The dialogical Self from the viewpoint of hermeneutic phenomenology

Hermeneutic phenomenology and dialogical Self theory

This paper aims at rereading some tenets of dialogical Self theory in the perspective of hermeneutic phenomenology. The issues of the proliferation of the Self’s internal positions, the formation of meta-positions, and the role of narrating the Self are addressed in a manner that allows the introduction of a conceptualization based on a phenomenological notion of temporality instead of dynamic models operating with objectivist (or subjectivist-psychological) notions of time. In substituting the Self’s regimes temporalizing by appropriating existential possibilities for the scheme of interiorizing and exteriorizing positions, the paper suggests a radicalization of the anti-Cartesian tendencies in dialogical Self theory. A special focus is laid on the transformation of trans-subjective possibilities of articulating socio-cultural forms of life into existential possibilities. Focusing on this transformation entails important consequences on the conceptualization of the Self’s dialogical nature.

I will start my considerations with a preliminary clarification of the concept of hermeneutic phenomenology that will be used in the remainder. Every kind of phenomenology deals with the constitution and articulation of meaning. Since there is no world of human existence without meaning, the task of phenomenology consists in analysing the meaningful constitution of the world and the articulation of meanings within-the-world. The natural world before being objectified and formalized by means of scientific theories is also meaningfully constituted within the horizon of everyday existence – that is, the horizon which as a “life-world” fore-structures any kind of theoretical conceptualization. From a phenomenological point of view, the world of existentially primary meanings pre-exists (and fore-structures) the formation of the epistemic relationship (including all kinds of “thematic worlds” conceptualized within this relationship). By implication, phenomenology has a priority over epistemology. Depending on where “the source of meaning” becomes localized, there is a variety of paradigms of constitutional analysis. Traditional (transcendental) phenomenology places emphasis on the “intentional life of consciousness” as such a source, trying to find the privilege point of reference of this analysis in the transcendental ego as a “noetic matrix of intentional acts”. In this account, “the transcendental ego is the precondition, a priori, for there being world at all and for there then being ‘my’ world” (Natanson, 1959, p. 44). It is also a precondition of inter-subjectivity and for there being any kind of social world. In contrast to Kant’s transcendental subject, the transcendental ego of traditional phenomenology is essentially minimalized and related not to invariant aprioristic structures but only bounded to situationally aprioristic presuppositions.

I put aside Sartre’s discussion of whether or not the (transcendental) ego is the original ground for intentional acts – a discussion that is still heavily laden with Cartesian assumptions. What ought to be mentioned, however, is the strange destiny of phenomenological psychology as it has been developed by the Dutch school of Buytendijk, Van Lennep, van den Berg, and others. There is a lesson to be learnt from this destiny. Husserl invested much efforts in clarifying the relation between transcendental phenomenology and empirical psychology. For him, phenomenological psychology is “an aprioristic, eidetic, intuitive, purely descriptive, and intentional science of psychical, which remains entirely within the realm of the natural attitude” (Kockelmans, 1987, p. 6). Originally, the Dutch school was in many respects strongly committed to Husserl’s program. The research work was guided by the idea that all psychic life is based on consciousness’s intentional orientation towards the world. As is well known, the authors of this school were especially productive in the psychology of emotions. It was the research work in this field that provoked a gradual philosophical reorientation. Studying, in particular, what appears at first when an emotion becomes expressed led to the conclusion that the situation is inherent in the emotional expressivity as a unity of subjective experiences and external milieu. Buytendijk (1987), in particular, reached the conclusion that the task of phenomenological psychology is to decipher the meaning-structure of situational self-expressivity. For him, this task cannot avoid a phenomenological approach grounded upon existential analytic. Thus, he argues that the Self’s experience of anxiety in the life-world cannot be phenomenologically conceptualized without assuming that the life-world is a trans-subjectivity (not to be confused with inter-subjectivity) that is co-primordial with the Self’s subjectivity. The research work of the Dutch school demonstrated the limits of any psychological research program based on traditional phenomenology. It is no accident that over the years the studies of the Dutch school moved closer to the theoretical views of Heidegger and Binswanger. The lesson I mentioned is that any psychological research predicated on phenomenological doctrines must avoid “egological” presumptions – even if they were radically non-Cartesian ones – that cut subjectivity off from the facticity of existence.

Hermeneutic phenomenology suggests a constitutional analysis that dispenses with positing the transcendental ego as the privilege point of reference in the constitution of meaning. The argument for de-privileging the transcendentally stylized “life of consciousness” lies in the impossibility to extract transcendental subjectivity from the facticity of existence. Subjectivity is always within the world of trans-subjective practices and the possibilities they generate. More generally, subjectivity is an outcome – and not a prerequisite – of the constitution of meaning. The meaningful formation of subjectivity takes place within the facticity of existence. Subjectivity is constituted by existential phenomena (such as mood, attunement, state-of-mind, anxiety, discursive articulation, conscience, solicitude, etc.), and remains both situated within existential facticity and transcended by the horizons of possible meanings that can be articulated, provided that these horizons belong to facticity. By implication, subjectivity projects its being upon possibilities: The Self is not enclosed in subjectivity; the Self is “always already” projected upon trans-subjective possibilities, thereby being constantly characterized by potentiality-for-being. The Self’s situated transcendence within the existential facticity and the Self’s potentiality-for-being go together, and this togetherness assigns to the Self the status of trans-subjective subjectivity. It is this status that Heidegger designates as Dasein.

In Being and Time, Heidegger (1962, p. 330) draws the strangely sounding conclusion that the “Self, which as such has to lay the basis for itself, can never get that basis into its power; and yet, as existing, it must take over a being-a-basis”. Heidegger’s task is to interpret the existential meaning of the Self’s state of being-thrown. Though being-a-basis – so his argument goes – the Self constantly lags behind its possibilities. Consequently, the Self never acquires power over her ownmost way of being from the ground up. The “thrown projection” is the uncontrollable basis of the Self’s existence as lagging behind its possibilities. The Self can understand her-self only in terms of possibilities that are already projected. Despite this “uncontrollable basis”, however, the Self is capable to defining and reflexively controlling her hermeneutic situation of choosing and appropriating existential possibilities. Yet the Self participates in various socio-cultural forms of life, and is involved in heterogeneous configurations of social practices. The Self has to make choices in a variety of hermeneutic situations. Being under the pressure to become specifically positioned in any particular situation, the Self creates heterogeneity within her-self. Like her personal development, the manifold of the Self’s positions are characterized by trans-subjective subjectivity. (Accordingly, it would not be correct to call them “internal positions”. They are always distinguished by an ecstatic unity of “internal” subjectivity and “external” trans-subjectivity.)

