Dennett and the "True Story" of
the Self
Because of its interrelation
with the issue of survival and human responsibility, the concept of personal
identity or the self has always concerned philosophers throughout history.
Daniel Dennett, an American philosopher who specialized in the philosophy
of mind, introduced a narrative theory of the self, which is the topic of
this paper. To pinpoint the strengths and the weaknesses of Dennett's theory
and evaluate it efficiently, it is important to look at other views of earlier
philosophers regarding personal identity. I will start with Descartes’
simplified view of the immateriality of the self, and will end with Hume’s
bundle theory of the self, in order to make sense of Dennett’s account of the
self as a narrative center of gravity. Explaining Dennett’s motivation in
introducing his theory and shedding light on its details will enable me
evaluate Dennett’s theory as represented in his article “Why Everyone Is a
Novelist” (Dennett). Displaying the advantages of Dennett's theory enforces the
urgency of displaying the objections that critics raised against it. To assess
the theory accurately, I will consider how Dennett could respond to those
criticisms before taking a final position towards his theory.
While constructing the
foundation of true and false and the criterion of certain truth, Descartes
drifts away to talk about his existence and what his self consists of; “whilst
I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I,
who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I
think, therefore I am (COGITO ERGO SUM), was so certain” (Descartes Part IV,
par.1). Descartes thinks of the self as an immaterial substance that thinks.
Asserting its immateriality, he confirms both its independence of any material
substance, including the human body, and its indivisibility. According to him,
the existence of the self does not require the existence of any external
substance distinct of it, “I concluded that I was a thing or substance, whose
whole essence or nature was only to think, and which, to exist, has no need of
space or of any material thing or body “ (Descartes Part IV, Par.2). Clearly,
Descartes explains his views of the self by using the first person pronoun as
if the “I” in his text is supposed to mean everyone or as if he was a
representative of all human beings. It follows that he equates the Self to the
soul and the mind or any immaterial substance.
Unlike Descartes, David Hume
seems to associate the Self with perceptions, which he finds inseparable from
the very nature of the self. Hume proposes that the self is intangible and is
indefinable since he cannot catch what he calls his self without catching a
perception. In other words, he cannot be conscious of his self without
capturing a consciousness of some kind of perception. Thus, Hume asserts that
humans are “nothing but a bundle or collections of different perceptions” (Hume
193). Accordingly, Hume denies the existence of what we call personal identity.
In fact, he even thinks philosopher’s attempts to prove the existence of
personal identity is a failure, because he believes our concept of personal
identity to be imaginary. Hume specifically mentions Berkeley when referring to
the fictional dimension of the concept of personal identity, “There are some
philosophers (e.g. Berkeley) who imagine we are every moment intimately
conscious of what we call our self; that we feel its existence and its
continuance in existence, and are certain of its identity and simplicity” (Hume
192). Actually, Hume not only thinks that the attempts of those philosophers to
prove the existence, continuity and simplicity of personal identity are a
matter of imagination, but he concludes that our consciousness of the existence
of the self is an imaginary matter as well.
The fictional dimension of
Hume's view of the self is illustrated in his analogy of the human mind as a
theatre where “perceptions make their appearances, pass, re-pass, glide away,
and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations” (Hume 193). Hume
thinks of human perceptions as different characters or different masks that
characters put on in a theatrical performance. For Hume, those masks or
characters resemble human perceptions because they are unable to reflect the
real identity of people who are wearing them; similar to the way different
perceptions themselves do not represent the mind’s identity. Actors may
identify with the characters the roles of whom they are playing, but no matter
to what degree actors identify with them they are not those characters.
Similarly, the varying perceptions that one experiences constantly might seem
to constitute the true Self. However, those perceptions in fact are the masks
that self puts on to maintain the unity and the consistence of its own
identity. While characters and perceptions cannot escape this
endless„multiplicity, the identity of both, the theatre and the self, always
stays the same, “it persists, while the actors come and go” (Hume 194).
According to Hume, what enables
people to keep track of the succession of their perceptions is memory. Thus, he
considers memory the source of personal identity. Hume finds in the existence
of memory the only explanation of the emergence of a sense of continuity in the
succession of perceptions in one’s mind. Storing perceptions with the aid of
memory is what helps us “extend the same chain of causes, and consequently the identity
of our persons beyond our memory, and we can comprehend times, and
circumstances, and actions, which we have entirely forgot but suppose in
general to have existed “(Hume 200). In other words, the existence of memory is
what enables us relate causes to effects and create a mental conception of
everything in our world according to our comprehension of the perceptions
sorted in our memory. Consequently, our conceptions of the world, including the
self, are not factual, since they rely on recalling our perceptions of them
from memory. Rather, Hume asserts the fictional aspect of personal identity and
states; “The identity that we ascribe to persons is fictitious” (Hume 198). He
denies the association of personal identity with “a soul or a substance that
our identity consists in” (Hume 192).
