Narrative identity: between ontologies and epistemologies (experience of the 20th century)

Babich Vladimir Vladimirovich ORCID: 0000-0001-8537-9782 PhD in Philosophy Associate Professor of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Tomsk State Pedagogical University 634061, Russia, Tomsk region, Tomsk, Kievskaya str., 60 v.v.babich@gmail.com Other publications by this author

Conduction

As more and more disciplines study narratives, many opinions are being formed about what narratives are, how they relate to human existence and why they are important to us. Despite the multiplicity of methodological approaches to the analysis of the narrative, most researchers agree that the narrative does not just tell what happened, but identifies or creates significant connections between events and their experience, thereby making them understandable ^{[18, 24, 2]}. In an attempt to clarify this thesis, philosophers divided into those who understand narrative primarily as a cognitive tool for constructing a meaningful order that explicates the experience of human existence (Hayden White, Louis Mink, Daniel Dennett, Peter Strawson), and those who consider it as an ontological category characterizing a special way of being a person in the world (Paul Riker, Charles Taylor, Alasdair McIntyre). The problem of the meaning of narrative for human existence is an inalienable part of the dispute between these two positions and involves clarifying the question of what is generally considered real and what ontological status is assigned to a personal narrative that forms a narrative identity.

The intertwining of epistemological and ontological

An important milestone in the formation of the epistemological perception of narrative is the debate initiated by such philosophers of history as Arthur Danto, Louis Mink and Hayden White, who argued that historical narratives retrospectively project narrative onto events. Danto understood the narrative as an "explanatory story", the purpose of which is to convince the listener of something, therefore it is accompanied by emotional stress ^{[7, p. 194]}. Mink argued that "Stories are not lived, but told. Life has no beginning, middle and ending" ^{[25, p. 60]}. In his opinion, a narrative is a vision of historical events and circumstances that "brings" all of them together in a single mental comprehension ^[26]. Narrative is considered as a cognitive tool that gives referential meaning to our stories about the world and ourselves. According to White, "the value attached to narrative in the representation of real events arises from the desire that real events reflect the coherence, integrity, completeness and completeness of life, which are and can only be imaginary" ^{[34, p. 23]}. These statements suggest that the narrative projects a false order onto the chaos of human existence, so it cannot be considered as an ontological category.

The epistemological approach to narrative analysis suggests the perception of narrative as a form of knowledge about the world and our existence in it. Danto, Mink and White recognizes that narratives play an important role in understanding reality, but at the same time argues that there is a deeper level at which human existence is perceived as an immediate given, a stream of real experience that is non-narrative in nature.

The position that narrative is just a "cognitive tool" that allows us to come to terms with the disorder of reality is not ontologically neutral: it is based on a certain concept of the nature of reality as a non—narrative stream of events onto which a meaningful order is projected. This ontological assumption underlies the argument of Peter Strawson, who argues that the self consists of a sequence of directly given moments and that all the processes of self-interpretation that a person tries to express through the narrative continuity of his life distort this reality. Modern neuroscience, according to Strawson, has shown that memories of your past and stories about it necessarily contain distortions, which means: "the more you remember, retell, tell about yourself, the further you risk getting away from an accurate self-understanding, from the truth of your existence. Some people constantly talk about their daily experiences to others in the form of stories. They are increasingly moving away from the truth" ^{[30, p. 447]}. Strawson opposes what he calls the "psychological thesis of narrativity," according to which people live their lives in a narrative experience. He believes that there are people who can be designated as "episodic personalities", those who do not see their lives as an unfolding narrative and do not consider themselves to be those who existed in the past and will exist in the future, thus they perceive the conscious identity of their existence not as something lasting.

Stroson's thesis that "the foundations of temporal temperament are genetically determined" shifts the question of the meaning of narrative for human existence from the field of philosophical questioning about reality to the spectrum of natural science theories ^{[30, p. 431]}. Strawson tries to turn the philosophical question of subjectivity into an empirical question, suggesting that our genes determine whether we are "diachronic" or "episodic" personalities, his reflections are based on the belief that "episodic existence" is ethically more valuable. Such an ethos, in turn, is based on the ontological assumption that the "real" is not a narrative.