The selfhood is subjectivity that – being entangled with social practices – projects its existence upon trans-subjective possibilities. The Self’s understanding as subjective existence projected upon trans-subjective possibilities is self-interpretation. (Let me once again draw the attention that in the foregoing formulations “trans-subjective” means “transcending and situating the Self’s subjectivity”.) All forms of narrating the Self belong to this self-interpretation. Narrative self-interpretation helps the Self to appropriate possibilities upon which the Self projects and understands her existence. What becomes constituted in narrative interpretation is the integrity of the Self as trans-subjective subjectivity that involves a diversity of positions. In a hermeneutic perspective, interpretation is identified by the operation of an ongoing circularity between a projected whole (of meaning) and articulated (meaningful) units. Interpretation might be treated only as a particular cognitive procedure, or it can be addressed in terms of a constitutive existential phenomenon. But in both cases, interpretation is recognized by means of the famous hermeneutic circle. Heidegger works out the existential analytic as a hermeneutic phenomenology of Dasein’s intrinsic hermeneutic circularity that enables the ecstatic unity of subjectivity and (horizonal) trans-subjectivity. Against this background, one should make sense of Heidegger’s often cited dictum that for existential analytic decisive is not to get out of the hermeneutic circle between fore-structuring understanding and interpretive articulation, but to come into it in the right way. Being and Time ascribes to this circle a crucial role in enabling the existential structure of the Self’s trans-subjective subjectivity.

Jean Grondin (2017) convincingly demonstrates that what Heidegger invokes in existential analytic is not the usual hermeneutic circularity of the whole and its parts. The author of Being and Time is rather preoccupied with the interplay of anticipatory understanding and interpretation that articulates meaning. This interplay is actually a movement forth (towards the world-horizon) and back (the meanings of average everydayness) that has much to do with (what Heidegger calls) the temporalizing of temporality. Going forth towards possibilities that can be appropriated throws light on one’s having-been as chosen and actualized possibilities, while repeating past possibilities in new contexts shifts the future horizon. The interpretive articulation of meaning does not take place “in the time” which is characterized by a strong (objectivist) differentiation between past, present, and future. The interpretive articulation rather temporalizes the Self’s being-in-the-world within the horizonal unity of temporality. Yet something from the part–whole circularity remains retained in Heidegger’s idea of the hermeneutic circle of existential analytic. Heidegger (1962, pp. 189–192) makes the point that all interpretation operates in the fore-structure of understanding as it is characterized by fore-having, fore-seeing, and fore-conception of what becomes articulated. In this formulation, the hermeneutic circle is presupposed as a circular relationship between the horizon that discloses what becomes articulated and the interpretively articulated units. Thus, the insistence that the Self’s “narrative history” – or the self-interpretive movement of one’s life (Freeman, 1993, p. 30) – is rooted in the subjective temporalizing of trans-subjective temporality retains a version of interpretive circularity.

What can be appropriated in the interpretive articulation has the character of a horizon of temporality, since each appropriated possibility temporalizes the Self’s being-in-the-world as a non-successive unity of coming toward the actualized possibility that opens a trajectory of having-been in a context that is made present. (To put it in terms close to developmental psychology, the Self’s psychic life is always temporalized as an anticipation of coming experience that creates a selective memory necessary for constructing present contextual identities.) In Heidegger’s (1962) formula of personal historicizing within the world, the Self “is its past in the way of its own being, which, to put it roughly, historizes out of its future on each occasion” (p. 41). In accordance with this formula, the Self’s past always goes ahead of her. The subjective-personal temporalizing of trans-subjective temporality not only appropriates but also transforms trans-subjective possibilities into existential possibilities. Accordingly, the Self is pluralized not only with regard to her positioning in a variety of hermeneutic situations but also in her personal regimes of temporalizing the socio-cultural horizons of possibilities in which she situates her-self.

Let me now turn to those aspects of dialogical Self theory which will be at stake in the coming discussion. Starting from the assumption that the ego is no longer the sole instigator of meaning, the theorists look for a conceptualization of the Self’s “dialogical existence” as a generator of meaning. This makes the enterprise of figuring out case studies in terms of dialogical Self theory akin to a phenomenological paradigm of constitutional analysis. Dialogical inter-subjectivity precedes and conditions the formation of subjectivity. In terms of this theory, self-awareness is no longer considered as a means for the comprehension of selfhood (Bento, Cunha, & Salgado, 2012). The Self is conceptualized as a dynamic multiplicity of relatively autonomous I-positions. Any of these positions is distinguished by spatial and temporal characteristics. Dialogical Self theory deals with the ways in which the Self fluctuates among different positions. The fluctuations are spontaneous, but they allow – and in a sense promote – a narrative integrity. This is why the biographical story of the Self can be expressed as polyphonic novel. The voices of the particular I-positions are not only functioning like interacting characters in a plot. Each of them possesses an authorial voice. The Self is capable of achieving a meta-position, but cannot replace the polyphony with a single, authoritative, voice. In this account, each “character has a story to tell about experiences from its own stance” (Hermans, Kempen, & van Loon, 1992, p. 29). Sociality starts with the Self, since “the outside world is also inside the Self in the form of external positions” (Bento et al., 2012, p. 429). By the same token, alterity is an integral part of the Self, thereby enabling the self-identity-in-difference (Hermans, 2011, pp. 656–657).

At the same time, the Self is portrayed as a “dialogical narrator”. The primary division within the Self is between the I as an author who narratively creates a plot that organizes experience and the Me as thematized within this experience in the form of both actor and protagonist. However, narrating the Self without diversifying the I-as-author in dialogically predisposed positions still does not warrant the flexibility the Self is needing when adjusting to the changing contexts of her existence. Each particular I-position – being on an equal footing with the other I-positions – has to narrate its own biographical story (Hermans & Dimaggio, 2005). The complex, dialogically structured Self exists not despite, but because of, the polyphony of her narrating voices. Guiding in this portrayal is the heuristic analogy with Bakhtin’s (1989, p. 6) view that the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novel is the “plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices”. The multivoicedness of the Self is considered in terms of internalized sociality. One assumes that other people occupy positions in the multivoiced Self. Both hetero-dialogue and auto-dialogue are rooted in internalized sociality that pluralizes the Self in dialogically predisposed positions. The dialogical balance can be destroyed, if a divergence of positions comes into being, and as a result, a strong tendency to centralization begins to

organize the self in such a way that there is one I position that may dominate the others, thereby reducing the possibility of dialogue that for its full development requires a high degree of openness for the exchange and modification of perspectives. (Hermans et al., 1992, p. 30)

Finally, the dialogical Self is not a historically invariant state of the Self. It has emerged under the socio-cultural conditions of late modernity. Broadly speaking, dialogical Self theory has been developed with the intent to become a strong alternative to “the psychological tradition of cultural dichotomies as representing cultures as internally homogenous and externally distinctive” (Hermans & Kempen, 1998, p. 1119). Elaborating on a concept of the Self that – in a constructivist manner – transcends individualism and (epistemologically designed) rationalism was the dialogical theorists’ initial ideological motivation. Such a concept would rid a wide range of psychological disciplines of the ethnocentric Western views of personhood. Philosophically seen, dialogical Self is inspired by Charles Taylor’s criticism of the “punctual self”. The alternative to the ethnocentric, rational-Cartesian, and individualistic views should “show that the self, conceived of as a dialogical narrator, is (a) spatially organized and embodied and (b) social, with the other not outside but in the self-structure, resulting in a multiplicity of dialogically interacting selves” (Hermans et al., 1992, p. 23).

