The greatest single source of unhappiness in human intercourse.

The below is extracted from Galen Strawson http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=5902350452928052260&postID=7449252599690225056considering memory, that it, memory, does delete. Petrarch, Proust and thousands of others have given this idea vivid expression.

‘Flashbulb’ memories (such as the memory of what

was one doing when one heard about the shooting of

President Kennedy or about 9/11) can be surprisingly inaccurate

– astonishingly so given our certainty that we remember accurately

Even when revision is charged, the common view that we always

revise in our own favour must yield to a mass of everyday evidence

that some people are as likely to revise to their own detriment –

or simply forget the good things they have done.

Rochefoucauld says that self-love is subtler than the subtlest man

in the world, there is truth in what he says. And revising to one’s

own detriment may be no more attractive than revising to one’s

advantage.

natural for some – for some, perhaps, it may even be helpful –

but in others it is highly unnatural and ruinous. My guess is that

it almost always does more harm than good – that the Narrative

tendency to look for story or narrative coherence in one’s life is,

in general, a gross hindrance to self-understanding: to a just,

general, practically real sense, implicit or explicit, of one’s nature.

It’s well known that telling and retelling one’s past leads to

changes, smoothings, enhancements, shifts away from the facts,

and recent research has shown that this is not just a human psychological

foible. It turns out to be an inevitable consequence of

the mechanics of the neurophysiological process of laying down

memories that every studied conscious recall of past events brings

an alteration.

life’ (nor is Diachronicity), and it is in any case most unclear that

the examined life, thought by Socrates to be essential to human

existence, is always a good thing. People can develop and deepen

in valuable ways without any sort of explicit, specifically Narrative

reflection, just as musicians can improve by practice sessions

without recalling those sessions. The business of living well is, for

many, a completely non-Narrative project. The aspiration to explicit Narrative self-articulation is not a necessary part of the ‘examined

Psychotherapy need not be a narrative or Narrative project. It

regularly involves identifying connections between features of

one’s very early life and one’s present perspective on things, but

these particular explanatory linkings need not have any sort of

distinctively narrative character to them. Nor need they be

grasped in any distinctively Narrative way. Nor need they interconnect

narratively with each other in any interesting way. I don’t

need to take up any sort of Narrative attitude to myself in order

to profit from coming to understand how the way X and Y treated

me when I was very young is expressed in certain anxieties I have

now. The key explanatory linkings in psychotherapy are often

piecemeal in nature, as are many of the key impacts of experience.

Ideally, I think, one acquires an assorted basketful of understandings,

not a narrative – an almost inevitably falsifying

narrative.

Some think that an 'Episodic' cannot

really know true friendship, or even be loyal. They are refuted by

Michel de Montaigne, a great Episodic, famous for his friendships

"There is nobody less suited than I am to start talking about

memory. I can find hardly a trace of it in myself; I doubt if there

is any other memory in the world as grotesquely faulty as mine

is!"

Montaigne finds that he is often misjudged and misunderstood,

for when he admits he has a very poor memory people assume

that he must suffer from ingratitude: ‘they judge my affection by

my memory’, he comments, and are of course quite wrong to do

so.

A gift for friendship doesn’t require any ability to recall past

We live’, as the great

short story writer V. S. Pritchett observes, ‘beyond any tale that we

happen to enact’.

Episodic (not relying on narrative) thinkers as opposed to diachronic (relying on narrative) :  Among those whose writings show them to be markedly Episodic I propose Michel

de Montaigne, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Stendhal, Hazlitt, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf,

Borges, Fernando Pessoa, Iris Murdoch,Freddie Ayer, Bob Dylan. Proust is another candidate 

On the other side arethe diachronics – Plato, St. Augustine, Heidegger, all champions  of narrative and Narrativity.

Take your pick!

AGAINST NARRATIVITY

 
"I think this may be the greatest single source of unhappiness in human intercourse!"

Let us cut to the chase. So what is this most single course of unhappiness in human intercourse?  According to Galen Strawson it is how we narratise our lives.

Yet, making sense of my present action . . . requires a narrative understanding of my life, When I evaluate my actions there are two ways I can do this. View my actions to be that of a human being as whole or do I take my experience to be that of an inner mental activity or 'self' or some sort.  Yet, I have to remember what I did, when I recall my actions my memory (that unreliable faculty)  

abridges, edits, reorders, italicizes.

But even if construction and

reconstruction are universal in autobiographical memory, they

needn’t involve revision as currently defined, for they may be fabrication - or they may fall on a kind of fabrication of

free story-telling or form-finding.

Many have proposed

that we are all without exception incorrigible self-fabulists, ‘unreliable

narrators’ of our own lives. Some

claim greater honesty of outlook for themselves, and see pride,

self-blindness, and so on in those who deny it.

But other research

makes it pretty clear that this is not true. It’s not true of everyone.

We have here another deep dimension of human psychological

difference. Some people are fabulists all the way down. In others,

autobiographical memory is fundamentally non-distorting, whatever

automatic processes of remoulding and recasting it may

invariably involve.

