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© Roger M Tagg 2012
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web" . This website is under continuing development.
The theme of this short book (114 pages up to the index) is to demolish the traditional (and natural, to many of us westerners) idea of a 'pre-existing self'. That means doing away with concepts like 'soul', Cartesian 'ego' or 'transcendental ego', and instead to say "I am what can be told".
Personally I think this viewpoint is a good one from the viewpoint of psychiatry, but not so useful in a pragmatic approach to everyday life.
Kerby's arguments derive from the hermeneutic approaches of people like Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur.
At the time of writing the book, Kerby was a lecturer at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He was a founding member of the 'Canadian Society for Hermeneutics and Postmodern Thought'. Nowadays he regards himself as an ex-philosopher!
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | 2 | Gadamer: "Being that can be understood is language". |
| 5 | Self is not "a religiously motivated soul substance or an idealistic transcendental subject" [RT: like Husserl's?]. These are 'speculative' concepts. Instead, the "self is a product of action". | |
| 6 | "One's identity may become fragmented into many different and discontinuous narratives." This is more than just schizophrenia. | |
| 7 | "Our (life) "history constitutes a drama in which we are the leading character." | |
| "In the case of personal narratives, 'truth' becomes more a question of a certain adequacy to an implicit meaning of the past, than of a historically correct representation or verisimilitude." | ||
| "The meaning of the past is not something fixed and final, but is something continually refigured and updated in the present." [RT: sounds like the stories told by disgraced Australian politician Craig Thomson.] | ||
| 8 | APK suggests the term prenarrative as "an earlier (and in a sense more primitive) stage of narrative structuration". | |
| 9 | It's goodbye to Kant's "Ding an sich". | |
| 11 | APK restricts himself to 'ordinary' language [RT: i.e. what we speak or write as 'text'], and doesn't discuss other sign systems. He mentions "advertising, animal gestures, art" [RT: but not mathematics, logic, scientific theories, ideograms, diagrams (including Frolio) and pictures. This may constrain his viewpoint. Also, his coverage of actions seems limited to 'ordinary' social traditions and situations, which might exclude a lot of what is addressed by 'speech acts', for example in management, business, research or war.] | |
| 1 - Time and | 17 | APK contrasts 'lived time' with 'atomic clock' time. William James said that the lived time is "no knife edge, but a saddleback". It includes some past and some future. |
| Memory | 22 | Our past is not just the chronology (list of date/time stamps and what happened at each), but "the accumulated significance of my successive experiences". [RT: I used to write letters home from boarding school, which followed the pattern "On Monday we did, X, on Tuesday we did Y etc". Nowadays I have 4 ring binders of nostalgia, plus a 20-year trail of all my weekly emails to and from a friend, and before that 20 years of diaries - not to mention all my photographs. So I reckon we each have a different balance between chronology and recollected significant episodes.] |
| 23 | Recollections aren't "images which somehow duplicate original experience" (which is maybe OK for 'knowing that'; rather, APK says, they are "tokens or traces for a certain intended sense". | |
| 24 | Memory incorporates "the 'nowness' of the 'then' ", (i.e. we have a different take on an old event when we think about it today.) | |
| 29 | "If the past, then, is not to remain just a collection of vaguely intuited phantasms, it must undergo interpretation, and this is intellectual work." [RT: I guess this is why we adopt the style of a novel when we articulate our memories.] | |
| 2 - On Narrative | 32-39 | [RT: This section seems mainly a literature review, and I haven't read many of the authors. APK seems to be trying to identify differences between various previous authors, and between them and his own position. Such authors include Locke, Samuel Beckett, Descartes, Hegel, Hannah Arendt, Alasdair MacIntyre, Derek Parfit, Neurath, and Proust. |
| 39 | "In spoken autobiographical discourse the character, the narrator and the author are assumed to be one and the same. Only when the listener suspects falsity or deception will he distinguish between them." | |
| "The prenarrative is ... the drama we call our lives. As dramatic, our lives cannot always be said to have a narrator, for it is only when, from within the drama, we take up the narrator's role that the story of our lives is actually told." But narration has already entered, in the form of this 'prenarrative'. | ||
