Practical Narrativity and Granular Experience

Roughly, MacIntyre defends narrativity as making one's telos intelligible, Velleman bases his view on agency, Rudd centers his view in identity over time, and Goldie discusses narrative as a way of making sense of possibilities. The common thread remains: in order for a concept that we have to exist and function in the way that it does, human experience must be narratively organized in some way or other.
Because of the multiplicity of narrative views, there is a similar multiplicity of criticisms of each specific view.
In works such as "The Origins of Selves" and "The Self as a Narrative Center of Gravity"
I mainly respond to Being and Nothingness here, but Sartre's view is brought out in some of his other work as well.
"The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity" 14-6.
And indeed, there is plenty of empirical evidence to support this claim.
"The Origins of Selves" 14.
"The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity" 17.
Sartre's primary distinction is drawn between being-for-itself and being-in-itself, which roughly correlates with existing as an object and existing as a subject. For the purposes of this paper, the latter distinction will be sufficient.
Ibid.
Being and Nothingness 166.
Being and Nothingness 167.
Ibid.
Being and Nothingness 168. Sartre means being present to at least one object.
Being and Nothingness 175.
Being and Nothingness 172.
Being and Nothingness 170.
Or, presumably, any finite set of possible futures.
Sartre, as I have just outlined, thinks there is also a necessary connection to one's futures.
I think most people on both sides of the narrative debate have read Sartre as a conceptual narrativist for this reason.
"Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (Readiness-Potential): The Unconscious Initiation of a Freely Voluntary Act," 1983.
"Internally generated preactivation of single neurons in human medial frontal cortex predicts volition," 2011.

And probably for Sartre, of how I got from who I just was to who I am now, for the benefit of those narrativists who are concerned with personal identity.
"Against Narrativity" 428-9.
"Against Narrativity" 433-7.
"Against Narrativity" 439.
Being and Nothingness 167.
Though there is not space to take up the issue here, it seems plausible that taking Sartre's line of argument as founded on practical rather than conceptual narrativity might make that broader conclusion harder to dismiss.
Practical Narrativity and Granular Experience
Significant discussion has sprung up on the place of narrative in the philosophical understanding of action, agency, and selfhood. But too often, the debate over narrative has been over whether narrativity is conceptually necessary: that is, whether human experience must be organized in a narrative fashion for one or more of our concepts to be coherent. This basic view, which I'll call conceptual narrativity, has been advanced or defended in various forms by Alasdair MacIntyre, David Velleman, Anthony Rudd, Peter Goldie, and numerous others. While these thinkers may differ on what aspect of human experience requires narrativity for coherence, I take all of them to be defending versions of conceptual narrativity. Because this has been the predominant method of arguing in favor of narrative views, most philosophers who have criticized the proliferation of those views have also addressed conceptual narrativity, most prominently Galen Strawson. I find Strawson's criticisms in "Against Narrativity" telling. After all, here is a person who claims not to have narrative experience, but who argues that he has perfectly coherent concepts of the various things the conceptual narrativists say he cannot have concepts of. This should be a nail in the coffin for conceptual narrativity.
However, both sides of this debate have largely neglected to note that there are narrative views that are not conceptual narrative views. In particular, there is a second kind of view, which I'll call practical narrativity, that eschews the quasi-transcendental arguments for conceptual narrativity. Instead, the practical narrativist holds that some level of narrativity is built into what it is to have human experiences due to various constraints on human biology, psychology, etc. The prime holder of this view is Daniel Dennett, but I will argue that he is not the only one to advance it. Indeed, one of the earliest thinkers to advance a view of narrativity and the self, Jean-Paul Sartre, is also a practical narrativist. Dennett and Sartre approach the issue of narrativity from different directions, but I will show that they nonetheless arrive at the same basic conclusion about the narrativity of human experience, the nature of that narrativity, and the reasons for its necessity in human experience. While either of these accounts could stand on their own, synthesizing them and adding additional empirical information (which Sartre in particular did not have) provides a stronger practical narrative view than either alone. Furthermore, while Strawson's argument against narrativity works when we're talking about conceptual narrativity, it does not do so well when facing a practical narrative view. Thus, those who object to giving narrative a central place in discussions of selfhood, agency, etc. will have to offer new criticisms in order to disarm practical narrative views.
