Essay Club: I Am Not a Story by Galen Strawson

"Self-knowledge comes best in bits and pieces."

I’ve been beating the narrative identity drum for a long time now. I first hinted at this in the conclusion to my 2023 essay series On Personality and Psychopathology¹, and since then I’ve been systematically laying out my perspective in a new series of essays, The Stories We Tell². The basic idea is this: our identities take the form of narratives constructed from a curated selection of memories, each of which is consistent with each other and our overall sense of Self. This narrative identity is influenced by our own experiences, but also the collective experiences of humanity, which have been handed down to us in the form of historical narratives, myths, and anecdotes.

These are all pretty well established psychological facts. Still, not everyone agrees with this view. Galen Strawson, a contemporary British philosopher of mind, has been a fierce critic of the narrative perspective. His critique is best articulated in his 2004 paper Against Narrativity, an influential piece which has been cited over 1800 times, and which forms the argumentative basis for his more recent Aeon essay I Am Not a Story (2015). The earlier essay is more philosophically robust, but I think the latter, written 11 years after the first, is a more accessible and enjoyable read. For this reason, and because I think it’s important to engage directly with one’s critics from time to time, I’ve chosen I Am Not a Story as our essay for this month. Let’s read it together and find out whether it presents a genuine threat to my worldview.

Galen Strawson (b. 1952).

I Am Not a Story (2015)

Summary

Strawson begins his essay by sharing a series of quotes from several prominent thinkers—Oliver Sacks, Jerome Bruner, Dan P. McAdams, J David Velleman, Daniel Dennett—all of whom offer a version of the same basic idea: “we story ourselves and we are our stories.” He observes that this idea is often presented as being both descriptive and normative; that is, it’s not just true that we all self-narrate, but it’s a good thing that we do it. Indeed, the better our story is, the more meaningful our life becomes. Strawson disagrees:

“I think it’s false – false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. These are not universal human truths – even when we confine our attention to human beings who count as psychologically normal, as I will here. They’re not universal human truths even if they’re true of some people, or even many, or most. The narrativists are, at best, generalising from their own case, in an all-too-human way. At best: I doubt that what they say is an accurate description even of themselves.”

Strawson acknowledges that many people find the self-narration theory persuasive, not least because it intuitively fits with their own experience. But there are many among us—including Strawson himself—who feel that the self-narration theory gets it wrong. For these non-narrativists, life feels “hopelessly piecemeal and disordered”; they lack the “emotion of authorship”, instead experiencing life as a hodgepodge of unrelated events, and themselves as not just one Self but a collective of distinct Selves. Strawson shares a series of quotes from John Updike, Erik Erikson, Mary Midgley, Paul Klee, Michel de Montaigne, and others who described experiences more like his own. He concludes that, at the very least, we need to acknowledge a multiplicity of perspectives on what constitutes the Self.

He then goes on to criticise the idea that self-narration is unreservedly a good thing. Quoting English dramatist Sir Henry Taylor, Strawson suggests that there is a danger in excessive self-storying:

“‘An imaginative man is apt to see, in his life, the story of his life; and is thereby led to conduct himself in such a manner as to make a good story of it rather than a good life’…

“[Taylor is] identifying a fault, a moral danger. This is a recipe for inauthenticity. And if the narrativists are right and such self-storying impulses are in fact universal, we should worry.”

Strawson also challenges the supposed link between good self-narration and good memory recall. Referencing the work of French essayist Montaigne, he says:

“Poor memory protects him from a disagreeable form of ambition, stops him babbling, and forces him to think through things for himself because he can’t remember what others have said. Another advantage, he says, ‘is that… I remember less any insults received’.”

The bottom line: a coherent life story is not an absolute good. By self-storying, we risk lying to ourselves about who we really are; and if self-narration does reflect a better memory capacity (a questionable claim in Strawson’s view), this only means that we are more likely to ramble on, hold grudges, think superficially, and be excessively ambitious.

Strawson concludes that narrative identity is probably a reality for many people, and he can’t deny that a good personal narrative provides a sense of meaning and purpose for many of us. However, the fact that some of us experience life this way doesn’t necessarily mean that all of us do, and it’s far from obvious that a good life story is a prerequisite for human happiness. Strawson remains unconvinced by the narrativists; as he sees it, “self-knowledge comes best in bits and pieces”.