Daniel Dennett embraced Hume’s
fictional view of personal identity but attempted to develop a narrative theory
of the self. Like Hume, Dennett does not believe that the self is real, but
rather fictional. He adds that a self is just like the center of gravity of an
object in physics; we assume that it resides in the center of an object but
actually; it is only conceptual but not corporeal or factual. J. David Velleman
in his journal article The Self as Narrator assesses Dennett’s theory and the
conclusion he reaches regarding the true story of our lives. Velleman clarifies
the reason of Dennett’s ascribing this theoretical aspect to the self, to
“understand, and predict, and make sense of the behavior of some very
complicated things” (Velleman 2). Velleman sees this reason as the function and
the advantage of Dennett’s concept of the self as a “non-existent author of a
merely fictional autobiography” (Velleman 2). In fact, the ability to
understand human behavior enables us to predict that behavior. Moreover,
predicting human behavior indicates knowledge of its causes and effects, and
that knowledge in itself is a means to control human behavior or at least to
direct it.
Dennett expands on this point
and affirms that human storytelling is similar to the spider’s web spinning or
the beaver’s dam building, since we approach narration as “our fundamental
tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition” (Velleman 2).
Storytelling can lead to self-protection, because understanding human behavior
provides one with awareness of its strengths and weaknesses, which enables one
to avoid both physical and emotional or psychological pain. Moreover,
storytelling enables man to achieve self-control, because the ability to
predict human behavior is what helps in controlling it. In addition,
storytelling helps him to express his attitudes and characteristics, the thing
that makes him more able to both, understand and define himself, to himself and
to others.
We can explain Dennett’s
theory of personal identity in light of his concept of the Intentional Stance.
The Intentional Stance is a theory that describes the behavior of any kind of
being according to mental assumptions and properties. Dennett thinks that we
establish this stance on the supposition of the rationality of the being or the
thing we are thinking of. After that, we try to attribute some beliefs and then
some desires to that same thing or being, before predicting its behavior
according to our prediction of its goals and in light of its desires. On the
foundation of this theory, Dennett explains the evolution of human consciousness,
and argues that it is all a matter of “explanatory strategy” (Zawidzki 36).
Accordingly, we can conclude that the objective of that process of mental
attribution or explanatory stance is to comprehend the behavior of things and
beings in our world. Therefore, Dennett describes our world as “mindless”, and
thus he attempts to figure out how our narratives of “purposes, reasons, selves
and consciousness emerge” from such an environment (Dennett 78). In addition,
Dennett attempts to layout the constraints of constructing such narratives in
order to “lampoon them as „just-so stories” (Dennett 78). Viewing our
narratives as stories can give us a sense of power insofar that we, as the
authors of those stories, can control the direction of our stories and make
them correspond to our goals and desires.
This very notion can be
applied to Dennett’s view of the self, since Dennett does not specify any kind
of characteristics to be attributed to the beings whose behavior we are trying
to comprehend. Perhaps we assume the rationality of our self, attribute beliefs
and desires to it, invent goals for it and predict its behavior, in order to
unify the different components of what we think our self is and to make sense
of its actions. In fact, Dennett suggests applying intentionality to people as
well as axes, meaning objects in general. He asserts that we presuppose the,
axehood of an axe even though we do not assume that it is imbued with spiritual
axehood. (Zawidzki 34-37). Dennett believes that the real nature of both,
people and thoughts is no different from the nature of axes, and thus should be
understood the same way.
To describe how the self is
not real, Dennett explains the self by applying it to scientific and literary
analogies. The literary analogy Dennett refers to is, what may be called a
self-character, which has a unified narrative and is employed to make sense of
our experiences and our behaviors. He expands on this fictional self to claim
that we act in our lives according to what is required for being that specific
character or self. While creating this character, Dennett believes we undertake
a special kind of thinking he calls “verbal thought” (Dennett 472), which
Jerome Burner also refers to as “the narrative mode” of thinking. (McCarthy 10).
He argues that much of our conscious thinking is “a variety of a particularly
efficient and private talking to oneself” (Dennett 472). In fact, Dennett
describes people as “confabulators” who are telling and retelling the story of
their own lives (Dennett 471). Trying to self-protect themselves from conveying
by mistake undesired information to others, people developed this behavior of
talking to oneself or “vocalization” to a “habit of subvocalization” (Dennett
472). As a result, this “subvocalization” is represented in the human
consciousness in a form of narrative or “verbal thought” (Dennett 472).
