The last category we consider is those that put language at the centre, and here
too we will see a tension between attempts to explain how and why we have
selves (i.e. ego theories) or how and why we have mere senses of selves (i.e. bundle
theories). What role is language meant to play in self-making? We have already
considered its crucial social function. The other is its role as the medium through
which narratives of self are created.
Narrative views of the self take many forms (Schechtman, 2011). Some say that
our sense of self is narrative in structure, others that the lives of selves are. Some
assume that selves must be agents, and that narrative is necessary for agency:
a narrative context is what makes our actions meaningful and interpretable to
ourselves and others. For example, a man’s behaviour could be characterised
with equal truth and appropriateness as digging, gardening, taking exercise,
preparing for winter, or pleasing his wife (MacIntyre, 1985, p. 206). Which
description the man chooses, for this and every other action in his life, deter-
mines who he is.
Such theories often leave it unclear whether and how we actually tell our self-nar-
ratives; if we are not aware of telling ourselves (or anyone else) a story, does that
matter for a narrative theory? The question of how exactly narrative self-con-
struction relates to language is also tricky, because it might result in denying con-
sciousness, or perhaps just ‘higher’ forms of self-consciousness, to humans and
other animals who have no language or only very basic language.
In most narrative theories, selves are the protagonists of the stories we spin –
whether the story is of a horticulturalist or a good husband. Selves are sometimes
also thought of as taking on more complex combinations of character, author,
and critic in their own lives (Schechtman, 2011). Think of the selves you create via
Facebook, Twitter, or email compared to those you create in face-to-face interac-
tions with people. Not only are they all different narratives of yourself, mediated
in different proportions by words, images, and bodily signals, but each new twist
of each narrative affects the others, and affects the ‘you’ who creates the next
one. The pressure to create ideal versions of yourself and the ways you impose
commentary (sometimes ironic) on your own and others’ idealised versions add
further complexity to the feedback loops.
For Daniel Dennett, the self is a ‘centre of narrative gravity’. But for him, unlike
most other narrative theorists, this self is fictional in the strongest sense: there is
no such thing as a self. When Dennett says that there is no Cartesian theatre, no
show, and no audience, he really means there is no inner observing self. He claims
that ‘if you leave the Subject in your theory, you have not yet begun! A good theory
of consciousness should make a conscious mind look like an abandoned factory’
(2005, p. 70).
If there really is no one in the factory, then Dennett must explain why we feel as
though there is, and explaining how we come to believe falsehoods about con-
sciousness is one of Dennett’s favourite pastimes, as we have seen with zimboes,
qualia, and vision. Do selves exist? Of course they do – and of course they don’t!
he says. There is obviously something to be explained, but not by invoking Ryle’s
‘ghost in the machine’ or any mysterious entity controlling our bodies. So what
kind of existence is it? For Dennett, self is a centre of gravity: it is invisible but real,
a ‘centre of narrative gravity’.
‘the “Self of selves”,
when carefully
examined, is found to
consist mainly of [. . .]
peculiar motions in the
head or between the
head and throat’(James, 1890, i, p. 301)‘the trouble with brains,
it seems, is that when
you look in them, you
discover that there’s
nobody home’(Dennett, 1991, p. 29)