Fulfillment as a Process of Becoming 2
Life Narratives
Paul Ricoeur
The concept of a life narrative or story can also be found in philosophy.
The French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, focused on the hermeneutics, or interpretation, of the self, and developed a narrative theory in relation to our existence.
His starting point was to assert that who I am is not an objective fact to be discovered, but rather something that must be achieved or created, and to which I must attest.
The human self is a certain kind of being, a subject of a temporal, material, linguistic and social unity.
And personal identity is best considered in terms of a narrative identity: what is the story a person tells about his or her life, and what story do others tell?
Two Identities
Ricoeur asserted that there are two kinds of identity in relation to selfhood.
Idem identity is the identity of something that remains the same and never changes with time.
Ipse identity is something that is reinterpreted over time, but has a sameness across and through change.
Self-identity is a reiterative process involving both dimensions: who I was in the past and who I am now.
Who we interpret ourselves to be is a process involving a reconciliation of our historical idem identity over the length of our personal biographies, as well as our ipse identity that survives time and is re-interpreted in the present.
Todd May
Ricoeur saw the development of one’s life narrative as a lifetime process of creating the self.
The creation of narratives is the construction of meaning and value over a lifetime.
Todd May, in his book A Significant Life, also views narratives as process.
May asserts that narratives are the stories we create about ourselves that assist us in what we think our life consists in; and as process, we come to live the stories we create.
Narrative Values
May posits the narrating of one’s life as a process creating meaning in life that is not so much a something, but instead a way of living life.
In the course of doing so, we create “narrative values” that have a subjective and objective quality (objective in the sense of socially endorsed) that are lived as a matter of more or less.
Over a lifetime, we act out these values on a scale of intensity that depends on our personal and social circumstances at the time.
But in another sense, we seek to act out our narrative values as a whole in a manner that coheres into what sort of person we think ourselves to be.
Life Themes
May views narrativity in life as not so much about a specific story or plot, but over a lifetime, hashed out in terms of themes we come to identify with, which set us on a trajectory we feel ourselves to be on with each new experience.
With each new experience, we express our narrative values in new ways such that they cohere in overall themes.
I hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading!
Tomas
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Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Becoming: A Life of Pure Difference (Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of the New) Copyright © 2022 by Tomas Byrne. Learn more here.
