts. In other words, in narrating the past we understand ourselves to be the implied subject generated by the narrative.⁹

Self-narration is—and this needs stressing—an interpretive activity and not a simple mirroring of the past. In this respect, even fictions can provide us with characters and plots that we may identify with and which disclose ourselves; our experience of literature and film should readily prove this point. In the case of our personal narratives, “truth” becomes more a question of a certain adequacy to an implicit meaning of the past than of a historically correct representation or verisimilitude. I shall argue below (chapter 1) that the meaning of the past is not something fixed and final but is something continually refigured and updated in the present. This question of the truth of our narrations immediately involves us in the important and complex problem of the relation between the expressed and the pre-expressed in human experience. Examination of this relation will be a pivotal concern throughout the later chapters.

This latter examination will involve showing that narrative is the form of expression most suited to portraying the vagaries of human experience. The basis for this belief is that our preexpressed, prethematic experience is already an implicit or quasi-narrative. Giving prethematic experience such a status implies the related claims that we always have a certain preunderstanding of our lives as being (1) historical, and (2) amenable to explicit (conscious) narrative exposition. In short, we know we are, in our lives, always already caught up in a story, already involved in a drama of some sort. This quasi-narrative background structure of our lives receives various degrees and varieties of articulation, though only with certain individuals (e.g., Marcel Proust) is there any pressing need or desire to express it in great detail.

This quasi-narrative position is not new. Stephen Crites, for example, developed such a position in an excellent article published in 1971. He attributes to human experience a “narrative quality” that may be viewed as an “incipient story.” He adds: “In principle, we can distinguish between the inner drama of experience and the stories through which it achieves coherence. But in any actual case the two so interpenetrate that they form a virtual identity. . . .”¹⁰ This storied nature of our experience is, for Crites, what holds the past (memory) and future (anticipation) together in the present, creating the more or less unified sense we have of our ongoing lives, a sense upon which our personal identity so thoroughly depends.

In this book, then, the term quasi-narrative refers to the general structure of our experience or, in other words, of our ongoing lives. Quasi-narrative is to be distinguished from the consciously worked-up narratives that we find in historical and biographical works and from the narratives that we explicitly or consciously give of ourselves and others. There is, however, an intimate connection between these two forms of narrative, as we shall see below. Explicating and developing this connection is in fact one of the central concerns throughout this work.

With respect to self-understanding, the quasi-narrative nature of our experience accounts for the ongoing sense of orientation and purpose our lives generally exhibit. It is out of this narrative preunderstanding that the explicit self-narrations of our lives are formed—though not in a strictly one-to-one relation. We might say, in Kantian fashion, that the quasinarrative nature of experience is the condition of possibility for the stories we tell of ourselves, but we must add that explicit narration may take up and reconfigure this implicit narrative structure in various ways (selecting, augmenting, and such like); this is usually what is happening when we recount, say, past episodes of our lives.

I will often refer to this quasi-narrative structure as the prenarrative level of experience, where the prefix should be taken to imply not the complete absence of narrative, as though it were prior to all narrative structure, but rather an earlier (and in a sense more primitive) stage of narrative structuration. This latter distinction should become clear as we proceed.

Although we are not self-consciously narrating ourselves all the time, narrational activity of some sort is common to a great deal of our experience—from dreams to memory to future plans from emotional to moral experience. We may also have a sense of participating in many stories at once, even though these stories are not explicitly narrated or focused upon. Such stories may also be at odds with one another (a conflict that could, for example, easily cause emotional disturbances), or they may be circumscribed and perhaps justified by yet another all-encompassing story. Both self-understanding and self-identity are linked with the coherence of our lives as reflected in our personal narratives. However, the nature of the prenarrative level of experience will usually preclude just any story being constructed; there is an interesting dialectical relation to be uncovered here.¹¹ Accordingly, I hope to show that self-narration is both a receptive and a creative activity, receptive in relation to embodying or expressing our prenarrative experience and creative in the way our conscious narratives inevitably refigure and augment the prenarrative level of experience.

Before offering the reader a brief overview and guide to the main chapters, I would like to sketch out the general intellectual arena within which this enterprise fits and from which it draws much of its substance and inspiration.