An intermediate exemplification

Let me briefly illustrate – by means of an example – the foregoing considerations of how choosing, appropriating, and actualizing an existential possibility is contextualizing an I-position. The example will also introduce conceptual figures that are necessary for a hermeneutic extension of dialogical Self theory. At issue in this illustration is the dialogical Self of a middle-aged male heterosexual person, father of two teenagers. His name is Paul. In choosing the possibility to become an LGBTQ activist, Paul contextualizes his I-position as “fighter”. Manifested as a “straight for gay rights”, this I-position opposes in the first place the external position of his wife who turns to be a strongly conservative supporter of policies and juridical practices against accepting homosexuality as a full-fledged legally normal reality. More specifically, her I-position as a devoted Roman Catholic is irreconcilable with her husband’s re-contextualized position as fighter for legalizing (in particular) the same-sex marriage. The mutual respect enacted by the maxim “we shall avoid discussing this theme in our family” seems to be the only solution of the emerging family conflict. The price which the new LGBTQ activist has to pay for avoiding the discussion of his repositioning is the damaged dialogue with his wife. Something of the intimacy of this dialogue seems to be lost forever. The distortion of relation to wife has serious repercussions on Paul’s I-position as the “head of the family”, i.e. as a husband able to take the lead in meeting difficult decisions in the family life. This position excludes making a compromise with his basic beliefs and views. It is a position that can only be ascertained if the free discussion of any issue is not artificially restricted. In addition, Paul has to make his I-position as a fighter for special human rights “coherent with” the external positions of his closest friends who are loyal to the state’s legal norms. (The state in which he lives does not legally recognize the same-sex marriage.) As a lawyer, Paul is convinced that there are basic deficiencies and flaws in the legal system of his state. His willingness to profoundly change this system severely affects Paul’s I-position as a “professional who respects the legal order”.

Thus, actualizing the possibility to be an LGBTQ activist and re-contextualizing the I-position as “fighter” by specifying (repositioning and counter-positioning) it as a position of social and legal critic entails unintended (unpredicted) changes of several other I-positions. The re-contextualization of these positions on their part not only alters the whole socio-cultural status of Paul’s dialogical Self but also transforms his position as activist for gay rights into a more radical position. Here is a possible illustration in this regard. His uncle – who is at the same time his favoured intellectual fellow and communicative partner – is a psychiatrist, who does not accept the 1974 declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. Paul, of course, decisively denies this “clinical” point of view. But the arguments his uncle adduces provoke him to think about the meaning of “normalizing homosexuality”. Paul realizes that the former attempts of clinical normalization are now replaced by attempts of political normalization. He begins to pay more attention to the Q-component of his position as an LGBTQ activist. In getting closer contacts with champions of queer studies, Paul further specifies his position as civil rights activist by opposing any form of normative binarism. He becomes convinced that the whole movement he supports has to resist integration in the established social order which for political reasons cultivates such binarism. Deconstructing normative binarism is the slogan which Paul now follows in his search for a radical revision of the existing legal system. He vehemently opposes the absorption of the homosexual rights movement in the political order of liberal democracy. It is hard to imagine all repercussions this re-contextualization of the I-position as “fighter” would have on all internal and external positions including the positions of his principal fellow-activists in the mainstream of LGBT movement. ²

In taking the risk of becoming isolated, Paul is compelled to re-define the totality of his dialogical Self. But he realizes that precisely in being involved in a double confrontation – on the one hand, a collision among several of his I-positions and on the other, a confrontation with several authoritative external positions – he gets the chance to carry out a genuine dialogue with himself. Paul also realizes that not only his position repertoire is essentially enriched and broadened, but a kind of complementarity between re-contextualized I-positions arising out of the appropriations of completely different existential possibilities comes into being. Thanks to this complementarity, the dialogical Self proves to be composed by entangled I-positions.

The dialogical proliferation of I-positions

There is an established picture of the Self’s internalized dialogue in dialogical Self theory. This dialogue proceeds among the various I-positions which a person can occupy. The cognitive, emotional, volitional, and social integrity of the Self is based on the dialogical relationships between these positions. The dialogical theorists have good reasons to prefer the talk of narrative and narration instead of traits. Even when they focus on traits, the latter are regarded not as existing per se, but as being displayed in a dialogical process. Dialogical relationships of agreement, disagreement, misunderstanding, cooperation, revoking, rejoining, questioning, etc. characterize the Self’s integrity in the plurality of positions. These relationships enable various forms of self-criticism, self-agreement, self-evaluation, self-conflict, self-consultancy, and so on. The Self as a whole of dispositions articulated through the internalized dialogue relates oneself to external social positions in accordance with the dialogical patterns of the particular I-positions (“sub-selves”). Thus, the socio-communicative being of the Self is a kind of continuation of the internalized dialogue. The emphasis on this continuation makes dialogical Self theory congruent with a mainstream model of personality as a balanced whole of dispositional traits (such as low neuroticism or high conscientiousness), characteristic adaptations, and integrative life stories (McAdams & Pals, 2006). The champions of the theory admit that the polyphonic self is the opposite of the Cartesian self (Hermans, 2001a, pp. 249–250).

The dialogical theorists strive for effacing the strong division between the internal world of the Self and the external world of social relations. In arguing that the communicative connections with partners from the social milieu are fundamental to the ways in which the Self constructs her cultural identities, these theorists stress that the internal plurality of positions is an interiorized sociality. Accordingly, the dialogical properties of the internal multivoicedness supervene upon communicative properties of external inter-subjectivity. If the thesis of this supervenience and the thesis that the Self’s socio-communicative being is informed by the internalized dialogue are put together, they imply that the dialogical Self exists as an ongoing interiorization and exteriorization of movable (constantly repositioning) I-positions. Some authors refer to this reciprocal process as a “cultivation” that harmonizes strategies of adaptation to social environments with strategies to forming new I-positions (Valsiner & Cabell, 2012). Due to the dialogue taking place in a multivoiced ensemble of I-positions – so the main argument goes – the Self is not to be addressed as individualized and self-contained. A concept of culture that avoids the reification of “collective entities” should correspond to the Self’s dialogical dynamics and dialectics. According to this picture, the dialogical process and the formation of I-positions are mutually reinforcing.

A particular I-position is by no means to be equated with the identity one gains when performing an institutionalized and normalized social role. It is rather the other way around: A social role becomes enacted when the voice of an I-position is enough authoritative for making the Self a motivated agent. The I-positions are also sufficiently flexible and resilient to prevent their identification with firm (imposed) cultural identities in terms of belongingness to ethnicity, confession, ideology, worldview, and so on. The formation of an I-position runs rather through a situational integration with a life-form. I am saying “situational” because this formation does not need a firm commitment to a particular form of life. The integration with a life-form is used rather opportunistically, with the intent to affirm the identity (under certain circumstances) of the I-position. The dialogical Self needs – as a part of the dialogical dynamics – to affirm such occasional identities on a regular basis.

