2010 The Philosophical Forum, Inc.

SELF, NARRATIVE AND SELF-CONSTITUTION:

REVISITING TAYLORS SELF-INTERPRETING ANIMALS

phil_

372

441..458441..458

KENNETH BAYNES

Since he first introduced it over 30 years ago Charles Taylors thesis that
humans are self-interpreting animalsor that the self is a being who exists
only in self-interpretationhas visibly influenced both the social sciences and
the humanities.1 Interpretive social science, cognitive psychology, action theory,
literary theory, historiography, ethics, hermeneutic philosophy, and the humanities
in general continue to wrestle with its implications. The thesis that humans are
self-interpreting animals has been significant in exposing the limitations of
various reductionistic approaches to the self as well as the deficiencies of narrowly
rational choice accounts of agency.2 At the same time, it has provided an attractive
alternative to various dualistic accounts of the person that seem either too removed
from instructive social-scientific inquiry and/or rely on implausible models of
agent-causation.3 The self is not best conceived as a substantial mental or psychological entity, an individuated and intact subject of experience, that exists prior
to its own self-interpretations; but neither is the self nothing more than the
neurophysiological or brain states and processes that are, at least in principle,
available to third-personal, objective scientific analysis.4 In contrast to these two
1

Introduction, Philosophical Papers, vol. I (New York: Cambridge UP, 1985) 3; see also ch. 2,
Self-Interpreting Animals.
Among the many possible ones, a good example of this influence can be found in the work of
Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993) and Beyond
Homo Economicus: New Developments in Theories of Social Norms, Philosophy and Public
Affairs 29 (2000): 170200.
For example, Roderick Chisholm, Human Freedom and the Self, Free Will, ed. Gary Watson
(Oxford UP, 2003) 2637.
By contrast, for a non-reductionistic account of how the brain contributes to the creation of the self,
see Joseph LeDoux, The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (New York: Penguin
Books, 2002): In my view, the self is the totality of what an organism is physically, biologically,

441

KENNETH BAYNES

broad approaches, Taylor has proposed an account of the person or self that he
describes as expressivist. The self is constituted, at least in part, through its own
self-interpretations and these self-interpretations are, in turn, not something that
can be understood absolutely (I, 3)that is, they cannot be described or validated in a way that makes them immune to further questioning or subsequent
reinterpretations. Rather, to use Taylors own preferred terminology, these interpretations are attempts at articulation that, though constitutive of the self, are
never final, can sometimes be mistaken, and always take place against a background of implicit understandings and practices that cannot be fully surveyed or
mastered by an agent.
At the same time, the thesis that we are self-interpreting animals has also
been the target of various criticisms. Apart from the initial concern that there is
something evidently paradoxical about the claim that the self is constituted
through its own self-interpretationslike a rabbit pulling itself out of a hat
further worries have been voiced about more specific features of Taylors thesis.
Some have thought it encourages a model of the self that is overly intellectual
(Flanagan) and others have criticized the account for its heavily moral or ethical
dimensions (Habermas; Strawson).5 Still others maintain that it rests on an
untenable model of interpretation. In his book, The Ethics of Identity, Anthony
Appiah has argued that Taylors thesis relies upon an unresolved tension between
what Appiah calls a subject-centered and a social-centered model of
interpretationthat is, a model in which the self is constituted either through a
process of self-conscious and explicit rule-application or through a non-conscious
socialization into a normative order or habitus.6
In what follows I want to clarify what I take to be Taylors central thesis and
defend it against some common misinterpretations as well as against Appiahs
recent criticism. At the same time I hope to indicate some of the remaining
challenges confronting his main thesis.
As I understand it, there are at least four distinct and important elements to
Taylors claim that humans are self-interpreting. First, and most importantly,
there is the constitutive thesis: Individual selves are (at least in part) constituted
by their self-interpretations. Second, there is what I will call the narrativity thesis:
We constitute ourselves by constructing (more or less coherent) narratives about

psychologically, socially, and culturally. . . . It includes what we would like to be as well as what we
hope we never become (31); see also, nt. 19, 327.
For these various criticisms, see Owen Flanagan, Identity and Strong and Weak Evaluation,
Identity, Character and Morality, ed. Owen Flanagan and Amelie Rorty (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1990) 3766; Jrgen Habermas, A Reply, Communicative Action, ed. A. Honneth and H. Jonas
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991) 21522; and Galen Strawson, Against Narrativity, Ratio 17.4
(2004): 42852.
Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005) 54.