Perceiving the narrative as a cognitive tool, Strawson denies it universality, considering the ideal of self-reflection to be erroneous. The philosopher concludes that the Socratic principle "an unexplored life is not worth living" cannot be universally valid. "Narrativity is not a necessary part of the 'explored life' (as is diachrony), and in any case it is not obvious that the explored life, which Socrates considered necessary for human existence, is always a good thing. People can develop in different ways without any explicit, especially narrative reflection, just as musicians can improve in practical classes without remembering these sessions. The practice of a good life for many is a completely non-narrative project" ^{[30, p. 448]}.

To illustrate his thoughts, Strawson turns to Sartre's novel Nausea. The hero of the novel Rocantin argued that "the world of explanations and reasonable arguments and the world of existence are two different worlds" ^{[15, p. 159]}. "Here is the course of my reasoning: in order for the most banal incident to turn into an adventure, it is enough to tell it. This is what fools people; every person is always a storyteller, he lives surrounded by stories, his own and others', and sees everything that happens to him through their prism. So he tries to fit his life to the story about her. But you have to choose: either live or tell" ^{[15, p. 51]}. In the novel, Sartre suggests that by trying to make sense of our experiences by talking about them, we discover a more primary level of experience of our existence, which cannot be reduced to a narrative. "Existence is not something you can think about from the outside: you need it to suddenly rush in, pile on you <...> or there is simply none of this ^{[15, p. 162]}.

Similarly, in Camus's novel, the "Outsider" narrative is not considered as a form that claims to explain the world, presenting the experiences of the subject, embedding them in a causal order. In the novel, the narrative is viewed as a secondary, retrospective process that falsifies the true nature of the subject's experience. The story told by the prosecutor during the trial explains Meursault's actions, enclosing them in a chain of causes and effects, contrasted with his own concise way of presenting the events that he caused, leaving them largely incoherent, random and inexplicable. The prosecutor, describing "the course of events that led this man to a cold-blooded, premeditated murder," insists that "Before you, gentlemen, is a completely reasonable man. You heard him, didn't you? He knows how to answer questions. He knows the value of words" ^{[10, p. 100]}. However, Mersault cannot recognize himself in this story, and the way the court endlessly analyzes his "soul" makes him even more confused: "when they talked about my soul, everything seemed to be flooded with muddy water, and my head began to spin" ^{[10, p. 105]}. Mersault's persistence in narrativizing reality is crucial in order to make him an "outsider", unable and unwilling to give socially acceptable explanations for his actions. In the novel, it is assumed that he was convicted not so much for the murder of an Arab, but for alienation from society, from customs and morals that cover up the absurdity of human existence. Therefore, the prosecutor symbolically imputes a second murder to Meursault, which he did not commit, but "in proportion to this guilt he must be punished."

In the novel, one can find at the same time an epistemological statement that the narrative does not provide access to what happened (reality remains fundamentally incomprehensible), and an ontological thesis according to which human reality is devoid of meaningful connections and eludes attempts to comprehend with the help of narrative.

We find a similar division in Roland Barthes's analysis of the past tense (le passé simple), as a result of which not only the epistemological statement is formulated that narratives claim to explain the world using the past tense, thanks to which "the verb implicitly belongs to the causal chain", but also the ontological assumption that reality "as such"inexplicable," "scattered in front of us." Narration as an "expression of order" reduces "torn reality to a pure logos" and puts the narrator in the position of "demiurge, god or reader" ^{[27, pp. 26-27]}. "To be more precise, it is not reality itself that is absorbed into the concept, but rather certain ideas about it..." ^{[3, p. 84]}. Barth speaks of the "reality effect" as "the absence of the signified absorbed by the referent", this is primarily a statement of the gap between real objects and the linguistic symbols that display them ^{[4, p. 400]}. The narrative does not reflect objective reality, but constructs and reproduces a "referential illusion", achieving a coincidence of articulation not with the reality of the world, but with the reality of texts. Narration is carried out "for the sake of the story itself, and not for the sake of direct impact on reality, that is, ultimately, outside any function other than symbolic activity as such" ^{[4, p. 384]}.

Thus, the ontological and epistemological are intertwined in the narrative. Each narrative is based on one or another ontological attitude — a view of human existence and the reality surrounding it — and there is also a certain epistemological view. Even the statement that narratives falsely impose an image of a stable, causally connected, continuous, unambiguous, decipherable reality is an ontological statement. Such an epistemological view of the limitations of human ability to cognize reality is intertwined with the ontological point of view, which asserts that human existence and reality as a whole are chaotic, devoid of any inner meaning and narrative order. The world eludes the human ability to know and understand, so the narrative structure found in the narrative appears as a false order projected onto this world. This simultaneously rejects the ontological assumption that there is a meaningful order in the world, and the epistemological statement that we can know this order.

