Narrative Identity, Autonomy, and Mortality

From Frankfurt and MacIntyre to Kierkegaard

John J. Davenport

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136453335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

In the last two decades, interest in narrative conceptions of identity has grown exponentially, though there is little agreement about what a "life-narrative" might be. In connecting Kierkegaard with virtue ethics, several scholars have recently argued that narrative models of selves and MacIntyre's concept of the unity of a life help make sense of Kierkegaard's existential stages and, in particular, explain the transition from "aesthetic" to "ethical" modes of life. But others have recently raised difficult questions both for these readings of Kierkegaard and for narrative accounts of identity that draw on the work of MacIntyre in general. While some of these objections concern a strong kind of unity or "wholeheartedness" among an agent's long-term goals or cares, the fundamental objection raised by critics is that personal identity cannot be a narrative, since stories are artifacts made by persons. In this book, Davenport defends the narrative approach to practical identity and autonomy in general, and to Kierkegaard's stages in particular.

1	Introduction
	Autonomy, Practical Identity, Self, and Character

1. EXISTENTIAL APPROACHES TO PERSONAL AUTONOMY AS DEEP RESPONSIBILITY

Analysis of personal autonomy has flourished in analytic philosophy for four decades, since Harry Frankfurt and Gerald Dworkin proposed “hierarchical” theories involving higher-order volitions that endorse certain first-order motives or aim to make them effective in action.¹ These theories have been critiqued in favor of a host of alternative positions emphasizing coherence among psychic states, interpersonal relations, responsiveness to values, and the development of personal competencies, among other criteria. But as these responses to the initial hierarchical models have proliferated, it has become less clear that a single phenomenon (or unified set of phenomena) in human life is the same target of analysis or object of dispute. While the concept of personal autonomy is very generally “self-governance” or some kind of authority, authorship, ownership, or control over aspects of one’s “self,” this is not enough to ensure that the main conceptions of it in analytic philosophy today are really discussing the same set of phenomena or presenting rival explanations of the same concept or human potential.²

Certainly by the time of its 20th-century revival, the notion of “autonomy” was no longer restricted to moral self-governance or control of one’s intentions through an overriding will to right conduct or fairness to each individual. While the Kantian “good will” could claim to be authoritative by expressing our shared humanity, the development of romantic individualism in the 19th century led to the idea that a wide variety of creative motives and more agent-relative reasons for action could express a particular self in its uniqueness and thus count as authoritative controllers of that self’s intentions.³ This momentous change was arguably implicit throughout the liberal tradition at least from John Locke’s notion that individuals receive from their creator a kind of authority to rule their own life that entitles them to certain basic liberties to try to order their affairs, within the limits set by other obligations, including those arising from the same authority in others. But it was the romantics who conceived it positively in terms of the distinctive calling to a creative venture or vocation for a unique work found in the depths of an individual’s self-discovery. As Charles Taylor says, “The notion of authenticity develops out of a displacement of the moral accent in this idea;” since Augustine, it consisted of being true to the voice of conscience within us, but Rousseau and especially Herder reinterpreted it as being true to one’s own original “way of being.”⁴ On this view, the significance of ordinary life depends on “an inner impulse or conviction” that is understood as the “voice of nature within us.”⁵ Self-expression becomes part of our telos, part of what it is to be a self.

Although they do not all endorse the claims romanticism made for the intrinsic value of “sentiment,” even apart from the proper objects of our loves, every major analytic account of autonomy from Joel Feinberg, Bernard Williams, and Frankfurt on has worked within this new paradigm: the relevant “self” in “self-governance” is no longer limited to a set of reasons or motives that are essential to all persons as such, or distinctive of morally responsible agency in general. Instead, autonomous motives can also include projects or commitments that are distinctive to the identity of particular selves.⁶ By illustrative contrast, John Rawls was still relying on the narrower notion when he linked his conception of justice to Kant’s belief that “a person is acting autonomously when the principles of his action are chosen by him as the most adequate possible expression of his nature as a free and equal rational being.”⁷ Here Rawls sounds like Hegel or even more like Marx, who referred to autonomy as the expression of one’s “species-being” or shared human nature (with the “sense of justice” operating as the distinctively human motive). He is much closer to the classical liberal and romantic ideas of individual autonomy when he follows “Royce’s thought that a person may be regarded as a human life lived according to a plan,” or lived according to endorsed long-term ends expressing a particular “conception of his good.”⁸ Notice how the “person” in this formulation is equated with the whole of an individual life-process (leaving aside types of freedom exercised in steering that process). Similarly, in all major contemporary analytic conceptions, the conditions of personal autonomy depend on the structure of individual selves and their capacity for “identity-conferring commitments,”⁹ though the conditions may also include forms of libertarian freedom.

