Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak
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and Narrative (III), Ricoeur advocates for the strong narrative concept of the self that “appears both as a reader and the writer of its own life.”71 One of these limitations – especially in clinical contexts – implicitly addresses a self-narrative disconnectedness from empirical evidence which provides the first-person perspective with a private, hermetic, unexaminable sense or truth: “meaning is always emergent, never quite fixed and how, in the ontogenetic process of making meaning over time, knowledge is transformed even while it is maintained. This microhistorical process of genetic epistemology renders each person’s ideas unique, even while, from birth onwards, each one of us willy-nilly co-opts to others in making our own sense of the world.”72
Daniel Dennett’s idea of replacing Ricoeur’s narrative self-identity with the “center of narrative gravity”73 was drawn from theoretical physics and biology. ←30 | 31→That center would be able to describe one’s condition also in terms of a naturalized, embodied self. Dennett’s heterophenomenological method additionally reinforced the third-person perspective as a necessary contribution to one’s self constitution. “Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control and self-definition – Dennett argues – is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly, concocting the story we tell others – and ourselves – about who we are” as “a unified agent whose words they are.”74 However, Dennett’s creative agency (though fictional) is able to provide an individual with multiple selves,75 in the form of “quasi-selves, semi-selves, transitional selves,” which would imply a personality disorder from which some contemporary subjects would prefer to be liberated, rather than be inflicted with. But some other subjects were probably satisfied with such and other implications of Dennett’s theory, like “the description of the narrative self as the computer software program running on the hardware computer of the brain” allowing “that such a self can survive many physical manifestations. In addition, descriptions that deploy computational language may be more appealing to contemporary readers than the language of souls.”76
Despite the unexpected multitude of narrative selves (and even narrative gravity centers!), a human brain shows a clear preference for “coherence and single-mindedness to dissonance and conflict,”77 for causality over passivity, for decision making over arbitrariness, etc. (however, not necessarily a clear preference for reality over fiction). That favored version of me will be stated as my very “real” self, as both authors explain. Why the heterophenomenological or objectively hermeneutical method can be useful in clinical contexts was exactly examined in McCarthy: “gathering the data of first-person reports of conscious ←31 | 32→experience, observing subjects’ emotional and physiological behavior, bracketing any worries about the ontological status of the objects of conscious experience, and taking a third-person stance toward the phenomena concerned.”78
3.2 The Narrative Self in Humanist Clinical Contexts and Beyond Them
Further objections to the narrative approach to an individual self would address:
1. subjects with limited linguistic competence, such as young children yet unable to narrate or to use symbols, complex motions, etc.;
2. subjects suffering from semantic dementia, word-finding difficulties, and agrammatism;79
3. traumatized subjects;
4. subjects with neurological impairments or brain injuries;
5. subjects suffering from functional and psychomotor disabilities or from the loss of motor abilities;
6. subjects in a coma and those with conditions such as locked-in syndrome;80
7. subjects with posthuman experiences whose narratives are simulated in literary works or fine arts.
These subjects are limited in their effective, narrative, and autobiographical storytelling. Heterophenomenology would not be sufficient for accessing information about who a subject is, and to provide empowering feedback for her. Technological tools such as the brain-computer interface can detect “signs of consciousness,”81 the meaning and relevance of which can be encoded and interpreted with the help of additional “behavioral assessment” and “volitional”82 brain activity assessment, which seems to match Dennett’s criterion of objective ←32 | 33→observation. A large number of studies “have concluded that high-level cognition can be observed in the absence of purposeful motor responses, suggesting a potential dissociation between behavioral expression of consciousness and consciousness per se.”83 Also, diagnoses of dementia,84 neural injuries, and serious mental disorders and related disintegrations, to a large extent require the objective clinical observation of a subject’s expressions and behaviors.
Subjects with transplanted or implanted organ,85 or implanted intelligent devices86 may also be temporarily disadvantaged in their approach to themselves; however, the problem is not restricted to the narrative self. Radical allograft experiences are documented case-by-case and will be examined in this volume together with experiences with artificial devices. Unlike these cases, the posthumanist experiments seem to be colonized by fictional and utopian narratives offered from scholars’ meta-perspectives and literature. Authentic first-person reports on a posthuman self/identity are scarce. There is no certainty as to whether posthuman creatures showed interest in self-identity or were rather satisfied with their post-egological and post-personal existence. However, as long as we are dealing with the originally human element in post- or ‘neohuman’ creatures, interest in self-identity will prevail, at least at “the next ego balance”87 level. That balance would not necessarily be achieved through the approach of the narrative self, but through the “care of the self” originating from “our capacity to tenderly and lovingly care for the body,”88 both in silence89 or in the middle of narratives and discourses.
←33 | 34→
Van den Berg examined the relationship between continuity, discontinuity, and the concept of a self whose coherence and balance were supported by narrative ability, as I tried to show above with Ricoeur and Dennett’s narrative theories. If a radical jump from human to posthuman identity implied a decline of the narratively structured self, there would be a radical discontinuity within the latter. However, according to van den Berg, discontinuity paradoxically promises more structure than continuity and homogeneity:
Discontinuity means: Intransitivity, a jump, a gap, disconnectedness, something accidental and open-ended. This sounds quiet puzzlingly. We are so used to the connectedness and the transition that we are no more able to imagine how can something arise outside connection. It