The I-positions are distinguished by situationally dependent identities. The dialogical theorists tend to treat an I-position as an autonomous trajectory of personalization within culture. It is a trajectory that passes over characteristic situations of a personal history. The position persists in such a trajectory, but it is always contextually expressed and situation-specific. Because of its reflexivity, the position is describable via the I–Me relationship. (Such a description admits that the Me is the embodied volitional, cognitive, and emotional expressivity of the Self’s I-positions.) In seeking a realization in various social roles, an I-position tends to opportunistically support one or another (basic) cultural identity. In dialogical Self theory, the profile of any I-position can be defined through the matrix of possible relations it has with various internal and external positions (Hermans, 2001a). By arguing that the plurality of the Self’s I-positions assumes a meta-position that elaborates on an integral identity, one commits the theory to various narrative approaches gaining currency in developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, cultural psychology, and personality psychology. As I will argue, it is the way of conceptualizing the Self’s narrative being-in-the-world that allows the extension (and partial reformulation) of dialogical Self theory in terms of hermeneutic phenomenology.

Each I-position formed and articulated within the dialogical Self is ruled by a constellation of constraints, sanctions, and instructions of how it can be fulfilled by performing various social practices in which external positions are necessarily involved. In this regard, each I-position has an externalized social counterpart. In discussing a psychotherapeutic case, Hubert Hermans (2001a) specifies internal positions such as “listener”, “freedom seeker”, “recognition seeker”, “doubter”, “idealist”, “perfectionist”, “fighter”, and “child in myself”. Depending on how the person matches her I-positions with external positions (as distinguished by typical social roles), the person is spatially positioning herself in a characteristic way. This positioning is an outcome of internal and external dialogues, granted that the interiorization of social positions contributes to the dialogical unity of the Self. The dialogical theorists are often focusing upon dramatically different trajectories of personal life that are hardly to be reconciled in one and the same Self. A case in point is conflicting trajectories of personal life epitomized by the devoted participation in customs and rituals of an orthodox confessional life, on the one hand, and the passionate involvement in business and intellectual activities committed to completely secular social roles, on the other.

A coherence and unity of the Self might be created only by bringing the divergent I-positions into a dialogue based not on rational grounds and a logically reconstructible process of reaching a consensus, but on a hermeneutic sensitivity for the otherness produced within one’s own Self. Dialogical Self theory draws on this assumption, but avoids to discuss it explicitly. In many cases, the dialogical theorists adopt a constructivist approach to the nature of dialogue. As a result, the dialogical process is viewed as ongoing exchange of arguments – supposedly providing the grounds for any kind of negotiations – that constructs communicative (intra- or inter-subjective) spaces whereby the norms and rules of argumentative discourse normalize (normativize) the possible roles that might take place in these spaces. Performing the roles in turn extends the exchange of arguments, which leads to a re-construction of the social spaces. In this account, the dialogue is the instrumental means for achieving inter-subjective consent. ³ Despite this limited approach to the nature of dialogue, the theory correctly admits that – thanks to the dialogical process – the Self might reproduce her multiplicity in a unitary narrative. Dialogical Self theory postulates that the I-positions always have a relational status. In elaborating on this status, the theorists advocate anti-essentialist and anti-Cartesian strategies of conceptualization. The I-positions are organized around stabilized, narratively reproducible, dialogical patterns. Alternation between and integration of I-positions is the outcome of the dialogical construction of self-identity.

For several theorists, constructivism about the Self’s diversified social existence (as producing diversification of sub-selves) is intimately tied to a kind of relational paradigm in personality psychology. Kenneth Gergen (2009, pp. 61–62), a prominent exponent of the constructivist recasting of this paradigm, convincingly argues that the very idea of the Self’s inner world is created from the relational process of co-action. He suggests a comprehensive program for a radical removal of the wall between inside and outside. Furthermore, Gergen’s studies convey a clear message that a relational-dialogical theory of the Self has to suspend the assumption of minds within heads by refiguring – as an initial step – the vocabulary of mental states in accordance with the task of making the relational basis of mental state apparent. For him, the language of interior and interiorization stems from a particular tradition of relationship: Expressions referring to states of mind, thinking, wanting, and the rest of mental discourse – so Gergen’s argument goes – not only gain their intelligibility, but are created within relationships of being-with-one-another. Like Gadamer, he assumes that the dialogical relationship – though inspired in each particular case by strongly subjective motivations – takes place already within the trans-subjective milieu of the fusing horizons. Accordingly, this relationship is itself a trans-subjective one.

In addition, Gergen insists on the primacy of discursive practices (in social life) when arguing that words of mental states are actions-within-relations. For him, the concept of relational-dialogical Self is to be defined in terms of relations within which all mental states become articulated. The Self’s boundedness by history correlates with the primacy of the (trans-subjective) relationship in all activities that individuals engage in. This approach allows a holist conceptualization of the Self without hypostatizing holist structures. The plurality of I-positions is not enclosed in an interior space. The conception of the relational Self successfully avoids being caught on the horns of the well-known dilemma between social determinism and atomistic individualism. But Gergen’s view of the primary relationship invites two possible interpretations. It can firstly be construed in terms of relations between discrete elements. In this case, the primary relationship would constitute a structure of such elements. As I will claim, interpreting the relational Self in terms of a manifold of discrete elements is still not freed from a kind of essentialism since it assumes a sort of structural determinism. On a second reading, Gergen’s relationship can be regarded as a manifestation of that part–whole relation which characterizes the hermeneutic circularity. More specifically, thinking, experience, memory, creativity, etc. are activities within interpretive circularity that constantly preexists self-understanding of having a being divided by the wall between inside and outside.

Though tending to a hermeneutic account, Kenneth Gergen leaves open the choice between the two readings of the relationship’s primacy. In a footnote about the relevance of hermeneutics to his relational approach, he reaches the conclusion that “Gadamer cannot account for the possibility of compelling interpretation outside one’s participation in a cultural tradition” (Gergen, 2009, p. 67). I do not agree with this conclusion. Is there any kind of interpretation outside one’s being-in-the-tradition? With regard to this – from the viewpoint of philosophical hermeneutics – rhetorical question, one should keep in mind that Gadamer does not refer to particular cultural traditions when equating the effective-historical being with being-in-the tradition. For him, tradition is the situated transcendence within the effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte) of being. In this account, tradition is the very historical being of human existence. Gergen advocates the same view when insisting that mental discourse is action within relations that transcend subjectivity. Nobody can escape the involvement in tradition (or relations transcending subjectivity), since this involvement necessarily follows from the finitude of human existence. Gadamer’s “authority of the tradition” is tantamount to the authority of what Gergen calls “the relationship”.

