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Narrative Contours of the Free & Responsible Moral Self

What is My Story?

We continue our quest to reflect deeply on the moral self with Charles Taylor, seeking wisdom for cultural and personal renewal. But how is our freedom situated in order to avoid chaos in our life? In his articulation of moral mapping, Taylor looks to narrative depth as a defining feature of the self, identity, and agency. Narrative is very consequential to the stability and continuity of the healthy individual over time. This dimension is in the shape of a personal quest. Taylor acquires this notion of self involved in a narrative quest from Alasdair MacIntyre (C. Taylor, 1989, 17, 48). MacIntyre writes: “The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest” (A. MacIntyre, 1984, 219). Narration of the quest for the good allows one to discover a unity amidst the diversity of goods that demand one’s attention. The continuity in the self is a necessary part of a life lived well in moral space. Taylor sees narrative as a deep structure (a temporal depth) in his thick concept of self, adding another texture to its communal and linguistic richness of moral language. The good is more than a concept outside the self, an ideal of life lived well, or a virtue in the sky. It is something embodied/incarnated, embedded in a life, carried in one’s story and the story of one’s community. Narrative community is an important way to understand and mediate the good. Taylor (1989) writes:

This sense of the good has to be woven into my understanding of my life as an unfolding story…. Making sense of my life as a story is not an optional extra…. There is a space of questions which only a coherent narrative can answer. (C. Taylor, 1989, 47) 

The key issue here for Taylor is the unity and past-present-future continuity of a life, over against a strong focus of the self-as-discontinuity promoted by Michel Foucault, where the quest is to get free of oneself, to get free of societal influences and one’s past. Foucault focuses on ‘freedom from’ obligations and ties to the other; Taylor focus on ‘freedom to’ assist the other, with a view to mutual growth and a better society.

The movement for Foucault is towards the ever-new, aesthetic, Romantic, re-invented self, a self which dislikes vulnerability, and tries to avoid being known by others, wedging itself free from history and community. For him and his ideology of care of self, narrative depth is not a priority, and there is a minimal interest in continuity of life with the past. Foucault is very future-oriented, he desires to escape the self of ‘oppressive history’, the normalized self. Taylor disagrees with this extreme approach, believing that one’s story, properly understood, is an essential and highly valued part of one’s identity. Thus, for him it becomes relevant to ask, “What has ‘shaped me thus far?” and “What direction is my life taking in terms of the good?”, “Does my life have weight and substance?” (C. Taylor, 1989, 50). Taylor suggests that a healthy self asks these important questions about the span of one’s life. He is not only interested in the immediate present, bemoaning the past, or escaping the painful past into a fantastic future of one’s own creation: “My sense of the good has to be woven into my life as an unfolding story” (C. Taylor, 1989, 47). This also includes a sense of calling. The pressing question between Taylor and Foucault is: What is the way to substantial freedom, to healthy character of freedom? Is it denial or deconstruction of the burdensome past, or is it fathoming one’s narrative depth of identity and marking out the trajectory of one’s narrative quest, in order to make sense of one’s story? Meaning of one’s life is at the heart of the narrative quest. Taylor would agree with counsellors and psychiatrists who respect the nuances of a person’s broken past/trauma in their therapy. Otherwise, the client is paralyzed/emotionally frozen from the start. We see this played out dramatically in the Netflix Series Transplant. A Syrian doctor emigrated to Toronto is experiencing many flashbacks to the war in Syria and the loss of his parents. The issues are deep and painful.

We dare not let our lives be reduced to a log thrown up onto the beach.

In this argument for narrative dimensions of the self, Taylor also draws on Paul Ricoeur (P. Ricoeur, 1992, 113-68) who has written on the important difference between ipse and idem-identity. Idem-identity refers to the objective stability of one’s identity (character) over time (read as a succession of moments) and outside time, character traits that don’t change with time. One might call it the ‘what’ of identity. Ipse-identity is more fluid and dynamic, as per one’s personal identity as an unfolding character in a novel–it is more future oriented. Ipse is the ‘who’ of identity. It develops over time and with experience and education in the temporal becoming of the self. One is a different self after an undergraduate degree, or the birth of one’s first child, for example. The narrative is carried through memory and anticipation, and linked with temporality. Crucial to ipse-identity is the ongoing integration of past, present, and future in a unified fashion, crucial to a healthy narrative unity (C. Taylor, 1989, 50). Ricoeur believes that narrative is the key genre for description of the self in time and space. The dialectic between ipse and idem identity is rooted in narrative. Telling one’s story is being able to track the dynamic relation of character and action over the course of one’s life.

There are two significant implications of these two features of identity through time. One is the possibility of the future as different from the present and past, also the possibility of redeeming the past, to make it a part of the positive meaning of one’s life story (C. Taylor, 1989, 51). Recently, I heard a person of thirty-something years say that he hates his parents and wants nothing to do with them. This is tragic! Taylor would encourage this person to seek out a fresh interpretation of, for instance, his suffering, parental neglect, hurts, and disappointments. Where is forgiveness in all this turmoil and angst? Narrative depth does not allow for such a discontinuity with the past, a refusal of past identity or origins. Taylor cautions against avoidance of/rejection of the past: 

To repudiate my childhood as unredeemable in this sense is to accept a kind of mutilation as a person; it is to fail to meet the full challenge involved in making sense of my life. This is the sense in which it is not up for arbitrary determination what the temporal limits of my personhood are. (C. Taylor, 1989, 51) 

This is deeply profound and true. The past, grappling with the meaning of the past, seeking healing from past hurts and failures, is vital to a healthy, resilient , stable identity. A whole culture (we in the West) can also cut itself off from its own past, to its detriment (Tom Holland, Dominion).