442

SELF, NARRATIVE, AND SELF-CONSTITUTION

who we are and what we most value or care about.7 Taylors preferred way of
describing this feature is to refer to humans as strong evaluators: we constitute
ourselves through evaluative judgments about what are matters of significance or
importance for us. Third, according to Taylor, our self-interpretations can sometimes be mistaken. This feature has been called evaluative realism (Pettit) and, at
least on its surface, this feature stands in some tension with the constitutive claim.8
If we are literally constituted through our self-interpretations and evaluative judgments, how can those self-interpretations themselves be mistaken? Finally, according to Taylor, the process of self-interpretation is social and, more specifically,
dialogical.9 We are constituted via our self-interpretations but, again, these
self-interpretations are not wholly up to us; rather they take place in what Taylor
calls a web of interlocution and so what we take ourselves to be is both shaped and
constrained by what others take us to be and this process is dialogical in that there
is a dynamic relation between our self-interpretations and those that others make of
us:10 As Taylor puts it, The community is also constitutive of the individual, in the
sense that the self-interpretations which define him are drawn from the interchange
which the community carries on. A human being alone is an impossibility, not just
de facto, but as it were de jure (I, 8). In the following remarks, I will primarily
concentrate on the first two aspects of Taylors claim, with only minor reference to
the last two features. This is not because the latter two theses are uncontroversial;
indeed, many might regard the last two aspects as the most controversial. As I just
mentioned, it is difficult to see how the strong constitutive claim can be reconciled
with the evaluative realist thesis that our self-interpretations can be mistaken.
Nonetheless, enough controversy also surrounds the constitutive thesis and the
narrativity thesis so I will concentrate primarily on them.
Let me begin with some remarks about the initial paradox: How can the self be
constituted through its self-interpretations unless there is an interpreter already
present and, on the other hand, if there is indeed a self prior to interpretation, then
how can it be constituted through its self-interpretations? An initial but ultimately
unsatisfying answer, I think, is that it cannot; and so there must be a self that in
7

10

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989) 47; on the narrativity thesis, see
more recently, Practical Identity and Narrative Agency, ed. Kim Atkins and Catriona Mackenzie
(Blackwell, 2007).
See Philip Pettit, Evaluative Realism and Interpretation, Wittgenstein: To Follow A Rule, ed.
S. Holtzman and C. Leich (New York: Routledge, 1981) 211ff.
This feature has also recently been characterized as a normative structure that depends upon the
attitudes of others as well as the individual. See for example Charles Larmore, Die normative
Struktur des Selbst, Von der Logik zur Sprache, ed. R. Bubner and G. Hindrichs (Stuttgart:
Klett-Cotta, 2007) 498514.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, 36, 5556; see also The Dialogical Self, The Interpretive Turn,
ed. Paul Roth, et al. (Cornell UP, 1986) 30414.

443

KENNETH BAYNES

some sense exists prior to its self-interpretations. Indeed, when Taylor is careful in
his formulations he says that the self is in part constituted through its selfinterpretations.11 However, this initial answer threatens to rob Taylors thesis of its
radical character and thus more needs to be said about the prior self and its relation
to its self-interpretations. At least two options are available to Taylor and, I think,
he makes use of each at different times.12 On the one hand, several theorists speak
of a sequence of selves in which each successor is somehow complexly nested in
or scaffolded upon its predecessor. For example, both Daniel Stern and, more
recently, Antonio Damasio distinguish among a proto-self (which is unconscious and constituted by interconnected and temporarily coherent collections of
neural patterns), a core self (or subject of experience), and an autobiographical self, and it is only with this last self (whose emergence normally begins in the
second year) that the child begins to form explicit self-representations.13 Other
theoristsfor example, those influenced by object relations theoryplace the
onset of self-representations earlier in the childs development but still see these
as dependent on prior selves or stages of the self.14 What is important in this first
strategy is that, by whatever psychological processes, it is meaningful to speak of
the formation of a selfa subject of experience or core selfthat exists prior to
the selfs own acts of self-representation or self-interpretation. Otherwise, it is
difficult to see how the interpretive process can ever get off the ground.
At the same time, however, this first option also confronts a serious challenge
that can be described in various ways: if the core self or subject of experience
that exists prior to the autobiographical self (to use Damasios terms) lacks
semantic content, it still remains difficult to see how the self-constituting
process of self-interpretation can get off the ground. Or, to put the problem in
slightly different terms, it is difficult to see how we move from a self causally
produced to a semantic order of symbolic meaning. On the other hand, if by the
earlier core self one means rather a variety of psychological conditions or
capacities, one could concede the general point that they are required for acts of
self-interpretation but resist identifying these capacities as the self.
11
12

13

14

See I, 3; Taylor, Reply, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1994): 20313.

See Taylor, To Follow a Rule, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995) 16768
and the very helpful discussion by Joseph Rouse, Practice Theory, Handbook of the Philosophy
of Science: Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, ed. Stephen Turner and Mark Risjord
(Elsevier, 2007) 648f.
Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999) and Daniel
Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York: Basic Books, 1985); see also Owen
Flanagan, The Problem of the Soul (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Todd Feinberg, Altered Egos:
How the Brain Creates the Self (Oxford University Press, 2001); and Shaun Gallagher, SelfNarrative, Embodied Action, and Social Context, Between Suspicion and Sympathy, ed. A.
Wiercinski (Toronto: Hermeneutic Press, 2003) 40923.
See for example Jessica Benjamin, Bonds of Love (New York: Pantheon, 1988) 29f.

