Between Minimal Self and Narrative Self: A Husserlian Analysis of Person

Summary

The minimal self is the immediate sense of ownership over one's experiences, while the narrative self is a more elaborate identity built through stories. This article argues that these two concepts are compatible and complementary, not opposed. To clarify their relationship, the author draws on Husserl's concept of the person, focusing on ideas of position-taking, habitualities, and overall style. This analysis shows how the self is embedded in its environment, relationships, and past, and is both passively constituted and actively shaped. The person thus mediates between the minimal self's perspectival ownership and the narrative self's authorship.

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Abstract

ABSTRACT The distinction between minimal self and narrative self has gained ground in recent discussions of selfhood. In this article, this distinction is reassessed by analysing Zahavi and Gallagher’s account of selfhood and supplementing it with Husserl’s concept of person. I argue that Zahavi and Gallagher offer two compatible and complementary notions of self. Nevertheless, the relationship between minimal self and narrative self requires further clarification. Especially the embeddedness of self, the interplay between passivity and activity, and the problems of uniqueness and persistence are better understood with Husserl’s analysis of person and its central concepts of position-taking, habitualities, and overall style. The embeddedness of self is elucidated by outlining how person is related to its environment, to other people, and to its past. This relational notion of self is both passively constituted and actively shaped: person mediates between minimal self characterized by perspectival ownership and narrative self based on authorship.

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