The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281

Narrative self-constitution as embodied practice
Katsunori Miyahara (Hokkaido University, kmiyahara@chain.hokudai.ac.jp)
Shogo Tanaka (Tokai University, shg.tanaka@gmail.com)

Abstract
Narrative views of the self argue that we constitute our self in self-narratives. Embodied views
hold that our self is shaped through embodied experiences. In that case, what is the relation
between embodiment and narrativity in the process of self-constitution? The question demands
a clear definition of embodiment, but existing studies remains unclear on this point (section 2).
We offer a correction to this situation by drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the body thathighlights its habituality. On this account, the body has an inherent tendency to cultivate anorganisation of habits through its history of engagement with the world (section 3). Next, we
explore its role in narrative self-constitution by distinguishing between two aspects of thenarrative self, the narrated I and the narrating I (section 4). We argue on phenomenologicalgrounds that self-narratives are informed by bodily perspectives in both respects. Furthermore,a focus on the habituality of the body allows for a better explanation of self-constitution thanthose based on implicit self-narratives (section 5). For these phenomenological and theoreticalreasons, we conclude that narrative self-constitution is an embodied and embedded practice(section 6).
Keywords: Self, embodiment, narrative identity, habituality, self-narrative, Merleau-Ponty

1. Introduction
In contrast to the Cartesian conception of the ego as an immaterial and timeless entity, current
theories of the self consider it to be something that emerges and develops over time through a
subject’s active engagement with the world (Bermúdez et al., 1998; Fuchs et al., 2010;
Gallagher, 2011; Siderits et al., 2011). This raises a problem. How should we understand theprocess through which the self emerges and develops over time? That is, how do we explain
the constitution of the self?
Two kinds of explanations prevail in the extant literature. One comes from what are
known as narrative views of the self (e.g., Bruner, 2004; Ricoeur, 1990/1992; Schechtman,
1

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
1996; see Schechtman, 2011 for an overview). On this view, selves are narrative entities. We
actively construct our selfhood and become who we are by developing self-narratives, that is,
by telling stories about ourselves. The other kind of explanation focuses on the role of embodied
actions. Several authors suggest that we develop our self-identity as an embodied subject
through bodily interactions with the world (e.g., Bermúdez et al., 1998; Cassam, 2011;
Gallagher, 2000). These two kinds of explanations are not incompatible. In fact, an intuitively
appealing view emerges when they are put together: we construct our selfhood as if we arecharacters in a story, but we are also embodied subjects embedded in the material world(Newen, 2018).
But then how do these two aspects work together to constitute a seemingly unified self?
Some authors have argued that an embodied sense of self is a precondition for developing anarrative self-conception (e.g., Menary, 2008; Thornton, 2004; Zahavi, 2014). Others argue
that the body interacts dynamically with our self-narrative to shape our self-identity over time(e.g., Brandon, 2016; Dings, 2019; Mackenzie, 2014). However, these studies leave the precise
nature of embodiment or the body largely underspecified. This is unfortunate because we would
certainly not achieve a clear understanding of the relation between embodiment and narrativity
in self-constitution without a clear understanding of embodiment.
In this paper, we will offer a correction to this situation by highlighting the habitualityof the body. By this, we mean the inherent tendency of the body to cultivate habits through its
history of interaction with the world. We shall draw on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to
explain what this entails and argue based on it that narrative self-constitution is an embodied
practice.
Our account will not exhaust the whole story about the relationship between
embodiment and narrativity in self-constitution. We shall claim that cultivated habits play a
crucial role in the constitution of the narrative self, but there also ways in which the bodycontribute to self-narratives that are not clearly related to its habitual character. For example,
traumatic experiences, which are far from habitual, can forcefully lend themselves to selfnarratives (Køster 2017a). We should make it clear from the outset that our aim in this paper is
not so much to fully illuminate the embodiment-narrative nexus as to show that we can better

2

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
understand a key aspect of this complex structure by getting clear about the nature ofembodiment.1
The paper is structured as follows. In section 2, we overview recent accounts that focus
on the coordination between embodiment and narrativity in the constitution of the self. Many
appreciate the role of embodiment in the constitution of the narrative self, but these accounts,
we suggest, remain suggestive and require further elaboration. We then proceed to develop a
more embodied conception of narrative self-constitution in the next two sections. The first stepis to gain a clearer understanding of the nature of embodiment or the body. To this end, insection 3, we introduce Merleau-Ponty’s account of the habituality of the body. Based on thisconception the body, in section 4, we elaborate on its contribution in the process of narrative
self-constitution. We do so by drawing an important distinction between two aspects of thenarrative self: the narrated I and the narrating I. In section 5, we augment our thesis bydiscussing its theoretical advantages over prominent views that emphasise the role of implicit
narratives in the constitution of the self.

2. Embodiment and narrative in self-constitution
There are several proposals on how narrative self-conception and embodiment contribute to
the constitution of the self. Following Priscilla Brandon (2016), we can divide them broadly
into two groups: unidirectional and interactive accounts (see also Dings, 2019).
According to unidirectional accounts, narrative self-constitution depends on embodied
experiences, but not the other way round. Consider Shaun Gallagher’s (2000) influential
distinction between “minimal self” and “narrative self”. With this distinction, Gallagher
contrasts between the role of embodiment and self-narratives in relation to the temporal

1

Recently developed pattern theories of self hold that multiple factors such as bodily processes,

pre-reflective self-awareness, behavioral habits and skills, social and intersubjective factors,
cognitive factors, self-narratives, ecological relations, and normative factors, also contribute to
the constitution of our selves (Gallagher, 2013, forthcoming; Newen, 2018). On these accounts,
self is not so much a static configuration of these multiple factors as a “dynamical gestalt”(Gallagher, forthcoming) that emerges from complicated interactions among them. Our
exploration into the embodiment-narrativity nexus highlighting the habituality of the body canbe seen as articulating one dimension of this dynamic configuration of self-patterns.
3