444

SELF, NARRATIVE, AND SELF-CONSTITUTION

Accordingly, Taylor more often makes use of a second strategy: even in the
earliest phases of the formation of the self, the individual is immersed in (semantic
or symbolic) webs of interlocution that both shape the self and form the initial
basis upon which subsequent acts of articulation, including more reflective selfinterpretations are based.15 This second option avoids the challenge of explaining
the transition from causation to semantics, but in turn raises equally difficult
questions about how or in what sense these webs of interlocution are interpretations of a self or, alternatively, how the self can be socialized into a habitus
while still retaining a sense in which the interpretations are genuinely her own or
can be properly attributed to her.16
It might be objected that these worries concerning the paradox of selfconstitution are simply misplaced and based on a confusion about what is meant
by the self. Surely, we dont exist only in our self-interpretationsthe self is a
psychological entity that engages in acts of interpretation and so cannot be
(exhaustively) identified with those interpretations. However, the objection continues, what is needed to avoid the appearance of a paradox is a clearer distinction
between the self and a self-concept. While the self-concept is constituted through
its interpretations, the self is not. Moreover, this response might further exploit the
distinction between the core self and the autobiographical self mentioned
above, insisting that the term self-concept should be substituted for the idea of
an autobiographical self .
However, I want to claim that the paradox cannot be so easily avoided in this
manner. In fact, I believe Taylor does and should reject any sharp distinction
between the self and a self-concept. Once again, it would threaten the radical
character of the claim that we are self-interpreting animals but, as importantly,
once such a sharp distinction is made, it is difficult to state what the self is or
whether it even exists.17 Of course, one might stipulate that the self just is the set
of basic psychological (and whatever other) capacities required for possession of
a self-concept; but, to anticipate, I suspect that attempts to identify this set of
15

16

17

For a careful discussion of both of these options in Taylors work, see Joseph Rouse, Practice
Theory.
Gary Watsons distinction between attribution and accountability might be useful here and he
notes his indebtedness to Taylor for his own expressivist account (in Agency and Answerability
[New York: Oxford, 2004, p. 271]). Recently, there has also been some very suggestive work on the
social acquisition of folk-psychological concepts among children, including the idea that persons
act for reasons, that address this concern: roughly, the claim is that the skills required for folk
psychology are not innate, but acquired through socialization into narrative structures, but I wont
pursue this question further here.Daniel Hutto, Folk Psychological Narratives (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2008).
For one author who draws this conclusion and argues that the self is a theorists fiction, see Daniel
Dennett, The Self as a Center of Gravity, Self and Consciousness, ed. F. Kessel, et al. (Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum, 1992): 16373.

445

KENNETH BAYNES

capacities will either be so thin and meager that we will be disinclined to call it a
self or (what is perhaps more likely) it will already be caught up in interpretive
debates that involve different possible self-concepts or self-interpretations. For
example, is the Buddhist understanding of the no selfrecently championed by
Derek Parfitoffered as an alternative (however paradoxical) self-concept or the
denial of the self (understood as a set of underlying skills and capacities? Let me
briefly mention two alternative accounts in order to provide some clarification and
support for what I take to be Taylors position.
First, in his insightful and highly readable book, The Problem of the Soul, Owen
Flanagan also distinguishes between a self and a self-model or self-concept (p.
241f.). His motivation for this is, in part, to explain how our self-interpretations
can be mistaken or diverge from who we really are (see p. 253) and, indeed,
insisting on such a distinction is one way to achieve this: our self-models (as
narrative constructions) are mistaken when they fail to capture adequately who we
really are. But the distinction between self and self-concept is not one that
Flanagan is able consistently to maintain: for example, he also describes the self
as an abstraction that is commonly captured in a narrative structure (p. 242) and
elsewhere as an abstraction designed to do, in interpersonal and intrapersonal
commerce, the work of explanation, prediction and control (p. 242). That is, the
self is a narrative construction based, at least in part, on the interests of the
narrator. So, on the one hand, according to Flanagan, the self as well as our
self-concepts are constructed through self-interpretations. On the other hand,
according to Flanagan, even our self-concepts are not narrative constructs all the
way down: Like the self, the self-model contains unconscious, preconscious and
conscious components (p. 245) and, he adds, my self-model is a complex,
dynamic, retrievable and expandable structure of who I am (p. 244). Moreover,
according to Flanagan, the self-concepts are or can also be dispositional structures that are often not fully available to conscious thought or reflection; but,
once again, this is also true of the self. I dont mean to take issue with any of these
descriptions of either the self or self-concept: the self is not a conscious narrative
construction all the way down; but neither is our self-concept. My point rather is
that, given Flanagans own analysis, a sharp distinction between self and selfconcept does not seem to be sustainable.18 Flanagan is, of course, correct in
suggesting that the claim that our self-interpretations can be mistaken implies that
they can sometimes fail to capture who we (actually) are. But this claim about the
failure of some of our self-interpretations does not support a sharp distinction
between self and self-concept as the initial objection above supposed. What
seems more likely is that some of our self-interpretations constitute our
18

See also James Phillips, Psychopathology and the Narrative Self, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and
Psychology 10.4 (2003): 31328.

