I am pleased to share a recent article published in Philosophical Psychology, co-authored with my colleague, Katsunori Miyahara.
https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
In this paper, we bridge the gap between "narrative" and "embodied" views of the self. While these two perspectives are often discussed separately, we argue that they are deeply intertwined through the body’s habituality.
Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, we explore how our history of engaging with the world shapes the "narrating I" and the "narrated I." Our conclusion is that narrating oneself is not just a linguistic act, but a practice fundamentally embedded in our bodily existence.
Working with Katsunori was a rewarding experience, as we both share a deep interest in extending phenomenological insights into contemporary cognitive science.
You can find the full abstract below:
Narrative views of the self argue that we constitute our self in self-narratives. Embodied views hold that our self is shaped through embodied experiences. In that case, what is the relation between embodiment and narrativity in the process of self-constitution? The question demands a clear definition of embodiment, but existing studies remains unclear on this point (section 2). We offer a correction to this situation by drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the body that highlights its habituality. On this account, the body has an inherent tendency to cultivate an organization of habits through its history of engagement with the world (section 3). Next, we explore its role in narrative self-constitution by distinguishing between two aspects of the narrative self, the narrated I and the narrating I (section 4). We argue on phenomenological grounds that self-narratives are informed by bodily perspectives in both respects. Furthermore, a focus on the habituality of the body allows for a better explanation of self-constitution than those based on implicit self-narratives (section 5). For these phenomenological and theoretical reasons, we conclude that narrative self-constitution is an embodied and embedded practice (section 6).
