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- Author: Jay L. Garfield
- Full Title: Losing Ourselves
- Category: #books
- Its mode of existence is merely conventional, determined by our customs regarding the application of words like this chariot.
- To put this another way, we do not stand over and against the world as isolated subjects; we do not act on the world as transcendent agents. Instead, we are embedded in the world as part of an interdependent reality.
- Consider, to take another analogy, a dollar. There are lots of ways to have a dollar. You might have a dollar bill, a dollar coin, ten dimes, or an electronic record. Your dollar, however, is neither identical to nor different from any of these ways that it might be instantiated. It isn’t identical, because you could swap dimes for paper and still have the same dollar. It is not different, because whether you hand me the paper banknote or the stack of dimes, you have handed me your dollar. The dollar isn’t something apart from these. If I lose the paper or the dimes, I have lost the dollar. Nor is the dollar some distinct entity that possesses the dimes or the piece of paper. No account that takes the dollar to exist either as identical to or as different from the medium in which it is instantiated makes any sense at all.
- Hume offers us a nice analogy: we can imagine a church founded by a small number of congregants. As it grows, new congregants join, others leave or die; some are buried in the churchyard. Ministers succeed one another. The old wooden building becomes too small for the growing congregation, and so it is replaced by a larger stone structure. After a number of decades, we might ask, “Is this the same church that was founded decades ago, or a different one?” [1.4.6.13] The parishioners are different; the minister is different; the bodies in the churchyard are different; the building is different. Nonetheless, since it makes sense to say, “This church is fifty years old,” in the most important sense, the church remains the same. So, while it is not some entity different from its parishioners, minister, building, etc., nor is it identical to them, it exists conventionally, and that is enough for it to be a real, functioning church. Once again, just so for persons.
- First, when we think of ourselves as selves, we assume that our existence is independent of that of our objects, and that we know ourselves more directly, more clearly, more immediately than we know other objects. That is, when I think of myself as a self, I can imagine that even if the entire world outside of me disappeared, I could remain as a center of subjectivity. I take my self to be the basis of my ability to experience the world, not as a part of that world.
- At the most basic level, the illusion of a self is the illusion that we stand outside of and against the world. We take ourselves pre-reflectively to be singularities: not participants in the world, but spectators of the world, and agents of actions directed on that world. This is what Wittgenstein’s metaphor of the relation of the eye to the visual field captures: the feeling that we as selves are not something in the world, but instead that we are the supramundane necessary conditions of its appearance to us.
- To be a person is to play a role; the person you are is constituted by the multiple roles you play, including family roles, professional roles, roles in networks of friends, and political roles.2 This is why John Locke (1632–1704) says in his Essay Concerning the Human Understanding that the concept of a person is a forensic or legal concept, not an ontological one.
- The point of this analogy is thus that to be a person is to be something like Hamlet, not to be like the actor playing Hamlet. Hamlet requires an actor to be instantiated—to be brought to life on the stage—as well as a literary context and a set of theatrical conventions that enable that instantiation or enlivening. In the same sense, we require bodies and collections of psychophysical processes to bring us to life on the stages in which we fret and strut our particular hours (to mix Shakespearean plays) as well as a social context and set of conventions that enable us to be recognized not merely as live human bodies, but as persons among persons. To the extent that we are single characters over our lifetime, we are, like Hamlet, played by a succession of actors: an infant; a toddler; a schoolchild; finally, with any luck, an elder.
- There is at least one important difference between Hamlet and one of us: our lines are not written in advance, and our characters are performed in the context of an improv show, not a scripted play. This is important because independence is at the core of the idea of the self, and as we discard that idea, one further myth worth discarding is the myth that we ever stand on our own two feet. Instead, our identity is forged only partly by the actors who perform the roles in which our identities consist: we are not performed by solo actors in a stand-up club, but in a vast improv group including friends, family, colleagues, and fellow citizens. Who we are reflects the way our role fits into this indefinitely large, unbounded human drama.
- We saw in chapter 1 that we can identify such a self, and that we do instinctively regard our own identities as bound up with such a self. And the self that we instinctively grasp and that plays this deep psychological role is not the person we have just characterized. The self is taken to be preexistent, primordial, unitary, and transcendent of the world of objects, independent of body, mind, and social context. The person is constructed; the person is dependent on the psychophysical and social network in which it is realized; the person is complex, embodied and embedded. That is the difference between the actor and the role. We are roles, not actors.
- In other words, we can think of awareness as a mode of embedding of the organism in its world, instead of as the relation between an interior subject and an exterior object, even if that is how it appears to us in introspection. To think of awareness in this way is to take seriously the idea that we don’t stand against the world as subjects that detect its properties or agents that act on it, but instead are part of the world, and that awareness is more an attunement to our environment than a recording in our minds of what is going on outside.
- To take ourselves to be selves, as we saw in chapter 1, is to take ourselves to be subjects with a very different mode of existence than that we assign to our objects. It is to regard ourselves as standing against the world rather than as being embedded in it. And it is to take our self-knowledge to be immediate, as opposed to the mediated knowledge we have of our objects.
- These—like ox-butchering—are domains in which improvisation is necessary, and in which one must be able to perceive and to act with great accuracy and responsiveness to one’s environment at great speed, without the luxury of continuous reflection and calculation.
- Zhuangzi is reminding us here that the boundaries of our embodiment are not necessarily those of our human bodies. The tools and equipment we use become part of us as persons. We experience this all the time. When we use a stick to probe a hole, we feel the hole through the stick; when we drive a car, we experience the car as an extension of our body and feel ourselves to be in control of its movements; when we look into the rear-view mirror, we see not a reflection, but what is behind us, and so on.
- the Zen philosopher Dōgen (1200–1253) writes, To study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to be actualized by the myriad things. When actualized by the myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.
- For another, it is all too easy to take the characters in the narratives we coauthor to exist independently of the stories. And just as we shouldn’t ever think that Hamlet has any reality outside of the play, we shouldn’t ever think that we as persons have any reality outside of the narratives in which we participate. In one sense, we are as fictional as Shakespeare’s creations: we are constituted as characters through the telling of a story; we are absolutely real within the bounds of that story; we are created, not discovered; and we have no reality at all outside of the context of the stories in which we figure. This is why we are persons, and not selves.