Dennett's Practical Narrativity
Dennett and Sartre advance their views on narrativity in human life from very different starting points. Dennett bases his view heavily on what could be called neurological or psychological facts, largely empirical information about how brains and minds behave. Sartre, on the other hand, focuses on the nature of what it is to exist as a conscious being in time. Nevertheless, they both arrive at a conception of narrativity that is granular (i.e. that centers around narrative as necessary to take specific individual actions, rather than to organize a life a la MacIntyre or constitute a self a la Velleman) and that derives its necessity from facts about how humans have to navigate the world. I will now sketch Dennett's and Sartre's views before bringing them back together into my own synthesized version of the practical narrative view.
Dennett, as I have said, approaches the question of narrativity from a highly empirical perspective. For Dennett, it simply is the case that the brain is a highly modular conglomeration of systems that evolved at different times and for different purposes. Due to their evolutionary etiologies, various physical contingencies (such as our brains being organized hemispherically), limitations in neural transmission speed across a brain as large as a human's, and for other reasons, various parts of the brain don't or can't always communicate effectively, even when it would be very useful if they could. But one advantage that humans have in solving this problem is language. We can talk to each other, and we can talk to ourselves. We can use - and did use, according to Dennett - language, first out loud, and then internalized, to open new lines of communication between various modules of the brain that would otherwise be inaccessible. As an example, he cites the cases of people who have had their corpora callosa severed, cutting off any communication between the hemispheres of their brains. They cannot (for instance) verbalize knowledge of an object gained from tactile inputs from their left hands, because the tactile control of the hand is in one hemisphere of the brain and verbal control is in the other. But by grasping the object firmly enough to cause pain, which creates signals in both hemispheres, these individuals can verbalize information about the object. Dennett claims that we use language and/or internalized language in an analogous, if more complex, manner.
Since this increased communication between areas of the brain can be quite useful, it has been genetically and/or culturally selected for since it emerged, to the point where it is now an inherent part of human experience. Because the communication Dennett posits routes through language, its structure follows from the structures of our linguistic communications. Dennett compares our use of language for cross-brain communication to spiders spinning webs: a natural process that has to follow certain patterns in order to be most effective. And those patterns, in the case of human language (and now of human self-conception) are narrative patterns. The neurological evidence that something needs to perform roughly the function of Dennett's narrative stream seems reasonably strong. The human brain is too big and made up of too many disparate parts that must coordinate with each other to produce our complex behaviors to do without some method of routing information between areas that don't otherwise communicate well. At this point the question of what mechanism performs the cross-brain communication function becomes empirical in nature. I suspect this is why Dennett does not trouble himself overmuch to justify why narrative is the best candidate for the structure of our linguistic cross-brain communications.
It's important to flag again the way in which Dennett's view is practical and not conceptual. The unifying faculty or 'center of gravity' does not have to exist or be narrative in order for our experiences to be coherent or in order for some concepts that we use to make sense. Rather, the center of gravity is a narrative process because it involves language, and the most effective way to structure cross-brain communication built on a linguistic base is the narrative structure. This is a practical constraint rooted in the particular environment that we evolved in and the particular brains that we have, not a defining feature of all selfhood, all agency, all diachronic identity, or what have you. Dennett's practical narrativity is granular: the element that is narratively structured is the moment-to-moment stitching together of our linguistically structured cross-brain communications, rather than the broader narrative self advanced by philosophers like MacIntyre or Velleman. The greatest weakness of Dennett's account is its failure to provide an argument for why cross-brain communication works best when narratively structured. Fortunately, this is a question which Sartre's more metaphysical approach is well-suited to address.
Sartre's Practical Narrativity
Sartre bolsters Dennett's view by providing an account of why the granular structure of human awareness might need to be narrative. Although his starting point is very different from Dennett's, they arrive at startlingly similar conclusions. Moreover, newer empirical evidence provides additional support for Sartre's position from a more naturalistic direction. Sartre views the temporal existence of the self as tripartite in nature, divided into modes of existence in past, present, and future. The three modes are only loosely connected, and as a result we experience a temporal disunity analogous to the neurological disunity of Dennett's view.