Vincent Descombes recently traced the development of French philosophy since Bergson through three important stages, which in turn represent three “advances” in our conceiving of the epistemic relation of the knowing subject to the “external world.”¹² The first stage is the “phenomenological victory over the ‘philosophy of representation,’ thanks to the concept of intentionality.” This stage was prefigured in Husserl’s exhortation zu den Sachen selbst, which carries over into Sartrean philosophy and phenomenological existentialism generally. Important to the phenomenological perspective is the unmediated presence of the human subject to the world and its phenomenal contents, which in turn entails a rejection of the Kantian Ding an sich and the metaphysical tradition that prefigures it. The second stage isolated by Descombes is the “hermeneutic victory over ‘onto-theology,’ thanks to the concept of interpretation.” From Nietzsche and Dilthey up to Heidegger, Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, and Ricoeur, this philosophical stance stresses human finitude and the partiality of our knowledge of the world. The last of Descombes’s stages is the “semiological victory over the ‘metaphysics of the referent,’ thanks to the revolutionary new concept of the sign.” This semiological position, though evident in both Peirce and, to some degree, Wittgenstein, derives its contemporary impetus (which extends to a number of humanistic disciplines) especially from Saussurian linguistics and has motivated French thought up to its present deconstructive and postmodern representatives. Says Descombes:

The discovery of the true nature of the sign is the thesis whereby a sign derives its meaning not from its relation to an independent thing . . . but from its relation to other signs inside a closed system.¹³

These three philosophical positions show an interesting and not arbitrary historical development.¹⁴ All three can be viewed as a reaction against a metaphysics that seeks being (ousia, Sein) beyond experience, that is, in a metaphysical referent beyond the given. Phenomenology especially emphasizes what Merleau-Ponty called the “primacy of perception” (that, to put it crudely, to be is to be perceived from the perspective of a human subject), while the second, hermeneutics, stresses that our knowledge of such being cannot escape from the historicity and locatedness of our gaze. There is thus no pure insight into being—an insight that could grasp the presupposed untainted intelligibility of things. The third position, semiotics, shifts this whole epistemological-metaphysical debate onto another level by firmly rejecting extralinguistic reference as being “the unilateral measure of the validity of our assertions,” to quote Descombes. The acquisition of knowledge would then be, to borrow from Wittgenstein, the learning and extension of new language games. This latter position, which Descombes identifies with semiotics, could however lead to an outright linguistic relativism or mere word play if it were not tempered by the life practices it both serves and gives rise to. The notion of reference should not, I suggest, be entirely abandoned, but should be recognized precisely as problematic, perhaps as one of the few central problems characterizing contemporary thought. Such caution will serve to exclude both its naive rehabilitation and its outright rejection.

It is my belief that these three positions, as outlined, are all of value, that their central insights should be integrated, and that contemporary hermeneutics can best be viewed as usefully fulfilling this task; the work of Ricoeur can be seen as one example of such attempted integration. On one hand, a hermeneutic philosophy can accept the phenomenological starting point of the human subject’s immediacy to phenomena. However, it does not delude itself into thinking that there is a privileged mode of access to phenomena that would disconnect the categories of our particular historical and linguistic heritage. On the other hand, while recognizing that our understanding is mediated by language and semiotic systems generally—the signifying networks of exchange and communication between human subjects—hermeneutics need not lose contact with the life experiences of the subjects within this broad semiotic realm. That is, we not only come to understand the sign systems operative in our world, but also, to some degree, ourselves as we live and interact in and through them. As Ricoeur has constantly stressed, semiotics (and structuralism) has still to take the final step of accounting for the experiencing subjects presupposed by any structural social system.¹⁵ Semiotics would, at its extreme point, remain arbitrary with respect to phenomenal experience, just as phenomenology would remain silent if it were consistently to avoid the conceptual and cultural biases of our languages.

This methodological interlude is intended to set the scene for all that follows. Hermeneutics in the form just outlined will be a guiding, though often implicit, philosophical stance throughout, but this will not prevent our accepting many important insights from both the phenomenological and the semiotic traditions (including their deconstructive and poststructural inheritors).

