Mackenzie's 'Constitution Of Selves'

Explain and assess Mackenzie’s argument that Schechtman overlooks the first personal significance of the body in the constitution of identity. Catriona Mackenzie’s (2009) Personal Identity, Narrative Integration and Embodiment, encapsulates a powerful critique and understanding of the significance of first personal constitution towards personal identity. Marya Schechtman’s (1996_ book The Constitution of Selves is critically assessed revealing a failure to recognize the degree to which, Mackensive believes, first personal significance of the body influences the constitution of identity. Mackenzie agrees with Schechtman on the role of narrative self-constitution possessing the ability to elucidate this signficance in the
The hypothesis supposes our being as methodically structured and intelligible, doubting life as a series of subtle and disconnected experiences. Each person’s identity has an innate narrative form, linking an episodic structure which illustrates momentous characters that interpret and select events to make intelligible. Schechman’s claims “we create our identities and shape our characters by appropriating our past, anticipating our future actions and experiences and identifying or distancing ourselves from certain characteristics, emotions, desires and values (Mackenzie, 2009; p.107).” Schechman states that to us, our lives are coherent and comprehensible, but only to the degree that we articulate and make intelligible our self conceptions to ourselves (body schema), to others and to society. To make snese of our emobodied experience and more importantly to construct our own idenity’s involves a complex interplay that responds and reacts with biological realities, the social and cultural imaginary, and one’s individual psychic history, which includes one’s relationship with others. REF