Of the three modes, the past is the simplest mode, being necessarily fixed. The past is thus a kind of object, since it cannot be anything other than what it is. However, the past is more than just 'what has happened' – to have happened, past events must have happened to someone (or been done by someone), and so past events are a necessary constituent of one's subjective identity: "I am my past. I do not have it; I am it.". Within every human identity is the element of what that person has done, and the identity cannot be dissociated from past events; even an attempt to deny the past within one's present – "'I am no longer what I was'" – necessarily contains within itself an acknowledgement of the very past that is being denied. Furthermore, one's identity is an essential element of one's past: it is the notion that all of these events happened to a single living, free person that unifies a disparate collection of happenings into a past. This past has an objective rather than a subjective nature, since one cannot be anyone other than the person who experienced one's particular past. At the same time as one necessarily is one's past, however, one cannot be only one's past: "I am not it because I was it." This is to say that while one's past is a component of the self, the self cannot be identified with its past. This distinction provides a natural transition into a discussion of the nature of the present.
For Sartre, the idea of the present is to be understood in two connected senses, that of temporality and that of presence in the world. In the temporal sense, Sartre notes that the present is normally conceived of as an ongoing process; it is the very essence of being. However, removing the events that are past and that are in the immediate future reveals that the present is in fact an "infinitesimal instant." In a significant sense, the self that exists at this miniscule nexus of past and future is the only self that ever truly exists. As we have seen, the past is more akin to an object, and thus cannot be a full part of the self. And as detailed below, because future possibilities are infinite, the self cannot be successfully identified with any of the specific potentialities of the future. However, because this instant is so small, it is impossible to effectively characterized in more than a brief phenomenological manner. Thus, while the present can indeed be characterized temporally as the instant between all the events of the past and all the potentialities of the future, the use of only this characterization ultimately says very little about what it actually means to be in the present. Hence Sartre's discussion of the idea of presence in the world: to say that one is present is to distinguish oneself from absence. "Thus the meaning of present is presence to ----." When one is present, one is present to all of one's surroundings, though those surroundings, being objects, are not similarly present to the person. Presence is therefore an internal relation within the subject which exists in the present to the various objects which are within the subject's current experience. Furthermore, the presence of a subject is what unifies the disparate collection of objects that happen to exist into more than just 'things that are near each other' - into an experience. In that all of the objects within one's experience as a subject are present to one, this common presence then enables the relation of those objects as present to each other. Thus, the existence of subjects is necessary for the conception of "presence to ----," and thus the present (in both senses) is necessarily an experience of a subject. But although being present to existence requires an internal relation between the self and existence, in order to maintain the distinction between self and surrounding, one must also deny that one is the being to which one is present. An essential element of the experience of the present is thus the denial that the present is all that there is to experience, or as Sartre says, "[t]he For-itself is present to being [in-itself] in the form of flight." The very nature of a subject in the present is to deny identification with the present, since that identification would reduce it to an object. Instead, the subject must move toward the possibilities of the future.
Sartre begins his discussion of the future by repudiating what he takes to be a common conception of it, namely that the future is a present which has not yet happened. To do this, he claims, is to reduce the future to an object which is fixed. This is antithetical to the actual nature of the world's myriad possible futures. Rather than a not-yet-reached present, the future is a necessary element of subjective experience: in denying identification with the present, one is fleeing it, but fleeing toward something – the future. The future must exist as the object of the flight from the present. A subject drives toward the future in an attempt to reach the possibilities it contains, possibilities which, if realized, would fill the lack that is an intrinsic part of being-for-itself. The self-knowledge that one can always be more or other than what one is now compels one to relate to those possibilities for being different and more complete. Similarly to the relation between the subject and the present, the subject and the future have a symbiotic relation. Only a subject, one "whose being is in question for itself" and thus could change itself, can have a future. And one can only exist as a subject if one is able to perceive one's incompleteness and, in dissociating from the present, be pulled into the future. But the future is not only a domain of the subject. Rather, Sartre notes, the future appears as a world that one could be present to: he finds himself conscious of both the words that he has written, and the words that are about to be written. The future is therefore not just the possibilities that exist for the subject, but also the consciousness of possible realities for the various objects that make up non-human existence. In this sense, just as the subject is its past, being inextricably linked to it, the subject is also its future, since it is only in this drive toward realization that a subject can exist as a subject and not an object. But one is only one's future "in the constant perspective of the possibility of not being it," the knowledge that there are infinite possible futures beyond the one currently anticipated. The future is by nature entirely fluid; while some possibilities may seem more likely than others, or even inevitable, this appearance is not the reality. In reality, what one will be is necessarily different from what one is, and what one will be can always be different from what one thinks that one will be.
