Relative State

The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity

December 11th, 2005

Philosopher Daniel Dennett (Wikipedia entry) has written an article called The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity, which gives an explanation of what a self might be.

..it does seem that we are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behavior, more or less unified, but sometimes disunified, and we always put the best “faces” on it we can. We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography.

The chief fictional character at the center of that autobiography is one’s self. And if you still want to know what the self really is, you’re making a category mistake…it can turn out that the best hermeneutical story we can tell about that individual says that there is more than one character “inhabiting” that body. This is quite possible on the view of the self that I have been presenting; it does not require any fancy metaphysical miracles…all that has to be the case is that the story doesn’t cohere around one self, one imaginary point, but coheres (coheres much better, in any case) around two different imaginary points.

Daniel Dennett takes a lot of ideas from the emerging field of cognitive science. This is a topic I will have to write more about in the future, because the new perspectives on the mind that come out of the discipline are more compatible with plural psychology than many older Western ideas.

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