Such criticism of the narrative is based on the juxtaposition of "reality" and "artificial" order, articulated human meaning, and from an epistemological point of view it boils down to the thesis that the story about oneself is secondary and not real in relation to the experience that is given here and now or was experienced earlier. In this interpretation, meaning is constructed in the process of narrative, i.e. "it is thought of as devoid of any ontological support and arises in an act of purely subjective effort," and not as a result of subject-object procedures ^[13]. The meaning of the events included in the narrative is interpreted not as something based on ontology, but as a narrative of events that arose in the very process and inevitably contains interpretations.

Postmodernists go much further than existentialists, demanding the rejection of making sense of the absurd world, they reject the anthropological perspective much more radically. If for Camus "The Absurd is born out of the collision of the human mind and the reckless silence of the world" ^{[9, p. 24]}, while remaining "the only connecting thread between them" ^{[10, p. 163]}, then postmodernists do not oppose man to the absurd, but dissolve him in it. Deleuze replaces the subject with an "anonymous nomadic singularity", and suggests considering the meaning not as a "predicate or property, but as an event" ^{[8, p. 146]}. According to Deleuze, life is imbued with quasi-causality, which is expressed in linguistic affects. Absurdity as a characteristic of utterance and as a characteristic of existence is asserted as a single category ^[11].

At the heart of such radical views is the empirical-positivist attitude to consider the most "real" that which is given directly in sensory perception. It is assumed that such direct perception gives access to reality itself. Thus, a certain method of cognition of reality is identified with the nature of reality. A similar way of thinking has been evident in the narrative debate over the past decades. For example, White argued that "Real events should just be; they may well serve as referents of discourse, they can be talked about, but they should not pose as narrators of the narrative" ^{[34, p. 8]}. Later, White softened his position, but his arguments still continued to depend on the juxtaposition of "structures of meaning" and "factual situations" ^{[33, p. 31]}.

The most radical arguments "against narrativity" tend to depend on ontological assumptions characteristic of the empirical-positivist tradition of thought. The argument that narratives retrospectively impose the illusion of order on the "real" presupposes the prior existence of "raw", atomized units of experience that do not depend on human processes of giving meaning and meaning; it is they who are asserted as truly "real".

Narrativity as a characteristic of human existence

The attempt to make a clear distinction between ontological and epistemological approaches to the narrative dimensions of human existence is especially problematic from a phenomenological and hermeneutic point of view. Hermeneutics rejects the idea of direct, "point-by-point" experience. Firstly, because temporality is implicitly present in experience, which means that the horizons of the past and the future are always present in the present. According to Husserl, even seemingly direct sensory perception is constituted "synthetically", combining the past and the present in the temporal horizon, forming the orientation of the future in the context of the interpretative process ^{[6, pp. 101-102]}. Secondly, hermeneutics. He emphasizes that experience is always culturally and historically mediated. According to Riker, hermeneutics rejects the Cartesian notion of direct access to oneself and asserts the thesis that subjectivity is always mediated. "There is no understanding of oneself that is not mediated by signs, symbols, texts; understanding oneself ultimately coincides with the interpretation applied to these subsequent texts" ^{[28, p. 29]}. Based on this thesis, Riker forms a model of narrative identity.

The structure of the hermeneutical circle reflects the processes of formation of meanings and meanings of experience. Since not only our historically formed horizon of interpretation determines the understanding of reality, but also criticism of previous articulation, as well as the acquisition of new experience, can be the reasons for the transformation of meanings and meanings, understanding our idea of who we are. As a result, one articulation turns into another, the most preferred one for the subject, thereby generating a new narrative. Taylor defines such dynamics as the principle of "the best possible articulation of experience" (Best Account) ^[31]. This process can be represented as a hermeneutical spiral.

Fig. 1. The hermeneutical spiral

The hermeneutic spiral is a model of a complex process describing the interaction between the articulation of the subject and his pre-reflexive experience of emotional experience of meanings and meanings, on the one hand, and personal narrative and the spectrum of interpretations existing in culture, on the other ^{[1, pp. 62-63]}.