There are two further and important methodological points to keep in mind here. First, I shall restrict my philosophical exposition to describing human experience from the point of view of language-using human subjects already enmeshed in social reality (the Lebenswelt). This philosophical stance will preclude my venturing into metaphysical speculation on the origins of, say, language or consciousness. Similarly, my phenomenological commitment avoids consideration of the human subject from a traditional empirical or naturalistic standpoint. For example, whether or not events of meaning, significance, understanding, and the like can be reduced to functionings on the physical-chemical level of scientific inquiry will not be of concern to us here, for such models and hypotheses rarely if ever connect with the experience human subjects have of themselves as meaningful, understanding, self-reflective social subjects.¹⁶

Second, though the semiotic realm (language, advertising, animal gestures, art, and so on) is far broader than what we ordinarily mean by the term language,¹⁷ I shall nevertheless restrict the discussion principally to language (spoken and written). Many other semiotic fields in the human sphere both presuppose and utilize ordinary language, and this to the degree that one is justified in calling such language the preeminent or privileged sign system of human intercourse. Neither visual art nor music, for example, serves as the social medium in which our everyday interpersonal transactions are carried out. It is closer to the truth to say that we exist as a speech community within which such semiotic systems and symbolic activities arise as vocational activities. That it might be possible to gain some form of self-understanding and sense of personal identity to the exclusion of linguistic competence is, I believe, secondary to a consideration of the human subject qua language user and will not, therefore, be a primary question in this work. I hope that my conclusions will be seen to support this claim. I begin with what has been called the “language animal,” with the aim of describing the nature of self and self-identity that this dominant characteristic of our lives entails.¹⁸

In brief, what is attempted in this book is to draw out and integrate insights from the works of important contemporary thinkers (primarily from all three of the above “traditions”) that are relevant to the central theme of self and personhood. The investigation should yield what I take to be a properly hermeneutic, indeed postmodern, view of the human subject—that is, a view that places particular importance on the role of both language and interpretation to the very constitution of what we generally mean by a self-conscious human subject.

Rather than begin in medias res with the narrative subject, we shall work our way toward this position through an initial consideration of time and memory (chapter 1). The section headed “The Time of Our Lives” brings into focus the historicality and connectedness of human experience, the temporal structure of our lives as a cumulative process of sedimented meanings. This sedimented history serves as the horizon within which our present acts take on meaning. Self-understanding will involve thematizing our history in recollective acts. Accordingly, the next section is an examination of memory and recollection. It is with recollection that the past is actively appropriated to the self. But this appropriation, as we shall see, is always an interpretation of the past, a selective and imaginative retelling of it from the perspective of the present. This first chapter will prepare us for the explicit consideration of the narrative nature of our experience and of our self-knowledge. I shall argue that if experienced time is basically the time of our lives—our history—it is through narrative that this history is recounted. The consideration of memory will lead us to this conclusion.

Chapter 2 deals explicitly with narrative and its relation to the self and self-identity. At this point, however, and in line with the previous chapter, the discussion will be limited to narrative as it figures in the makeup of our daily lives. An important goal of this and later chapters is to show that narrative structures are indigenous to human experience and are not simply an imposition of art on life: the art-to-life relation is a two-way street.

The first section, “I Am I,” aims at discrediting the view that the self is immediately given to itself through some introspective intuition. I shall argue, following Alasdair Maclntyre and Hannah Arendt, that one’s identity is that of a character in a narrative and that self-understanding is accordingly a matter of the emplotment of one’s experiences. These latter themes are taken up in more detail in the second section, “The Story of Our Lives,” which develops the theme of narrative as a mode of understanding. The primary problem tackled here is the relation between the narrative and prenarrative levels of experience. I shall argue, against Louis Mink and invoking Ricoeur, that narration of oneself is both a receptive and a creative activity, that the implicit narrative structure of life is taken up and augmented in our explicit narratives. The goal is to show that we are always already caught up in narratives and that we are primarily, as Maclntyre has said, storytelling animals.