This brief summary should be a sufficient basis for appreciating why both the existential tradition in the history of philosophy and contemporary narrative accounts of self-identity can make vital contributions to current debates about personal autonomy. The signature thesis of narrative theories can be stated in a summary (though somewhat loose) way as follows:

Signature Narrative Thesis: each person’s individual’s identity is, or depends on, an understanding he has of his life in narrative form, as a development from his past towards his future prospects, ending in his death.

So phrased, this thesis is similar to Dan McAdams’ statement that identity “is itself a life-story”¹⁰ and to Marya Schechtman’s statement that “the lives of persons are narrative in form.” The signature thesis leaves open how this form gets there, and thus it is weaker than causal theses such as her claim that “a person creates his identity by forming an autobiographical narrative.”¹¹ It is certainly open to causal claims like Peter McInerney’s thesis that “People consistently represent themselves as enduring entities that have specific types of bodily, psychological, and social characteristics,” and that such representations of persons (including themselves) have multiple direct and indirect effects on “the unity through time of persons’ psychological makeup,” usually by strengthening links between psychic states over time.¹² The signature thesis holds that such (mostly tacit) self-representations that have such unifying psychological effects tend towards narrative form: attitudes and dispositions of thought, judgment, emotion, and other motives that make up a distinctive self are connected and develop together with a coherence of plot, theme, and ethos much like that recognizable in the development of a complex character in a novel. And this has implications for autonomy: the authority of a motive to guide decisions and actions in the name of the self— to make particular ways of being count as self-determined—may depend (at least in part) on its thematic “centrality” in our life-narrative.

Narrative theories may also clarify the very concept of personal autonomy that the debates are supposed to be about, helping us pin down the central phenomena in need of philosophical explanation. Narrative theories naturally direct us to think of selves with the potential for autonomy as characters who are both agents and recipients of action in the stories they live out. The notions of character and (derivatively) character-traits are originally narrative notions, ideas first developed in literary art that from ancient times have also been applied to real embodied psyches. And while personal autonomy is not the same as Kantian moral autonomy—choice according to the moral law, or giving priority to moral obligation—it is still a broadly ethical concept, analogous to “free will” as the type of control needed to be responsible for garden-variety actions and intentions. While “free will” is the name or label for the control-conditions of responsibility, in general (for intentions, actions, omissions, consequences, etc), personal autonomy denotes the control needed to be responsible for (some parts of) one’s character. In short, autonomy is the control-condition of responsibility for one’s self in the sense of character-features that can be assessed as virtuous or vicious, as high or low in moral worth, as weak or strong. In Susan Wolf’s phrase, the autonomous person is deeply responsible for motives and dispositions with moral significance, such as virtues and vices;¹³ in the deepest sense, he is responsible for the core of his identity from which most of his particular free decisions flow.

Autonomy as Deep Responsibility (ADR): personal autonomy of the most fundamental kind is the set of conditions that constitute an agent’s control over her volitional character—the ethically significant features of her identity that are shaped by her central ends and priorities—sufficient to allow her to be ethically responsible for this character (if she also meets relevant epistemic conditions).

This definition does not deny that there are other weaker senses of “autonomy” in use; for example, sometimes autonomy is valued simply as an antidote to blatant physical coercion, and it may also be a useful label for the mental competencies necessary to manage one’s affairs, e.g., in making important medical and legal decisions. Instead, ADR is a hypothesis about the core notion of autonomy underlying such derivative senses. It says that the core form of autonomy, which we may simply label existential autonomy, is the freedom-condition of the deepest sort of responsibility that persons can attain (though not every person who is morally responsible for particular actions actually achieves this kind of responsibility for self¹⁴).