| 40-45 | [RT: I struggled even more here. The issue is "What's the relationship between the narrative and our experiences?" He brings in the views of Ricoeur, Louis Mink, MacIntyre (again), Barbara Hardy, David Carr etc. According to APK, Ricoeur seems to waver between pushing too far (on the 'narrative' theme) and not pushing as far as he (APK) would like. He asks "Does it really matter whether our narrative is true or false?" I suggest that to most of us, it does - but maybe less to a psychiatrist who's job is to find the patient a 'stance' that will help him or her through a crisis.] | |
| 47 | APK does think that Wilfred Sellars's "myth of the given" goes too far. [I think this implies that our experiences themselves are a myth.] | |
| 49 | "Emotions also have a life history, for they change during the course of our developing understanding." | |
| 50 | Charles Taylor: "We already have incorporated into our language an interpretation of what is really important". [RT: Is this why the Eskimos are reputed to have 50 words for different types of snow? Maybe British railway companies need a few more!] | |
| 54 | "Recollection does not simply describe but tends also to dramatize" - and to bring 'value' into things. | |
| 55 | In "the world of concrete action ... we must respond ... with more than just understanding and compassion" (as opposed to the world of literature). | |
| 56 | C Taylor: "Our identity is defined by our fundamental evaluations". [RT: I think I disagree; lots of people might have the same set of these evaluations. I think Taylor is talking about 'character', not identity.] | |
| 61 | Hauerwas and Burrell say that "any old narrative won't do" - the narrative can be checked against other people's experiences, as well as for internal consistency. But then they say "All our notions are narrative-dependent, including the notion of rationality". [RT: including, I suppose 'consistency' as well. The phrase "rationality is rhetoric" sounds like bullshit to me. I would rather say "logic is a language".] | |
| 61-2 | H&B go on to say "Discriminating among stories is less a matter of weighing arguments than of displaying how adopting different stories will lead us to become different sorts of persons". [RT: That's the psychiatrist's view again. It might also apply to Craig Thomson - depending on the story he tells, the Australian government might fall and Craig cease to be an MP!] | |
| 62 | APK seems equivocal about Lyotard's crusade against meta-narratives and 'totalizing ideologies' and for 'multiplicity and segmentation'. Others [RT: MacIntyre?] bewail the loss of a "guiding telos, a modern mythology". APK likes the 'meta-narrative' that everything is narrative. | |
| 63 | "Narratives, traditionally conceived, seem inherently moralizing. The closure to human actions that they effect is often that of promoting one moral order over another." This comes from Hayden White. | |
| "... a stringent and unswerving self-conception is a sign of possible intolerance toward people with a different outlook. ... One becomes blind to alternatives." | ||
| 3 - The Subject | 65-66 | APK categorizes 3 misconceptions: 1) "the doer before the deed", "the I that thinks"; 2) "thoughts that exist prior to their linguistic expression"; and 3) "language is a neutral vehicle which is secondary to the message conveyed" |
| 66 | "The only reality that exists independently of us is precisely one that is not for us other than posited for us, such as the subatomic model employed by science." [RT: I failed to understand this point. The sentence is very contorted.] | |
| [RT: With respect to his quotations from Benveniste, I would say "unlike animals, humans develop sign systems and conceptual models, and as we grow up, we take on more and more levels of abstract symbolisms".] | ||
| 69 | "The subject of speech does not bear a one-to-one relationship with the speaking subject." | |
| [RT: Helen Keller's description of her early life as "I did not know that I knew aught" sounds not so different from many of the head-banger types one meets in the street these days.] | ||
| [RT: APK seems to be struggling with the possibility that his view of language as non-neutral clashes with his pre-narrative/narrative distinction.] | ||
| 70 | He pre-supposes that Helen Keller didn't have any pre-narrative experiences, just a "riot of sensations and impulses". [RT: seems dodgy to me.] | |
| 75 | "Does what is said never surprise the speaker?" | |
| 80 | Lacan's 'mirror stage' - a child's first realization of itself as a person. [RT: but this is visual and body-related.] | |
| 85 | Following Kristeva, APK says that poetic language revitalizes our symbolic capacities. [RT: I'd say this is just one of a number of means.] | |
| Lacan's view of the psychoanalytic model is that "something that is not expressed does not exist". But, APK says, "the repressed is always there". | ||