446

SELF, NARRATIVE, AND SELF-CONSTITUTION

(autobiographical) selves but that others can fail to cohere or turn out to be
inadequate or mistaken for other reasons. And this, in fact, is what I take Taylors
own position to be. Though he is not explicit about it, there is nothing in Taylors
account that precludes the possibility of the self-concepts with which we identify
standing in some tension with our selveswith other narratives or scripts that also
(in part) define who we are and over which we do not exercise complete control.19
However, it nonetheless remains up to us (in the context of dialogic exchange with
others) to determine how to relate to these scriptsto decide how we want to
identify with them and what responsibility we are prepared to assume for
them.
Second, in a very different account of the self, Galen Strawson has recently
argued that, in approaching a theory of the self, we must answer the phenomenological questionwhat is my experience or sense of the self?before we can
address the factual questionwhat is the self?20 After considering (and rejecting) various proposals for what is phenomenologically essential to our sense of
selfincluding agency, personality and narrativityStrawson defends what he
calls the Pearl view of the self: the self is a two second long mental selfphenomenon that is part of the material world, even if it cannot be reduced to it
(p. 14). I cannot pursue the details of his account here, and Strawson may be right
that a strong sense of diachronic unity and agency are not phenomenologically
universalthough, if so, this would seem to present a significant challenge to at
least some aspects of Taylors thesis. However, what I think Strawsons essay
more importantly reveals is that competing philosophical conceptions of the self
can be motivated by very different concerns. To make a much longer story short,
I think that Strawson is primarily interested in what Marya Schechtman has called
the question of re-identification (what makes me the same person through time)
rather than the question of characterization (which is central to issues of responsibility, character, and self-evaluation).21 Taylor, like Schechtman, by contrast, is
primarily interested in the latter question and, when it concerns the notion of the
self relevant to this set question or, better, set of questions, I want to claim, a sharp
distinction between self and self-concept cannot be sustained. Although I cant
develop her argument here, I am also sympathetic to Schechtmans further claim
that in the end various attempts to answer the question of re-identification fail.
Taylor arrives at the same conclusion when he writes that the punctual or
19

20

21

For a good discussion of this issue, which also resists any sharp distinction between the self and
self-concept, see Marina Oshana, Autonomy and Self-Identity, Autonomy and the Challenge of
Liberalism, ed. John Christman and Joel Anderson (New York: Cambridge UP, 2006) 7799.
Strawson, The Self, Models of the Self, ed. Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Shear (Exeter: Imprint,
1999) 119.
For this distinction, and an extended defense of it, see Marya Schechtman, The Constitution of
Selves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

447

KENNETH BAYNES

neutral selfthe self, that is, that figures predominantly in connection with the
question of reidentificationis an erroneous understanding of the self: This is
the self that Hume set out to find and, predictably, failed to find. And it is basically
the same notion of the self that Parfit is working with, one whose identify over
time just involves . . . psychological connectedness and/or psychological continuity, with the right kind of cause (pp. 4950).
However, while this contrast between the re-identification question and the
characterization questions points to an important difference in their concerns, in a
more recent essay, Against Narrativity, Strawson addresses the characterization
question as well and his disagreement with Taylor is even more explicit. In this
essay Strawson suggests that what I have called Taylors narrativity thesis is
based on a hasty generalization from his own personal experience and that the
best lives almost never involve this kind of story-telling (pp. 43637). Further,
Strawson explicitly denies that his own life involves such a narrative form-giving
and is none the worse off as a result: . . . I have absolutely no sense of my life as
a narrative with form, or indeed as a narrative without form. Absolutely none
(p. 433).
As in the earlier essay, the issues separating Strawson and Taylor are complex
and, for present purposes, I must limit my discussion. On the one hand, I think
Strawson is correct in suggesting that Taylors thesis goes too far, especially in his
stronger thesis that narrativity is inevitably tied to hyper-goods (that is, higherorder goods in light of which we order other goods and that are, according to
Taylor, real features of the world (see p. 436). Others sympathetic to Taylors
position have suggested that narratives need not be as thickly construed as Taylor
sometimes seems to suggest.22 On the other hand, insofar as Strawson speaks of
narrativity in a broader sense he mischaracterizes the narrativity thesis as a general
claim. Thus, while he acknowledges that the way I am now is profoundly shaped
by my past and that my present sense of selfagain, more or less what he earlier
called the pearl view of the selfis a product of past experiences, he claims that
neither of these are sufficient to establish the narrativity thesis. Further, he also
denies that ones life is somehow less of a life (or even not a life at all) unless it
is conceived as some sort of ethical-historical-characterological developmental
unity, or in terms of a story, a Bildung or quest (p. 441). But this descriptionI
think most would agreeitself overstates the narrativity thesis. There need not be
(and seldom is) one, sequential, coherent narrative; there are often profound gaps,

22

Schechtman, Stories, Lives and Basic Survival: A Refinement and Defense of the Narrative View,
Narrative and Understanding Persons, ed. D. Hutto (New York: Cambridge UP, 2007) 15578;
Habermas, Reply (to Taylor), Communicative Action, ed. A. Honneth (London: Polity Press,
1991) 21522.

448

SELF, NARRATIVE, AND SELF-CONSTITUTION

inconsistencies, and tensions.23 For the narrativity thesis to be more than trivial
perhaps it must, as Strawson points out, provide more than the steps involved in
making a cup of coffee; on the other hand, though, it surely can cover only shorter
segments of ones life, without involving a claim to have one unified and continuous story to tell from beginning to end. One must also be careful not to assume
an overly conventional notion of what constitutes a narrative.24 Finally, as many
narrative theorists point out, self-interpretations can also include rationalizations and self-deceptions, even given the best of intentions. As I noted above,
Taylor also insists that our self-interpretations can sometimes be mistaken. What
does seem essential to the narrativity thesis is what I shall call a process of
account-giving that requires, on condition of making oneself intelligible, locating
ones action in a script that makes sense of ones life (to oneself) at any given
time. To be a self or an agent an individual must locate herself and her action
within a larger narrative context; and at least part of what it means to be a self or
agent is to engage in (implicit or explicit) acts of self-interpretation and/or
account-giving. Or, to borrow a phrase from a related context, to be a self an
individual must be located within a narratively structured space of reasons.
Schechtman places two further constraints on these narrative constructs: a reality
constraint, which requires that a persons narrative roughly conforms to what we
know about the world; and an articulation constraint, which requires that the
agent recognize a general explanatory obligation and be roughly able to meet it.25
In both cases the aim is to block certain sorts of narratives, such as those that an
individual suffering from a significant psychological disorder might provide. The
mere ability of an individual to construct any narrative is not sufficient to indicate