Narrating the Self and positioning

The concepts of positioning, repositioning, and counter-positioning play a crucial role in the picture depicted by dialogical Self theory. The formation of new I-positions – as a process of repositioning that internalizes external attitudes, thereby enabling the contextual constitution of self-identities – is achieved through innovation and transformation of the dialogical patterns. This formation runs parallel to (and becomes legitimized by) the construction of self-narratives by means of which one presents and affirms oneself inside one’s social milieu. In this regard, one has more or less wide repertoire of self-narratives, depending on the I-positions from which he/she can narratively present her/him-self. The emergence of communicative ability is on a par with the ability of self-narrating. In dialogical Self theory, any coherent self-narrative transforms the subjectivity of the I-positions into the Me as – following James’s classical conception – more or less objectified outcome of self-knowledge. Narrating the Self objectivates (makes manifest), thereby making the dialogical patterns explicit rules. ⁴ The transition from the I to the Me reflexively brings into play normativity indispensable for having objectivated identity of the Self. Accordingly, any story about the Me told from a particular I-position objectivates the Self. A self-narrative – presumably uniting local stories about the Me – should bring more coherence into different dialogical patterns, thereby enabling a dialogical homogeneity within the dialogical Self.

The narrative dimension of the theory under discussion enacts the transition from the static plurality of I-positions to the dialogical-historical existence of the Self. By means of narrating the Self – as a kind of reflexive control over the Me – the I-positions qua discrete entities enter into a common, discretely structured, communicative space. Any I-position is present within this space through the stories it tells or can tell. Following this assumption, one is to state that within the dialogue of I-positions each “narrative organizes a vector of experience along a temporal horizon that spans past, present, and possible realms” whereby the corresponding I-position gains its positioning to the other positions (Ochs & Capps, 1996, p. 37). But positioning also occurs – by means of “ongoing micro-dialogues” – in one’s self-talk, in the social orders one inhabits, and in one’s cultural activities (Raggatt, 2007, p. 364; Raggatt, 2012, p. 29). Positioning processes are at play on the level of dynamically arranging the intra-subjective communicative space as it has to be opened to various inter-subjective spaces of communication. The dialogue at once enables and legitimizes the regimes of temporalizing that characterize the I-positions’ coexistence. The dialogue is continuous – and for most part not an explicit subject of deliberation – but it has its “special moments” (Heidegger’s Augenblick; Tillich’s Kairos) in the Self’s personal development when the Self is recapitulating the meaning and the “fate” of her dialogical existence.

In dialogical Self theory, the dialogical process of self-narrative construction is conceived of as a process of bringing into communicative play discrete positions determined by dialogical patterns. The repositioning takes place in this process. At the same time, the reverse claim also seems to be defendable: The I-positions animate inner and outer dialogues that trigger the need of local self-narratives’ plots (Gonçalver & Ribeiro, 2012, p. 301). By implication, self-narratives are at once premises and outcomes of a dialogical process that is based on the formation of discrete entities. Narrating the Self – so the argument goes – both anticipates and secondarily creates continuity (of the positioning processes) based on the primary (patterned) discreteness of the dialogical Self’s I-positions. Since the voices of the particular I-positions “function like interacting actors in a story”, and each voice “has a story to tell about experiences from its own stance” (Hermans, 2005, p. 19), a self-narrative – supposedly constructed from a meta-position – may serve as an instrument for making such a story a coherent whole. Any I-position that is able to unfold an integrative self-narrative is referred to as meta-position. As a rule, the term “meta-position” is first and foremost associated with the possibility of reflexive-narrative meta-cognition. However, self-reflexivity enabled by a meta-position does not imply a hierarchically dominant status. A meta-position can be dominated by a particular I-position, and should not be “considered a ‘control centre’ of the self or an agency that guarantees the unity and coherence of the self in advance” (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010, p. 148). In developing an overarching view of the dialogues between the I-positions (without ceasing to be a particular I-position), the meta-position is not emotionally neutral as regards the emergence of tensions, discrepancies, gaps, and so on (Dimaggio, 2012, p. 357). The affective engagement of a meta-position is expressed by the plot of self-narrating it suggests.

The dialogical Self is the Self who puts into a dialogue her I-positions, thereby creating though narration her (biographical) meta-cognition that is, in particular, indispensable for the positioning processes. A meta-position has a threefold function of unifying, executing, and liberating (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010, p. 151). The unifying function consists in bringing together divergent positions whereby inter-linkages become clear; the executive function is responsible for the way in which a meta-position creates a stable basis for decision making; and finally, a meta-position serves a liberating function when it succeeds in controlling the habitual behaviour of established positions. Adopting a meta-position gives the person a chance to construct a self-narrative that puts into a coherent temporalized whole past memories, present experiences, and motivated expectations. The plot of integrative narrative should be effective enough to sublate (or at least suppress) conflicts and collisions, thereby overcoming various kinds of incommensurability between I-positions. The ways in which alterity is experienced between different I-positions (multiplicity of self-narratives related to various identities) within the dialogical Self inform the ways in which one constitutes alterity in her social experience.

It is my contention that there is an inclination among the dialogical theorists to restrict self-narrating to an instrument of organizing experience. Accordingly, any self-narrative exists per se as a separate body that can be invoked in case of troubles (for instance, clashes between I-positions, or legitimizing innovative moments, or broadening the multiplicity of positions). Self-narratives are conceived of as “detachable instruments” for constructing stable identities within the integral communicative space of internal and external dialogues. Before sketching out some alternative views about the dialogical Self from the perspective of hermeneutic phenomenology, let me mention some attempts at revising dialogical Self theory which are of particular interest for my further considerations. These attempts are guided by the observation that the theory’s way of interlinking exteriorization and interiorization of the dialogical Self turns out not to be sufficient in overcoming Cartesian dualism. The revisions they suggest radicalize the tendency (existing in dialogical Self theory) to minimizing the threshold between intra- and inter-personal dialogues in dialogical Self theory. Leni Verhofstadt-Denève’s (2003) model of the “phenomenological-dialectical personality” illustrates the revisionist attempt which aims at substituting the phenomenological constitution of the social reality within the Self’s life of consciousness for the dogmatic positing of present social (external) positions.

Preventing the reification of culture (as a “group entity”) through radicalizing the role of subjectivity is the task of other revisionist attempts. Some authors react with scepticism to the claim that dialogical Self theory introduces a non-monolithic and non-reifying concept of culture. They argue that this theory does not effectively meet the objective of non-reifying account of culture and Self. In their argument, “a treatment of culture as positions may itself entail the reification of dynamic, flowing patterns into static, fixed entities” (Adams & Markus, 2001, p. 284). By the same token, the notion of positioning assumes the idea of fixed and spatially located positions. The theory which introduces this notion tends to reify culture “in the form of positioning” (temporal–spatial discrete manifolds of particular positions) – a criticism that I will later raise in another form. In criticizing the exclusive preoccupation with the objective content of self-knowledge, these critics put accent on the cultural influence on subjective ‘I’ aspects. The “subjective processors of self-knowledge” is what they are interested in. For them, the adequate concept of culture should be that of cognitive and behavioural patterns. It goes without saying that any version of the theory of cultural patterns works along the lines of a conception of normatively ruled subjectivity that is capable to objectivate its “content”: The patterns create identity by normatively ruling and objectivating subjective intentions, emotional expressions, and volitional acts. The dialogical Self theory dramatically needs a conception of culture that does not anymore agonize between subjectivism and objectivism.

