Narrative and Self-Making

"We are the stories we tell ourselves". A popular aphorism. Does it have any philosophical depth? Here I look at the role of narrative in making the self looking at two very different philosophers who share a common thread on this matter: Paul Ricoeur and Daniel Dennet.

I walk down the street shuffling as I avoid passers-by. I notice a big dog coming towards me, check that the traffic is clear, step off the kerb to avoid it. I arrive at a shop and select ingredients for supper. During these desultory tasks I process and act on the world as it presents itself, sharp and clear. Locke saw waking experiences as reliable in their vivid consistency (Hume preferred 'forceful and lively'). Such quotidian events are the basis of autobiographical memories as recounted. That is, meaning routinely attaches to them via propositional attitudes: the beliefs, intentions, desires, hopes and fears that we attribute to actions if asked about, or reflecting on, them. So, "I was heading to the shops to buy some milk"; "I was worried about getting too close to the big dog." In such narrative constructions, we wrap up the salient features of our projects in a short sentence or two. I stepped off the pavement because I believed the dog looked dubious. There was likely no awareness of such a belief, no meta-cognition at the time; I simply acted. But in any subsequent recollection, a narrative compresses the myriad of events that took place into the actions that form a framework of meaning encapsulating 'what happened'.

The French philosopher of hermeneutics, Paul Ricoeur expresses this distinction between 'actions' and 'events' as follows:

"A meaningful action is an action whose meaning is for someone. Interpretation is what makes action understandable by revealing the structures of intention and consequence."

Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (1990)

Beliefs, hopes, fears and desires are shrink-wrapped statements of the actions that see as coming from the 'inner lives' of ourself and others. We interpret actions as guided by inner forces and this act of interpretation is a conduit to summarising them in narrative folk psychological terms.

Events on the other hand are every occurrence that may be either ignored or squashed by a narrative into a summarised action. Consider the extraordinary range and breadth of events likely to be encapsulated in the following narrative of an action: "She left her husband because he was too self-centred". Events may also include the parts played in our lives by inanimate objects or nature or the myriad tacit bodily and sensory micro-processes that our interactions with the world comprise.

Actions then express the intentions of agents that we assume to have folk psychologies making them tick as they move towards the world. The hurricane does not act because it has no desires or intentions. It may cause extraordinary actions in those who encounter it but as an event, but we attribute no agency or meaning to its events. Likewise, the act of walking includes a myriad complex interplays of muscles and vascular processes that underpin our gait. But the act of walking has no meaning unless someone is walking somewhere to do something. We can only interpret walking, running, reaching, ducking etc when we wrap them into macro-projects to which we ascribe narrative weight. "I was walking to the shops this morning and had to step off the kerb to avoid a big dubious dog" tells the listener (who may be oneself given that our inner voices routinely tell us things) of actions because it speaks of beliefs, intentions, desires, hopes and fears.

En route, from events to actions to narrative, the act of tacit or explicit interpretation involves compression. In the telling, we edit out all that lacks meaning, leaving in only actions, the semantic signposts that get to the heart of the actions, the 'what we were doing'.

This compression is radical but rarely considered as such when we focus on actions that speak of the underlying folk psychology. Novels (predominanty, but not exclusively... cf The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker), using take a radically shorter time to read than the fictive time they cover. The novelist or playwright or recounter of human behaviour can compress extended periods of time into short sentences by selecting the meaningful actions of characters from the whole of the events in the time they are covering. Macbeth takes three hours in the theatre but coherently covers 17 years of a particular Scottish history because Shakespeare's narrative compression fillets the story down to the folk psychological set pieces— the character-revealing semiotics that unveil his interpretation of the folk psychological motivations of the protaganists. Macbeth's belief that the Witches' prophecy will come true; his fear that the guards will reveal that he has killed King Duncan; his hope that killing Banquo and his son will remove his fear that Banquo's heirs will rule instead of him. Each of these is captured in a few short scenes that speak of the project, the motivations, the psychology that underpins Macbeth's direction towards ruin.

Narrative compression enables the story-telling we use to encapsulate our interpretation of their inner lives. The compression allows us to speak of our inner worlds quickly. In the philosophy of mind, the eliminitavist project of Paul and Pat Churchland proposes that the mental will (eventually) become redundant as science strangles out folk psychology in science. However, in everyday life this is a fool's errand because we don't ever have time for exactitude, only for reduction. We rarely (if ever) acknowledge that this reduction is a 'useful fiction' but brief consideration of how a myriad events became narratively compressed and composed as an action ("he stormed out because he was jealous") reveals the utility in brevity of compression and of folk psychology.

Jorge Luis Borges' excellent 1946 parable, On Exactitude in Science (Del rigor en la ciencia) captures this neatly. He uses the conceit of a story derived from an ancient text of an empire of obsessive cartographers who strive for perfect accuracy in their map-making. Over time, they produce increasingly detailed maps in this quest. It culminates in an apotheosis: a map the exact size of the territory it represents, one which covers the whole empire. Borges notes that such exactitude is useless. Why? Because compression is key to utility in cartography, just as it is to narration and folk psychology. As linguists often say about the gap between linguistic codes and the diversity of human speech in the wild, the map is not the territory.

