A Criticism of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Account of Narrative Identity. A Neuro-philosophical Perspective
Abstract
In MacIntyre’s view, the agent in order to have a consistent identity should be able to narrate a story about her life, which relates the different episodes of her life together. This story should explain the transition between these episodes. This story is based on the notion of the good of human beings. A notion of the good should be present in the agent’s life to give a direction to her life. This integrity forms an identity for the agent. We intend to challenge this narrative view of identity in this paper. We will argue in this paper that though identity is formed in the eye of others, it does not need to be constituted in a unified narrative form, i.e., the agent does not need to place all episodes of her life in narrative order and have a consistent and unified account of her life, which includes her life from birth to death. Rather, shorter-term episodes of time suffice for identity formation. We will appeal to some findings of empirical psychology and neuroscience to support our claim.
References
Allebone, J., G. Rayner, B. Siveges, S. J. Wilson. 2015. “Epilepsia Altered Self-Identity and Autobiographical Memory.” Epilepsy 56(12): 1982–91.
Berzonsky, M. D. 2011. “A Social-Cognitive Perspective on Identity Construct.” In Handbook of Identity Theory and Research, edited by S. J. Schwartz et al., 55–76. New York: Springer.
Casebeer, W. D., and P. S. Churchland. 2003. “The Neural Mechanisms of Moral Cognition: A Multiple-Aspect Approach to Moral Judgment and Decision-Making”. Biology and Philosophy 18(1): 169–194. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023380907603.
Cho, E. D. 2018. “Narrative Identity.” In Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion, edited by David A. Leeming D. Berlin–Heidelberg: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27771-9_200167-1.
Erikson, Erik H. 1958. Young Man Luther. New York: Norton.
Erikson, Erik H. 1968. Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: Norton.
Faught, Edward. 2016. “Who Am I? Forgetting Your Past Is Forgetting Yourself.” Epilepsy Currents 16(3): 141–42. https://doi.org/10.5698/1535-7511-16.3.141.
Lane, Andrew. 2011. “The Narrative Self-Constitution View: Why Marya Schechtman Cannot Require it for Personhood.” Macalester Journal of Philosophy 20(1): Article 6. http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/philo/vol20/iss1/6.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1959. “Notes from the Moral Wilderness, II.” The New Reasoner 8 (Spring): 89–98.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1966. A Short History of Ethics. London: Routledge, 1998.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd ed. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1982. “Intelligibility, Goods, and Rules.” The Journal of Philosophy 79 (11): 663–65.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1986. “The Intelligibility of Action.” In Rationality, Relativism and the Human Sciences, edited by Richard M. Burian, Joseph Margolis, and Michael Kraus, 63–80. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1987. “Can One Be Unintelligible to Oneself?” In Philosophy in Its Variety: Essays in Memory of François Bordet, edited by Christopher McKnight and Marcel Stchedroff, 23–37. Belfast: Queen’s University of Belfast.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 2016. Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McAdams, Dan P. 1985. Power, Intimacy, and the Life Story: Personological Inquiries into Identity. New York: Guilford Press.
McAdams, Dan P. 1995. “What Do We Know When We Know A Person?”. Journal of Personality 63(3): 365–95.
McAdams, Dan P. 2011. “Narrative Identity.” In Handbook of Identity Theory and Research, edited by Seth J. Schwartz, Koen Luyckx, and Vivian L. Vignoles, 99–115. London: Springer.
McCall, George J., and Jerry L. Simmons. 1978. Identities and Interactions: An Examination of Human Associations in Everyday Life. New York: Free Press.
McDowell, John. 1979. “Virtue and Reason.” Monist 63(3): 331–50.
Nelson, Hilde L. 2003. Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Raggatt, Peter T. F. 2006. “Multiplicity and Conflict in the Dialogical Self: A Life-Narrative Approach.” In Identity and Story: Creating Self in Narrative, edited by Dan P. McAdams, Ruthellen Josselson, and Amia Lieblich, 15–35. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press.
Ritivoi, Andreea D. 2011. “Virtuous Selves in Vicious Times: Alasdair MacIntyre on Narrative Identity.” Narrative Inquiry 21(2): 367–73.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1986. “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator.” In Facts and Values: Philosophical Reflections from Western and non-Western Perspectives, edited by Marinus C. Doeser and John Kraay, 34–68. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff.
Schechtman, M. 1996. The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Schneewind, J. 1982. Virtue, Narrative, and Community: MacIntyre and Morality. The Journal of Philosophy, 79(11): 653–63. https://doi.org/10.2307/2026540.
Serpe, Richard T., and Sheldon Stryker. 2010. “The Symbolic Interactionist Perspective and Identity Theory.” In Handbook of Identity Theory and Research, edited by Seth J. Schwartz et al. 225–48. New York: Springer.
Stanley, B. K., and Shaun Nichols. 2012. “Memory and the Sense of Personal Identity.” Mind 121(483): 677–702. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzs080.
Schleim, S., and F. Schirman. 2011. “Philosophical Implications and Multidisciplinary Challenges of Moral Physiology.” Trames Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 15(2): 127–46. https://doi.org/10.3176/tr.2011.2.02.
Strawson, Galen. 2004. “Against Narrativity.” Ratio. An International Journal of Analytic Philosophy 17: 428–52.
Strohminger, Nina, and Shaun Nichols, 2015. “Neurodegeneration and Identity.” Psychological Science 26(9): 1469–79.
Taylor, Charles. 1992. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Copyright (c) 2022 Roczniki Filozoficzne
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