Some think that revision is always

motivated by an interconnected core group of moral emotions

including pride, self-love, conceit, shame, regret, remorse, and

guilt. Some go further, claiming with Nietzsche that we always

revise in our own favour: ‘“I have done that”, says my memory. “I

cannot have done that”, says my pride, and remains inexorable.

Eventually – memory yields.’
is

"I have a past, like any human being, and I know perfectly well that

I have a past. I have a respectable amount of factual knowledge

about it, and I also remember some of my past experiences ‘from

the inside’, as philosophers say. And yet I have absolutely no

sense of my life as a narrative with form, or indeed as a narrative

without form. Absolutely none. Nor do I have any great or special

interest in my past. Nor do I have a great deal of concern for my

future." How releasing is that?  Very, I would say.

That’s one way to put it – to speak in terms of limited interest.

Another way is to say that it seems clear to me, when I am experiencing or apprehending myself as a self, that the remoter past

or future in question is not my past or future, although it is certainly

the past or future of  me the human being. This is more dramatic,

but I think it is equally correct, when I am figuring myself

as a self. I have no significant sense that

this question – was there in the further past. And it seems

clear to me that this is not a failure of feeling.

It is, rather, a registration of a fact about what I am – about what the thing that is

currently considering this problem is.

If one of my remembered experiences has a from-the inside

character it must – by definition – be experienced as something that

happened to me

*.

This may seem plausible at first, but it’s a mistake: the from-the inside character of a memory can detach completely from any

sense that one is the subject of the remembered experience. My

memory of falling out of a boat has an essentially from-the-inside

character, visually (the water rushing up to meet me), kinaesthetically, proprioceptively, and so on.

that it carries any feeling or belief that what is remembered happened

to me, to that which I now apprehend myself to be when

I am apprehending myself specifically as a self.

I’m well aware that

my past is mine in so far as I am a human being, and I fully accept

that there’s a sense in which it has special relevance to me now,

including special emotional and moral relevance. At the same

time I have no sense that I was there in the past, and think it

obvious that I was not there, as a matter of metaphysical fact.

One clear statement of the psychological Narrativity thesis is

given by Roquentin in Sartre’s novel La nausée:

a man is always a teller of stories, he lives surrounded by his

own stories and those of other people, he sees everything that

happens to him

life as if he were recounting it.

Sartre sees the narrative, story-telling impulse as a defect, regrettable.

He accepts the psychological Narrativity thesis while rejecting

the ethical Narrativity thesis. He thinks human Narrativity is

essentially a matter of bad faith, of radical (and typically irremediable)

inauthenticity, rather than as something essential for

authenticity.

The pro-Narrative majority may concede to Sartre that Narrativity

can go wrong while insisting that it’s not all bad and that it

is necessary for a good life. I’m with Sartre on the ethical issue,

but I want now to consider some statements of the psychological

Narrativity thesis. Oliver Sacks puts it by saying that ‘each of us

constructs and lives a “narrative”,

The distinguished psychologist Jerry Bruner writes of ‘the

stories we tell about our lives’, claiming that ‘self is a perpetually

rewritten story’, and that ‘in the end, we use

narratives by which we “tell about” our lives’.

Dennett claims that

we are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all

sorts of behaviour, and we always try to put the best ‘faces’ on

it we can. We try to make all of our material cohere into a single

good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional

character at the centre of that autobiography is one’s

self.

Marya Schechtman goes further, twisting the ethical and the psychological

 A person, she says, ‘creates his identity [only] by

forming an autobiographical narrative – a story of his life’.

Charles Taylor presents it this way: a ‘basic condition of making

sense of ourselves’, he says, ‘is that we grasp our lives in narrative 

and have an understanding of our lives ‘as an unfolding

story’

It is argued that because we cannot but orient ourselves to the good, and hence

determine our place relative to it and hence determine the

direction of our lives, [that] we must inescapably understand

our lives in narrative form, as a ‘quest’ [and] must see our lives

in story

This, he says, is an ‘inescapable structural requirement of human

agency’,

How, indeed, could a subject of action give an ethical character

to his or her own life taken as a whole if this life were not

gathered together in some way, and how could this occur if not,

precisely, in the form of a narrative?

Yet I have a perfectly good grasp of myself as having a

certain personality, but I’m completely uninterested in the answer

to the question ‘What have I made of his life?’. I’m living it, and this sort of thinking about it

is no part of it. This does not mean that I am in any way irresponsible.

It is just that what I care about, in so far as I care about

myself and my life, is how I am now. The way I am now is profoundly

shaped by my past, but it is only the present shaping consequences

of the past that matter, not the past as such.

I agree

with the Earl of Shaftesbury:

"The metaphysicians . . . affirm that if memory be taken away,

the self is lost. [But] what matter for memory? What have I to

do with that part? And thus let me lose

successive selfs, or new selfs, ‘tis all one to me: so [long as] I

lose not my opinion [i.e. my overall outlook, my character, my

moral identity]. If I carry that with me ’tis I; all is well. . . . – The

whilst I am, I am as I should be.

Narrative outlooks generalize from their own

case with that special, fabulously misplaced confidence that

people feel when, considering elements of their own experience

that are existentially fundamental for them, they take it that they

must also be fundamental for everyone else. Paul Ricoeur appears to concur.