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
character of the self. The minimal self refers to the “immediate subject of experience,
unextended in time” (Gallagher, 2000, p. 15, emphasis added). It is already present in andshaped through pre-reflective embodied engagements with the world. In contrast, the narrative
self is “the more or less coherent self (or self-image) that is constituted with a past and a futurein the various stories that we and others tell about ourselves” (Gallagher, 2000, p. 15, emphasis
added). We come to conceive of ourselves as temporally persistent beings by producing a
coherent story out of our embodied experiences. Thus, embodiment forms a prerequisite forthe construction of narrative self-conceptions.
Richard Menary (2008) advances a similar unidirectional proposal (see also Thornton,
2003; Zahavi, 2014). In contrast to Gallagher, Menary claims that embodied experiences, likeperception and action, already have some degree of temporal structure (viz., “minimal
embodied narratives”) (Menary, 2008, p. 79). Since perception and action unfold over time,
the subject of these experiences is not strictly speaking “unextended in time”. We experience
ourselves pre-reflectively as subjects that retain their identity over the process. But this does
not suffice to base our self-conception as a subject that persists over a longer stretch of timecomprising multiple episodes of perceptions and actions. For Menary, this self-conception is
produced through narrative self-constitution. We gain it upon reflection by “find[ing] ameaningful form or structure in [the] sequence of experiences” (Menary, 2008, p. 76). By thesame token, the narrative self requires embodiment insofar as self-narratives “are constructed
out of a sequence of embodied experiences and perceptions” (Menary, 2008, p. 83).
Interactive accounts paint a more dynamic picture of the relationship between
embodied experiences and narrative self-conceptions (e.g., Brandon, 2016; Dings, 2019;
Jongepier, 2016; Mackenzie, 2014). For example, Roy Dings thinks of the interrelation
between embodied experiences and narrative self-conceptions in two ways. First, narrative selfconceptions do not just draw on embodied experiences as “building blocks” for a self-narrative,
but they also shape our bodily responsiveness to the world. Dings calls this process “narrative
self-programming” (2019, p. 194). Second, embodied experiences also inform our narrative
self-understanding. In particular, our bodily experiences can affect our narrative self by
motivating us to reflect on our narrative self-conceptions (Dings, 2019, pp. 196–197). Thus,
narrative self-conceptions are not simply constructed out of embodied experiences. Rather, “weneed to take a diachronic approach and acknowledge that narrative affects embodiment which
in turn affects narrative which in turn affects embodiment and so on” (Dings, 2019, p. 203,emphasis in original). Embodiment and self-narrative exhibit a “dynamic and recursiveinterplay” (Dings, 2019, p. 203).
4

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
For the interactionists, embodiment and narrativity are not simply two co-existing
aspects of the self. Rather, they are deeply interwoven such that the body plays a fundamentalrole in the constitution of the narrative self. However, their account of the role of the body is
strikingly underdeveloped. For example, Dings (2019) rightly indicates that the body can nudge
subjects to reflect upon their narrative self-understanding. However, it remains unclear whether
and how the body might be involved in the constitution of a narrative self-understanding in thefirst place.
Some accounts are more attentive to the role of the body (Butler and Gallagher, 2018;
Køster 2017b; 2017c; Mackenzie, 2009; Meyers 2014). Self-narratives appear to play a keyrole in the development of a self-conception that represents oneself as a subject that persist
over time, a temporal being (Gallagher, 2000). However, as some suggest, this does not meanthat our self-conception as a temporal being is constituted exclusively in self-narratives. For
example, Allan Køster (2017c) challenges the conventional conception of “personal history”
that identifies it with the subject’s self-narrative. Denying that narrative is “the only
conceivable mode of temporal structuring of experience” (Køster, 2017c, p. 176), he argues
that we each constitute ourselves as a “temporal being” both reflectively by making sense of
our past experiences and pre-reflectively through our history of bodily engagements with theworld (see also Mackenzie, 2009).
Køster presses the point by drawing on the phenomenological notion of sedimentation.
Sedimentation designates the “structuring principle” under which stable structures emerge outof contingent, temporal, historical processes (Køster, 2017c, p. 176). For instance, we develop
a sense of familiarity with places and people after engaging with them repeatedly. This senseof familiarity does not arise out of a reflective comparison between the present and the past.
Rather, we usually come to feel familiar simply through spending enough time in certain places
and with certain people. If so, our pre-reflective experience of the world is not strictly
constrained to the present. Instead, it already bears a meaningful relationship with the past evenwhen we are not explicitly aware of it. Put differently, the self is already implicated in theexperience as a temporal being prior to any narrative reflection. It bears a historical perspective
formed (or sedimented) through its embodied engagement with the world. According to Køster,
there is a dimension of “embodied selfhood that is prior to narrative configuration, butnonetheless concretely individuated through personal history” (2017c, p. 173).
However, further elaboration is necessary to better understand the coordination between
embodiment and self-narrative in the constitution of the self. It seems that we can distinguishbetween “two senses of self, one as an embodied experiencer of and actor in the world and the5The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
other as a narrator of those experiences and actions [...] from a first-person point of view”(Menary 2008, p. 66). But then how should we understand their relationship in the context ofnarrative self-constitution? Køster proposes that we develop a narrative self-conception“through a process of narrating the narratable” (2017b, p. 905, emphasis in original) among
our embodied experiences. In our view, however, this answer remains too schematic. It does
not tell us much about the concrete ways in which narrative self-constitution is constrained andinformed by the subject’s embodiment.
In the following, we attempt to advance our understanding of the role of embodimentin narrative self-constitution precisely by offering a concrete story in this respect. Philosophicalresearch on this topic intensively debates the relation between embodiment and narrativity.
However, it has left it largely underspecified what embodiment exactly means. This isproblematic. How could we achieve a theoretical understanding of the role of embodiment
without being clear about the nature of embodiment or the body in the first place? We need tobetter understand the nature of the body to explain its intricate relationship with self-narratives.
We think that the key notion here is habituality. The body has an inherent tendency todevelop habits through its history of engagement with the world. Accordingly, embodied
agents do not simply live in the here and now. Their experience always already involves
meaningful temporal relationships with the past and future. This conception of the body willallow us to clarify the effects of embodiment on the narrative self and the practice of selfnarration. Fleshing out these claims will be the task of the next two sections.

3. Habit and habituality of the body
Historically, habits have often been recognised as playing a significant role in the formation ofcharacter and selfhood (Carlisle 2014). This is why Køster (2017c) highlights the habitualityof the body in the constitution of the historical self, the self that exceeds a personal history
contained in self-narratives. However, the relation between the habituality of the body and thenarrative self remains obscure. Do habits simply form a basic layer of the self that exceeds thenarrative self? Or do they have a positive role to play in the constitution of a narrative self?
And, if so, what kind of role might this be? Answering these questions will grant a clearer
understanding of the relationship between embodiment and self-narratives in the constitutionof the self.
In this section, we therefore clarify what we mean by habits and by the habituality ofthe body. We argue that habits constitute our general relationship with the world. Furthermore,
6

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
the habituality of the body––the body’s inherent tendency to develop an organisation of habits––implies that the body is capable of constituting a general perspective on the world. We explore
how this “bodily perspective” (Mackenzie 2009) contributes to the constitution of the narrative
self in the next section.2
Let us begin by considering habits in relation to actions. There is broad consensus in
the literature that habits are structures that generate embodied actions. Yet, as Bill Pollard notes,
habits are also “acquired through the repetition of a certain kind of action in certain
characteristic circumstances” (2006, p. 77). Clare Carlisle captures the circular relationshipbetween habits and actions nicely:[H]abit can be either a source or a result of actions. We sometimes say that we act ‘outof habit’, implying that habit is a cause; but we can also recognize that habits arethemselves brought into being through the repetition of an action or experience. Indeed,
habit can be both the source and the result of action, so that it is self-perpetuating.
(Carlisle, 2014, p. 7; see also Carlisle, 2006, p. 77)
There is also a broad agreement that actions performed out of habit are largely non-deliberativeand non-reflective. Suppose you move to a foreign country where the custom is to take off yourshoes when entering someone’s home. In the beginning, you will need to remind yourself totake off your shoes every time you enter someone’s home. However, once you are habituatedto the practice, you will do so without thinking much about it. Behaviours that once required
careful deliberation or reflective attention can thus develop into habits. As Pollard puts it, “oncehabituation is complete, [...] [n]o deliberation, decision, choice or monitoring need take place”(2006, p. 78).
However, beyond this abstract level of agreement, different authors specify the conceptof habit in different ways. Xabier Barandiaran and Ezequiel Di Paolo (2014) identify two typesof accounts in the history of philosophy. On the one hand, there are associationist views, which
regard habit as a mechanical structure that associates two simple elements: sensory stimulus
and motor response. As Susana Ramírez-Vizcaya and Tom Froese put it, these accounts tie
habits with “rigid patterns of behavior that are automatically activated by context cues to which