Sartre's overall picture is now one in which the past, present and future modes of selfhood have symbiotic relations between each other. One cannot be a self without a past, present, and future. However, because the past is necessarily fixed, identifying oneself with one's past would be to assume the guise of an object. And because the future is necessarily infinite in possibility, identifying with any one possible future is also to assume the guise of an object. Accordingly, our only authentic self is the self of the present, because it is only this part of the self that can be present to the world as an unfettered subject rather than as an object. But even just being present to the world around myself is a diachronic process; I cannot be aware of the infinitesimal moment in time that is the precise 'now' in which my present self exists. That means that my actual conscious self must be at least an amalgam of my present self and my very recent past. But that past, which is fixed and therefore not truly me, must be integrated with my present self. This integration is accomplished by narrative. A narrative thread connects my unperceived present self to the moments-ago past of which I am aware, knitting the two together to flesh out an identity that is incomplete with only the tiny instant of the present. In essence, my self-conception is always at least partly composed of a story I am telling myself about my very recent past. Narrative, by building a story connecting my past and my present, gives me Sartre's twin realizations that I am and am not my past: part of the self-understanding I need to navigate the world as a subject rather than objectifying myself.
As before, it's important to clarify how Sartre's narrative view is practical rather than conceptual. His starting point makes this project more difficult than with Dennett, since Sartre clearly seems to be talking about narrative in the context of understanding what selfhood has to be. However, I think a practical reading of Sartre is quite easy to apply. Rather than talking about conditions for what it is to be a self in the definitional or conceptual sense, I think Sartre is talking about how a self must be organized in order to effectively relate to a world with the temporal structure he describes. That is, given certain facts about temporal existence (namely, that the past is fixed, the future completely fluid, and the present an infinitesimal nexus between the two), conscious beings will have to integrate their immediate present selves with their immediate past selves in order to function and navigate in the world. After all, it's impossible to seek authenticity if one lacks any sense of object permanence, stumbles about aimlessly, and gets eaten by a tiger. This granular knitting together of past and present on a moment-to-moment level has to happen for us to do, well, just about anything. Do, not think. For this reason, I take Sartre to have a convincing practical narrative account available.
Indeed, Sartre's general conclusion that we live our lives with our actual self slightly divorced from our self-awareness is bolstered by neurological evidence. The fact that action potential spikes in the motor cortex appear to precede awareness of a subject's deciding to move by at least 150 and sometimes up to 800 milliseconds was originally discovered in 1983 by Libet et. al. and the result was replicated at the level of individual neurons in 2011 by Fried et. al. The classic interpretation of this result is that one's body and brain begin to react to the present environment before one is consciously aware of any decision to do so. This evidence dovetails with Sartre's view that the selfhood of which one is aware is in fact an identification with the self one very recently was.
Dennett and Sartre Synthesized
Having sketched Dennett's and Sartre's practical narrative views, I now turn to the way in which they bolster each other to provide a more integrated and more plausible account. Dennett's view of the brain as modular, where the modules cannot always communicate well with each other, has been further bolstered by neuroscience in the intervening decades. Further research showing that our most complex behaviors arise from the orchestration of activity all across our brains cements the practical need for our brains to deploy any available capacities to bolster cross-brain communication. Dennett's claim that human experience takes the form of a constantly spun stream of linguistic communication within our brains therefore seems at least plausible. However, as I said, Dennett does not provide convincing evidence that this linguistic cross-brain communication needs to be narratively structured. This is where Sartre comes in. The view can be bolstered with Sartre's understanding of temporality for an explanation of why our linguistic stream of thought needs to take a narrative form. As Sartre argued, the present self that is choosing and acting must be integrated with the recent past in order to get coherence from experience. Put another way: in order to perform the cross-brain communication function that Dennett is after, our linguistic thread must effectively tie together the instant present and the immediate past. This requirement can now be seen as supporting a narrative structure for that thread: it marks a movement through some number of past events, strings the relevant ones together, and provides an explanation of how I got from where I just was to where I now am. This is a narrative, at least at a granular scale of a few seconds to a few minutes. And, I will now argue, it successfully defuses Strawson's objections to conceptual narrativity.