23

24

25

For some interesting discussion of the possible breakdowns, gaps, and limits to an individual
narrative, see J. Melvin Woody, When Narrative Fails, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology
10.4 (2003): 32945; James Phillips, Psychopathology and the Narrative Self, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 10.4 (2003): 31328; and Shaun Gallagher, Pathologies in Narrative
Structure, Philosophy 60 (2007): 20322.
See also Schechtman, Stories, Lives and Basic Survival: A Refinement and Defense of the
Narrative View, Narrative and Understanding Persons, ed. Hutto, 15578; and John Christman,
Narrative Unity as a Condition of Personhood, Metaphilosophy 35 (2004): 695713. It of course
follows from the narrativity thesis that being a self will always be a matter of degreepossession
of a self can vary among individuals and even within the course of an individuals own life; it is also
the case that not all humans possess what Gallagher calls narrative competency and so there is no
guarantee that all members of the human species possess a self in this sense; nothing, howeveror
at least very littlefollows from these claims about our moral obligations to those who lack a self
or who lack narrative competency. Similarly, it does not follow that because an individual is a
wanton (in Harry Frankfurts phrase) he or she deserves less moral consideration. I thank an
anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify this point.
Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves, 114ff; and Stories, Lives and Basic Survival,
16263.

449

KENNETH BAYNES

proper agency or selfhood. Clearly, however, these constraints must not be made
too demanding and what, in any given case, constitutes their satisfaction will be a
matter of degree and open to contestation.
So, to take stock thus far, my proposal is that Taylors thesis that we are
self-interpreting animals focuses on what has been called the autobiographical
self, without denying that there are other selves in the sense of basic psychological capacities that are developmentally prior to and required for the existence of this self. Nonetheless, it is this autobiographical self (and not these prior
selves) that is centrally relevant for addressing concerns raised by the characterization question (in contrast to the re-identification question).26 Further,
Taylor need not (and indeed cannot) insist on drawing a very sharp distinction
between the (autobiographical) self and a self-concept. Finally, the narrativity
thesis can be retained, as central to the idea of account-giving, so long as it is
not understood in an overly strong ethical manner or in a way that links it too
exclusively to a specific conception of the good life (or set of hyper-goods). On
this construal, the thesis that humans are self-interpreting animals remains
radical because it implies that the self that is generally of most interest to
usthe self bound up with its characterization traitsis (at least in part) constituted through its self-interpretations. It remains, nonetheless, a controversial
thesis: what aspects or dimensions of the (autobiographical) self are constituted
through our self-interpretations? Is it, for example, a matter of our selfinterpretations that we are self-interpreting animals or does this claim reveal
something deeper about human nature? In Sources of the Self Taylor suggests
that the concern with the self is a distinctive feature of modernity: People
didnt speak before of the self or a self. 27 Does this mean that the self as
such did not exist before these interpretations became prominent? Werent the
ancient Athenians, for example, also self-interpreting animals even though
they may not have recognized themselves as such? Or, in other words, what are
the limits to our interpretive acts of self-constitution? (This, of course, is a
question central, for example, to more Foucauldian interpretations of the social
construction of the self in which the suggestion seems to be that the

26

27

Dan Zahavi, in Self and Other: The Limits of Narrative Understanding (in Hutto, Narrative and
Understanding Persons, 179201), argues directly against this claim, suggesting there must be a
more intact, phenomenologically clarified experiential self prior to any such autobiographical
self. Zahavis discussion raises some hard and still controversial questions about the role of a
phenomenological access to a pre-reflective self that reach back to debates between Sydney
Schoemaker, Dieter Henrich, and Juergen Habermas. For a very helpful discussion, see Peter Dews,
Communicative Paradigms and the Question of Subjectivity, Habermas: A Critical Reader, ed. P.
Dews (New York: Blackwell, 1999) 87117.
Taylor, Reply, 207 (see nt. 11).

450

SELF, NARRATIVE, AND SELF-CONSTITUTION

self is a fairly recent construction and the product of various genealogies of

power or technologies of domination.28)
In a Reply to similar criticisms of Sources of the Self Taylor suggests that,
even with respect to what I am now calling the autobiographical self, there are
features of the self that are perennial or universal and others that are more
culturally specific. As an example of the latter, one might cite the contrast he
draws, in Interpretation and the Sciences of Man, between the codes of honor
and dignity in traditional Japanese society and those based on understandings of
negotiation and contract that have shaped much of the modern west. At this level,
culturally specific beliefs and values shape the understanding and, in turn, the very
selves who express them in their attitudes and practices.29 More generally,
however, there are also social formations that are not unique to one culture but
rather include many otherwise distinguishable cultures at once. The modern
preoccupation with the self discussed in Sources of the Self offers one such
example of a social formation and Taylor explores this level further in his recent
book, A Secular Age.30 Finally, at the deepest level of the autobiographical self
there are features that Taylor considers universal in that they are essential to
what it means to be a person or to be a human being. It is at this level, I believe,
that Taylor would locate his claim that we are self-interpreting animals. Even if
humans are not aware of the fact that they are constituted through their selfinterpretations, or even if they do not gain any significant reflective stance on this
dimension of themselves, it is nonetheless the case that they are constituted
through their self-interpretations. Indeed, what Taylor considers to be one of the
centrally defining features of modernity is precisely the reflective distance humans
achieved concerning this feature of their identities or selves. Thus, according to
Taylor, there are indeed limits to our self-constitution and the fact that we are
self-interpreting animals seems to be one of them (Reply, p. 207).
What can be said in support of the claim that it is a deep or universal feature of
human beings that they are self-interpreting? In fact, at various points Taylor
offers a transcendental argument to support his claim. Transcendental arguments, to recall very briefly, purport to show that something whose existence is not
in dispute is only possible if certain further conditions obtainas paradigmatic
28

