Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak
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am a body which rises towards the world,” as Merleau-Ponty puts it.51 “Notice that we are not talking about a direction of causality. And we are not dependent on neuroscience to validate experience; that would be scientific imperialism.”52 We can problematize the embodied self in terms of psychology, phenomenology, philosophy of biology, philosophy of technics, the narrative self and literature theory, Eastern philosophical traditions, therapy –and this is what this book does.
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The ‘incarnate subject’ concept has a long history in cultures, religions, and philosophies. Step by step, the French phenomenologists Malebranche, Maine de Biran, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty elevated Descartes’ “union of the soul and the body”53 to the paradigm of the self not only embodied but also interconnected with fellow embodied selves and the surrounding reality. “The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be intervolved in a definite environment.”54 Nowadays, the nature of ‘definite environments’ is changing. The question of how technologies affect the embodied self is worth examining:55 Does it co-evolve in parallel with the increasing presence of technologies in our lives and experiential horizons?56 Or is it suffering from disintegration, losing its agential energy and becoming a patient? What exactly within a living organism, body, and embodiment is susceptible to manipulation and prone to techno-poiesis? In this book, the Embodied Self Theory will be predominant as a framework to integrally weigh up all the pros and cons of becoming the thesis ‘we, humans, face posthumanism as the next stage of the human development’ justified.
3.1 An Outline of Narrative Theory
Narrative theory belongs to the highly-esteemed (but also highly discussed)highly-esteemed concepts of the self for the highly integrative and therapeutic effects of autobiographical narration, as “the I tells the story of the self and the story becomes part of the Me.”57 Constructing one’s own biography by means of a “storied nature of human experience”58 is the narrative method in a nutshell. Is there no self ←27 | 28→without narrative? To answer this question, it is worth reiterating how difficult it is to achieve a narratively-managed selfhood in overwhelming experiences.
For Immanuel Kant, first-person autobiographical narratives were “not exactly sources for anthropology” but were “nevertheless aids”59 in understanding oneself, being understood by other subjects, and getting involved in intersubjective relations. Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer explored the crucial role of narrative ability for shaping one’s individual self. “Being able to say” something with reference to oneself implies referring to oneself as another. This ‘another’ is being revealed, identified, and confirmed by the “I” that stories and re-stories her life course as a sequence of experiences, both personal and interpersonal, active and passive. To provide a story form for her life, the I must use “a capacity more specific than the general gift of language that expresses itself in the plurality of languages”60 to report on single, isolated episodes connected by the logical conjunction or grammatical particle “… and ….” (according to “the method of the AND, ‘this and then that’ ”61) or ordered consecutively, as in “they do X,” “they stop doing X,” “they do Y,” “they stop doing Y,” etc. Storying and re-storying transforms single episodes into a chain of experiences, or into an elaborate composition (“fabric” in English, “Gewebe” in German) filling one’s self-identity. Nietzsche pioneered the art of narration as the very source of coherence and meaning, as he was also the discoverer of the crisis of modern subjectivity and selfhood. However, to provide narratives that are both auto-creative and auto-biographical with some factual content (still associated by modern societies with truth and authenticity, not just with the originality of the narrative itself), that is, to minimize the effect of confabulation or, by and large, “the competence to style life” (dieser Kompetenz der Stilisierung des Lebens)62 which seem fundamental for artistry,63 the narrative ability is to refer to a subject’s authentic activities, experiences and agential abilities: “By ‘being able to act,’ I mean the capacity to produce events in society and nature. This intervention transforms the notion of ←28 | 29→events, which are not simply what happens. It introduces human contingency, uncertainty and unpredictability into the course of things.”64
Thus, narrative ability is about the arrangement and re-arrangement of the changeable, fleeting, and instant life occurrences and life experiences of nearly all life spheres in order to provide a diachronic, relatively coherent, legible and meaningful plot, by means of storytelling. This plot will be continuously developed, constantly updated, re-storied, and re-interpreted day after day. A subject’s ability to do this is the ability to narrate herself, including her willingness to do this, which Nietzsche considered to be the key form of the will to power. As a consequence, the narrative ability which originates from a subject’s life and practical potentials would be empowering to her self-confirmation as an individual. In that sense, one may formulate an imperative of sovereign, auto-biographical narration. That imperative would make the narrator responsible for her self-identity in the ethical perspective inasmuch as she is dealing with the question about her identity, which is not established forever and is far from coherence. Therefore, the narrative theory of the self seems nearly perfectly tailored to meet the need of contemporary humans with their chronic identity crises and, in particular, with their experience of chronic self-alienation.
‘Being able to narrate’ occupies a pre-eminent place among the capacities, insofar as events of whatever origin become legible and intelligible only when recounted in stories; the age-old art of story-telling, when applied to oneself, produces life narratives which the historians articulate as history. Emplotment marks a bifurcation in identity itself – which is no longer merely the identity of the same – and in one’s own identity, which incorporates change as peripeteia. One may speak, consequently, of a narrative identity: the identity of the narrative plot that remains unfinished and open to the possibility of being told differently or of letting itself be told by others.65
“Composition”66 emerges from bridging “the episodic dispersal of the narrative and the power of unification unfurled by the configuring act constituting poiesis itself,”67 as the narrative ability is poietic, which also means efficient and causative.68 “This narrative necessity transforms physical contingency, the other ←29 | 30→side of physical necessity, into narrative contingency, implied in narrative necessity.”69 Despite the limitations of the narrative concept of the self