Paul Ricoeur (1913 to 2005) was a French philosopher who held that we come to know who we are the way we come to know a character in a story, so that our identity over time is a narrative identity, in which scattered events are gathered into a life that hangs together. On this view, the unity of a life is the unity of a told story. Therapeutic Shamanism agrees that the everyday self, the middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer, is woven from the stories we tell ourselves, and adds that beneath it lies the Soul, which is not a story at all.
Who was Paul Ricoeur? #
He was born in Valence, France, in 1913. His mother died when he was seven months old, his father was declared missing, presumed dead, in the Battle of the Marne in 1915, and he was brought up by his grandparents and an aunt. Captured in June 1940, he spent almost five years as a prisoner of war in Germany, where the prisoners ran a camp university; he lectured there, and translated the philosopher Edmund Husserl‘s Ideas in the margins of the book itself, for lack of paper.1
After the war he taught at Strasbourg, the Sorbonne, Nanterre and the University of Chicago. His major works include The Conflict of Interpretations (1969), The Rule of Metaphor (1975), the three volumes of Time and Narrative (1983 to 1985) and Oneself as Another (1990). He died at Châtenay-Malabry, near Paris, in 2005.2
What is narrative identity? #
Ricoeur’s answer to the question ‘Who am I?’. It is not answered by pointing to a fixed core inside us, nor by saying that the self is an illusion. It is answered the way we answer the question of who a character is, by telling their story. A story takes events that happened by chance, a meeting, an illness, a war, and links them into episodes that belong together and mean something. A life gets its shape the same way. “I try to show”, Ricoeur said, “that the unity of a life is the unity of a told story.”3
He thought the self is known only indirectly, never by looking straight inward. “There is no direct knowledge of the self, only that which passes through the intermediary of norms, of symbols.”4 We come to understand ourselves through the long route of the stories, symbols, works and traditions we are surrounded by, including the great stories of literature, and then return to ourselves changed. Imagination is at work here too. For Ricoeur, metaphor and narrative do not just copy the world, they create new meaning.5
What are sameness and selfhood? #
Two different ways of being the same person over time, which Ricoeur named with the Latin words idem and ipse. Sameness, idem, is what lets other people recognise us, through the lasting traits and habits of our character. Selfhood, ipse, is constancy kept through change, and its model is the kept promise. Even if my wishes or opinions change, I hold to what I said I would do.6
Narrative identity sits between the two. The story of a life holds together what stays the same and what changes, so that a person can grow, suffer, fail and begin again and still be recognisably themselves.
How does Ricoeur’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most closely in the account of the middle-world self. The ego is a part of us constructed so that we can live and act in the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer. It is a complex thought-formThought-form. A human-created living being: an ideology, religion, corporation, conspiracy theory or platform that has taken on a life of its own. Genuinely alive, but soul-less in the deep sense: natural things alone are full of Soul. More about this, woven from the stories we tell ourselves, the introjectsIntroject. A foreign belief, message or story swallowed whole (often in childhood) and lodged inside as if it were our own; a type of intrusion. More about this we take on, the belief systems we adopt, the roles we play and the masks we wear, and it is the part most people mean when they say ‘I’. It is only through raising our awareness, by such things as meditation or psychotherapy, that we begin to see it is, in fact, just a bunch of stories.7 Ricoeur’s narrative identity describes this self from the inside, and with real respect for what the stories do. See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body?
The two approaches also meet on how much the stories matter. We become entangled with stories about who we are and how we must or must not behave, many of them taken on unconsciously in childhood and still shaping us now.8 Ricoeur’s long route of self-understanding through stories and symbols, and the shamanic work of loosening the hold of old stories, both take seriously that a life is lived through the stories told about it. See What is disentanglement?
And Ricoeur’s respect for symbol and story, as carriers of meaning that plain statement cannot hold, is close to the distinction between mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this, what is metaphorically true, and logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this, what is literally true.9
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On whether the story is the whole of who we are. For Ricoeur, the self we can know is the narrated self; there is no route to ourselves that does not pass through stories and symbols. Therapeutic Shamanism holds that the narrated self is one part of us, the middle-world self, and that there is more. Unlike the middle-world self, which is constructed from the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, the Soul is our truest self, our true nature, wild and free, free from the domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and baggage of the human middle-world, part of nature and a child of Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this. It is both who we truly are and the blueprint for what we are meant to grow into. The middle-world self is meant to be a vehicle through which the Soul can be expressed, but all too often it is not.10
So where narrative identity asks how a life can be told so that it holds together, shamanic work also asks whether the story being told is the Soul’s own, or one taken on from family and culture. The Soul is not found by telling a better story. It is met directly, in the Lower-World. See What are the different parts of the self in Therapeutic Shamanism?
Has the idea of narrative identity been challenged? #
Yes. The philosopher Galen Strawson, in his essay “Against Narrativity” (2004), named Ricoeur among those who hold that a richly narrative outlook on one’s life is essential to living well. He rejected that claim, and held that many people, whom he called ‘Episodics’, have no particular tendency to experience their lives as a story at all, and live perfectly good lives.11 Defenders of narrative accounts of the self, among them the philosopher Marya Schechtman, hold that the life story at work in a person is mostly implicit, kept track of without being told aloud or consciously composed.12