29

30

Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self (Amherst, MA: University of Mass, 1988); for an
excellent discussion of this topic in Foucaults work, see Beatrice Han, Foucaults Critical Project
(Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998); for some of Taylors reservations concerning Foucaults project,
see Reply, 207f. and his essay Foucault on Freedom and Truth, Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed.
David Hoy (New York: Blackwell, 1986) 69102; see also Allison Weir, Who Are We? Modern
Identities in Taylor and Foucault, Philosophy and Social Criticism 35 (2009): 51840.
See Taylor, Interpretation and the Science of Man, Philosophy and the Human Sciences v. 2 (New
York: Cambridge UP, 1985) 36f.
Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007).

451

KENNETH BAYNES

example is Kants claim that conscious experience requires rules (or concepts) not
derived from experience as well as a non-temporal agent equipped with a capacity
for combining sensory intuitions and intellectual concepts into judgments.31 One
rather truncated version of a transcendental argument is sketched by Taylor as
follows: Strong evaluation is essential to identity, and identity is essential to
being a fully functioning human being.32 In this form, the argument, I believe,
moves too quickly; it also potentially begs the question concerning what it means
to be a fully-functioning human being.33 However, I believe that a slightly
modified version may be more compelling.
Self-understanding is a pervasive feature of human life. Aristotle famously
remarked that all men by nature desire to know (Meta A.I). Humans desire not
only to understand the world in which they live but also to make sense of their
lives.34 This desire or even need for understanding can appropriately be called an
interest of reason (Kant) not in the sense that humans are fundamentally rational
maximizers, but in the sense that (by and large) humans need to maintain some
degree of coherence and intelligibility in their lives if they are to function as agents
at all. This interest of reason is, in turn, related to the narrativity thesis I
mentioned above: Reasons for action require a narrative context to make a
sequence of action intelligible. The standard beliefdesire model employed in
folk-psychological explanations is compelling only when the invoked beliefs and
desires are located within larger narratives that make them intelligible to the
individual actor and to others.35 To be sure, the stories we tell to make our conduct
intelligible will often involve varying degrees of rationalization as well. Nor do
these narratives have to be complete or exhaustive accounts of our lives and some
people certainly display greater interest and/or skill in constructing them than
others. Nonetheless, most of us at least some of the time (perhaps when were not
overwhelmed with just getting by, though sometimes as a means of getting by)
engage in such efforts at making sense of our lives. Finally, this project is
seldom if ever monological; rather, the narratives we construct (and which in
turn construct us) generally arise from webs of interlocution (Sources, p. 36), in
which our own efforts to understand ourselves intersect and respond to the interpretations of others, both consciously and unconsciously. Thus, Taylors thesis
that we are self-interpreting animals does seem to capture a pervasive feature of
31
32

33
34

35

See Taylors discussion of Kant in Transcendental Arguments in Philosophical Arguments, 2033.

See Taylors Reply to Comments on Sources of the Self, Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 54 (1994): 209.
For a similar criticism, see Flanagan, Identity, 41.
J. David Velleman also makes a basic interest in self-understanding central to his account of human
agency; see Self to Self (New York: Cambridge UP, 2006).
Alasdair MacIntyre, The Intelligibility of Action, Rationality, Relativism and the Human Sciences, ed. J. Margolis, et al. (Boston: Nijhoff, 1986) 6386.

