This document discusses contemporary approaches to the self. It summarizes that the self is not a fixed thing according to naturalism and Hume, but is also not purely determined by external forces. A phenomenological approach views the self as a pre-reflective feature of experience rather than an object. The narrative self is a cultural construction but still real. An hermeneutical approach sees identity as co-authored within social and historical contexts rather than fully known or described. The document concludes that there is a minimal self and an extended narrative self, with the latter built upon the former, converging with neuroscientific accounts of core and extended consciousness. This allows defending experience of self without reducing it to cultural design.

1. Professor: Jorge Martínez Lucena

2. Contemporary Crises of the Self
1.The self is not a (durable) thing ontologically speaking (Hume and
naturalism).
• “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call
myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other,
of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I
never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and
never can observe any thing but the perception.” (Hume, 1888:
252)
• “According to naturalism human beings are complex biological
organisms and as such are part of the natural order, being
subject to the same laws of nature as everything else in the
world. If we are going to stick to a naturalistic approach, then
we cannot allow that there is anything to the mind which needs
to be accounted for by invoking vital spirits, incorporeal souls,
astral planes, or anything else which cannot be integrated with
natural science” (Botterill & Carruthers, The Philosophy of
Psychology, 1999: 1)

3. Contemporary Crises of the Self
2.The self is a cultural artifact; something created by “myself”
and/or others (Nietzsche, Foucault and some naturalists like
Dennet).
• “The “subject” is not something given, it is something added
and invented and projected behind what there is.” (Nietzsche,
The Will to Power, 1968: 267)
• “One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor
the most constant problem that has been posed for human
knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample
within a restricted geographical area – European culture since
the sixteenth century – one can be certain that man is a recent
invention within it (…) As the archaeology of our thought easily
shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps
nearing its end.” (Foucault, The Order of Things, 1970: 386)
• “Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don’t spin them;
they spin us. Our human consciousness, and our narrative
selfhood, is their product, not their source.” (Dennet, The
Reality of Selves, 1991: 418)

4. Challenging the Self
Who are we? If we are not a thing, what are we? Who is
talking when I say “I”.
1. Is there any present-day approach to the self which
takes into account the naturalistic claim without
losing the self, its existence and its durability?
2. Is there any contemporary account of the self which
let us defend the narrative and cultural production of
the self without converting the self into a fake, into
something strictly decided by others either culturally
or evolutionarily.
A response to these challenges can be found by mixing a
phenomenological and an hermeneutical approach.

5. A Phenomenological Approach
Taking Hume into account: “from the fact that the self is not an object of
experience it does not follow that it is non-experiential” (Evans, The Subject of
Consciousness, 1970: 145).
According to this approach, there is a minimal self which is not a thing but a pre reflective feature of every experience, a mineness, a self-giveness, the fact that any
experience implies a perspective from where it is lived.
The self is no longer “something that stands opposed to the stream of
consciousness, but is, rather, immersed in conscious life; it is an integral part of its
structure” (Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood, 2005: 125).

6. A Phenomenological Approach
The narrative self might be a cultural construction,
but this does not make it unreal: “To declare
everything peculiar to human life fictitious simply
because it cannot be naturalized, because it
cannot be grasped by a certain mode of scientific
comprehension, merely reveals one’s prior
commitment to a naïve scientism, according to
which (natural) science is the sole arbiter of what
there is” (Zahavi, 2005: 112)

7. A Phenomenological Approach
Narrative self is based on minimal self and this
relationship converges with neuro-scientific
descriptions.
Narrative or autobiographical self = Extended
consciousness
Minimal Self = Core Consciousness = Core Self

8. A Phenomenological Approach
“Extended consciousness is not an independent variety
of consciousness: on the contrary, it s built on the
foundation of core consciousness. The fine scalpel of
neurological disease reveals that impairments of
extended consciousness allow core consciousness to
remain unscathed. By contrast, impairments that begin
at the level of core consciousness demolish the entire
edifice of consciousness: extended consciousness
collapses as well.” (Damasio, The Feeling of What
Happens, 2000: 17)
The core (minimal) self is “a transient entity, ceaselessly
re-created for each and every object with wich the brain
interacts” (Damasio, 2000: 17), and “must possess a
remarkable degree of structural invariance so that it can
dispense continuity of reference across long periods of
time.” (Damasio, 2000: 135).

9. An Hermeneutical Approach
Our Identity (narrative self) is not a regular object
for our knowledge because of several reasons: 1. It
cannot be known objectively; 2. It cannot avoid a
subjective implication in its interpretation; 3. It
cannot be captured in an explicit description; 4.It
cannot be described without making reference to
its surroundings.
“We are not selves in the way that we are
organisms, or we don’t have selves in the way we
have hearts and livers. We are living beings with
these organs quite independently of our selfunderstandings or –interpretations, or the
meanings things have for us. But we are only selves
insofar as we move in a certain space of questions,
as we seek and find an orientation to the good.”
(Taylor, Sources of the self, 2009: 34)

10. An Hermeneutical Approach
“(…) we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own
narratives. Only in fantasy do we live what story we please. In life, as both
Aristotle and Engels noted, we are always under certain constraints. We enter
upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves parts of an action
that was not of our making.” (MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2007: 213)
There are several additional agents co-authoring our narrative selves, giving us
certain situations, frameworks of meaning and interacting with our choices. Some
of them are:
• Ourselves (our choices, our narratives)
• Educational institutions
• Media
• Language
• Defining Community (traditions)
• Modern States

11. An Hermeneutical Approach
We are all continuously evolving tales of ourselves and of others:
“I have been arguing that in order to make minimal sense of our lives, in order to
have an identity, we need an orientation to the good, which means some sense
of qualitative discrimination, of the incomparable higher. Now we see that this
sense of the good has to be woven into my understanding of my life as an
unfolding story. But it is to state another basic condition of making sense of
ourselves, that we grasp our lives in a narrative.” (Taylor, 2009: 47)
(Alison Saar)

12. Conclusions
There is a way to theoretically defend our experience of the self, which does
not point us towards considering the self merely as a cultural device
designed by others in order to marshal us to our established destiny.
• Minimal self is a feature of every experience.
• Narrative self is a cultural creation in which we participate only as coauthors.

13. Exercise
Given this points, we are faced with certain questions:
1. How can we defend a border between humans and the rest of the
animals if the base of our identity is the minimal self?
2. If w need to be capable of telling stories or of shaping our own narrative
self in order acquire personhood, how can we defend human dignity in
cases where these narrative skills have not been developed or have been
lost or interrupted.
Exercise: Try to elaborate your answer to these questions taking into account
the material we have discussed today.