As a hypothesis about the function of personal autonomy or the basic nature of the phenomena it denotes, ADR is clearly inspired by two central themes in the tradition of existential philosophy. First, Søren Kierkegaard’s portrayal of life-stages ranging from “aesthetic” triviality to “ethical” commitment and culminating in “religious” faith implies that persons can be shallow or deep, vacuous or well-defined by deep commitments; only persons with lasting cares have the sort of volitional character that even make them candidates for autonomy. Second, writers such as Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Nikolas Berdyaev, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Viktor Frankl (as well as several existential novelists) have argued that persons are meant to become responsible for themselves as a whole—not because they control every aspect of personality (or the situations and upbringing that form personality) but because they can shape these psychic materials in different ways through cares or devotions that give lasting purpose to their lives.

These connections should not be surprising. Existential writers from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche onwards were both responding to and developing the romantic paradigm that turned Kant’s concept of moral autonomy into the concept of governance by the deep self of a unique individual (which may be more than Lockean self-governance by the desire for happiness and judgments instrumental to it). Beyond the immediate social level where political liberties, legal competence, and monetary means may enable one to carry out parts of a life-plan, they sought psychological insight into the sort of self that could form such a plan or articulate its own understanding of its final ends, and the ultimate sources of its inspirations. Thus, they helped complete the paradigm-shift begun by the romantics that has set the agenda for contemporary analytic efforts to analyze autonomy, even if mainstream analytic practitioners rarely recognize this heritage. Thus, also, the existential writers helped forge the idea that, with effort, a person can fashion a self that is more than the raw materials of birth and chance make her to be, and thereby become responsible for her very self—the concept of autonomy specified by ADR as the ultimate explanandum or highest target for autonomy theory. For that reason, if we could show that some existential conception of the individual self and its social relations stands up to rational scrutiny, this would reassure us that the notion of deep self-governance is not a mere fantasy or romantic illusion (as naturalizing reductionists suspect). Similarly, if some existential conception can be reconstructed in a way that is phenomenologically adequate, fitting with more of the evidence and cases we now have than do rival accounts, this could go a long way towards disclosing some of the determinate conditions of personal autonomy, or giving us a partial conception.

This book does not review the main existential accounts to determine the most likely candidate, but instead focuses on one existential model that is especially promising because of its connections with narrative theories of identity. While Nietzsche and Sartre have inspired several varieties of the view that life-stories are fictions and real lives are more fragmented, episodic, and discontinuous, Kierkegaard’s rich portrayal of a person’s freedom developing concrete identity over time arguably implies a narrative process in free choice itself. Because his philosophical anthropology has more in common with Aristotelian and other traditions of virtue ethics, his account also influenced (through Heidegger) contemporary hermeneutic conceptions of historicity. Paul Ricoeur, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre, who are among the most influential 20th-century sources of narrative theories of selves, rarely acknowledge Kierkegaard as a direct influence. But if Heidegger had more clearly acknowledged his debts, the extent to which Kierkegaard provided essential starting points for their accounts would be more evident.

It should be clear now why the main themes of this book are more closely connected than they might at first appear. The task of explaining personal autonomy can be advanced both by arriving at a clearer and more rigorous narrative conception of selves and by developing the concept of volitional character. Narrative theories of identity provide a bridge through which we can connect proposals from the mainstream analytic literature on autonomy and existential conceptions of self. In particular, I will focus on ideas from Kierkegaard’s conception of “e...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Sigla to Kierkegaard Works
• 1 Introduction: Autonomy, Practical Identity, Self, and Character
• 2 Narrative Realism about Practical Identity
• 3 Narrative Unity, Autonomy, and Kierkegaard’s Aesthetic–Ethical Distinction
• 4 Kierkegaardian Wholeheartedness: Purity of Heart versus Doublemindedness
• 5 Selves in Time before Death: Kierkegaardian Religious Narrative Unity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index