Before Peirce intuited Gazzaniga’s primary claim, there was the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, who was one of the first thinkers to deny a unified, essential self. He believed that we are “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions.” With our memories and imaginations, we shape these perceptions into continuity—a consistent “Wilsonness”—and causality: I am the effect of first uttering “ball.”
This is an early version of the narrative theory of self that Daniel Dennett developed in the 1980s, significantly in the essay “Why Everyone Is a Novelist.” Dennett substantiated Hume’s idea with neuroscience, demonstrating that the brain possesses no central cognitive unit but rather processes data in several regions. What gives our being a “center of gravity” is language, with which we construct a cogent “I,” to which we attribute, as we would to a character in a novel, intention, agency, rationality. Inhabiting this “I,” we can explain otherwise confusing experience. Of course the identity we construct is not a simple unity but a network of diverse narrative flows: my story of myself as a son, a spouse, a parent, a professor, a man who appears a certain way in the eyes of others, including parents, spouse, child, workmates, and so on. This is not to mention the “wordless” forces—like our genes and instincts—that we must also negotiate.
For Dennett the constructed self remains the center of these crisscrossing stories. Paul Ricoeur, however, believes that our narrative networks are too complicated for central command. In his work in the late eighties and early nineties, this French philosopher (he died in 2005) envisioned identity as a heterogeneous, ever-changing weave of interacting narratives, with no one story consistently organizing the others. The narrative I create to make sense of my experience is already too complex and expansive for me to control, since my circumstances are changing in ways I can’t predict, as are the lives of the other characters (family, friends, colleagues), the settings in which I and these characters exist, my community, my country, my environment, my planet, and so on. But these aren’t the only factors that keep my narrative mobile. I also appear as a character in the constantly morphing narratives of the others in my life, as well as in the similarly shifting stories of my larger cultural network, and my role in these narratives can change the way I explain myself to myself and others. And of course most, if not all, of these narratives—both the ones I produce and am produced by—are ambiguous, paradoxical, unpredictable. I am not an original book but an amalgamation of millions of textual scraps, each of which is always growing, contracting, hiding. I am also a squirmy, multilayered fragment in the collections that make up the identities of others.
We can despair over how overwhelming it all is, how little control we possess over the crazed and multitudinous strands weaving our being. Or we can view this sublime interplay of cultural signs as an ethical invitation. That’s what Ricoeur does.
He thinks that some narratives are ethical, and some aren’t. Unethical stories are those unresponsive to the heterogeneity of the network, while ethical ones are sensitive to as many strands as possible. To create a narrative of such rich variety is not only good; it is beautiful, as the novels of Woolf, Faulkner, Proust, and Joyce are: capacious, multiple, polyvocal, rhythmical, generous. The fading of fact into fiction generates an ethics that is aesthetic.