| 89 | For psychoanalysts, a patient's 'historical truth' is little more than 'narrative truth' [RT: whatever that is.] Too 'archaeological' a model of truth is "reducing the contextual significance of the present and future for the very meaning of the past". | |
| 90 | It looks like Donald P Spence (1984) is responsible for the term 'narrative truth'. Even APK thinks he is extreme. He says "While we may agree with Spence's general position ..." [RT: I don't.] APK excuses it, saying it is "only limited relativism" | |
| "Another possible problem with narrative relates to its aesthetic and rhetorical appeal." [RT: Yes, we are easily 'carried away'.] | ||
| 91 | Spence's purpose is psychology-oriented [RT: which is a rather limited and specialized aspect of human life. After this, APK gets into a longish side-issue on historical narrative.] | |
| 95 | Since much history reads like a novel, and some novels are read like history, people can get confused [RT: or duped by manipulative speakers and writers pushing their agenda]. We are effectively being asked for "willing suspension of disbelief" [RT: not today, thanks!] | |
| 96 | Historical (and similarly self narrative) has these dangers: 1) it doesn't meet a natural desire for 'empirical exactitude'; and 2) it opens the gates to abuse. APK suggests that exactitude means 'boring'. [RT: I don't think that's much of an argument.] | |
| APK puts danger #2 down just to our being "prey to human fallibility". [RT: Maybe, but I'd say that recognizing our fallibility is a pretty important aspect of self-knowledge, and more important than telling nice - but tall - tales. I think he should have picked this up much earlier on.] | ||
| 97 | APK says that the aim should be 'creative adequation' [RT: yer what? I agree one wants 'projection of one's possibilities' and not just objective fact. And one doesn't want (like someone I once knew) the line that "this is how I am, so you lot had better accommodate that fact".] | |
| 101 | APK calls his model the 'semiotic subject', as opposed to a 'Cartesian ego'. "A person is ... a living body of gestures and articulation that exists in extensive interaction with other acting bodies and ... speech, texts, art works and meaningful action generally". [RT: I dropped several instances of the word 'semiotic' as I didn't see what it added. This model seems to down-play the body - what about my legs and feet (ability to walk and run), arms and hands (ability to do work) - and my sex appeal? (not much of that these days!)] | |
| 105 | "The possibility of unity for the subject can only arise through 2 primary channels: (1) routine activity at the level of praxis and (2) acts of self-narration." [RT: That doesn't seem to fit me at all, especially since I retired. What about my reading this book, and trying to make sense of it?] | |
| APK's model divides the subject into 1) the speaking subject (whoever is telling the story); 2) the subject of speech (the I in the text); and 3) the spoken subject - where 3) is whoever is seen by the listener/reader. A diagram he uses to explain this is shown below this table of highlights. | ||
| 106 | In the diagram, 'Implied Author (2) might be the signatory of a letter. Implied Author (1) is where the author "cannot be naively identified with the real author". | |
| 107 | "Manipulation of the viewing/reading subject is recognized as an essential function of texts." | |
| Conc- | 109 | "What we have attempted here is to move behind the scenes of the human drama to discover how our role-playing is enacted." |
| lusion | 112 | [RT: APK seems to have written this in a pre-Neuroscientific era.] |
| 114 | "Autonomy, freedom and identity ... are not pre-given or a priori characteristics." [RT: True - we invented these concepts, and many people use them to mean exactly what they like.] | |
| "Religion is a semiotic system that presumes to articulate that which is beyond the given." Modern thinking may oppose such metaphysical and utopian thinking, but there is also the consideration of "what works for people". |
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My view is that taking this 'it's all narrative' line too far is a recipe for any story being regarded as just as good as any other. I think APK recognized this danger, but he didn't enlarge on it enough. My preference is for a more inclusive model, or even a 'pluralistic' set of models geared to different aspects of life. For instance, words singularly absent in this book are 'evidence', 'probability', and 'timeliness'.
Not all philosophers these days go along with the narrative line, for example Dan Zahavi (2007).
For a wider examination of this topic, I would recommend this collection of articles and thoughts published as a web page by 'Cafe Philosophy', a group in Auckland, New Zealand.
Finally, I'd say APK made a wise choice by quitting philosophy and going into music.
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 8th June 2012
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .