My recent posts about the narrative self have generated some interesting conversation about the philosophical underpinnings of my approach to the narrative self. In “Mosaics and Bundles,” I quipped that the narrative self is “self-assembling,” to make the larger point that we are capable of self-reflective growth — which means we can revise. And if we can revise, then what, exactly, can we revise? Are there any limits?

It’s fashionable in recent times to think of language not merely as “representing” the inner and outer worlds of our experience but actually constituting experience. If this view were correct, then like any other experience, the self should be susceptible of limitless revision. Nevertheless, most of us — at least when we’re outside a classroom — don’t act like this is the case. Let’s explore this a bit more deeply.

Suppose I am in narrative self revision mode, and I decide I should be taller. I can certainly tell myself a series of stories in which I’m taller, but the obvious problem is that other people won’t necessarily experience me as taller because of the stories I’m telling myself. Suppose I tell them those stories as well. Suppose everyone I tell accepts my taller stories and starts telling them, too. This situation represents a maximal story-sharing condition: A whole community of language users who are talking like I’m taller.

Now here’s the operative question: In this community in which the taller story prevails, am I able to reach the top shelf in my kitchen, which I could not reach as a formerly shorter person?

One way to avoid the obvious consequences of this question is to dodge it. For instance, if this “revision” actually happened, no one in the community would be able to remember me being anything but as tall as the language game we’re caught in says I am. But even the fact that I can say this possibility means that we can triangulate and view at least some things from multiple perspectives, narrative-wise.

On the surface, pursuing a question like this may look like a ridiculous waste of time, but this question reveals something deep about human experience — something we need to come to terms with, not theoretically, in a classroom, but practically, for the sake of managing our lives. This question also reveals something interesting, if not particularly deep, about how difficult it is to exorcise naive realism. People sometimes talk (and think) like the only two choices available are (1) to embrace naive realism or (2) completely reject reality, in favor, for instance, of idolizing the languages we speak or the ways we experience as arbiters of reality. If you’re keeping score, this puts me more in line with Kant, who rejects human experience as a “mirror of nature,” arguing that we do not have direct access to the nature of reality. (Trigger warning: Agreeing with this move does not a Kantian make. At the very beginning of the Western philosophical tradition, Herakleitos came to the same conclusion.) As I have argued elsewhere, giving up privileged access to reality does not mean giving up all access: The trick is how to approach the problem of what is real.

And that brings us back — believe it or not — to philosophical practice and narrative self analysis. There are limits to revision, and we can think of them (provisionally) as limits as set by what is real independently of the stories we tell ourselves about what is real. Speaking from the vantage of decades of working with people around issues concerning the narrative self, I can safely say that much of the time is spent sifting through what we believe are limitations imposed “from outside” in an attempt to discover which ones actually are. This is important — and practical — work. Growth involves striving to stretch beyond our current selves, so we need to have some idea what to strive for. It is an exercise in futility to strive to be significantly taller.

The moral of this story is simple: When it comes to revision and the narrative self, there are limits. Finding those limits and retelling our stories is not so simple.