452

SELF, NARRATIVE, AND SELF-CONSTITUTION

our understanding of what it means to be self or a person. Being a person is not

simply a species classification or, as Taylor more sharply puts it at one point: we
do not have selves the way that we have heart or livers, as an interpretation-free
given (Sources, p. 106). Rather, in ways deeply analogous to Harry Frankfurts
view that what it means to be a person requires the capacity for second-order
valuations, Taylors thesis points to this dimension of care and to its constitutive
role in making us the distinctive kinds of persons (or selves) that we are.
There is, however, one further feature of Taylors thesis that humans are selfinterpreting animals that I have not yet mentioned. From his earlier essay on
Responsibility for Self up through his more recent essay on Leading a Life,
Taylor has also emphasized the active side of narrative construction. We dont
simply find ourselves with narratives fully constructed and/or given to us; rather
individuals construct narratives, more or less consciously, from scripts ready to
hand and through the interpretations and interactions of others. Borrowing a
phrase from Richard Wollheim, Taylor describes this active dimension as leading
a life: to be a person is to construct a narrative unity for ones life and to assume
responsibility for the life one leads.36 The claim is less strong than more ambitious
models of autonomy or conceptions of the self as a causa sui;37 but, if I have
understood his position correctly, without this active dimensionor what he
earlier called an individuals assuming responsibility for selfit is hard to see
how a narrative unity can be the selfs own. If, as I argued earlier, location in a
narrative context is a condition of agency, it is also the case that it is our (socially
acquired) capacity to act for (normative) reasons that allows us to construct our
normative/practical identities.38
It is with respect to this last feature that Anthony Appiahs recent critique of
Taylor is most relevant. According to Appiah, Taylor bravely but unsuccessfully
attempts to reconcile a subject-centered and a social-centered view of agency or
the self. A subject-centered account emphasizes the active side of agency as
found, for example, in the notion of leading a life. It is the agent who constructs
a narrative or offers a self-interpretation or who takes responsibility for her
practical identity even if she is not its sole author; or, to invoke some of the other
familiar language, it is the agent who incorporates, endorses, or identifies
decisively with an aspect of his motivational structure, thereby making it more
fully or authentically his own. On this view, then, the self constructs itself by
36

37

38

Charles Taylor, Leading a Life, Incommensurability, ed. Ruth Chang (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1997), esp. 180.
For a persuasive critique of the view of the self as causa sui, see Galen Strawson, The Impossibility
of Moral Responsibility, Free Will, ed. Gary Watson (New York: Oxford UP, 2003) 21228.
See Jeanette Kennett and Steve Matthews, Normative Agency, Practical Identity and Narrative
Agency, ed. C. Mackenzie and K. Atkins (New York: Routledge, 2008) 21231 and, more generally,
the work of Christine Korsgaard.

453

KENNETH BAYNES

incorporating self-descriptions into itself or by decisively identifying with them.

Appiah quotes Taylor who writes: practice is, as it were, an interpretation and
reinterpretation of what the rule really means.39 In our context this means: the
practice of self-constitution is an interpretation and reinterpretation of who the self
really is. Yet, according to Appiah, this subject-centered view overstates the active
side of the self and underestimates the Wittgensteinian lesson that there is a
point where interpretations run out and practical reasoning comes to an end
(Philosophical Investigations, #201 and #211). It is thus not a question of an agent
who offers an interpretation of his life or conduct, but rather a question of
acknowledging or perhaps even yielding to the practices or life-forms that have
shaped who one is and in which one finds oneself. With respect to the question of
self-interpretation, then, the lesson is that the self does not actively create or
constitute itself in its self-interpretations; rather, it discovers itself as it comes to
understand the practices in which it is always already engaged. This is what
Appiah describes as a social-centered account of agency.
However, there is some reason to think that Appiah himself overstates the
tension to be found in Taylor, perhaps because he attributes to Taylor a model
of interpretation (as the self-conscious application of an explicit rule) that Taylor
would himself reject. Taylors preferred way to describe this process of interpretation is in the language of articulation. In our efforts to achieve selfunderstanding, we attempt to articulate the inarticulate, to make more
perspicuous the values and commitments that have not yet been made explicit,
and to assume responsibility for those with which we identify. This is, of course,
the further sense in which Taylor suggests that humans are strong evaluators:
we do not simply assess which of the competing preferences that confront us is
stronger or weightier; rather, we attempt to discern which among the competing
values and ideals are the ones that we care most about and the ones that genuinely command our allegiance. For Taylor, this process invokes a more significant notion of responsibility for selfnot one where it is simply up to us
to determine, in an exercise of radical choice, what is of most significance, but
in the sense in which we attempt, through the exercise of practical reason and
deliberation, to establish what is of most value to us.40 To be sure, an element of
discovery as well as constitution is involved, but the contrast between selfcentered and social-centered seems inappropriate because it suggests the mutually exclusive alternatives of autonomous self-creation, on the one hand, and
passive acquiescence to forces outside it, on the other. Rather, to borrow from a

39
40

Taylor, To Follow a Rule, Philosophical Arguments, 178.

See Taylor, Responsibility for Self, The Identities of Persons, ed. A. Rorty, esp. 299; and Leading
a Life, Philosophical Arguments, 180.

454

SELF, NARRATIVE, AND SELF-CONSTITUTION

parallel account by David Velleman, what happens when an agent acts (or
decides) is that he, so to speak, throws his weight behind a particular interpretation, preference, or motivational structure and thereby identifies with it
and makes it his own in a deeper sense.41 Moreover, the idea of a self-reflective
agent (which lies at the center of the self-centered account) is more or less a
fictionit is a status that we attribute to others and self-ascribeyet, again
following Velleman, it is a fiction that becomes more than fiction as the individual self (at least in the normal case) gradually comes to assume greater
responsibility for his self-descriptions and for himself. [The individual] is
endowed with a self because his inner narrator is a locus of control that unifies
him as an agent by making decisions on the basis of reasons.42
Thus, though Taylors view is a subject-centered accountindeed, one closely
tied to the agents basic interest in and need for self-understandingit is also an
account in which the agent can be mistaken in his interpretation and thus there is
a genuine sense in which it is not simply up to him to decide who he is. However,
what Appiah calls the social-centered side cannot be understood in purely causal
termsas the social whole into which the individual is socialized and a self
formed. Rather, Taylor prefers to speak of attempts to render articulate the inarticulate (or not yet articulated) webs of interlocution in which selves always
already find themselves. In his most recent book, A Secular Age, Taylor again
rejects a strong opposition or distinction between self and society. The social
imaginary that characterizes the modern era is one that construes agents as both
constituted and constituting, as products of the symbolic order and yet as simultaneously endowed with individual form-giving power.43 Or, put differently, the
social imaginary (or symbolic order) is the product of our self-interpretations; yet
it shapes them just as much as it is a product of them. On this point, despite their
other differences, Taylor is (not coincidentally) very close to the position of Jrgen
Habermas: Individuals reproduce the lifeworld through their various interpretive
acts, even while such action always takes place against the background of a
symbolic lifeworld that makes this action possible.44 What Taylor further adds and
develops more fully in The Secular Age is the claim that this dual status of the
agent is itself part of the modern social imaginary and that it thus makes little
sense to ask whether we really are that way or not. We are, according to Taylor,
the products of the societies, cultures, and traditions that shape us; and yet, it is a
feature of our own social imaginary that, at least as an initial default position,
41