2

Mackenzie (2009) defines the bodily perspective as an “integrated experience of the body”(2009, p. 116). We will use the term in a slightly different sense. For us, it refers to ourperspective on the world grounded in the organization of habits cultivated in our body. We
explain this in more detail in the rest of this section.
7

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
they have become mentally associated as a result of having been frequently repeated in the past
in a stable context” (2019, p. 2).
On the other hand, there are organicist views, which conceive of habits as selforganising teleological structures characteristic of living creatures. Habits do not ‘blindly’
associate sensory stimuli with motor responses. Instead, habits allow living creatures to adapt
to their environment intelligently without laborious deliberation (Miyahara and Robertson,2020). As Daniel Hutto and Ian Robertson put it, habits are “special adaptive tendencies thatmake [living things] disposed––unlike purely mechanical and physical systems––to sensitively
adjust in characteristic ways to the particularities of their situated circumstances” (2020, p.
207).
Merleau-Ponty’s account of the habituality of the body elaborates the organicist view
from a phenomenological perspective. As in other organicist views, Merleau-Ponty denies that
habits consist in automatic processes that associate sensory stimulus with motor action. He
states thatwhat links elementary movements, reactions, and “stimuli” together in habit is not anexternal association. Every mechanical theory runs into the fact that learning process is
systematic: the subject does not weld individual movements to individual stimuli, butrather acquires the power of responding with a certain type of solution to a certain formof situation. (1945/2012, p. 143, emphasis added)
Consider again the habit of taking off your shoes when entering someone’s home. The way inwhich you take off your shoes will vary depending on the context of the situation. These kindsof observations motivate Merleau-Ponty’s view that habits do not consist in external
associations between sensations and movements. Instead, habits enable us to adapt flexibly tosituations without engaging in laborious deliberations. They consist in general dispositions togenerate patterns of responses to patterns of situations. For Merleau-Ponty, as Diana Meyers(2014) puts it, “habit has an agentic dynamic of its own […] thus making improvisation
possible” (p. 145).
However, habits are not reducible to behavioural dispositions on Merleau-Ponty’s
account. Habits are also perceptual and affective in nature because embodied actions areintertwined with perceptual and affective experiences of some concrete situation. Habitualresponses are possible only because we perceive the immediate situation as presenting apreviously encountered pattern. And perceiving the situation in light of a pattern is not an
intellectual operation. For Merleau-Ponty, it is rather what he calls the “motor grasping of a
motor signification” (1945/2012, p. 144). Once habituated to an action, we come to perceive
8

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
certain situations as calling forth a relevant embodied action––one that we have previously
performed in a similar situation. To borrow terminology from ecological psychology, habitsinvolve sensorimotor dispositions to detect and exploit environmental information that specify
the presence of certain affordances (Miyahara et al., 2020).
Moreover, the perception of the situation is affective in nature. We identify a patterned
situation, not by constructing an objective mental representation of the scene, but by
encountering “a typical or familiar physiognomy” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, p. 145).
Habitual actions thus presuppose our knowledge of the significance of the situation. Mostly,
this is not a matter of obtaining propositional knowledge. Rather, it is a matter of having “aknowledge in our hands” or “a knowledge of familiarity” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, p. 145).
We can respond to situations adequately out of our habit thanks to our awareness of what isdemanded by the situation that is built into our perceptual and affective experience.
In short, perception, action, and affect are only conceptually separable. As MerleauPonty puts it, “habit expresses the power we have of dilating our being in the world” (MerleauPonty, 1945/2012, p. 145). That is, rather than reducing to behavioural dispositions, habits
ground our general perspective on and ongoing embeddedness in the world. As Butler andGallagher (2018) also points out, Merleau-Ponty thinks that to acquire a habit is “for our bodies
to assimilate a new meaningful frame of reference” (p. 53).
Another important idea identifiable in Merleau-Ponty’s account is that habits are also
involved in the generation of speech and thought. Speech and thought are commonly
considered to be external to each other. We create thoughts in our mind and then use speech tocommunicate those thoughts. Merleau-Ponty argues, however, that speech is not an externaltranslation of “a ready-made thought”, but rather that “speech accomplishes thought”(1945/2012, p. 183). When you spot an insect and remark “there’s a dragonfly”, you do not
first identify the insect as a dragonfly (in thought), and then proceed to make the remark (inspeech). Speech itself can form an act of recognition. This is why we sometimes mumble toourselves when there is no one around with whom we intend to communicate our thoughts.3

3This is not to deny the possibility of identifying objects without overt speech. Surely, most

adults can identify a dragonfly without saying “there’s a dragonfly”. Yet, even in such cases,
we often perform the identification by generating covert inner speech. Moreover, even if it ispossible to identify objects without inner speech, non-linguistic thoughts need not be involvedin every linguistic expression to make their “ready-made” contents.
9

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
For Merleau-Ponty, speech is “a genuine gesture” (1945/2012, p. 189). It is anembodied act performed in response to a situation. “There’s a dragonfly” is typically uttered ina specific context (such as when spotting a dragonfly hovering above a pond). Like
sensorimotor actions performed out of habit, speech consists in “a certain type of solution to acertain form of situation” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012, p. 143). More specifically, MerleauPonty holds that “the intention to speak can only be found in an open experience” (1945/2012,
p. 202). In other words, we do not use speech to respond to a situation with a speech when weare tightly coupled with it in sensorimotor terms. You will, for example, simply walk along insilence if nothing remarkable happens when you stroll through a park. The intention to speakarises when something significant outside the scope of current sensorimotor engagement
happens.
Merleau-Ponty thus considers language acquisition to be a form of habit acquisition. It
is a matter of developing a habit of responding to situations by thinking and speaking. It isdeveloped in our history of engagement with not only the so-called natural world, but also withothers and their use of what Merleau-Ponty calls “available significations” already establishedin language (1945/2012, p. 189). Merleau-Ponty famously dubbed this pre-establishedrepertoire of significations “spoken speech” (1945/2012, p. 202). Language acquisition thus
consists in developing a linguistic habit through familiarisation with spoken speech. It is a
special case of “enculturation” into a cognitive practice (Fabry, 2018; Menary and Gillett,2022; see also Di Paolo et al., 2018).
This is not to say that speech reduces to the mindless production of a predetermined setof expressions (associated with a predetermined set of situations). As noted, habits enable us
to improvise flexible responses to situations without engaging in deliberations. Linguistic
habits also allow us to improvise thought and speech that is original to the speaking subject. A“new meaningful intention” is flexibly created in response to the relevant situation (MerleauPonty, 1945/2012, p. 189). Merleau-Ponty calls speech based on the creative application of
linguistic habits to some situation “speaking speech”, which he distinguishes from the preestablished repertoire of “spoken speech” (1945/2012, p. 202). An important consequence isthat, while being a decidedly linguistic practice, self-narrative is also an embodied practicegrounded in the habituality of the body.
In sum, on Merleau-Ponty’s account, the body shapes our general relationship with theworld. It generates a general perspective on the world that constrains our ongoingembeddedness in it. It affects our experience with respect to behaviour, perception, affect, and,moreover, thinking and language. It does so based on its inherent habituality, that is, its nature
10

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
to develop an organisation of habits through its history of engagement with the world. Drawing
on this conception of the habituality of the body, in the next section, we will undertake a finegrained phenomenological exploration into the role of embodiment in narrative selfconstitution.

4. Habituality and the constitution of the narrative self
How does the bodily perspective founded on the habituality of the body contribute to theconstitution of the narrative self? We approach this question by first distinguishing between
two aspects of the narrative self. The narrative self is usually understood as the self-conception
we construct by telling stories about ourselves, a self-conception that features oneself as theprotagonist of a self-narrative. However, this does not exhaust our relation to our self-narrative.
Self-narratives are self-referential (Smith and Watson, 2010; Fabry, 2023). They are stories
about a subject who also produces those stories. Therefore, the narrative self can also be
understood as the subject who engages in the practice of self-narration.
As Schechtman (2011) put it, we can take different roles with respect to self-narratives,
such as being a character and being the author (pp. 412–413). Likewise, Hutto and Gallagher(2017) distinguishes between two aspects of the narrative self, “the self who is narrated” and“the self who narrates” (p. 165).4 Narratological studies talk about a similar distinction between
the narrated I and the narrating I (Smith and Watson, 2010). In the following, we shall follow
this latter terminology and discuss the role of the bodily perspective in the constitution of thenarrated I (narrative self-conception, section 4.1) and the narrating I (the subject of selfnarration, section 4.2) in this order.

4.1

Habituality and the narrated I

Stories represent characters as temporal beings that persist over time. It is therefore common
to emphasise the role of self-narratives when explaining the nature of our self-conception as

4Both Schechtman (2011) and Hutto and Gallagher (2016) also point out that we can also takea critical stance on our self-narrative. It is an important question that lies beyond the scope of
this paper to explore what this entails for the relationship between embodiment and narrativity
in self-constitution.
11

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
temporal beings (Gallagher, 2000). The idea is that self-narratives establish a meaningful link
between past experiences and the present. They thereby enable us to identify our current selfwith the subjects of past experiences. However, stories also represent characters as individuals
invested with personal character traits. To borrow terminology from the narrative therapy
literature, our narrative self-conceptions involve “identity conclusions” (White, 2007) that(sometimes misleadingly) describe our nature and character. The narrated I has both
temporality and personality as central features.
This is consistent with the distinction Marya Schechtman (1996) draws between twoquestions regarding the constitution of personal identity: the reidentification question andcharacterisation question. The reidentification question asks how we can identify subjects
existing at two or more points in time as aspects of the same person. The characterisationquestion concerns the material content of the self. It asks how a person develops a personal
character definitive of their identity, viz. “the set of characteristics each person has that makeher the person she is” (Schechtman, 1996, p. 74). The answer, according to Schechtman, is that
personal characters are constituted in self-narratives.
What role might the body play in this context? Sometimes, Schechtman appears toadvance a radical thesis that personal character is constituted exclusively in self-narratives, aposition Menary (2008) dubs the abstract narrative view (we shall discuss Schechtman’s view
further in the next section). By contrast, we would like to defend a more modest thesis that
grants self-narrative a significant yet limited role: With respect to both temporality andpersonality, the narrative self (qua the narrated I) is informed by the organisation of the habitsthat shape our general relationship with the world. As such, the narrated I is not just constituted
in self-narrative. It is also grounded in the habituality of the body.
We can offer two arguments in defence of this claim. First, consider the constitution of
the narrated I as a temporal being. We do not accomplish this by recollecting a random set ofpast experiences, and then establishing a meaningful link between them to form a coherent
story that features a subject that persists over time. Rather, there is typically a pre-existing
habitual pattern to our embodied experiences. When telling a story, this naturally motivates us
to consider ourselves as temporal beings. For example, consider a child with a morning routine.
Every morning, she wakes up, has breakfast, dresses up, packs her backpack, and finally walks
to school. This sequence of events will be so familiar to her that she will usually not evenrecognize it as such. Yet she has an implicit sense of familiarity with it, which will come to theforefront of her awareness (due to its absence) when she is compelled to do things differently.
For example, she will vividly notice it when her parent is sick and cannot execute the routine
12

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
as usual. This implicit sense of familiarity is pervasive in our regular life replete with repeatedpatterns of experiences and actions. As we saw in section 2, it is an affective experience thattypically comes along with the development of stable patterns of interactions with the world.
And it has a feature that deserves special attention for our purpose. That is, it entails that ourexperiences usually involve an implicit reference to the past because we can feel something to
be familiar only in relation to past experiences and actions that have some similarities with it.
Accordingly, when producing self-narratives, we do not need to construct a selfconception as a subject that persists over time ex nihilo, that is, by gluing together a collectionof disparate episodes. Rather, the temporal continuity of the self is already implicit in our
experience thanks to the sense of familiarity and the pre-existing habits that ground them. The
body cultivates stable patterns of interactions through its history of engagement with the world.
The temporal continuity of these patterns confers our experience with a sense of familiarity,and this motivates us to represent ourselves as temporal subjects upon reflection. In short, thenarrated I is usually constituted as a temporal being precisely because it reflects a temporalcontinuity that is already implicit in our experience thanks to the habituality of the body.
Second, consider the constitution of the narrated I as someone invested with a personal
character. Again, we do not come to represent ourselves as someone with a personal characterby making a coherent narrative out of a random set of singular experiences. Rather, the habitualpattern of embodied experience also constrains and informs the material content of our selfnarratives in certain directions. For instance, suppose you have a habit of overpacking for trips.
You will then find this act to be familiar, something you always do, when you prepare for atrip. This sense of familiarity will incline you to describe yourself as someone who tends tooverpack. This reflective thought can make you think of your other habits by association, forexample, that you tend to over-plan your lectures, overstock your refrigerator, and so on, andeventually lead you to conclude that you are an anxious person. 5 You can do this without
necessary listing singular episodes from the past because as Fuchs (2017) points out, “thehabitual body always forms an extract of one’s personal history” (p. 308). In such ways, selfnarratives about personal characters are often constrained and informed by the contents of ourhabits.

5

The habitual pattern that underlies a narrative self-conception (or an identity conclusion) is

often opaque for the subject. Unravelling this hidden background is considered a crucial stepin narrative therapy (White, 2007, pp. 26–27).
13

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
However, this is not to say that our narrative self-conceptions are automaticallydetermined by the habits we have. You are not necessarily an anxious person just because you
tend to overpack. Narrative self-conceptions are constrained and informed by habitual patternsof our day-to-day lives but are not determined unequivocally by them. Accordingly, there isalways the possibility of revising or “re-authoring” (White, 2007) our narrative selfconceptions, which is particularly useful in cases where they have harmful effects on our lives.
Yet, in considering the role of embodiment in narrative self-constitution, neither should weoverlook the fact that narrative self-conceptions are usually strongly constrained and informedby habitual patterns of life shaped through our history of embodied engagement with the world.
Note that by talking about pre-existing habits, we are not suggesting that habits arealways shaped prior to and independent of self-narratives. The process of habit formation isoften mediated by self-narratives (Dings, 2019; Wagner, 2021). Your habit to overpack may
have resulted from this process in the past given that you purposefully aspired to be moreorganised when younger. Yet, it can also pre-exist your attempt to produce a self-narrative.
This might be when a specific instance of self-narration occurred after you developed
the overpacking habit. This is compatible with the observation that there is a “dynamic
interplay” (Dings, 2019, pp. 203–205) between embodiment and narrativity on a larger timescale. Self-narratives can give direction to our patterns of embodied engagement with the world,and hence shape our habits over time. These habits can, in turn, guide our self-narratives incertain directions, thereby shaping our narrative self-conceptions. As such, habits and selfnarratives conjointly make and remake the narrated I over time.

4.2

Habituality and the narrating I

The body also contributes to the constitution of the narrative self by shaping the subjective
perspective of the narrating I. To understand what this means, it is important to stress that selfnarratives are not objective records of everything that has happened in a specific subject’s
experiential life. Rather, they represent past events selectively and subjectively to form a
coherent story (see Bruner, 2004; Heersmink, 2018; Kind, 2015). This means that selfnarratives are open to revision if only within certain limits. This is crucial in the context ofnarrative therapy, where the therapist often encourages patients to re-author their self-narrative
to change their relationship with problems in their life in a way that is more conducive to theirwell-being (cf. White, 2007). This is possible only because self-narratives are made in relation

14

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
to the subjective perspective of the narrating subject (i.e., the narrating I) that is itself subject
to change.
But how does embodiment relate to this process of authoring and re-authoring a selfnarrative? We can start to uncover its effect by exploring the nature of the subjective
perspective. The subjective perspective of the narrating I has two distinguishable aspects.
First, it is shaped by self-narratives. In constructing a self-narrative, we tend to selectpast experiences and make sense of them in line with the story we regularly tell about ourselves.
If you think of yourself as an anxious person, you will be inclined to select those experiencesthat are readily associated with anxiety. There is a certain circularity involved in the process of
self-narration. We construct stories about ourselves by recollecting past experiences, but thosestories, in turn, influence the way we recollect and interpret past experiences to construct stories
about ourselves. As Anthony Rudd (2007) puts it, the existence of a narrative self-conception“is what gives meaning to what I am doing now, and is the basis for my capacity to formulate
explicit narratives about myself when I do so” (p. 63; see also Heersmink, 2018, p. 1833).
Second, the subjective perspective of the narrating I is also embodied in nature. As
Mackenzie (2009) indicates, the subjective perspective consists of a “bodily perspective”:“subjectivity is actively constituted against the background of, and in relation to, the life of thebody, which provides the implicit frame of reference for one’s sense of self” (p. 117). In thecurrent context, it is especially important to notice that self-narration is itself an embodied andembedded practice. In self-narration, we reflect on past experiences and construct a coherent
story out of them. One might then think that self-narration consists in a purely mental act
detached from the first-order flow of experiences. However, this is not necessarily the casewhen we consider the actual practice of self-narrating. Suppose you visit a park with yourpartner. At the park, you suddenly remember that you came here before with him/her, and you
start to talk about that memory. In such ways, we often perform self-narration in response to
an experienced situation. It is not necessarily a detached mental act, but it can also take placein the form of a “genuine gesture” to use Merleau-Ponty’s terminology from section 3.
The bodily dimension of the narrating I shapes the way in which we recollect andsynthesise past experiences in response to a situation. You talk about the past visit to the park
because talking about a shared memory is a pattern of behaviour you have developed throughyour history of interactions with your partner (and with other people). You select a specificepisode from the past and you meaningfully relate it to the present, because you have the habitof recollecting and talking about shared memories with your partner. Self-narration is the
manifestation of a specific kind of linguistic habit––a narrative habit––that involves
15

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
responding to situations by talking and thinking about the relevant past. This is analogous to
how utterances in general can be regarded as manifestations of shared linguistic habits (seesection 3). In other words, self-narration is also a cognitive practice in which we learn toparticipate through the process of enculturation (Fabry, 2018).6
As intimated in section 3, Merleau-Ponty thinks that we respond to a situation withspeech when we are not tightly coupled with it in sensorimotor terms––that is, when thesituation presents us with an open experience. There seems to be a similar structure to selfnarration. Situations that are completely familiar or completely novel typically fail to elicit
story-telling responses. In the former case, we tend to navigate the situation through habituatedpatterns of responses. We have no motive to think reflectively about the past. In the latter case,we tend to focus exclusively on finding the right response to the pertinent situation. This leaves
little room for concurrently thinking about the past and reflecting on ourselves. In contrast, amemory of the past is elicited, and we are moved to produce a self-narrative, when we sense
some degree of familiarity and novelty. To adapt Merleau-Ponty’s expression, we are moved
to engage in reflective story-telling when a situation presents us with an open experience
involving a mix of familiarity and novelty (see also Butler and Gallagher, 2018, pp. 55–56).7
Self-narrating acts are thus comparable to other speech acts in being habit-based
responses to open experiences. That said, obviously not all speech acts are self-narrating acts.
Self-narrating acts are distinctive in their dynamic entanglement with the act of recollection. In
some cases, self-narrating can itself be an act of recollection, such as when you recollect your6

We have used an intersubjective example in which you produce a self-narrative by talking

with another person. However, self-narratives can also be produced individually. Individual
self-narratives are often scaffolded by an ecology of artifacts we construct for ourselves, amemory ecology resulting from “narrative niche construction” (Heersmink, 2018, 2020). Eitherway, producing a self-narrative is an embodied and embedded practice based on our bodily
perspective or habitual patterns of engagement with the world.
7

The situation does not only trigger story-telling. It also guides its contents in certain directions.

Depending on the characteristics of the situation, story-telling develops around similarities anddifferences between the present and the past. Your conversation with your partner can centre
around how life has changed since you last visited together, but also around how some things
remain the same.
16

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
previous visit to the park by talking about it in response to the situation. In addition,
recollections can invite further story-telling. When we recollect past episodes, they canmotivate us to extend our current story-telling in a coherent way. When remembering yourprevious visit to the park, you might remark that you did not have a child back then. This kindof development in story-telling can then motivate further recollections (with their relevant
contents). By remarking on it, you might call memories strongly related to the prior absence ofthe child. You might think about how you visited a bar that evening, and how it is not easy to
do so anymore because of the child. In recollection, we are thus often aware of past episodesin terms of affordances for self-narrating acts. When performed, self-narrating acts then invite
further recollections that open up a renewed “landscape of affordances” (Rietveld & Kiverstein,2014) for additional story-telling. Self-narratives develop dynamically over time driven by theco-evolution of recollection and self-narration.
It is tempting to think that producing a self-narrative is a matter of reviewing the
temporal flow of experience and then constructing a story from a detached subjective
perspective. However, in practice, self-narrating is an embodied activity embedded in thespatial and temporal unfolding of experience. This practice is informed by the narrative andbodily perspective of the narrating I. This is important for our thesis: insofar as the subjective
perspective of the narrating I is generated through one’s history of embodied interaction withthe world, the practice of narrative self-constitution is grounded in the habituality of the body.
Let us close this section by considering one well-founded worry. One might respond to
our proposal by saying that narrative habit is not so much bodily, but rather a mental habit of
the mind, a habit to recollect past episodes relevant to a given situation. In that case, even if it
is right to say that narrative self-constitution is a habitual practice, it will not follow that it isan embodied practice grounded in the habituality of the body.
We find this mentalistic conception of narrative habits problematic. It might appear
convincing if we frame it exclusively in mental terms as a habit to recollect and interpret thesignificance of past episodes. However, the practice of self-narrating often involves bodily
processes, such as talking or writing about past experiences and actions. Moreover, as MerleauPonty suggests, these bodily processes do not simply accompany purely mental processes ofrecollection and interpretation but are often constitutive of these mental activities. That said,
we are acutely aware that the nature of narrative habits remains underdeveloped in the current
discussion. Therefore, our current proposal indicates that if we want to better understand therole of embodiment in narrative self-constitution, further investigation is necessary regarding
the nature of narrative habits, their role in self-narrating, and their relation to our embodiment.
17

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
5. Implicit narratives and the habituality of the body
We have proposed understanding the role of the body in the constitution of the narrative self
by focusing on its inherent habituality. The body develops organisations of habits through its
history of interaction with the world. These habits ground our general relationship––a bodily
perspective––towards the world (section 3). This bodily perspective contributes to the narrative
self in a twofold manner: (1) it forms the basis of the temporality and personality of thenarrated I (see section 4.1) and (2) it constitutes the subjective perspective of the narrating I
that grounds the embodied and embedded practice of self-narration (see section 4.2). Our
primary motivation for this view has been phenomenological. Our argument is premised on aclose examination of narrative self-constitution from the subjective point of view. In thissection, we further motivate this idea by highlighting its theoretical advantage.
A question that naturally arises concerns the reach of narrativity. We appear to develop
personal characters without necessarily telling stories about ourselves. You might be ananxious person for a variety of reasons; it is not necessarily because you consider yourself assuch in your self-narrative. You might consider yourself an anxious person because you findyourself to be an anxious person upon self-reflection. What should we make of this observation
when it comes to the question of determining the respective roles of the body and self-narratives
in the constitution of the self?
It is tempting to think that our personal characters initially develop separately from ourself-narratives. Self-narratives then play a supplementary role in the constitution of the self.
Alternatively, we might think that self-narratives are implicitly operative before we engage in
explicit acts of self-narration. Personal characters that appear to be in place when we explicitly
reflect on ourselves might be produced by prior implicit self-narrations outside the scope of
conscious awareness. This idea is elaborated in the works of Schechtman (1996; 2007; see also
Jongepier, 2014; Rudd, 2007). On her influential narrative self-constitution view, “a person’s
identity [...] is constituted by the content of her self-narrative, and the traits, actions, andexperiences included in it are, by virtue of that inclusion, hers” (Schechtman, 1996, p. 94).
Furthermore, self-narratives can be both explicit and implicit. More than “the explicit tellingof one’s life story [is] involved in having a narrative self-conception” (Schechtman, 1996, p.
113).
Our personal characters involve what Schechtman calls our “general orientation toward
the world” (1996, p. 111). This orientation shapes the way we navigate through life in a global
manner. It is not something equipped from birth and then fixed for the rest of life. Rather, it is18

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
something that we develop over time through our daily interactions with the world.
Furthermore, a general orientation does not originate in explicit self-narratives. It cannonetheless inform our explicit narrative self-conception (Schechtman, 1996, p. 116). Consider
a person with an entrenched feeling of financial insecurity. It is not a static feature she wasborn with. Instead, it is a character developed dynamically through her history of interaction
with the world. For example, she has developed it because she spent her childhood in poverty.
It then confers a coherent pattern on her experiences and actions across a wide range ofsituations. Finally, the person can come to conceive of herself as having an entrenched anxiety
about financial insecurity by reflecting on her experiences and actions.
Schechtman thinks that a general orientation towards the world results from “implicit
self-narratives” (1996, p. 115). An implicit narrative “is understood as the psychologicalorganization from which [one’s] experience and actions are actually flowing” (Schechtman,
1996, p. 115). An implicit narrative forms “a dynamic set of organizing principles, a basic
orientation through which, with or without conscious awareness, an individual understands
himself and his world” (Schechtman, 1996, p. 116). One might think of having an entrenchedfeeling of insecurity as a pre-narrative personal character, but for Schechtman, it is a character
trait constituted by an implicit self-narrative.
There are several considerations that make this account attractive (although defendersof the notion of implicit self-narratives are not always explicit in this respect). To begin with,
self-narratives generate coherent self-conceptions (Gallagher, 2000). These self-conceptions
allow us to understand and interact with the world in a coherent manner over time. This makes
it tempting to suppose that self-narratives underlie our basic orientation toward the world, anorientation that confers a coherent pattern to our interactions with the world. Moreover, theimplicit character of the self-narrative at issue explains how these basic orientations can be inplace prior to explicit narrative self-conceptions. Furthermore, self-narratives develop overtime. We update our self-narratives as we accumulate new experiences and develop new
relationships with others over time. This coheres with the idea that our basic orientations
towards the world is dynamic in nature, something that develops over time in response to ourhistory of interaction with the world.
Consider again the person with the entrenched feeling of financial insecurity. Over time,
she might develop a self-narrative that features her as the protagonist (with an entrenchedfeeling of financial insecurity). This occurs as she interprets past experiences and actions
implicitly (without conscious awareness) as affirming her anxiety over financial insecurity. By
being incorporated into her implicit narrative self-conception, the entrenched sense of financial
19

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
insecurity shapes the ways in which she experiences herself and the world in a global manner.
This is not unlike how when we incorporate a social role in our explicit narrative selfconception, this starts to shape our relationship with ourselves, other people, and the world ina global manner. This enables her to further incorporate this trait into her explicit narrative selfconception. She can do so when she articulates and acknowledges it on conscious reflection as
one aspect of her basic orientation towards the world.
This is not to say that we constantly take these two steps in building explicit narrative
self-conceptions. We seldom engage in self-reflection to articulate our own character in thecourse of everyday life. Explicit self-narration is rather the exception rather than the norm. This
is why Schechtman thinks that self-narratives are mostly implicit. Self-narration is “a largely
implicit process that manifests itself mostly in the quality of our experience and the choicesthat we make” (Schechtman, 2011, p. 407).
These considerations might lead us to conclude that our basic orientation towards theworld is first-and-foremost defined by implicit self-narratives. However, Schechtman’s
account of implicit self-narrative involve two critical problems. The first problem concerns its
psychological reality. For Schecthman, our experiences and actions are largely shaped by amental organization that operates below the level of conscious awareness and has a narrative
structure. To establish this view, she would need to provide “a substantive account of thesenotions, and some credible evidence for believing that such phenomena exist” (Hutto, 2016, p.
38). However, she remains obscure on this score.
The second problem concerns its conceptual cogency. Narratives are first and foremost
public entities that we tell ourselves and to each other by using language (Menary, 2008, p. 71).
Furthermore, self-narratives are usually understood as a specific form of representation ofremembered past events. Fabry (2023) identifies some conceptual requirements for something
to be a self-narrative. But she argues the psychological organization Schechtman refers to as“implicit self-narrative” fails to satisfy them. In other words, explicit and implicit selfnarratives are widely different in their nature except for the fact that they both play a role inshaping our experience and action. In that case, however, it is questionable whether we should
understand the psychological organization that defines our general orientation toward the world
as a form of self-narrative at all. As Fabry (2023) puts it, “calling them self-narrative means tooperate with a very weak notion of ‘self-narrative’ to the point that the very idea of selfnarrativity becomes otiose” (p. 16).
We suspect that the notion of an implicit narrative is motivated by a false inference. It
is tempting to think that the “psychological organizations from which [one’s] experiences and
20

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
action are actually flowing” (Schechtman, 2011, p. 115) already have narrative forms because
they can be incorporated into explicit narratives upon reflection. They are articulable innarrative form. However, we cannot infer from the fact that something is articulable in one
form to the conclusion that it is already in said form prior to articulation. This is so in the same
way that we cannot infer from the fact that a statue can be sculpted out of rock that it was
already present in the rock before being sculpted out.8 Our basic orientation to the world canbe articulable in narrative form without already bearing that form.
One might think that we need to posit implicit self-narratives because there are no otherways to account for our basic orientation towards the world. We contend that this challenge
can be met with recourse to the habituality of the body. We have already seen that the body
shapes our general relationship with the world based on its history of interactions with theworld in virtue of its inherent tendency to cultivate habits. We can think of the basic orientation
towards the world in question as corresponding to the general relationship grounded in the
habituality of the body. Moreover, the body cultivates organizations of habits spontaneously
without relying on reflective acts. This explains why our basic orientation towards the world isalready in place prior to explicit acts of self-narration. Furthermore, habits generally develop
dynamically over time. This coheres with the idea that our basic orientation towards the world
emerges and develops dynamically over time.
Consider again the person from the previous example who was raised in poverty. She
engages in corresponding patterns of interactions in her day-to-day activities in such a way thatover time they become entrenched in her habits. Then these habits come to shape thecharacteristic ways in which she understands and navigates the world. For example, she
experiences her financial situation as precarious even when she is relatively well off and makedecisions based on that fact. She can further develop an explicit narrative self-conception witha corresponding content on reflection. She then identifies herself as someone with a basic
orientation towards the world that is largely defined by an entrenched anxiety about financial

8

Meyers (2014) makes a similar claim. Suppose you infer that your “lived bodily experience[…] must have had an implicative narrative form” because you could tell a story about it. “Butif so”, she writes, “saying that the lived body possesses an implicit narrative form amounts tonothing more than saying that lived bodily experience is susceptible to being narrated as a partof the life of a person” (p. 149).
21

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
insecurity. However, she does not need to produce a self-narrative beforehand to develop ageneral relationship with the world.
In response, one might say that this is exactly what Schechtman means by implicit
narratives. Her suggestion is not that we implicitly interpret our experiences and actions todevelop a general orientation of the world. Rather, one might say, it is precisely this kind ofprocess enabled by the habituality of the body in which we cultivate a general relationship withthe world that she is referring to as implicit narratives (cf. Jongepier, 2016). In that case,however, as we saw above, it is unclear what is exactly narrative about implicit narratives.
There is also the concern that the label “implicit narratives” might obscure the bodily origin of
the general relationship with the world that develops prior to explicit self-narration. Theseworries may not be insurmountable, but at least for now, there are no strong reasons to endorse
this conciliatory proposal and preserve the concept of implicit narrative in the theory.
In sum, our personal identity is not solely determined by explicit narrative selfconceptions. Defenders of narrative views of the self, like Schechtman, accommodate this byappealing to implicit narratives. However, as argued, this construct is questionable both interms of its psychological reality and conceptual cogency. By acknowledging the habitualityof the body, we can explain how personal identity is not solely determined by explicit narrative
self-conceptions without introducing implicit narratives. This gives us an additional reason tothink that narrative self-constitution is a process that is heavily informed by our embodiment.

6. Conclusion
In this paper, we have claimed that narrative self-constitution is an embodied practice. While
many acknowledge that the self is both narrative and embodied, existing accounts remain
unclear about the role of embodiment in narrative self-constitution (section 2). We haveproposed a concrete account on this issue by clarifying the nature of embodiment drawing on
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the habituality of the body and by offering a fine-grained descriptionof narrative self-constitution in practice. For Merleau-Ponty, the body has an inherent tendency
to cultivate an organisation of habits through its history of interaction with the world. Thisgrounds our general pre-reflective relationship with the world (section 3). Merleau-Ponty’s
analysis sheds light on how the effect of embodiment permeates the practice of narrative selfconstitution.
We also drew a distinction between two aspects of the narrative self: the narrated I andthe narrating I. The narrated I (our self-conception as a protagonist in a self-narrative) is
22

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
characterised by its temporality and personality (section 4.1). Narrative views of the selfconsider both to be constituted in self-narratives. By contrast, we suggest that they are informed
and constrained by pre-existing habits emerging from our history of interaction with the world.
The narrating I refers to the fact that we are also the authors of self-narratives (section 4.2).
Self-narratives are generated from the subjective perspective of the narrating I, which isinformed both by pre-existing self-narratives and by pre-existing organisation of habits.
Among them are narrative habits that ground the way we constitute ourselves in self-narratives,
which is itself an embodied practice embedded in a situation. The practice of narrative selfconstitution is grounded in the habituality of the body in this twofold manner.
We also argued that our embodied practice account of narrative self-constitution has atheoretical advantage over narrative views that advocate for implicit self-narratives (section 5).
Implicit narratives purport to account for how personal identity starts to develop before explicit
self-narratives are in place. But implicit narratives are questionable both in terms of their
psychological reality and conceptual cogency. We have argued that acknowledging thehabituality of the body is the appropriate way forwards in this regard. We develop our basic
orientation towards the world by developing organizations of habits. Self-narratives, either
explicit or implicit, are not required in this process.
For the above phenomenological and theoretical reasons, we conclude that narrative
self-constitution is neither detached from nor tenuously related with embodied processes.
Instead, narrative self-constitution is an embedded practice pervasively permeated by theeffects of embodiment. It is a practice grounded in the habituality of the body.

Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper have been presented in various occasions, including the 1st
Hokkaido-Tartu Philosophy Workshop, Tokyo Forum of Analytic Philosophy (University ofTokyo), Cognition and the Self: Traditions and Dialogues (National Taiwan University), andan Attention and Narrative Self (ANS) reading group meeting. We thank the participants ofthese occasions for their helpful feedback. Research for this paper was supported by the JSPS
KAKEN “Developing a habit-centred paradigm of philosophy and science of mind”(20K00001), “The Embodied Self: From Minimal to Narrative” (20H04094), and “Developing
an enactive epistemology and ontology: Affectivity, autonomy, and consciousness”(23K00001).

23

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
References
Barandiaran, X. E., & Di Paolo, E. A. (2014). A genealogical map of the concept of habit.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 522.
Bermúdez, J. L., Eilan, N., & Marcel, A. (Eds.). (1998). The body and the self. MIT Press.
Brandon, P. (2016). Body and self: An entangled narrative. Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences, 15(1), 67–83.
Bruner, J. (2004). Life as narrative. Social Research: An International Quarterly, 71(3), 691–
710.
Butler, M. G., & Gallagher, S. (2018). Habits and the diachronic structure of the self. In A.
Altobrando, T. Niikawa, & R. Stone (Eds.), The realizations of the self (pp. 47–63). Palgrave
Macmillan.
Carlisle, C. (2006). Becoming and un-becoming: The theory and practice of Anatta.
Contemporary Buddhism, 7(1), 75–89.
Carlisle, C. (2014). On habit. Routledge.
Cassam, Q. (2011). The embodied self. In S. Gallagher (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of the self
(pp. 139–156). Oxford University Press.
Dings, R. (2019). The dynamic and recursive interplay of embodiment and narrative identity.
Philosophical Psychology, 32(2), 186–210.
Di Paolo, E. A., Cuffari, E. C., & De Jaegher, H. (2018). Linguistic bodies: The continuity
between life and language. MIT press.
Fabry, R. E. (2018). Enculturation and narrative practices. Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences, 17(5), 911–937.
Fabry, R. E. (2023). What is self-narrative?. Inquiry, DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2023.2177338
Fuchs, T. (2017). Self across time: the diachronic unity of bodily existence. Phenomenology
and the Cognitive Sciences, 16, 291-315.
Fuchs, T., Sattel, H., & Henningsen, P. (Eds.). (2010). The embodied self: Dimensions,coherence and disorders. Schattauer.
Gallagher, S. (2000). Philosophical conceptions of the self: Implications for cognitive science.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(1), 14–21.
Gallagher, S. (Ed.). (2011). The Oxford handbook of the self. Oxford University Press.
Gallagher, S. (2013) A pattern theory of self. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 443.
Gallagher, S. (forthcoming) The self and its disorders. Oxford University Press.

24

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
Heersmink, R. (2018). The narrative self, distributed memory, and evocative objects.
Philosophical Studies, 175(8), 1829–1849.
Heersmink, R. (2020). Narrative niche construction: Memory ecologies and distributed
narrative identities. Biology & Philosophy, 35(5), 1–23.
Hutto, D. D. (2016). Narrative self-shaping: A modest proposal. Phenomenology and the
Cognitive Sciences, 15(1), 21–41.
Hutto, D. D., & Gallagher, S. (2017). Re-Authoring narrative therapy: Improving ourselfmanagement tools. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 24(2), 157–167.
Hutto, D. D., & Robertson, I. (2020). Clarifying the character of habits: Understanding what
and how they explain. In F. Caruana & I. Testa (Eds.), Habits: Pragmatist approaches from
cognitive science, neuroscience, and social theory (pp. 204–222). Cambridge University Press.
Jongepier, F. (2016). Towards a constitutive account of implicit narrativity. Phenomenology
and the Cognitive Sciences, 15(1), 51–66.
Kind, A. (2015). Persons and personal identity. Polity Press.
Køster, A. (2017a). Narrative self-appropriation: Embodiment, alienness, and personal
responsibility in the context of borderline personality disorder. Theoretical medicine andbioethics, 38, 465-482.
Køster, A. (2017b). Narrative and embodiment – a scalar approach. Phenomenology and the
Cognitive Sciences, 16(5), 893–908.
Køster, A. (2017c). Personal history, beyond narrative: An embodied perspective. Journal of
Phenomenological Psychology, 48(2), 163–187.
Mackenzie, C. (2009). Personal identity, narrative integration, and embodiment. In S.
Campbell, L. Meynell, & S. Sherwin (Eds.), Embodiment and agency (pp. 100–125). Penn
State University Press.
Mackenzie, C. (2014). Embodied agents, narrative selves. Philosophical Explorations, 17(2),154–171.
Menary, R. (2008). Embodied narratives. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15(6), 63–84.
Menary, R., & Gillett, A. (2022). The tools for enculturation. Trends in Cognitive Science,14(2), 363–387.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge. (Original published1945)
Meyers, D. T. (2014). Corporeal selfhood, self-interpretation, and narrative selfhood.
Philosophical Explorations, 17(2), 141–153.

25

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in PhilosophicalPsychology. http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09515089.2023.2286281
Miyahara, K., Ransom, T. G., & Gallagher, S. (2020). What the situation affords: Habit andheedful interrelations in skilled performance. In F. Caruana & I. Testa (Eds.), Habits:
Pragmatist approaches from cognitive science, neuroscience, and social theory (pp. 120–136).
Cambridge University Press.
Miyahara, K., & Robertson, I. (2021). The pragmatic intelligence of habits. Topoi, 40(3), 597–
608.
Newen, A. (2018) The embodied self, the pattern theory of self, and the predictive mind.
Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2270.
Pollard, B. (2006). Explaining actions with habits. American Philosophical Quarterly, 43(1),57–69.
Ramírez-Vizcaya, S., & Froese, T. (2019). The enactive approach to habits: New concepts forthe cognitive science of bad habits and addiction. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 301.
Ricoeur, P. (1990/1992). Oneself as another (K. Blamey, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
Rietveld, E., & Kiverstein, J. (2014). A rich landscape of affordances. Ecological Psychology,
26(4), 325–352.
Rudd, A. (2007) In defence of narrative. European Journal of Philosophy, 17(1), 60–75.
Schechtman, M. (1996). The constitution of selves. Cornell University Press.
Schechtman, M. (2011). The narrative self. In S. Gallagher (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of theself (pp. 394–416). Oxford University Press.
Siderits, M., Thompson, E., & Zahavi, D. (Eds.). (2011). Self, no self?: Perspectives fromanalytical, phenomenological, and Indian traditions. Oxford University Press.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading autobiography: a guide for interpreting life
narratives. 2nd ed. University of Minnesota Press.
Thornton, T. (2004). Psychopathology and two kinds of narrative accounts of the self.
Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 10(4), 361–367.
Wagner, N. F. (2021). Habits and narrative agency. Topoi, 40(3), 677–686.
White, M. (2007). Maps of narrative practice. WW Norton & Company.
Zahavi, D. (2014). Self and other: Exploring subjectivity, empathy, and shame. Oxford
University Press.

26