Drawing on the experience of Heidegger, Gadamer and Arendt's thinking, Riker concretizes the theory of narrative identity, in which he emphasizes not only the culturally and historically mediated nature of self-interpretation, but also how narratives presented in culture take part in shaping our horizon of interpretation, mediating our attitude to the world and to ourselves. If the narratives present in culture primarily affect how we perceive ourselves in the world, events and things around us (correlating our experience with the spectrum of available interpretations), then there are no "pure", "unprocessed", direct experiences, the narrative interpretation of which would necessarily be a matter of retrospective distortion. Our personal narratives are always in a dialogical relationship with cultural narratives, and both of these areas are objects of constant reinterpretation. Consequently, Riker argues: "Our own existence cannot be separated from the description that we can give about ourselves" ^{[29, p. 156]}. From the point of view of hermeneutics, the dispute about whether we live life "as it is" or tell narratives about it is a dubious contrast. It is not true that life itself somehow, "as if by nature," follows the structure of the narrative, but it is also not true that we first live and then turn the experience into a story. Rather, life and the story of our lives are intertwined with each other in a complex movement of mutual determination. In this view, the narrative interpretation of experience is not a process of falsification of something "true" and "real", but is an element constituting the existence of a person. Jerome Bruner wrote: "life as it is is inseparable from the life being told, or, to put it more bluntly, life is not "how it was", but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold" ^{[19, p. 12]}. The hermeneutic tradition assumes that human existence implicitly contains a process of constant interpretation and comprehension, and therefore it is problematic to assert the opposition between life and narrative based on the assumption that only the latter contains interpretation.

Riker does not disclose the issue of the relationship between narrative and experience when he argues that: "time becomes human time to the extent that it is articulated in a narrative way, and, conversely, narration is significant to the extent that it outlines the features of temporal experience" ^{[14, p. 13]}. It is difficult to imagine a complete identification of experience and narrative. It is difficult to agree with the thesis that a non-narrativized experience of existence is impossible. However, it is one thing to assume that narrative interpretation is constitutive for human existence, and quite another to assert that any experience is narrative. The second thesis offers a vague understanding of narrativity, identifying it with the temporal structure of experience as such, while the concept of narrativity risks losing its meaning. It becomes difficult or impossible to assess the validity of the various interpretations offered by narratives. In turn, the first thesis implies that a crucial aspect of our being in the world is that we engage in a narrative interpretation of experience and this interpretation is a constituent element of our "I". This allows you to critically distance yourself from the idea of the existence of a stable, substantial core of personality. Emerging narratives and new experiences constantly challenge our narrative interpretations, forming the dynamics of narrative identity (see Figure 1).

The relationship between experience and narrative can be clarified through the concept of interpretation. If experience always has an interpretative structure, as stated in the hermeneutic tradition, then narratives can be understood as having a "dual hermeneutics" structure in the sense that they are interpretations of an experience that already contains an interpretation. Anthony Giddens and Jurgen Habermas argued that the humanities, unlike natural sciences, are characterized by "double hermeneutics", since they deal with objects that are formed using primary interpretation ^{[23; 17]}.

Riker uses the concept of "mimesis II" to denote how literary and historical narratives create everyday prefigurative interpretations of actions performed. His concept of "reconfiguration" or "mimesis III", in turn, refers to the process by which people interpret literary and historical narratives from the point of view of their specific life situations and thereby reinterpret their experiences in the light of cultural narratives ^{[14, pp. 66, 93-94]}. In his Lectures on Imagination, Riker talks about the possibility of literature to transform reality: "literary works do not reproduce the previous reality, they reproduce a new reality. They are not connected by the primary that precedes them" ^{[32, p. 97]}. This process can be characterized in terms of "double hermeneutics". We constantly interpret our lives with the help of language exchange systems; we are also involved in the constant process of reshaping our identity, which is conditioned by the dialogical attitude of the "I" to culturally mediated narrative models. Consequently, there is an interpretive continuum that ranges from the basic interpretative structure of "point-based" sensory perception to more complex sense-forming practices such as narrative interpretations of experience.

The hermeneutical understanding of this process goes beyond the dichotomy of "finding" or "constructing" an intelligible order. What Riker characterizes as the process of "plotting" is not a matter of representing a predetermined narrative order, but rather a creative reorganization of reality, a synthesis of experiences, events and interpretations in such a way as to characterize our experience ^{[14, pp. 237-238]}. In this process of narrative interpretation, we simultaneously articulate meaningful connections between past experiences and reconstruct our identity in the present. Riker demonstrates the possibility of considering narrative identity as a constitutive activity, which is not an externally determined order, but a creative process of rethinking one's own experience of existence.

