The Disembodied Narrative Self Sample Clauses

The Disembodied Narrative Self. We begin with a few narrative theorists who spend little time accounting for embodiment or, in one case, believe the self to be a disembodied fiction. The latter is Xxxxxxx whose account we considered above. Remember, his view is that the self is like the center of narrative gravity—a convenient fiction. Like the center of gravity of an object, which is not a physically existing thing in the world, the self is a similarly non- existent entity. The narrative self is the protagonist in a fictional story, while the physical brain is the author. He states, ‘Call me Xxx’, you hear from my lips, and you oblige, not by calling my lips Xxx, or my body Xxx, but by calling me Xxx, the theorists’ fiction created by…well, not by me but by my brain, acting in concert over the years with parents and siblings and friends (Xxxxxxx, 1991, p. 429). From his perspective, the brain is needed to create the self (and so is embodied in some very minimal sense), but the narrative self that results from the brain is nothing remotely physical (Xxxxxxx, 2014). In fact, as his center of gravity analogy suggests, the narrative self is non-physical by definition. It follows that for Xxxxxxx, a self can exist without a body, for he states, “your current embodiment, though a necessary precondition for your creation, is not necessarily a requirement for your existence to be prolonged indefinitely” (Xxxxxxx, 1991, p. 430). He argues that self can exist without a body in the way that a computer program can survive the absence of a computer if it is simply transferred to another computer by a disk, USB drive, etc. In short, the body is only contingently related to the self (Xxxxxxx, 2014). Xxxxx Xxxxxxxxx also views the narrative self as an inherently disembodied entity, but for different reasons. Xxxxxxx’x self is disembodied because it is a fiction in the first place, whereas Xxxxxxxxx’x approach to embodiment accounts for and addresses embodiment in a different fashion. Her narrative self-constitution view (the notion that subjects create narrative selves by thinking of themselves as persisting subjects with a past, present and future) is cast as an answer to the question of psychological continuity, rather than bodily continuity, both of which are possible answers to the general question of how personal identity arises. One sequelae of the psychological identity thesis is that a single personal identity could theoretically inhabit more than body, or perhaps no body at all (Xxxxxxxxx, 199...