Like a novelist who cannot
separate himself from his characters, Dennett thinks that we are all novelists;
unable to separate ourselves from the self-character we create. In addition,
trying to make everything happens fits with that character’s coherency; he
argues that we do create a convenient narrative context for our self-character.
The outcome of this process is a story of our lives, “We try to make all of our
material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography”
(Dennett 473). If our lives are series of endless stories including the
creation of our own fictitious selves, how can we know what the true story is,
if there is any? Does it matter if our life story is true or false, since it is
only a story after all? Dennett’s answer to this question is that “there is no
true story” because he thinks that even attempting to figure out the true story
in itself is a mere error, “If we wanted to settle what the true story was,
we’d be falling into error” (Dennett 471). To be able to assess Dennett’s conclusion,
we should look at critics’ views of his theory. Some critics have objections to
Dennett’s narrative theory and accordingly, to his conclusion regarding the
self. One of the biggest and most common objections that those critics raised
is the limitedness and restrictiveness of Dennett's narrative view of the
self.
Critics such as Joan McCarthy
and Tadeusz Zawidzki think that the narrowness of Dennett’s account of the self
emerges from the association of linguistic ability with the self, that gives,
according to those critics, priority to a kind of ability that not all people
possess. McCarthy argues that according to Dennett’s theory, people who do not
have the appropriate linguistic capacity cannot express or/and identify with
their selfhood, and thus cannot comprehend their world accurately. In her
opinion, Dennett limits self-interpretation and self-comprehension to
verbalization, “private talking to oneself” (Dennett 472), which she thinks, is
improbable. Zawidzki, on the other hand, emphasizes the lack of
self-identification and self-comprehension that the language-deprived
experience. Zawidzki claims that Dennett does not give an assertive answer
regarding the degree of consciousness for the language-deprived and the
non-human animal (Zawidzki 97). Nevertheless, Zawidzki is inclined to think
that Dennett at least credits those creatures with a minimal degree of
consciousness, without underestimating the privileges speaking humans do have.
Zawidzki illustrates that by quoting Dennett in his Consciousness Explained; “
one does not do deaf-mutes a favour by imagining that in the absence of
language they enjoy all the mental delights we hearing human beings enjoy”
(Zawidzki 98). Clearly, those critics claim the inconsistency and invalidity of
Dennett’s account of the self, because it cannot be applied to people with poor
linguistic abilities and/or to people with hearing and speaking disorders.
On the other side of the
coin, other critics have a different interpretation of Dennett’s account, which
serves as a response to McCarthy’s and Zawidzki’s objections particularly
regarding the role of language in the conception of the self. Joan McCarthy in
her book; Dennett and Ricoeur on the Narrative Self, presents the view of a
leading, as she claims, neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, who in his The Feeling
of What Happens distinguishes between two types of a self; a non-verbal self
and a verbal or “autobiographical self” (McCarthy 80). Damasio thinks of the
narrative aspect of the self in a broader sense, since his account includes the
notion of a “non-verbal story teller” (McCarthy 80). Therefore, in light of
this view, the narrative theory of the self generally and the occurrence of
self-comprehension specifically, do not require the usage of language or
verbalization. Damasio’s inclusive view of the narrative self suggests a
“wordless” kind of storytelling, which is more like “registering what happens
in the form of brain maps” (McCarthy 81). Similarly, Dennett in his
Consciousness Explained clarifies that “Metaphors are the tools of thought”
(McCarthy 73) implying that metaphors are incorporated in all kinds of thinking
and can be in all kind of forms; verbal, non-verbal, visual, audible, etc.
Accordingly, creating narratives is different from verbalizing or reporting
narratives, which indicates that storytelling existed prior to language
(McCarthy 81). Moreover, Damasio scientifically supports the independence of
self-narration from language by asserting that while the left hemisphere of the
brain is responsible for language; both the right and the left hemispheres are
responsible for storytelling (McCarthy 81). Thus, the interpretation of Dennett's
evaluation of the relationship of verbalization with selfhood varies from a
critic to another. Unlike critics who view verbalization as a required
companion of the self, Damasio does not consider language and the so-called
verbal thought to be a required condition for the existence of a self (McCarthy
83). Given the previous facts, we can conclude that we can distinguish between
two kinds of narrations; verbal and non-verbal self-narration which both serve
the narrative mode of thinking we employ to make sense of our world.