The narrative model of identity is attractive because, conceptualizing the subject as a self-establishing reality in the dialogic process of reinterpretation of culturally mediated narratives, it not only allows us to explicate the active activity of the subject and his ability to form meaning, but also clarifies the modality of our social existence as "animals telling stories" ^[20]. As Colin Davis writes, such models are attractive because they take into account both "the decentralization of the subject (the stories we tell about ourselves are never entirely our own)" and the fact that "it allows us to imagine ourselves as agents, and not just victims of our desires and anxieties" ^{[21, c. 150]}. This explains why even theorists who support the concept of the "death of the subject" approach the understanding of the subject in narrative terms. Yulia Kristeva, following Riker, shares Arendt's point of view that the possibility of narration determines the specifics of our lives and at the same time immerses us in sociality, asserting the opportunity to share experiences with others ^{[16; 22]}.

An alternative to the assumption that narratives are the projection of a false order onto reality is the possibility of considering them as something constitutive of human existence. There is a long tradition of narrative prose (which includes "Don Quixote", "Madame Bovary", etc.), which examines the influence of stories on how people interpret the experience of their existence. M.G. Pavlova, analyzing the concept of Ricker's narrative, argues that the circle of reading and the chosen ones for self-interpretation are important for the formation of the self literary characters. "Access to the self (to who I am) and, importantly, to the interpretation of my own life situations is provided by the opportunity to give my existence meanings drawn from the narrative resources available to me. Thus, the process of reading and living in fictional worlds is one of the important stages of interpreting and changing oneself" ^{[12, p. 15]}.

The narrative identity model asserts that cultural narratives and fragments of individual life stories are subject to constant reinterpretation. The narrative interpretation of lived experience is an endless process in which the past is constantly retold in relation to the present and the future. Narrative is just one of several ways in which we give meaning to the experience of our existence. Instead of assuming that this interpretative process leads to the formation of a single consistent narrative, we can consider it as a dynamic interaction of countless narrative fragments forming new narratives that are among themselves in relation to rivalry, conflict, dialogue and are subject to endless revisions.

The concept of narrative identity assumes that narratives exist only through individual interpretations, which means that cultural systems cannot mechanically determine the processes of meaning formation. Because of its temporality and historical situationality, narrative interpretation must be characterized by what Gadamer designated as "always being understood in a different way." "To the historical finiteness of our existence belongs our consciousness that those who come after us will understand differently [immer anders verstehen werden]" ^{[5, p. 439]}. An interpretation, from a hermeneutical point of view, can never be final or exhaustive. The articulated interpretation acts as a method of reflexive reflection, during which we do not assert a priori "eternal truths", but, taking into account additional facts, consistently resolve the contradictions between narratives, thereby forming the "best possible articulation of experience" (best account), which from an epistemological point of view corresponds to the principle of fallibilism, which asserts that any statement the subject matter of the judgment is not exhaustive and final and implies a replacement for a better interpretation in the future; and from an ontological point of view corresponds to the principle of "the openness of the subject". This determines the understanding of one's own future as an uncertain creative project and at the same time the possibility of finding meaning in one's own experience of the past.

Conclusion

The results of the study bring us closer to the position of "realists", according to which narrative interpretations have a real impact on our existence by shaping it: they allow us to construct our self, take part in creating an intersubjective world and influence how we interact with others. From an empirical point of view, this means that interpretations have real, material, world-forming consequences.

If the human ability to form meaning and give meaning to experience is not perceived as "unreal", then it is difficult to understand why the interpretative process by which we establish narrative connections between episodes of our existence—interpreting present experience in relation to the past and the future and reinterpreting the past in the light of the present — would necessarily be something falsifying. In research, we must take into account the difference between experience and narrative, but this does not contradict the fact that narrative interpretations of experience play a constitutive role in our existence.

Thus, researchers who deny the ability of narratives to constitute human existence consider the meaning and role of (self-)interpretation from the point of view of antirealism and adhere to the ontological assumption that there is an experience of understanding reality that does not depend on the human ability to give meanings and meanings. The view that narrative interpretation inevitably distorts the "original", "pure" experience is questionable from the point of view of the hermeneutic tradition of thinking. When human existence is understood as a process of interpretation carried out in the temporal horizon, including the constant intertwining of the past, present and future, it is problematic to imagine an "authentic", undistorted, direct experience of the existence of our Self, cleansed of interpretations and independent of the past, present and future. If such a "pure experience" cannot be extracted, then there is no reason to reject narrative interpretations as unrealistic or knowingly false.