Human-Life Story
A Human-Life Story is a narrative for a human life.
- Context:
- It can range from being an Authentic Life Story to being an Inauthentic Life Story.
- See: Psychology, Narrative, Denouement, Identity Crisis.
References
2015
- (Wikipedia, 2015) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_identity Retrieved:2015-11-30.
- The theory of narrative identity postulates that individuals form an identity by integrating their life experiences into an internalized, evolving story of the self, which provides the individual with a sense of unity and purpose in life.[1] This life narrative integrates one’s reconstructed past, perceived present, and imagined future. Furthermore, this narrative is a story - it has characters, episodes, imagery, a setting, plots, themes, and often follows the traditional model of a story, having a beginning (initiating event), middle (an attempt and a consequence), and an end (denouement). Narrative identity is the focus of interdisciplinary research, with deep roots in psychology.
In recent decades, a proliferation of psychological research on narrative identity has provided a strong empirical basis for the construct, cutting across the field, including personality psychology, social psychology, developmental and life-span psychology, cognitive psychology, cultural psychology, and clinical and counseling psychology.
- The theory of narrative identity postulates that individuals form an identity by integrating their life experiences into an internalized, evolving story of the self, which provides the individual with a sense of unity and purpose in life.[1] This life narrative integrates one’s reconstructed past, perceived present, and imagined future. Furthermore, this narrative is a story - it has characters, episodes, imagery, a setting, plots, themes, and often follows the traditional model of a story, having a beginning (initiating event), middle (an attempt and a consequence), and an end (denouement). Narrative identity is the focus of interdisciplinary research, with deep roots in psychology.
- ↑ Cite error: Invalid
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2013
- http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-ethics/#NarCri
- QUOTE: According to theorists attracted to this general approach, it is the Narrative Criterion of Personal Identity: what makes an action, experience, or psychological characteristic properly attributable to some person (and thus a proper part of his or her true identity) is its correct incorporation into the self-told story of his or her life (MacIntyre 1984, 1989, Taylor 1989, Schechtman 1996, DeGrazia 2005). Narrative identity is thus really about a kind of psychological unity, but not just an artless or random unity. Imagine, for instance, a subject of experiences to whom various experiences merely happened over time. The events would be unified in a purely passive respect, simply as the experiences contained within the life of that subject of experiences. But for that subject to be a person, a genuine moral agent, those experiences must be actively unified, must be gathered together into the life of one narrative ego by virtue of a story the subject tells that weaves them together, giving them a kind of coherence and intelligibility they wouldn't otherwise have had. This is how the various experiences and events come to have any real meaning at all — rather than being merely isolated events — by being part of a larger story that relates them to one another within the context of one life (Schechtman 1996, 96–99).
This view purports to account for our practical concerns in a far more adequate way than the previous accounts of numerical identity. So it make sense for me to rationally anticipate some future experiences only if they will be mine, where what makes them mine is that they will fit coherently and accurately into my own ongoing self-told story. What explains my special sort of concern for myself is that I'm in fact an extended narrative ego — not some time-slice concerned about the well-being of some future time-slice — and I'm constantly extending that narrative into the future, so my concern is global, a concern for the whole self I'm creating via this story, the whole self whose various parts are mine. And as for responsibility, the Narrative Criterion implies that what makes some past action mine (for which I'm eligible for praise or blame) is that it flowed from my central values, beliefs, and experiences, that there's a coherent story I may tell uniting it to the other elements of my life. And a similar story may be told to account for compensation (Ibid., 136–162).
There are, nevertheless, problems with the account. For one thing, it is not entirely clear why a self-told narrative is necessary to unite the various experiences and events of one's life into a coherent whole. I may have robust psychological unity without having told myself any kind of story. But even if we allow for hypothetical narratives to do this work, or for third-person narratives to count, it remains unclear just what role a narrative would be playing here at all. For surely we must allow that some narratives get it wrong — it can't just be that whatever I say, or someone else says, about the way the events of my life fit together is what goes — and if we allow for that, then it seems we must admit that it isn't the narrative itself that makes the various events and experiences united with one another; rather, they must be united with one another independently, and the (correct) narrative just serves as a kind of post hoc overlay, an articulation of the pre-existing unity. And we will see yet another worry about the ambiguity of narrative identity in our later discussion of the communitarian objection to the methodology employed here.
But perhaps the most serious worry comes from the fact that, as it stands, narrative identity depends on numerical identity (DeGrazia 2005, 114)
- QUOTE: According to theorists attracted to this general approach, it is the Narrative Criterion of Personal Identity: what makes an action, experience, or psychological characteristic properly attributable to some person (and thus a proper part of his or her true identity) is its correct incorporation into the self-told story of his or her life (MacIntyre 1984, 1989, Taylor 1989, Schechtman 1996, DeGrazia 2005). Narrative identity is thus really about a kind of psychological unity, but not just an artless or random unity. Imagine, for instance, a subject of experiences to whom various experiences merely happened over time. The events would be unified in a purely passive respect, simply as the experiences contained within the life of that subject of experiences. But for that subject to be a person, a genuine moral agent, those experiences must be actively unified, must be gathered together into the life of one narrative ego by virtue of a story the subject tells that weaves them together, giving them a kind of coherence and intelligibility they wouldn't otherwise have had. This is how the various experiences and events come to have any real meaning at all — rather than being merely isolated events — by being part of a larger story that relates them to one another within the context of one life (Schechtman 1996, 96–99).