Ricoeur examines this relationship between temporality and story telling in his three-volume magnum opus Time and Narrative (1983). In short, for him narrative works to refigure lived time into fictive time. From this, fictive time is then reinterpreted for the reader within the temporality of reading time (or 'watching time' in the case of films or the performing arts). The map of intrigue that weaves and inter-weaves actions into the highest level of macro projects is emplotment. That is the sequence of actions that speaks directly to us of the characters' propositional attitudes at scale. Macbeth's obsession. Lady Macbeth's ambition. Emplotment is the interaction of characters' inner projects with the world, other characters and events that often don't share them.

In Ricoeur's analysis, emplotment (mise en intrigue) belongs to the second of three stages of mimesis; a term originally located in Aristotle’s Poetics. It refers to the way stories represent and shape human experience. Ricoeur expands this notion by distinguishing three interrelated stages:

1. Mimesis I (Prefiguration): The world before narration, where human actions, cultural symbols, and temporal structures already contain the potential for storytelling.
2. Mimesis II (Configuration): The process of emplotment, where events, characters, and actions are structured into a meaningful narrative. This is the creative act of organizing time and experience into a coherent plot.
3. Mimesis III (Refiguration): The moment of interpretation and integration, where the reader or audience applies the narrative to their own understanding of the world.

Emplotment in mimesis II functions as a bridge between raw experience and its meaningful representation within narrative. It transforms disparate events into a structured whole. It compresses the territory of experience into the map of meaning. Ricoeur argues that this process does not merely reflect reality but actively shapes how we perceive and interpret time, history, and human action. Let's step into this.

Self-Narrative

In his excellent paper, The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity, Daniel Dennett (1986 - link HERE) tells a story of the development of human communication where all thought was originally expressed verbally. So questions are blurt-outs that someone else might here and might answer. Then, our ancestors come to blurt-out when no-one else is around. The utterer becomes the listener—to their own blurt out. As this occurs more and more, the process is internalised. Our ancester develops inter-accessibility between parts of the brain that didn't previously connect in such a way. He asserts that we ended up with a different type of communication: purely internal: thought. Not from a unified Cartesian entity or soul but a mechanism of making the brain and nervous system function more effective, particularly when problem solving.

Over time the silent inner-voice becomes a narrative centre of gravity for the self. We become the answers to the questions that the world and others ask us. But—much more importantly—the answers to the questions we ask ourselves. We also ask questions to ourselves and create stories about other people—and also about the world—to better understand them both. Our identity becomes the interplay of the inner-voice's questions and the answers we give to ourselves about ourselves on internally hearing them. Sometimes the different 'faces' to parts of that story that don't sit together well.

Dennett says:

It does seem that we are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behavior, more or less unified, but sometimes disunified, and we always 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 center of that autobiography is one's self. And if you still want to know what the self really is, you're making a category mistake. After all, when a human being's behavioral control system becomes seriously impaired, it can turn out that the best hermeneutical story we can tell about that individual says that there is more than one character "inhabiting" that body. 

This is a different view from Ricoeur's but narrative once again sits at the heart.

Considering how all the stories that we hear or tell ourselves are compressed in interpretation that ends up in propositional attitudes encapsulating projects (so that we don't end up with maps the size of the world!), we see that our views of both ourselves and others are like 1:50,000 scale maps. We could not absorb or process every fine detail so the resulting narrative is a curated and compressed collection of the most important signposts we've seen. We make our 'self' in a dialectic process with ourselves, others and the world. The narrative we end up with never encapsulates the myriad of events but—through hermeneutic engagement with the stories we tell ourselves about them—we shrink the world radically through interpretation into maps that we can use.

To finish, consider Little Red Riding Hood. Let the story seep back into your mind.

A skilled writer could tell the story of Red Riding Hood in a 5,000 page work if she described in minute Proustian detail the orchestration of every single event behind the fairy tale summation, every nuance of observation, intention and belief our heroine is wrapped in from home to Grandma's house and beyond. We might minutely describe every thread of the wolf's bonnet, every movement of his lips and tongue when speaking. But none of this is usually worth recording because it does not need interpreting unless it afffects the overall project of the tale. Perhaps the wolf's lick of his lips is important—particularly if the storyteller sees this action as speaking of hope, of anticipation, of hunger, of motivation and of malicious planning. Then, maybe, that lick makes its way into the narrative. The settling of the tongue back into the mouth however won't because it speaks of nothing.

Choosing the facets of our lives and those of others that count as important is a hermeneutic act. It is an act of interpretation and inner-dialogue. When we do that wonderful (or awful) thing that humans are uniquely apt to: to ourselves as another—which Ricoeur notes, we always do—the resulting narrative with its associated hermeneutics and compression, allows us to make a self.

Ade Webb
March 2025