42
43
44

David Velleman, What Happens When Someone Acts?, Mind 101 (1992): 46181; Taylor,
however, would probably resist the reductionist dimension of Vellemans proposal.
Velleman, The Self as Narrator, Autonomy and the Challenge of Liberalism, 5676.
Taylor, A Secular Age, see esp. 481ff.
Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987) 343.

455

KENNETH BAYNES

we view one another as accountable agents who bear responsibility for their
choices.45
Somewhat surprisingly, Appiahs alternative solution to the tension between
self and society is more problematic and leads to an even greater dualismthough
now a dualism between reasons and causes. Appiah suggests that we return to
Kants two standpoint approach in which the theoretical and the practical
perspectives no longer conflict because they are no longer competing for the same
causal space. Instead, the logic of structure (which yields causes for action) and
the logic of agency (which yields reasons for action) belong to two distinct
standpoints (p. 56). Despite its initial appeal, this approach does not address the
issue that Taylor (or, for that matter, Wittgenstein) confront. For them, the question is how something can be a reason (or how certain practices can seem
significant/valuable) from within the agents practical or deliberative perspective.
A successful answer to these questions would seem to require a way of relating
internal and external perspectives in a less oppositional manner. What we want to
know, for example, is how an agent can come to see certain practices as meaningful or valuable, or how certain considerations can seem reasonable to the agent
in question. It may indeed be the case that, as Wittgenstein put it, interpretations
come to an end; but, put into Taylors language, this would be the point at which
efforts at articulation fail and such points cannot be known in advance.46 In the
case of ones own self-interpretation, such failure can sometimes lead to a crisis in
identity; though, as Taylor emphasizes, these moments of incommensurability,
when not cast in an unacceptably detached way, may be both less frequent, but
also more informative than is often supposed.47 The more general point, however,
is that the space of reasons cannot be characterized as a separate and distinct
sphere that is immune to social and other causal influences; rather, the space of
reasons, while perhaps clear in a certain wide range of cases, also contains a great
deal of ambiguity and uncertainty and remains pervious to social influences that
operate, so to speak, behind the backs of the actors involved. Moreover, unless we
are members of the same sociocultural lifeworld, we often cannot know what
could even be a reason for a person without knowing a great deal about the social
forces that have influenced him or her. Further, in the case of any selfinterpretation, there is always also the possibility of a tension between what an
45

46

47

My own view is that this general picture fits well with the compatibilist position developed by P. F.
Strawson, T. Scanlon, R. Jay Wallace, and others. For a related view, see Kenneth Baynes, Freedom
as Autonomy, Handbook on Continental Philosophy, ed. Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen (New
York: Routledge, 2007) 55187.
See, in particular, Taylors discussion of the valuable role of ad hominem argument in Explanation
and Practical Reason, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995)
3466.
See Taylor, Leading a Life and Explanation and Practical Reason, Philosophical Arguments.

456

SELF, NARRATIVE, AND SELF-CONSTITUTION

agent takes to be a reason or what the agent considers valuable and what can really
be a reason or be a matter of significance for him or her. In general, we defer to
an agents self-descriptions unless the account he or she gives strikes us as
implausibleitself always a matter of degreegiven other things we believe
about him, including the social and other causal influences on his life.48 Accordingly, although the idea of two standpoints is importantit points, for example,
to the limits of an exclusively causal account of human conductAppiahs
proposal strikes me as ultimately more problematic than Taylors more subtle
account of articulations that take place against a background or framework of
inarticulacy.
In sum, then, I have argued that Taylors transcendental argument for the claim
that we are self-interpreting animals is compelling, at least in its modified form.
To reject this account of what it means to be a (autobiographical) self or a person
would seem to entail as well a rejection of the claim that human beings have a
fundamental need to understand or make sense of themselves. At the same time,
however, as Appiahs recent criticism reveals, the tensionor, perhaps more
positively stated, dialecticbetween a subject-centered and socialcentered account continues to present a challenge for the interpretive or hermeneutic approach Taylor advocates. In particular, I think we need to consider more
fully what the space of reasons is and how it can be shaped by social and natural
factors while still remaining a space of reasons sustained by the interpretive acts
of the self-interpreting animals who inhabit it.
Syracuse University

48

For a defense of this claim, see also Kenneth Baynes, The Transcendental Turn: Habermass
Kantian Pragmatism The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. Fred Rush (New York:
Cambridge UP, 2004). 194218.

457