Things That Bother Me by Galen Strawson (Book Summary)

This is a book summary of Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc. by Galen Strawson (Amazon).

Things That Bother Me book by Galen Strawson

Quick Housekeeping:

All content in “quotation marks” is from the author (otherwise it’s paraphrased).
All content is organized into my own themes (not the author’s chapters).
Emphasis has been added in bold for readability/skimmability.

Book Summary Contents:

About the Book
Self
Narrativity
Luck
Death

**Death, Freedom, Self: Things That Bother Me by Galen Strawson (Book Summary)**

About the Book

“I find philosophy—philosophy in the largest sense—a profoundly concrete, sensual activity. I know others who feel the same. The world of ideas seems as solid as the world of seas and mountains—or more so.”

“Ideas seem as embodied, in the world of ideas, with its views and obstructions and vastness, as we do in our material world. They seem tangible, with specific savors, aesthetic properties, emotional tones, curves, surfaces, insides, hidden places, structure, geometry, dark passages, shining corners, auras, force fields, and combinatorial chemistry.”
“These pieces are about free will and con as well as death, and about what it is to be a genuine ‘naturalist’ in the philosophical sense—someone who doesn’t believe in anything supernatural. They’re about the idea of the self, the sense of having or being a self, the sense of the self in time, the ‘narrative’ outlook on life, and, en passant, the unlimited nature of human credulity. There’s a mildly polemical element in the pieces about ‘narrativity’ because they’re written against what seems to me to be an oppressive consensus. According to this consensus, anyone who lives their life in a way that is even remotely well adjusted necessarily lives it in a ‘narrative’ fashion. I think this is a false and potentially harmful view.”

Self

“By the ‘sense of the self’ I mean—at least—the sense that people have of themselves as being, specifically, a mental presence, a mental someone, a mental locus of awareness, conscious mental subject that is distinct from all its particular experiences, thoughts, hopes, wishes, feelings, and so on … Suppose the seven elements (outlined below) capture the core of the ordinary human sense of the self. The question arises whether they’re all essential to anything counting as a genuine sense of the self. I think not—not even in the human case.”

The self is thought of/experienced as a thing: “The general idea is this: the self, the ‘I,’ isn’t thought of as merely a state or property of something, or as an event, or as a mere process or series of events. To this extent, there’s nothing else for it to seem to be, other than a thing … It’s certainly thought of as something that has the causal character of a thing, something that can undergo vicissitudes and affect other things.”
The self is thought of as specifically mental (a mental thing): “When the self is thought of as a thing, its claim to thinghood is taken to be sufficiently grounded in its mental nature alone. It may also have a nonmental nature, as materialists like myself suppose (it may be a system or a collection of systems in the brain), but its being a thing is not thought to depend on its counting as a thing considered in its nonmental nature. The self is the mental self.”
The self is thought of as a subject of experience (a conscious feeler, thinker, chooser): “As far as I can see, each of us has an extremely good idea of what a subject of experience is just in being one and being self-conscious—independently of any religious or philosophical commitments we may have … We have a tendency to think that in the human case it is above all the mental self that is the subject of experience.”
The self is thought of as something single: “The self is standardly thought to be single both when it’s considered ‘synchronically,’ i.e. as existing at a given time, or during any truly unitary or ‘hiatus-free’ period of consciousness, and when it’s considered ‘diachronically,’ i.e. as a thing that persists over a longer period of time … ‘The subjective ‘I’ can never be . . . divided, and it is this ‘I’ that we presuppose in all thinking.'”
The self is thought of as something that is a distinct thing (it isn’t the same thing as the whole human being, the human being considered as a whole): “It’s thought of as distinct from any and all of its conscious mental goings-on—thoughts, feelings, and so on: it has thoughts and feelings, but it isn’t the same as them, or constituted out of them. Thirdly, it may well be thought of as distinct from nonconscious mental features—beliefs, preferences, stored memories, character traits. Fourthly, it may be thought of as separate from anything physical—an immaterial soul, or something of the sort. But this idea is certainly not an integral part of the sense of the self.”
The self is thought of as something that is essentially an agent: “It goes about its own active business—thinking, imagining, choosing—quite independently of any of the large-scale movements of the body, and, it is also, of course, thought of as the thing that actively initiates the large-scale movements of the body. It’s experienced as ‘the source of effort and attention, and the place from which . . . emanate the fiats of the will,’ in William James’s words.”
The self is thought of as something that has a certain character or personality: “The seventh claim is that the self is thought of as having character or personality, in exactly the same way as an embodied human being is. This can also seem routine. After all, we take it that our personality is a matter of how we are, mentally speaking. So if we think that our existence involves a mental self, we’re presumably bound to think that it is the self that has a personality … For most people, their personality is something unnoticed, and in effect undetectable, in the present moment. It’s what they look through, or where they look from, an automatic and uninspected presupposition, a global and invisible condition of their life, like air, not an object of experience.”

Narrativity

“Some people, it seems, live in ‘narrative’ mode, and wrongly assume that everyone else does the same: they experience their lives in terms of something that has shape and story, a narrative trajectory … To be narrative is ‘to be naturally disposed to experience or conceive of one’s life, one’s existence in time, oneself, in a narrative way, as having the form of a story, or perhaps a collection of stories, and—in some manner—to live in and through this conception.'”

Strawson’s non-narrative experience:

“I have no sense of my life as a narrative with form, and little interest in my own past. My personal memory is very poor, and rarely impinges on my present consciousness. I make plans for the future, and to that extent think of myself perfectly adequately as something with long-term continuity. But I experience this way of thinking of myself as remote and theoretical, given the most central or fundamental way in which I think of myself, which is as a mental self or someone. Using ‘me’ to express this way in which I think of myself, I can accurately express my experience by saying that I do not think of me as being something in the future, although I take it that GS (Galen Strawson) the human being will be there.”
“As I think further about my mental life, I’m met by the sense that there is no ‘I’ that goes on through the waking day (and beyond). I feel I have continuity only as an embodied human being. If I consider myself as a mental subject of experience, my sense is that I am continually new.”
“Since I find myself to be relatively transient, I’ll use myself as an example. I have a past, like any human being, and I have a respectable amount of factual knowledge about my past. I also remember some of my past experiences ‘from the inside,’ as philosophers say (I don’t just remember that they happened, I remember at least something of what they were like at the time). And yet I have absolutely no sense of my life as a narrative with form, or indeed as a narrative without form. Absolutely none. Nor do I have any great or special interest in my past. Nor do I have a great deal of concern for my future.”

Transient vs endurant self-experience:

Endurant self-experience (diachronic): One naturally figures oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future—something that has relatively long-term temporal continuity, something that persists over a long stretch of time, perhaps for life. I take it that many people are naturally endurers, and that many who are endurers are also narrative.
Transient self-experience (episodic): One doesn’t figure oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future, although one is perfectly well aware that one has long-term continuity considered as a whole human being.

Psychological/ethical narrativity thesis:

“‘Self is a perpetually rewritten story,’ according to the psychologist Jerome Bruner; we are all constantly engaged in ‘self-making narrative’ and ‘in the end we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives.’ Oliver Sacks agrees: each of us ‘constructs and lives a ‘narrative’. . . this narrative is us, our identities’ … Human beings typically experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort, or at least as a collection of stories.”
“I’ll call this the Psychological Narrativity Thesis. It’s a claim about the way ordinary human beings actually experience their lives. This is how we are, it says, as a matter of empirical fact; this is our nature. It’s often coupled with a normative or evaluative or ethical claim, which I’ll call the Ethical Narrativity Thesis, according to which a richly narrative outlook on one’s life is a good thing, essential to living well, to true or full ‘personhood’ … One may think both theses are false. This is my view.”

Revision thesis:

“If one is narrative one will also have a tendency to engage unconsciously in invention, falsification, confabulation, revisionism, fiction, when it comes to one’s apprehension of one’s own life. I’ll call this ‘revision.'”
“The Revision Thesis is that narrativity always involves some tendency to revision, where revision essentially involves more merely than changing one’s view of the facts of one’s life. (One can change one’s view of the facts of one’s life without any falsification, simply by coming to see things more clearly.) Revision is by definition nonconscious. It may sometimes begin consciously, with deliberate lies told to others, for example, and it may have semi-conscious instars, but it’s not genuine revision in the present sense unless or until its products are felt to be true in a way that excludes awareness of falsification. The conscious/nonconscious border is murky and porous, but I think the notion of revision is robust for all that; the paradigm cases are clear, and extremely common.”
“Is a tendency to revise necessary for narrativity? No. In our own frail case, narrativity may rarely occur without revision, but storytelling is sufficient for narrativity, and one can be storytelling without being revisionary. So the Ethical Narrativity Thesis survives the threat posed by the Revision Thesis.”

More harm than good?

“The aspiration to explicit narrative self-articulation is natural for some—for some, perhaps, it may be helpful—but in others it’s unnatural and ruinous. My suspicion is that it almost always does more harm than good—that the narrative tendency to look for story or narrative coherence in one’s life is, in general, a gross hindrance to self-understanding: to a just, general, practically real sense, implicit or explicit, of one’s nature.”
“It’s well known that telling and retelling one’s past leads to changes, smoothings, enhancements, shifts away from the facts (‘reconsolidation’) … isn’t just a charged psychological foible. It turns out to be an inevitable neurophysiological consequence of the process of laying down memories that every studied conscious recall of past events brings an alteration. The implication is plain: the more you recall, retell, narrate yourself, the further you risk moving away from accurate self-understanding, from the truth of your being. Some are constantly telling their daily experiences to others in a storying way and with great gusto. They’re drifting ever further off the truth.”
“Human beings hold many views about themselves that have very little to do with reality.”

Luck

“In the end, luck swallows everything: this is one way of conveying the fundamental respect in which there can be no ultimate responsibility. In this sense, no punishment or reward is ever ultimately just or fair, however natural or useful or otherwise humanly fitting or appropriate it may be or seem.”

Pair with: Condemned to Choose: Cake vs Oxfam Thought Experiment (Galen Strawson Excerpts)

**Self-origination / causa sui:**

“There’s a fundamental sense in which you did not and cannot make yourself the way you are.”
“Nearly all of those who believe in strong free will do so without any conscious thought that it requires ultimate self-origination. But self-origination is the only thing that could actually ground the kind of strong free will that is regularly believed in.”
“In order for one to be truly or ultimately responsible for how one is in such a way that one can be truly responsible for what one does, something impossible has to be true: there has to be, and cannot be, a starting point in the series of acts of bringing it about that one has a certain nature; a starting point that constitutes an act of ultimate self-origination. There’s a more concise way of putting the point: in order to be ultimately responsible, one would have to be causa sui—the ultimate cause or origin of oneself, or at least of some crucial part of one’s mental nature. But nothing can be ultimately causa sui in any respect at all.”

Basic argument:

See more: The Basic Argument against Ultimate Moral Responsibility (Galen Strawson Summary)

(A) One is the way one is, initially, as a result of heredity and early experience.
(B) These are clearly things for which one can’t be held to be in any way responsible. (This might not be true if there were reincarnation, but this would just shift the problem backwards.)
(C) One cannot at any later stage of one’s life hope to accede to ultimate responsibility for the way one is by trying to change the way one already is as a result of heredity and experience. For one may well try to change oneself, but
(D) Both the particular way in which one is moved to try to change oneself, and the degree of one’s success in one’s attempt at change, will be determined by how one already is as a result of heredity and experience. And
(E) Any further changes that one can bring about only after one has brought about certain initial changes will in turn be determined, via the initial changes, by heredity and previous experience. This may not be the whole story, for
(F) It may be that some changes in the way one is are traceable to the influence of indeterministic or random factors. But
(G) It’s absurd to suppose that indeterministic or random factors, for which one is in no way responsible, can in themselves contribute to one’s being truly or ultimately responsible for how one is.

Action, change, & responsibility:

“One can’t be ultimately responsible for one’s character or mental nature in any way at all.”
“Whatever one actually does, one will do what one does because of the way one is, and the way one is is something for which one neither is nor can be responsible, however self-consciously aware of one’s situation one is.”
“Suppose you are someone who struggles to be morally responsible, and make an enormous effort. Well, that too is a matter of luck. You’re lucky to be someone who has a character of a sort that disposes you to be able to make that sort of effort. Someone who lacks a character of that sort is merely unlucky … People sometimes think that one can take credit for effort even if one can’t take credit for natural talent, but in the end being the kind of person who’s got determination and who perseveres and makes an effort–that too is a gift, a piece of luck.”
“The claim is not that people can’t change the way they are. They can, in certain respects (which tend to be exaggerated by North Americans and underestimated, perhaps, by members of other cultures). The claim is only that people can’t be supposed to change themselves in such a way as to be or become ultimately responsible for the way they are, and hence for their actions. One can put the point by saying that in the final analysis the way you are is, in every last detail, a matter of luck—good or bad.”
“No one can be ultimately deserving of praise or blame for anything. It’s not possible. This is very, very hard to swallow, but that’s how it is. Ultimately, it all comes down to luck: luck—good or bad—in being born the way we are, luck—good or bad—in what then happens to shape us. We can’t be ultimately responsible for how we are in such a way as to have absolutely, buck-stopping responsibility for what we do.”

Death

“If, as an adult, I ask myself whether I’d rather be alive than dead tomorrow morning, and put aside the fact that some people would be unhappy if I were dead, I find, after reflection, in any normal, non-depressed period of life, that I have no preference either way. The fact that I’m trying to finish a book, or about to go on holiday, or happy, or in love, or looking forward to something, makes no difference. When I put this question to myself and suppose that my death is going to be a matter of instant, painless annihilation, completely unexperienced, completely unforeseen, it seems plain to me that I lose nothing. I/GS (Galen Strawson), the human being that I am, lose/loses nothing. My future life and experience (the life and experience I will have if I don’t die now) don’t belong to me in such a way that they’re something that can be taken away from me. I am, ploddingly, simply not a thing of such a kind that the life and experience it will have if it doesn’t now die can be rightly thought of as a possession of which it can be deprived.”

No loss/no ownership (of the future) & IPU annihilation:

“I used to call this view No Ownership (of the Future), but it often seems better to call it No Loss (of the Future) … If one believes that what one is most essentially, considered as a self or subject of experience or person, is a fleeting or transient thing, a short-lived entity—and I think this view must be taken very seriously—then No Ownership or No Loss may seem to follow immediately.”
“If No Loss is true at all, then it’s true no matter how we die. But I’m going to restrict attention to instant, painless, unexperienced, completely unforeseen annihilation—I’ll call this IPU annihilation. There is in this case no fear, no suffering. Everything is completely normal up to the instant of extinction; nothing bad is experienced.”
“No Ownership seems to be part of a broader and perhaps deeper view that can be stated without reference to ownership. This is the view that my life doesn’t go worse for me in any sense if at any time I cease to exist in IPU annihilation. Why not? Because of the kind of thing I am—even when I’m considered in the ordinary non-transientist way as a thing of a kind that normally enjoys a relatively long-term existence. This view has a long name: My Life Is No Worse If Shortened By IPU Annihilation (No Worse for short). In one variation it’s this: given that I’m alive and must die, my life doesn’t go worse for me in any sense if I cease to exist in IPU annihilation.”
“More is not better: there’s no entity of which it is true to say that, for it, more life is better than less life. One has already gone wrong if one has a conception of what one is that makes it seem that more could be better. The conception of what one is builds in the mistake … There is no entity named by I, existing here and now, that can properly be said to be such that it will not experience the thing I am looking forward to if I die. Nor is death crucial, given this fundamental sense of I. For even if I live, there is no entity named by I existing here and now that will either experience or fail to experience the thing I am now naturally looking forward to.”