Author Govert SchullerPosted on Categories Philosophy
Introduction.
Following are two sections from the dissertation: “The Possibility Conditions of Narrative Identity“. Though I intended to include much more Jaynesian theory, I think these two sections will be most accessible for Jaynesians. The rest is also pretty compatible with Jaynes. What my dissertation did was to highlight the narrative component of consciousness and identity.
§ 30. Rorty and Trans-generational Narrative Identity Development
Somewhere between a) the long-term evolutionary story of language and narrative cognition, and b) the short-term life-span course of individual identity formation, lies c) the medium-term development of literature itself, including its impact on identity formation.
Anthropologist and Jaynes scholar Brian McVeigh makes a similar point on inserting a medium-term, cultural time-span with its own developmental arc.
Mainstream, conventional research psychology typically utilizes two types of time: (1) developmental, i.e., the trajectory of the human life span; and (2) evolutionary or the unimaginably long passage of many millennia. But I submit that certain research projects demand a third type of temporality measured in several centuries (or in some circumstances several millennia). This mid-range type is better suited for understanding sociocultural adaptation ( McVeigh, 2019: 5).
Here I will lay out the main idea and the contributions from two scholars in the way they highlighted larger or smaller chapters of this story. They are the American philosophers Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and Charles Taylor. The leading thought is that our identities have gone through changes in tandem with the changes in oral myths and written literature.
If our identities are thoroughly socially constructed by the formative power inherent in narrative cognition, then it stands to reason that any changes in the plots, characters, evaluative practices and emotional evocations throughout the ages will have a profound impact on the manner we take the world and ourselves to be and what action possibilities would be open.
Amélie Oksenberg Rorty wrestled with this issue in her paper “A Literary Postscript: Characters, Persons, Selves, Individuals” (1976). She perceives an enormous amount of identity variations throughout written history and acknowledges that identity theory is at an impasse, because theorists are very far from a consensus about the criteria by which persons can be identified. She wanted a history of the notion of identity and in her paper offered “a skeleton outline of some of the emotional and social spaces in which each of these move and have their being” (302).
In very short order the development of identity formations throughout western history went from Greek heroic characters, for whom lineage and deeds were paramount marks of identity; to figures who are “defined by their place in an unfolding drama” (307); to persons as dramatis personae who know they are playing roles and have donned a mask and are also a “unified center of choice and action” (309); to inward directed souls and minds slightly detached from the world; to selves with legal rights and societal obligations; and to individuals as “indivisible autonomous units” feeling the dialectic of individuality and community.
She sees connecting links between the different conceptions–the themes of agency and interiority are pervasive–but doesn’t see an “underlying substance” (320). If there is an abiding theme it would be that “humans are just the sort of organisms that interpret and modify their agency through their conceptions of themselves” (323). Her proposed research program to still make some sense of all variations would be to “investigate the biologically adaptive functions of the various cultural grafts: the obsession with unification and choice, salvation and simplicity, isolated integrity and achievement” (323).
In short–and in congruence with the concepts of narrative identity and its evolutionary roots so far presented–Rorty sees persons and individuals (the neutral terms she uses to envelop the entire class of variations) as entities inventing themselves through self-interpretation within a cultural evolutionary context.
In very short, identities are the product of adaptive self-interpretation, which went through a series of changes in at least the last 3,000 years, and its record can be found in literature.
§ 31. Charles Taylor and the History of Inwardness
The second contribution to this mid-range story of the cultural evolution of identity comes from Charles Taylor. In his landmark study Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) he addresses the historical development of how identity was experienced covering more or less the same time-span as Rorty, i.e. early classical Greece to modernity.
Taylor, like Rorty, highlights the themes of interiority and agency and starts his story actually when the “inwardness” had not yet become a part of a person’s experience of himself and life. He observed that in Homer the locus of strength, inspiration, thought, and passions are fragmented throughout the body and were not yet to be ‘found’ in a unified mind located in the head. Taylor brings in the research by German philologist Bruno Snell, who wrote The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought.