The conceptual figures of the hermeneutic phenomenology are incompatible with any conceptualization of internal and external position as factually present, discrete, entities. This kind of phenomenology also opposes the assumption that the dynamic multiplicity of relatively autonomous I-positions is emerging in the landscape of the mind. It is easily to say that this multiplicity is situated within practices and transcended by horizons of existential possibilities, granted that an interrelatedness of social practices (presumably constituting a particular cultural life-form) projects its potentiality-for-being upon an ever transcending horizon of possibilities. Yet working out this view requires significant conceptual innovations, some of which I am going to briefly discuss.

For Hubert Hermans (2005, p. 13), the “notion of the ‘dialogical self’ considers the self as a multiplicity of parts (voices, characters, positions) that have the potential of entertaining dialogical relationships with each other”. The same multiplicity is often referred to as a chronotopically organized “position repertoire” (Hermans, 2001b). (The dialogical theorists are prone to address the Self – existing under the conditions of growing globalization – as populated by an unprecedented density of I-positions that requires a constant harmonization of the position repertoire’s heterogeneity. ⁵ ) The dialogical Self – as a “society” within the Self – is viewed as a multiset, while the relationships among its elements form abstract structures remaining invariant under certain transformations. From a culture-theoretical perspective corresponding to this approach, the Self’s multiplicity of positions provides the base for a cultural identity organized with regard to the Self’s belongingness to various cultural communities. The differences produced by the dialogical multiplicity should also be regimented by the structural unity of the Self as existing in heterogeneous cultural media. Within the totality of the Self, the stable differences among the I-positions are substituted for the (dialogical) play of differences. But there is also in some of the theory’s versions the reverse tendency to placing the accent on the dialogue that constantly produces differences that are not to be subdued to normatively structured distinctions. To be sure, this accent demonstrates that deconstructionist initiatives are not alien the development of dialogical Self theory. My critical point however is that by putting the relational integrity (as assuming relations among discrete units) of the dialogical Self first, the adherents of this theory – regardless of how strongly they are committed to deconstructionist figures and images – jeopardize their efforts to avoid commitment to a kind of determinism/essentialism I already mentioned when discussing the two possible readings of Kenneth Gergen’s conception. The bias towards the structuralist paradigm of discreteness in dialogical Self theory seems to be confirmed by the claim that the theory’s main concepts are “located at the interface of different models of the self” (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010, p. 120).

According to the main claim I will defend, the dialogical Self is neither (a) localizable (within the mental landscape) nor (b) should it (ontologically) be defined by any form of inner/outer demarcation. The ecstatic unity of the Self with trans-subjective interplay of practices and possibilities brings (a) and (b) to naught. ⁶ The claim about the ecstatic unity – worked out as a concept that is alternative to the concept of the Self’s coupled interiorizing of socio-cultural positions and exteriorizing of I-positions – essentially differs from the thesis that through emulating socio-cultural positions as I-positions the otherness of the external voices penetrates the personal life, thereby constituting otherness-in-the-Self. (Various models of in socio-cultural psychology are assuming the primacy of the being-with-one-another. Interestingly enough, the authors of these models also tend to treat the Self’s temporal existence within the horizon of temporality characterizing the being-with-one-another (Abbey, 2007).) In the perspective of the hermeneutic phenomenology, the otherness is neither created through a virtual dialogue with a mirror-image of the Self nor is it due to the appropriation of external positions. The otherness is produced through the choices of possibilities engendered in trans-subjective contexts and their appropriation as existential possibilities. Choosing trans-subjective possibilities and appropriating them as existential possibilities push the Self’s being-with-one-another in many different directions. This line of reasoning leads to the view that the “production of otherness” does not begin with “othering” (i.e. demarcating between “the Me as part of us” and “the other as not one of us”). The otherness as projected upon existential possibilities is on a par with the Mine (the appropriated existential possibilities in the personal history).

In order to clarify further how in my view the concept of otherness is to be located in (the hermeneutically extended) dialogical Self theory, I will draw on an important distinction Heidegger introduces in Being and Time. In dealing with the issue of solicitude, he distinguishes between two extreme kinds of concern for the others. On the first kind of solicitude, one can “take away care for the Other”. In so doing, one dooms the Other’s existence to passivity: “This kind of solicitude takes over for the Other that with which he is to concern himself. The Other is thus thrown out of his own position” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 158). Proceeding in this manner makes the Other one who is dominated and dependent, even if this domination is hidden from him. The other kind of solicitude is oppositely directed. It gives the care “back to the Other authentically as such for the first time… and helps the Other to become transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 159). Roughly, if the first kind of solicitude contributes to the inauthentic existence of the Other in the public sphere of “the They” (das Man), the second kind helps the Other to find her “resolute way to authentic existence”. Now, the second kind of solicitude is not unconditional. It requires a dialogical Self who is capable to figure out the “liberating solicitude” for the Other within the dialogue of her I-positions. There is no recipe of how “to give care back to the Other” (i.e. to restore his active attitude towards his being-in-the-world). This can only be achieved via genuine self-dialogue. If one is willing to have a liberating solicitude for the Other, one has to discover the Other as a proper alter ego in one’s dialogical Self.

As I already mentioned, the kind of structural determinism characterizing some versions of dialogical Self theory is additionally complemented by a mentalist accentuation that handles the mind as the unquestionable and exclusive place, on which the Self’s intrinsic dialogue comes into being. Consequently, one attributes to the mind the superior role of interrogating itself whereby the individual mind becomes dialogical Self. The pluralization of internalized positions and their polyphony do not call into question the status of mentality as the privileged point of reference in conceptualizing the Self. There is a dialogical Self because the personal mind dialogizes with itself in forms of self-criticism, self-agreement, self-evaluation, self-conflict, self-consultancy, and so on. In so doing, the personal mind multiplies its voices that in relating themselves to external positions become autonomous I-positions. However, arguing that there is a polyphonic multiplication of the dialogical Self as well as deconstructing any privileged voice/position – by borrowing arguments from Bakhtin’s model of undoing a single author at work in Dostoevsky’s works in favour of the polyphony of the characters’ voices – do not suffice for overcoming the Cartesian way of privileging the mentalist point of view. On the alternative I am going to outline, the Self enjoys the dialogical plurality of I-positions because of being beyond her mental seclusion, thrown in the world of social practices, and capable to transform the possibilities interplaying with these practices into existential possibilities. Phrased differently, the diversification of I-positions in the dialogical Self roots in the ecstatic unity of the Self’s subjectivity with a trans-subjective world. While “James carries the self to society, and Mead brings society to the self” (Hermans, 2011, p. 658), hermeneutic phenomenology accentuates on this ecstatic unity as a requisite for James’s volitional Self and Mead’s innovative self.

Hermeneutic phenomenology can provide resources for conceptualizing the dialogical way in which the multiple voices of the I-positions are accompanying and opposing one another. This way of multiplying I-positions should be spelled out in terms of the Self’s being in social practices. The Self is constantly in an ecstatic unity with the horizons of traditions, possible institutionalized roles, possible scenarios of social interaction, possibilities of committing an ethos, possibilities of becoming involved in a medium of a habitus. Before having an outer/inner division in the Self’s existence, the Self is in a state of thrown projection. The latter is the counterpart of being at once within subjectivity and beyond it within a trans-subjective world. Narrating the Self is the reflexive control over one’s situated transcendence. As already stressed, narrating the Self is not a post factum organization of the Self’s experience. It rather accompanies (and partially regulates) the entwinement of the subjective with the trans-subjective. This is why narrating the Self is not a detachable tool of organizing experience, but a dimension of the Self’s being in social practices. Narrating the Self devises important strategies of carrying out self-reflexivity. Due to the nexus of reflexivity and narration, the Self constantly produces self-narratives as a requisite for constructing personal identity. These narratives span from local and situational narratives (related to particular I-positions) to autobiographical narratives that spell out cultural identities constituted in the Self’s personal history. ⁷

The kind of narrating that mediates internal dialogues selects from personal history “some motivations and actions as more truly her self” or as an emergent part of her current dominant I-position (Barresi, 2012, p. 56). In dialogical Self theory, the reflexive-dialogical Self is at once the basis for and the process of a repetition of the social world. (This duality is especially emphasized in some extended models of the dialogical Self (Cresswell & Baerveldt, 2011).) However, such a claim reduces the self-narration to a reproduction of the external in the internal. As ontological constituent of human existence, narrating the Self is not a reproductive but a productive power of all modes of being-in-the-world, enabling the Self’s unity with trans-subjective horizons projected by interrelated social practices. It is the indeterminacy and non-locality of the particular I-positions that make the existence of the reflexive-dialogical Self dispersed over a plurality of existential projects. This dispersal requires a kind of (not necessarily meta-positional) complementarity between incompatible hermeneutic situations in which the Self appropriates existential possibilities. Let me unfold this motif.

I-positions and existential possibilities

The Self is thrown in the world of social practices, and the formation and diversification of the Self’s I-positions strongly depends on this thrownness. ⁸ Since social practices are interrelated, the Self unavoidably exists in a totality of practices by adopting a reflexive stance towards the changing configurations of practices within this totality. Seen from the opposite perspective, the interrelatedness of social practices in which the Self is thrown projects its totality upon possibilities, i.e. possible configurations designed to achieve various outcomes. To put it in terms of hermeneutic phenomenology, the Self is not enclosed in my-self, but is “from the very outset” within-the-world, thrown in changing configurations of practices and shifting horizons of possibilities. In dealing with the world within-the-world, the Self is a “thrown projection”. In this formulation, “the world” refers both to the totality of what is ready-to-hand in practices and their contextures-of-equipment, and to the horizon of open possibilities for dealing with what is ready-to-hand. The configurations of social practices project their interrelatedness upon possibilities that become appropriated and actualized by the same practices. Within this trans-subjective interplay of practices and possibilities, socio-cultural forms of life become disclosed and meaningfully articulated. In participating in diverse configurations of practices, the Self as a “thrown projection” also partakes in a multitude of socio-cultural forms of life (and their specific traditions).

Yet, thanks to the reflexivity of her being-in-the-world, the Self is not simply thrown in the swirl of changing configurations and shifting horizons of possibilities. It is the Self who – in being in the trans-subjective interplay – reflexively chooses and appropriates what has been chosen. The Self’s way of choosing and appropriating trans-subjectively generated possibilities – that is, possibilities of articulating socio-cultural forms of life – turns them into existential possibilities. In transforming trans-subjective possibilities into existential ones, the Self at the same time adapts – in the course of her personal development – various social practices to her intentions, beliefs, desires, ambitions, projects, interests, etc. In other words, the Self manages to personalize social practices, thereby configuring them in accordance with her individual form of life. The latter consists of configurations of personalized social practices. These configurations are constantly positioned towards socio-cultural forms of life. From the Self’s perspective, each of these forms of life is associated with an authoritative voice expressing imperatives, maxims, behavioural patterns, values, goals, and norms. In this account, the dialogue takes place not within the Self, but in the “zone” of choosing, appropriating, and transforming trans-subjective possibilities into existential ones. It is the dialogical positioning towards established socio-cultural forms of life that diversifies the Self into dialogically related I-positions. The Self is at once within the configurations of her personalized social practices and beyond her-self, thrown in the interplaying trans-subjective practices and possibilities. The Self is in an ecstatic unity with the socio-cultural life-forms in which she participates, since the practices of her personal form of life appropriate and turn into existential ones possibilities from the horizons on which the configured social practices project their potentiality-for-being. The Self is never operating behind the transformation, allegedly committed to a program or algorithm for acquiring existential possibilities from the trans-subjective interplay. Each I-position of the dialogical Self can be found (but not factually located) at several points of trajectories transforming possibilities projected by social practices into existential possibilities.

Against the background of the foregoing considerations, one can specify further the weak point in the model of the Self’s coupled processes of interiorizing socio-cultural positions and exteriorizing I-positions. In reflecting upon these processes, the model’s champions admit an initial actual (static) presence of the Self’s I-positions and the socio-cultural positions. This assumption is at odds with the observation that – with regard to the Self’s personal development – all external and internal positions are only existing in the “zone” of appropriating and transforming trans-subjective horizons of possibilities into existential possibilities. Put alternatively, the Self individualizes and personalizes her-self by constituting I-positions within the trans-subjective interplay of practices and possibilities. There is no personal existence without ongoing transformation of possibilities contextually engendered by social practices into existential possibilities. The greater the diversity of trans-subjective possibilities one may choose, the more urgent is the need of the Self’s positioning by means of proliferating I-positions. It is this multilinear transformation – and not alleged (factually present) correlations between internal positions and socio-cultural positions – that induces a variety of trajectories in the Self’s personal development, each of them (a) distinguished by a regime of temporalizing of an I-position and (b) eluding a description as factual presence.

From the viewpoint of hermeneutic phenomenology, neither the Self nor culture is a composite of discrete parts. To be sure, conceptualizing the ecstatic unity in terms of the Self’s interpretive being-in-the-world leads to freeing the concept of culture from any (mentalist, cognitivist, normative, linguistic, etc.) sort of essentialism (Ginev, 2014). Anti-essentialism is a shared strategy of dialogical Self theory and hermeneutic phenomenology. Yet when the champions of the former underscore the anti-essentialist character of their enterprise, they are inclined to commit themselves to a concept of culture as a composite of discrete elements. According to them, the very approach to the multiplicity of positions among which dialogical relationships can be established requires a concept of culture qua a constant translocality of particular elements corresponding to the Self’s multiple voices. Interestingly enough, the dialogical theorists do not suggest a non-objectivist concept of culture. They insist that culture is first and foremost communicational tools that mediate relational experiences. Yet, shifting the perspective from cognitive structures and frameworks to media of communication does not ensure an approach exonerated from objectivism and essentialism. By the same token, the continuity of subjective choices within trans-subjective horizons cannot be recast in terms of subjective presence in a statically objectified social structures.

To sum up, the transformation of trans-subjective horizons into existential possibilities fore-structures the Self’s contextualized motivations, desires, beliefs, interests, and plans. This fore-structuring becomes (partially) “rationalized” by narrating the Self, whereby the self-understanding as being contextualized by various configurations of practices contributes to the proliferation of I-positions. The transformation itself comes to the fore as a positioning of the Self in ecstatic unity with trans-subjective contexts. The appropriation and actualization of an existential possibility is a cornerstone in the articulation of a particular I-position, but it is not accountable for the genesis of such a position. An appropriated existential possibility can trigger a significant repositioning within a new context, but it per se leads to an autonomous new I-position only in very few extreme cases. The genesis and formation of such a position need rather a “chain” of choices of inter-dependent existential possibilities and a series of re-contextualization. This is why the genesis of an I-position should rather be accounted in terms of a tendency to choosing and appropriating trans-subjective possibilities of a certain kind and transforming them into existential possibilities. This tendency leads to a relatively stable trajectory identifiable as a series of re-contextualization.

Any I-position narratively identifies itself via (a) already appropriated possibilities and (b) possibilities that are envisioned to be appropriated. To reiterate, there is no appropriation of existential possibilities without narrating the Self. This kind of narrating ensures the series of re-contextualization that build up the temporal–spatial existence – that is, the “chronotope” – of an I-position, granted that each re-contextualization changes the regime of the subjective temporalizing of trans-subjective temporality. In this regard, narrating the Self is inherent in the continuous contextual constitution of the I-positions’ dispositional traits. To say that any I-position constantly is in a state of ongoing creation is to insist that no position (including the Self’s meta-position dealing with the totality of I-positions) could have essence beyond its continuous re-contextualization. Accordingly, there is no context “ready to be settled” before the appropriation of a trans-subjective possibility and its transformation into an existential possibility. Put otherwise, there are no ready-made contexts, waiting to be occupied.

If repositioning were a continuous re-contextualization, then the structural discreteness (of an allegedly enclosed context in which activities manifesting an I-position take place) should be fore-structured by the continuous formation of chronotopes. (Here I use the same notion of fore-structuring that was implemented earlier: All structural traits of what is contextually constituted remain in an open horizon, and are amenable to be revised in accordance with possibilities that can be actualized.) The transcendence that enables re-contextualization is at the same time fore-structuring what becomes contextualized. Any chronotope exists in its being towards possibilities as fore-structuring transcendence. As already mentioned, the contexts arising within a chronotope are not present at the moment when one decides to transform a trans-subjective possibility. In this account, appropriating an existential possibility is a contextualization. By implication, there are no “contexts that are already out of use”, supposedly accumulated and conserved in the past-as-passive-presence. At the very moment of its emergence, any context of choosing, appropriating and actualizing an existential possibility is in a process of re-contextualization. The actualized possibility shapes in a new manner the dialogue between I-positions, and opens new opportunities of contextualization. This picture can be generalized for the Self’s historicity.

In appropriating an existential possibility, the Self reveals an achievable future. The very appropriation illuminates the series of re-contextualization of an I-position, which has been led to unveiling that achievable future. Phrased differently, in revealing a future of an I-position, the appropriation of an existential possibility selects a relevant trajectory of having-been. In this account, the personal history has also only a potentiality-for-being. It is not a reservoir of conserved past events and episodes. Like the history of a cultural form of life, the personal history is constantly in the making: Depending on the chosen possibility, a trajectory of having-been becomes constituted. Making present a chronotope of an I-position results from the unity of a disclosed achievable future that retroactively enables the constitution of a possible trajectory of having-been. The Self’s contextual presence is made by the temporalizing – that is, choosing and appropriating – open horizon of possibilities that play the role of temporality. The continuous fore-structuring of contextual relations and dispositional traits is tantamount to the ongoing temporalizing of the ecstatic unity of the dialogical Self within the trans-subjective interplay of practices and possibilities. (This is why there is no essence of the Self beyond the re-contextualization of the Self’s I-positions.) If choosing a trans-subjective possibility and transforming it into an existential possibility reveals a future in light of which one sees possible trajectories of one’s having-been, then the context in which the possibility is appropriated temporalizes the spatialized temporality of the Self’s trans-subjective subjectivity. The I-position gains a presence in the context of choosing and appropriating through relating the chosen existential possibility to a relevant trajectory of having-been. The contextual presence is only a moving unity of achievable future and selectively constituted having-been. The contextual temporalizing of temporality (the open horizon of existential possibilities) is accomplished to become re-contextualized in new a contextual temporalizing of temporality. Because of the Self’s situated transcendence, any contextual temporalizing of the ecstatic unity is constantly beyond the Self’s subjectivity.

The hermeneutic revision and extension of dialogical Self theory suggested in this paper should not be seen as an attempt at restricting the “sphere of subjectivity” in favour of the trans-subjective being-in-the-world. (If this were the case, the revised theory would promote a kind of “trans-subjective determinism”.) The formation of contextualizing configurations of practices follows its own “logic of practices”. The Self is constantly “thrown” in such trans-subjective configurations. But stressing this “thrownness” is not at the expense of diminishing the role of the Self’s agency. The Self does not create the interrelatedness of practices and the growing inter-contextuality of her personal existence. But by choosing and appropriating possibilities, the Self actively participates in configuring practices and enacting particular links of co-referential meaningfulness among possible contexts. Thus reconsidered, the dialogical theory is no longer an explanatory enterprise that looks for causal models of what is studied. With regard to the dispersal of the Self over several socio-cultural contexts within the interplay of practices and possibilities, the theory should proceed in a doubly-interpretive manner. It has to conceptualize the dialogical Self by approaching the interpretive reflexivity endogenously operating in the various forms of internal and external dialogue, granted that the only territory where these forms take place is the transformation of trans-subjective possibilities into existential ones. The hermeneutic conceptualization of the dialogical Self can accomplish its task only by being engaged in a constant radical interpretive reflexivity about its own theoretical notions, conceptual assumptions, ontological premises, and so on. This radical reflexivity has to be methodologically dovetailed with the forms of endogenous reflexivity manifested by what is studied. Such a dovetailing is the task of any theory based on the double hermeneutics.