Commentary

I want to be fair to Galen Strawson. I Am Not a Story was written with a popular audience in mind, so we shouldn’t expect to be bombarded by meticulous argumentation or empirical research here. Personal anecdotes and quotes from beloved literary figures can be very convincing, and this is as it should be—after all, how else would we know about some of the less typical aspects of human life? That said, I feel that Strawson relies too much on this kind of ‘evidence’, and I think that this is simply a byproduct of there being very little actual evidence to support his position. As Strawson himself tells us, there is a “remarkably robust consensus” amongst psychologists and philosophers about narrative identity.

There are two big flaws in Strawson’s reasoning that I want to highlight here. First, he seems to have a somewhat outdated understanding of the narrativist position in general. His view, as I understand it, is that self-storying is a conscious process—that we consciously construct our personal myth as we go through life, perhaps in order to give our lives meaning or to sell ourselves better to others. In truth, self-narration is largely an unconscious process³. It can be done consciously, and indeed, some people are more intentional about this than others, but most of our self-storying happens beneath the surface. Strawson does acknowledge this early in the essay, but he is quick to dismiss it, and he doesn’t seem to recognise that this has always been the position of most narrative psychologists.

The second mistake Strawson makes is to misunderstand the nature of personal narratives. He describes how his own self-knowledges comes “in bits and pieces”, and uses this to suggest that he doesn’t experience his life as a narrative. I disagree; I think Strawson does have a personal narrative, he just doesn’t recognise it as such. His story is the story of a man with a fragmented identity, of a man with many faces, perhaps even many different lives spread over decades. It’s possible that this narrative doesn’t provide Strawson with a strong sense of meaning and purpose, but this only means that the narrative is not a particularly compelling one for him. Either way, it’s still a story—and no matter how degraded or fragmented a story is, if there’s a main character and progression over time, it’s still a story.

On the fragmentary nature of personality, though, I do have to concede some ground. As a psychologist, I’m well aware that people can wear different ‘masks’ in different situations; I know that people can dissociate, even to the point of experiencing life through multiple different ‘personalities’; as a schema therapist, I also know that the different ‘parts’ of a person can be identified and worked with for the purpose of psychological growth. How do I square this with my narrative ideas?

My solution to this problem is self-integration. To live life as a series of disconnected experiences, or to be constantly changing masks from moment to moment, is not good for the soul. At best, we might get away with living this way for a few years. But this can’t go on forever; if we want to live lives that are meaningful, purposeful, and productive, we eventually need to take stock of who we really are and either subsume our lesser parts into our true Self, or burn off any dead wood that’s hindering our growth.

So was my mind changed by Strawson’s arguments? The short answer: not really. At best, I Am Not a Story is a reminder that not all brains work the same way. There are people with better and worse memory recall, and there is variation in the overall coherence of peoples’ internal narratives. Some people are the same person no matter where they are or who they’re with, and others are prone to wearing different masks in different settings. These are important observations, and I’ve never denied them. But none of this disproves the fact that human personality is fundamentally narrative in nature. Ultimately, the logical and empirical evidence for psychological narrativity is too strong. One man’s story about rejecting life stories isn’t enough to convince me otherwise.

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Housekeeping

What did you all think of I Am Not a Story? Will you leave this post a convinced anti-narrativist? Do you think I’ve given Strawson a fair shake? Share your thoughts in the comments! And if you enjoyed this, please do all the usual good things—like, share, subscribe.

Live Discussion

For those who don’t already know, this year I started hosting live Essay Club chats alongside my review/discussion posts. It’s open to anyone, so if this is something you’d like to participate in, the details are as follows:

Date/time: Sunday 27th of April, 7:00am Australian Eastern Standard Time [please cross-check this with your own time zone!].

Access via this link: https://join.freeconferencecall.com/mindandmythos

Essay Club is all about the conversations it generates, so if you enjoy a good intellectual discussion, I highly recommend coming along for the live discussion. If you encounter any issues with the link or anything else, please drop me a direct message.

May Essay Club

In May we’ll be tackling—at long last!—J. R. R. Tolkien’s On Fairy-Stories (1947) (PDF). I believe this is the longest essay we’ve covered to date, and it says a lot, so give yourself some time to read through it. The Essay Club post will be published on the 18th of May, and the live discussion will be hosted the following weekend (date/time still to be determined).

Tolkien is one of the greats, so I’m looking forward to this one. Hope to see you all for Essay Club live next weekend!

1. On Personality and Psychopathology: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

2. The Stories We Tell: Part 1, Part 2

3. You can read more about this in my post on the Self-Memory System, a model that describes many of the psychological processes involved in self-narration.