Against "Against [Conceptual] Narrativity"
Strawson takes himself to be attacking two claims about narrative in human experience: the first, an empirical claim that our lives are narrative and second a normative claim that our lives should be narrative. As Dennett/Sartre practical narrativity is little more than some statements of empirical fact in my view, I will address only Strawson's first point. Strawson attempts to refute various narrativity theses by calling attention to the fact that he himself does not experience his life as a narrative (broadly construed). That is, he has no sense of his identity, life story, call-it-what-you-will cohering over the entirety of his life into an account of who he is and has been. Yet behold: clearly he has selfhood and agency, clearly he takes actions, clearly he is responsible for those actions. So it can't be the case that narrativity is necessary in order to be a self, or an agent, or responsible. Strawson clearly thinks this is a knock-down argument against all of the various narrativity theses he is taking on.
However, I think Strawson illegitimately conflates conceptual and practical narrative accounts here, insofar as he addresses practical accounts at all. The argument given above is very clearly aimed at conceptual narrativity and not at practical narrativity. Nowhere in Strawson's description of his experiences does he assert that his brain is substantially faster or more interconnected than other humans'. Recall that on the practical narrative view, human experience is narrative because of these facts about human brains and how they have to work in order for the humans they're part of to survive in a temporal world that demands complex behavior from us. Nowhere is there a justification in terms of what it means when we say one is an agent, or in terms of an ethical assessment of the course of a person's life. That is, nowhere is there a justification in terms of the concepts that Strawson lays claim to despite not considering himself to live a narratively structured life. The thrust of the practical narrative view is that anyone with a brain configured in thus-and-such a way, living in a world with the temporal constraints that ours has, can be shown to be narrative simply by virtue of navigating the world at all. And behold: Strawson navigates the world as we all do. Hence, Strawson is Dennett/Sartre narrative whether he likes it or not.
Strawson's most likely reply is that this practical narrative view simply does not exist on the scale of the views he wants to attack. As he says, he is mainly after the views that an entire human life is experienced as a narrative, or taken as a narrative. However, I think the practical narrative view offers a stronger claim than the one Strawson takes to be "trivial": that experiences involving sequences of action involve the creation of little narratives. I think the additional strength of the practical narrative claim derives from its ubiquity. Practical narrativity entails that even a strongly episodic person like Strawson is constructing a story about what he is presently doing at every moment of every experience that he ever has. His sense of his self as not being the same self that his past happened to is a recapitulation of what he was experiencing moments before, and a linking of that past self to his present self. There is, at least, this very real sense in which even an episodic like Strawson is always telling stories and must always be telling stories. I think this is a bolder claim than saying that Strawson is necessarily involved in narrativity when he recounts for me how he made his last cup of coffee.
As an additional consideration, I think Sartre's claims about the necessity of narrativity are meant to hold up even in the face of precisely the recognition that Strawson has - that the self he is now is not the self to whom his past happened. After all, it is from a perspective that includes that very outlook on the past - "I am not it because I was it" - that Sartre creates his practical narrative view. Agreeing with Sartre's characterization, understanding the truly tripartite nature of oneself, and even experiencing oneself as a tripartite self - none of this alters the self's essential character as being split up in this way and needing to tie itself back together. And it is this underpinning from which Sartre will go on to make the broader claims about narrativity across entire lives with which Strawson takes issue.
Overall, I think this picture of practical narrative has been too much ignored by both sides of the debate over the place of narrative in human life. I find that Dennett and Sartre, especially when synthesized to best advantage and bolstered with newer neurological research, present a strong case for the practical narrative view that I have given above. I think I have shown that Strawson's anti-narrative view fails to gain purchase against practical narrativity, and that practical narrativity avoids being a trivial narrative of the sort Strawson willingly concedes the existence of. While the question of if or how practical narrativity could support more diachronic claims about narratives over a human life remains open, I think that there is at least the possibility for fruitful inquiry from this direction.


Works Cited
Dennett, Daniel. "The Origins of Selves." Cogito 3 (1989): 163-73. PDF (page #s from D2L).

---. "The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity." Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives.
Ed. F. Kessel, P. Cole, and D. Johnson. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1992. PDF (as above).

Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Being and Nothingness." Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings. Ed. Steven Priest.
New York: Routledge, 2001. 165-76, 206-20. Print.

Strawson, Galen. "Against Narrativity." Ratio 17 (2004): 428-52. Print.