Taylor agrees with Foucault that it makes sense to set a future trajectory for one’s life, to project/prospect a future story, to have what MacIntyre calls ‘a quest’. This promotes the sense that one’s life has direction and a mission, rather than just working until exhaustion. Taylor says,

Because we cannot but orient ourselves to the good, and thus determine our place relative to it and hence the direction of our lives, we must inescapably understand our lives in narrative form, as a ‘quest’. (C. Taylor, 1989, 51, 52) 

This quest requires a telos or goal. For this to be effective of change, some knowledge of the good is required. Taylor believes in narrative in the strong sense—a structure inherent in human experience and action, narrative as a human given, part of reflection and self-interpretation in the moral animal. One begins to experience transcendence above the circumstances and struggles of one’s life. This narrative is embedded in community where one is accountable to other such narratives. This adds depth to our relationships. Taylor sees these conditions as connected facets of the same reality.

There is, in Foucault’s constitution or discovery of self, the will to escape the past, especially with his heavy emphasis on the continual, radical reinvention of self from the ground up. He has left us this heritage in the early twenty-first century (Abigail Favale). He does not want to leave a trail in the character of the self; it is a very abstract and limited relationship to narrative. This is where Taylor can both correct and complement Foucault. Taylor presses the question as to whether one can so easily accomplish this ‘great escape’ from one’s past self history There is a deficit in the narrative unity and continuity of the self that is endemic to Foucault’s liberation strategy (freedom from). 

In Taylor’s sense of the moral self, Foucault is suggesting a self-articulation that attempts to escape one’s earlier, historical self, untying the present and future self from a past identity. The assumption is that the earlier self is in the confines or grip of power/knowledge. Foucault’s focus of concern is the becoming of the self (ipse-identity), the re-scripting of the self. There is a common interest, in both Taylor and Foucault, in the future of the self, but a sharp disagreement on the relationship with the past. This reveals a major difference in the possibilities for the future or one’s life. Taylor maintains continuity with the past, with a view to carefully and sensitively resolving past issues. Foucault, on the other hand, maintains a radical break with the past, seeing a need to deconstruct it, escape it, disrupt its hold. One can also attempt to change one’s identity in order to hide from the pain of the past. But, the pursuit of a complete, discontinuous re-invention of self courts psychosis and the lively possibly of doing oneself damage (C. Taylor, 1989, 51). It is easy to imagine that some very extreme (even criminal or anarchistic) forms of life could emerge out of assuming such experimentation. In Taylor, on the other hand, the good is interlaced with narrative and community in order to provide the self with more infrastructure, roots, and depth of meaning. 

What are we to conclude? With Taylor’s vision as a corrective to Foucault, one can build on Foucault’s strengths in the arts of escaping domination with its strong sense of responsibility for one’s self-creativity and self-empowerment, and moderate his extremes (the strongest being social anarchy). In his revolutionary fervour, Foucault seems to miss the point of the idem-identity (the continuous aspect of the moral self) as an essential part of the unifying aspect of one’s character, story, and identity. He dos not have a full grasp of Ricoeur’s concept of narrative. Both philosophers agree that taking responsibility for one’s self-constitution is a mature strategy. Nevertheless, the two disagree dramatically on the importance of a thoroughly situated self with a freedom that is also intimately contextualized in a relationship to the good, to community, and narrative. Taylor does offer insights on the contours of the self to which Foucault was philosophically blind. Ricoeur believed that it was in accountability/carrying out one’s promises that one realizes a true, authentic self. These insights seem to be important in making intelligible sense of the meaning of life, and also in offering a dimension of normative accountability. In general, Foucault over-plays the factor of power to exclusion of the good and a healthy narrative; his moral self is consciously very power-laden. New York Times journalist David Brooks follows more in the intellectual path of Taylor in his fine book on his emergent moral growth over time: The Second Mountain.

~Gordon E. Carkner, PhD Philosophical Theology, University of Wales, Author, Blogger, YouTube Webinar Producer, Meta-Educator with UBC Postgraduate Students.

Application See also a critique of freedom as designated by the consumer culture: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/09/the-metaphysical-promise-of-the-consumer-society

Brooks, D. (2019). The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life..

Favale, A. (2022). The Genesis of Gender: a Christian Theory. Ignatius Press.

Holland, T. (2019). Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Basic Books.

MacIntyre, A. (1984). After Virtue: A study in moral theory. (2^nd Edition) Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 

Ricoeur, P. (1992). Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Harvard University Press.

Thiselton, A. (1995). Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self: On Meaning, Manipulation and Promise. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Side Note from Wikipedia: The theory of narrative identity postulates that individuals form an identity by integrating their life experiences into an internalized, evolving story of the self that provides the individual with a sense of unity and purpose in life. This life narrative integrates one’s reconstructed past, perceived present, and imagined future. Furthermore, this narrative is a story – it has characters, episodes, imagery, a setting, plots, and themes and often follows the traditional model of a story, having a beginning (initiating event), middle (an attempt and a consequence), and an end (denouement). Narrative identity is the focus of interdisciplinary research. In recent decades, a proliferation of psychological research on narrative identity has provided a strong empirical basis for the construct, cutting across the field, including personality psychology, social psychology, developmental and life-span psychology, cognitive psychology, cultural psychology, and clinical and counseling psychology.

My 2020 audio podcast on The Existential Identity Crisis of Millennials: