Peter Brockelman, Time and Self
A.11: experience of self to that self
B.15: problem of identity of self over time; problem of self-deception
B.16: self-deception involves experience of holding opposites such as conscious (calm) and unconscious (anger)
C.71: To be a self is narrative, temporal: “coreferentiality”: conscious reflection of past, present, future in the present.
C.72: “attitudes towards life,” “life values,” “agency,” “openness,” “possible being”
C.73: The self is a temporal relation which reflectively relates itself to itself. It is not merely that temporal relation, then, but also a reflective relationship and attitude to that.”
C.74: The self is “tensed.” “the very notion of self involves memory, decision, and anticipation”
C.75: This involves the self as both subject and object, and to know that one knows.
D.76: The self involves seriality or difference as well as continuity or unity in its coreferentiality
E.78: The anticipated sense of the future means that the self necessarily includes a dimension of faith.
E.78: “To exist as a self is possible only on the basis of faith.” “Getting to know ‘me’ means getting to know that thematic vision of life, that fundamental stance in my life which threads my actions together into a temporal whole, ‘me’”
F.80: Unity of the self in the face of temporal difference: fact of phenomenological existence: experience
F.82: Identity, what makes “Jane” Jane and not Joyce, lies in “just this particular autobiography, set of intentions, and fundamental attitude toward life right now in relation to others, her own past, and future, and reflectively herself. ‘Jane’ is not ‘Joyce’ precisely because each of them is a different story.”
F.82: Deception is self-deception when the preconscious self, which always has a certain continuity or unity, goes unrecognized or unacknowledged by the consciously reflecting self. Brockelman uses "anger" as an example: One can deny that one has been angry, but one's self-deception comes to light if another person is able to "trigger" the memory of that anger. For Brockelman, this is evidence of the unity of subjectivity over time.
F.83: Attitude helps to define this story: “Stalin’s sense of will and domination, we can imagine, is quite different than Thomas Merton’s more ‘mystical’ attitude of not willing and letting go.”
Jerome Bruner, “The ‘Remembered’ Self.”
53: In this work, Bruner describes the self (that one remembers) as a “perpetually rewritten story.”
There are two main aspects here: agency and “victimicy.” What he means by this is: On the one hand, the self actively lives out the story by acting out of subjective intent: dreams, wishes, aspirations, effort. On the other, the self must make adjustments on the basis of the objective circumstances one finds oneself in, beyond one’s control, such as physical, financial, and social conditions. The self, then, must constantly negotiate the dream or story that it is trying to live out, and the adaptations required as circumstances unfold beyond control.
Brockelman argues for the unity of the self amidst difference; Bruner argues for the continual revision of the “self” story, and perhaps by implication, of its partial multiplicity: It is never quite what one imagines it to be.