To respond to<< the point you make is that the cognition-story is also a meta-story. I’m not sure about that, and neither are you, it seems! For later you go on to say that what I say refers to nothing that could be invariant of any individual.>> Stories do not need to be about individuals or humans, there are myths, fables, etc. that are invariant of gods, animals, and forces.
But more to the point, before there were stories about individuals -biographies and auto-biographies -, there were hagiographies, where people,Saints, for example, wrote about what they did in every day life not as an ‘I’, but from the viewpoint of a generalized ‘you’, or ‘thou’ of God: “You told me dear Lord to find the bucket under the chair and that is what your humble servant did.” This would be a meta-story, since it contains an explicit commentary language on an object language where the ‘I’ disappears under a ‘you’. It is not quite a ‘story’ since it has a dogmatic dimension of revealed truth, like your ‘cognitive strategy’ suggestion, since you are not simply telling a story, but commenting upon how people — or YOU — do not tell stories that are true enough; and what should replace the simple first level stories to be more true is, at least for you, a ‘cognitive strategy’. This second level story, or meta-story, is what I called a form of critique and dogmaticism or in the Christian tradition, a form of catechism: meta-stories used to instruct others in a kind of popular manual for the masses. Repackaged in the modern garb of science today, you call it a ‘cognitive strategy’: it is way of speaking about the ‘I’, but now using a ‘you’ in terms of generalities: “Know that God loves YOU in all that YOU do”, etc. And this is how you begin the title of your writing “ Who are you YOU really?” You do not address the ‘I’, but the ‘you’, which is in fact now just a secular ‘thou’ of a cognitive strategy. No doubt, if you were to read, or have read, the hagiographic and catechistic style of addressing people, you have noticed that the person writing often tries to speak of his/herself, not with ‘I’, but with ‘you’ = an exterior form of address that is often equated with what everyone is, or should be, according to a general code or morality. Or in your case, the codes of cognitive-behavioral research on the masses.
Though these distinctions are not habitual today, I think the argument above can be followed by an average reader. If so, let’s ask a second question:what is this ‘you’ or ‘thou’ used in the dogmatic meta-story trying to address? It is no longer the individual self, per se, but an ‘it’, a fragmented locus of the drives, a pre-self, something for the Christians, that was the place of the body and sin. It is the place you speak of when you talk about your ‘drunken nights out’ and fragmented states. Summarily, the dogmatic meta-story, is not so much a bedtime story, but a form of demand on what YOU — a good soul — should do in face of an IT, i.e., the place of the body, the drives, and passion.
In the end, what I am proposing, is that your ‘belief’ in a cognitive-behavioral meta-story is altogether the same ‘belief’ of a christian in a meta-story of morality/sin. It is a way of speaking that has a 2000 year old tradition. In fact, instead of asking in the title “Who are you really?”, it would be more accurate to ask under these conditions “Who art thou really?”.
My aside on Freud’s Super-ego(Thou/you), Id (it), and Ego (I/me) was just an indication, that since his writings, we have been freed from such religious and scientific dogmatism. But to go into this here would not be the place.
Hope this dots the i’s.
S
