take a guess...

What might I likely post about while writing my thesis? Musings on self, or lack thereof, you say? Why yes.

I'm reading (skimming) a book by Anthony Kerby, Narrative and the Self. Unsurprisingly, Kerby takes the position that the referent of I or me we commonly regard as ourself is nothing more than a narrative construction. Language thus occupies a central position in our lives: "language is viewed not simply as a tool for communicating or mirroring back what we otherwise discover in our reality but is itself an important formative part of that reality, part of its very texture." (2) Or, as Hans-Georg Gadamer, a student of Heidegger's, put it "being that can be understood is language." (2)

Kerby concludes:

Self-narration, I have argued, is what first raises our temporal existence our of the closets of memorial traces and routine and unthematic activity, constituting thereby a self as its implied subject. This self is, then, the implied subject of a narrated history. Stated another way, in order to be we must be as something or someone, and this someone that we take ourselves to be is the character delineated in our personal narratives. (109)

Kerby goes on to resolve the mind-body problem by saying there is no such thing as mind. I haven't read that part, but I'm guessing that he'll argue that, though we certainly have a physical organ we call 'mind'—a part of our body—it does not constitute "me" (or "I", "you", [as a matter of fact, I've just 'constituted' 'you' by including you in my narrative, and 'you' are now probably split between some sense of identification with the 2nd person pronoun that you've just read, and with the implied subject ('I') of my authorial voice, with which you typically identify to some extent when reading narratives. or not.]). What creates "me" is nothing more than the narration of experience by consciousness.

Okay, here's what Kerby says:

"The self is essentially a meaning construct deriving from language and conversation generally, where language must be seen as essentially "material," that is, as an extention of the sphere of activity of the human body. On the other hand, the human body is alive with expression, with signification. Such a body of gestures we call a person [his emphasis]. It would be artificial (or at best hypothetical) to introduce into this unity a strict substantial division of body and mind, or body and self. Accordingly, I have defined subjectivity as the possibility of expression, but this is not to make of subjectivity some sort of res cogitas or thinking power. Subjectivity is nothing but an honorary appellation we give to a being that has the expressive-linguistic capabilities commonly found in persons. (112)

hmmm.