The remaining sections attempt to back up these claims concerning the thoroughgoing importance of narrative in our lives by considering its importance to both our emotional experience and to morality. The third section, “Narrative and Emotion,” examines the work of Charles Taylor on the importance of language and interpretation for our emotional experience. The claim here is that the higher or, as Taylor calls them, subject referring emotions are inseparable from an autobiographical articulation that itself discloses value directions in the person’s life. Emotions, it will be argued, both call forth narrative articulation and are themselves based on some degree of narrative understanding of events. The fourth section, “The Virtue of Narrative,” considers the way in which the value of an event is dependent upon how we narrate that event. The primary claim here is that narration rarely if ever escapes being evaluative. As social beings we are already indoctrinated into certain traditional narratives that set up “standard” expectations and obligations and that guide our explicit evaluations; narrative, as Jean-François Lyotard has claimed, is a primary vehicle of ideology.

In chapter 3 we move away from a general discussion of narrative to a more particular consideration of the individual in relation to language. I shall pursue, in greater detail than before, both the nature of spoken language and the development of self-consciousness with language usage. The first section, “He Who Says ‘Ego’” studies the formation of selfhood and self-consciousness as these arise through the use of the first-person singular and recognition of its dialectical relation to the second person. The analysis proceeds via consideration of the linguist Emile Benveniste’s important writings on language and the human subject. The second section, “Signs of Derrida,” complements the earlier discussion of narrative by considering the soliloquizing subject and arguing against the position of language as, in essence, a means of communicating prefigured intentions. I shall argue, with Derrida and against Husserl, that meaning arises from and requires the presence of signifiers and their iterability. The third section, “The Alter Ego,” examines the way language usage introduces a split in the subject between what I shall call the speaking and the spoken subjects. Of importance here will be a discussion of Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage of ego development. The fourth section, “Narrative and Truth,” draws some important conclusions, on the basis of the above sections, concerning the problematic relation of self-narration and truth. I shall argue for a pragmatic rather than a representational theory of truth in this area. The discussion concludes with a consideration of the similarity of the problems of self-narration and the writing of history.

After a last criticism of the Cartesian cogito, the final section, “The Semiotic Subject,” draws together our previous investigations into the self and self-narration by arriving at a systematization of the human subject into three primary moments: the speaking subject, the subject of speech, and the spoken subject. Briefly, these three subjects represent the three aspects of human expression. The speaking subject is the individual qua site of expression—the language user. The subject of speech is the purely signified subject of utterances, that is, the subject qua position within a signifying network without consideration of the flesh-and-blood author of the utterance; in other words, the subject projected by, or meant in, the utterance. Finally, the spoken subject is the audience of the utterance or the subject qua listener or receiver, the individual affected by the utterance. A rough but perhaps useful parallel can be drawn between the three subjects outlined above and the more often encountered division, from the literary sphere, between narrator, character, and spectator.

A cautionary note. General language usage predisposes us to conceive of the self in a way that is usually at odds with what I am proposing here. As Nietzsche has said, language leads us to posit a substantial “doer before the deed.” In light of such common expressions as “I think,” “I walk,” “I remember,” there is a strong tendency to believe in a self existing outside those acts, a self that is their motivator. Although I shall argue against this motivator position—this will indeed be a major focus in what follows—it is nevertheless very difficult to avoid the structure of language that supports it. While I find it acceptable and perhaps unavoidable to say “I think,” I would not want to suggest by this usage that there is a prelinguistic entity (some inner I) that does the thinking. Using I, as in the beginning of the last sentence, is not only difficult to avoid but of course becomes doubly problematic in a treatise that seeks gradually to unfold a possible meaning for the I and the self. I must trust that the reader will bear this precaution in mind, especially in the early chapters.

A concluding note. From a hermeneutic perspective there can be no such thing as a final “truth” of the human subject and the human condition, for we investigators are not the disengaged spectators that such a scientific inquiry would require. We are ourselves the subject of the inquiry, and the asking of the question regarding the nature of the human subject is a considerable part of what it means to be such a subject. Thus I cannot claim the venerable status of the “truth” for what is contained in these pages. What is hoped for is that the reader finds this interpretation of the human subject to be both a plausible and a coherent account, and at times perhaps even a provocative one.¹⁹