Snell remarked on the absence in Homer of words that could happily be translated by our ‘mind’, or even by ‘soul’ in its standard post-Platonic meaning, that is, a term designating the unique locus where all our different thoughts and feelings occur (118).
Snell found in Greek literature that there was a gradual change form the Homeric sense of bodily dispersed passions and thoughts to the Platonic sense of a unitary inner mind.
Plato’s view, just because it privileges a condition of self-collected awareness and designates this as the state of maximum unity with oneself, requires some conception of the mind as a unitary space (119).
Against expectation the language of interiority was rarely used to make moral points (536, n7). That came later. With the Stoics interiority became the locus of the will, which could give or withhold assent by choice (137), and in the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus the language of inwardness became more pronounced (537, n4).
With Augustine inwardness becomes even more central and very complex as it became the place of the soul, the will, truth, God and moral development. Taylor observed that Augustine was “concerned not just with a turn away from what is outside, but with a search within” (537, n4) and quoted his famous line: “Noli foras ire, in teipsum redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas“, which translates as “Do not go outward; return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth” (129). For Augustine the inner/outer category becomes central and subsumes the other opposites of “spirit/matter, higher/lower, eternal/temporal, immutable/changing” (128-9). And the unity and wholeness of the self is only to be found in God and not (yet) in itself, which idea culminates in Descartes, for whom interiority is the locus of all thought as thinking substance, res cogitans, as opposed to res extensa, the spatial world of matter and one’s body.
Taylor considers the addition of “moral sources”, which were previously located outside in the well-ordered cosmos as an “epoch-making” and a “radical twist” to Augustinian inwardness (143). Reason rules the passions and dominates a disenchanted world. Reason becomes ‘disengaged’. The good life comes from one’s dignity as a rational being (152). Descartes established a “new conception of inwardness, an inwardness of self-sufficiency, of autonomous powers of ordering by reason” (158) resulting in a move towards mechanism and treating experience as a vorhanden object.
Another big step happened with the empiricist John Locke, who arguably demolished and rebuild the mind as a “punctual self” emptied from innate ideas and teleological impulses, i.e. the Tabula rasa. Locke “reifies the mind” and uses “metaphors to do with constructing and assembling stuff” (166). Ideas are impressions from outside to be treated as inert objects or propositional entities (164-5). Its context was the rise of a disciplinary stance and practices with its “ideal of rational self-responsibility” (167). Enormously important for Locke’s concept of personal identity is the role of reflexivity by which the self appears to itself. “Its only constitutive property is self-awareness” (49).
The story continues with Hume, Kant, Schelling and Schopenhauer, who all contributed additions or made rejections to this ongoing concept of interiority. The arc more or less ends in the literary experiments of T.S. Elliot, Ezra Pound and Marcel Proust. Inwardness is now complemented by decentering (465). The unitary self is no more and the focus is on the “flow of experience” and on language and its structures (465). The context is the ongoing Romantic reaction against mechanism, capitalism and industrialism (460-65). Meanwhile philosophers like Dilthey and Heidegger combat the role of mechanistic-utilitarian categories and turn from an idealized nature to the pragmatic life-world and try to retrieve experience from conventional, instrumental modes (469).
The upshot of this extraction from Taylor is the idea that 1) not only the concept of identity went through many phases, but that all these thinkers both expressed and influenced how identity was experienced at a non-thematic, quotidian level, and 2) that these identity concepts highlighting interiority can be integrated into a narrative identity theory, which Taylor himself subscribed to but not fully fleshed out theoretically (48-9).
Sources
Jaynes, Julian. 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
McVeigh, Brian J. 2019. “Jaynesian Psychology: Misunderstandings and Methodology”. Document at academia.edu.
Rorty, Amelie O. 1976. “A Literary Postscript: Characters, Persons, Selves, Individuals”. In Rorty, Amelie O. (Ed.), The Identities of Persons. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 301-323. Also in Rorty, Amelie O. (Ed.). 1988. Mind in Action. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988.
Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P.