Saying no (to a story): personal identity and negativity

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 20 (2):353-364 (2021)
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Abstract

The concept of narrativity and narrative identity has two birth certificates: it is linked to the phenomenological tradition—beginning with Arendt’s “political phenomenology” —and to the tradition of German Idealism gradually slipping into existentialism. In this article, the author focuses on the latter tradition that helped to pave the way of the concept of narrative self. Key among the thinkers of Classical German Idealism has been Hegel, often considered the philosophical storyteller. Yet the author argues that Hegel’s concept of narrativity is not exclusively applied to the self and has hardly any role in the constitution of consciousness. This is the reason why Hegel has the means to formulate a more convincing concept of the self and personal identity. The author does not deny that narrativity is seminal, both for leading a life as a human being and as a concrete person; however, originally consciousness and self-hood are born out of negativity. One enacts one’s selfhood, once one realizes that one has to interrupt narrativity, step in, refuse to live by it, or just ordinarily rephrase it consciously and by this appropriate it.

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Phenomenological approaches to personal identity.Jakub Čapek & Sophie Loidolt - 2021 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 20 (2):217-234.

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References found in this work

Oneself as Another.Paul Ricoeur - 1992 - University of Chicago Press.
Against Narrativity.Galen Strawson - 2004 - Ratio 17 (4):428-452.
Giving an account of oneself.Judith Butler - 2005 - New York: Fordham University Press.
The Order of Time.Carlo Rovelli - 2018 - [London]: Allen Lane. Edited by Erica Segre & Simon Carnell.

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