Damasio's view supports
Velleman’s interpretation of the role of speech or verbalization in the
determination of human behavior. Velleman affirms that the utterance of our
self-narrations can lead us to act according to our narrations, in order to
maintain correspondence between our narrations and our life. In addition, he
refers to the importance of the casual role of the uttering of our narrations
in the corresponding outcome of our behavior. However, Velleman redefines the
role of those utterances and makes them indicate a kind of self-commitment that
“feeds back into your behavior” (Velleman 12). In other words, sometimes
reporting what you are going to do makes you do it, and other times reporting
what you are not going to do prevents you from doing it.
In reporting your future
action, what motivates you is to maintain correspondence between your
narrations and your actions, just like a novelist who should maintain
correspondence between his narrations and the actions of his characters.
Consequently, it is not a matter of uttering narrations, but rather it is a
matter of commitment to conform our behaviors to our narrations whether we
utter a verbal commitment or we do not.
Whether Dennett’s account of
the narrative aspect of the self is dependent on language as verbalization or
as self-explanation and/or non-verbal narration, does not answer the question
if the true story of our life matters when it is just a story. In other words,
Dennett’s fictional view of the self does not logically indicate the
truthfulness or the falseness of one’s narratives. Nevertheless, characters in
some novel, even though they are unreal in the sense that they do not exist
outside of their fictional world, do exist as real fictional characters and we
can predict and evaluate their behavior as well.
Moreover, one can evaluate
the accuracy of their narratives by reviewing the incidents of their lives as
depicted in the novel and be able to decide if they are true. If a novelist
decides that one of his characters does something or says something, it means
that whatever he does or says is true. The fact that they are fictional
characters has nothing to do with the truthfulness of their actions and
accordingly, the truthfulness of the novelist’s narration and/or his identity.
The novelist is the one who decides what his characters will do and thus he is
the one who knows and determines what the true narration is. If the self is
like a novelist, it follows that it can create various narrations, can decide
what narration it prefers and can determine which narration is true.
Accordingly, a self is both the creator of the narratives and the controller
and the decision maker of the preferable version of those narrations in order
to achieve narrative coherence. Hence, I support Velleman's objection to Dennett’s
account of the self as fictive and false. Velleman claims that the fact that
self is fictitious can mean that it is true as well.
My only disagreement with
Dennett's claim that attempting to figure out the “true story of our life is a
mistake; is that the rapid and constant changeability of the narratives of our
life, not the falseness of its narratives, makes it hard to determine the “true
story of our life, yet not impossible” (Dennett 471). Like a river, whose water
changes constantly, we still think of it as the same river because of the unity
of its components, which causes its continuity. A self, even though it has
different narrations, counts as the same when it maintains its narrative
coherence. Moreover, with fictional entities such as characters, one should
follow the logic of the world of fiction, i.e. the accuracy of the incidents
within a novel, to be able to evaluate the correspondence of their narrations
to their actions. In that sense, figuring out the true story of our self and
our life can be possible.
Nevertheless, whether Dennett
was concerned with proving the truthfulness or the falseness of our narratives,
his main objective was to pinpoint the advantages of the narrative mode of
thinking that we fall into, in helping us predict our behavior and control it
in order to make our life easier. His depiction of the self in light of his
narrative theory does not mean to give credit or priority to one narrative,
even his own, regarding the conception of the self over another narrative.
Dennett attempts to explain how the narrative technique develops and works in
the human mind by observing its effect on the human behavior and without
deciding about validity of one’s narrations. Knowing that the creation of our
self-narration corresponds to the creation of characters in a novel can help us
view our life in an objective approach, which can contribute to widening the
perspectives of our life. Furthermore, focusing on the narrative aspect of the
self, we will be able to reshape our selves by changing the context of our
narration and /or by recreating a new narration for our lives.
Works Cited
Dennett, Daniel C. "Why
Everyone Is a Novelist." Selves Part VIII. London: The
Times Literary Supplements, 1988.
466-474.
Descartes, Rene'. Discourse
on Method. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett
Publishing Company, 1998
Translated by Donald A. Cress.
Hume, David. A Treatise of
Human Nature Introduced by Michael P.Levine.
New York: The Barnes &
Noble Library of Essential Reading, 2005.
McCarthy, Joan. Dennett and
Ricoeur on the Narrative Self. Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 2007.
Velleman, J. David.
"Narrator, The Self As." Department of Philosophy, University of
Michigan Fall 1999: 1-23.
Zawidzki, Tadeusz. Dennett.
Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007.
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