The Self and its Discontents

I am currently reading Bob Dylan's autobiography, Chronicles and while I'm not particularly taken by Dylan's prose, I have found one aspect of his development relatively interesting, insofar as it relates to some of the material I covered in my undergraduate thesis. As many of you probably know, Bob Dylan was once Robert Zimmerman, until he decided to change his mid-west persona to become the folk singer with whom we are all now familiar. The way he tells the story, he felt he wasn't Robert Zimmerman; he didn't identify with anything from his past in small-town, conservative, Cold War America. And thus he became Bob Dylan. While this point might merely be metaphorical, in many ways he sounds like he is describing a reinvention of himself without regard to his past. If anyone is familiar with some of the ideas I developed in my thesis, one might guess why I find such a proposition puzzling: Can someone feasibly conceptualize oneself divorced from the past to which one's present necessarily refers? My intuition is that such a feat could not be accomplished without some level of psychological discord.

If any of the claims in my thesis bear some resemblance to reality, I think the most promising candidates are found in my discussion of the self, and how it is to be rightly understood. The simplified version goes something like this: The self is no more (or no less) than the narrative that an individual constructs to explain the individual's situation at the present moment. In matters of personal identity, when philosopher's ask what it is that makes a person the same person at t1 and t2, I think the answer is to be found in his or her own narrative. To put it plainly, the self is simply the story that one tells to provide coherence to one's current situation with reference to one's past. And this is where I find difficulty in the intelligibility of Mr. Dylan's story.

In developing my view of the self, I built off of Richard Rorty's philosophy, mostly from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and an essay on what he takes to be Freud's contribution to self understanding, "Freud and Moral Reflection." Rorty sees a normative dimension to the narrative conception of the self. When people are given choices on how to act or what to do in a given situation, they should ask themselves: "What kind of action would I perform that would make for a story I would like to tell later?" or "If I do this rather than that, what kind of story would I have to tell about myself later?" [Editor's note: Though this looks (and is) rather subjective, Rorty's pragmatism precludes options that would result in the suffering of others. To be brief, these kinds of questions relate to the development of one's self, and pertain to projects of private self-fulfillment. Rorty sees nothing incongruous between such projects and those of social solidarity, i.e., those of ethical/political spheres.] I will admit that a logical contradiction does not seem to arise in what Rorty takes to be essential to the self and what Robert Zimmerman, a.k.a. Bob Dylan, claims to have done. It seems logically possible to say that Robert Zimmerman looked at the narrative that led to a particular moment, at which point he said: "From hereon, I am Bob Dylan, and I want the story I tell later to contain no elements of Robert Zimmerman's life." But logic and experience rarely match up as neatly as we might like.

Elsewhere in Rorty's political philosophy, he speaks of the importance of a certain kind of nationalism. Rorty's nationalism is one that recognizes the failures of the past, but calls for the individual to identify with the kind of liberal democracy he or she wants to achieve; this nationalism assumes that such national allegiance will translate to a commitment that inspires proactive involvement in a better future. Implicit in this conception of nationalism (I think) is a subscription to a narrative conception of national identity: The nation is no more (or no less) than the narrative constructed to explain the nation's situation at the present moment. Achieving desirable ends seems improbable without recognition of the nation's past. Practical adjustments to national failures seem wholly unrealizable without such recognition. So should we expect anything less from the self?

This is my intuition that stems not from logical conclusions but experiential premises: A decision to reinvent oneself is necessarily predicated on a past that would make such a decision intelligible. Therefore a total disavowal of that past is unintelligible. For why would one feel the need to reinvent oneself, from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan, in the absence of a prior story that doesn't jibe with the story one wants to tell in the future? If this reinvention attempts to erase the past that provides its explanation, how can one not feel a sense of alienation from oneself? It would be as if someone creates an artificial break in a narrative and attempts to render coherent a life lived without precedent. Would it not be better to acknowledge and own the past that led to such a decision, rather than attempt to divorce oneself from oneself? I admit that my hang-ups on these issues reflect the sense of alienation I experienced in my past endeavors to reinvent myself in ways inconsistent with the life I led prior. Based on my own personal experience, I wonder if there exists some substratum of beliefs and values that is so entrenched in our narratives that any attempt to reinvent the self in ways incongruous will only result in alienation or anxiety. Regardless, I wonder if there isn't something more universal here than my own personal experience. Or maybe, as Scot Kotterbay would say, I'm just smoking crack.