Hi David--
Great post... Albeit a bit long.
<Certainly this is possibly true, that in "theory"
this is a way "to find and out", but I am not at all
convinced that the majority of individuals, as well as
the multitude of traditions, religions, cultures, that
conceptualize this notion of getting "rid of
the self," have such a benign notion. The self, the
body, feelings, emotion, these aren't being thought of
"per se.">
Hopefully you're not treating "self", "feelings",
"emotion", and "body" as equivalent terms here. A
couple of my major points-- perhaps not clearly
articulated --was 1) that the self is not simply what
is given to consciousness, 2) self is something that
we take an active relation to, and 3) self is
something that we construct or actively foster/develop
in relating to self. This is why self isn't something
we simply have or find present to hand in the world.
The question here would be "what can we say about the
conditions of a self appearing as such? What does it
mean to have a self?" Various traditions are
consistent with this active nature of self-relation.
The pre-Platonic warrior tradition fostered a
particular notion of self in terms of privilaged
affective states. In Plato, the self-relation becomes
one of submitting the appetitive and honor portions of
the soul to reason... Even in Nietzsche we find this
call to create the self with a particular aim in view.
This leads to the points you make about Baumeister...
The very way in which we foster or develop a self can
often lead to misery and despair. Insofar as the self
seems to entertain some sort of relationship to the
good (regardless of how the good is conceived) self
can come to seem like a curse in relation to its lack
of proximity to the good. Hence:
< In fact, we find these attached to
gendered construction of the self as well, masculine
and feminine. As one among many, Roy Baumeister
describes this notion in his book, _Escaping the
Burden of Selfhood_. Baumeister includes suicide as
not as simply an overcoming certain notions of the
self and relating to the self, but overcoming all
notions that that individual has acquired and
all notions that that individual has developed in
relating to the self.>
<For individuals who are living this, it is a "getting
rid of," the self as an alien thing. And these
reactions, I would argue, to the self are
"situationally" developed, or shall we say,
misdeveloped, through processes of each individuals
lifetime: including, specifically, the
course, of human development.>
The self falls into a nihilistic desire to destroy
itself in its failure to produce a self. As you say,
it's as if the self were an alien kernal, an invader
generating nothing but misery in its despotic demands.
One question would be whether or not this is
necessary. It seems to be a particular relation to
good that fosters this sort of reaction... Namely,
this intense reaction seems to occur when the self is
shackled to transcendental goods like those found in
Plato or the Kantian notion of respect for the
categorical imperative.
<Moreover, there is another problem, that is the
problem of the move between theory and action,
intention and actualization. The individual
may have a theory/knowledge of overcoming certain
notions of the self and ways of relating to the self,
but whether this is realizable or actualizable in
praxis/action is entirely questionable. To
say it is so doesn't make it so.>
I think you need to lay this point out more. If the
self is not something we simply have, if it's not
simply an object but something we actively take a part
in producing, then the theory/knowledge, praxis/action
problems are no problems at all. It's not a question
of first theorizing a self and then acting according
to it. No, because the self is already a system of
values. To become a self is already to engage in
acting as a self. Hence were returned to the whole
relationship to the self's comportment towards the
good, to what the self takes as its good. Whether or
not a Cartesian self fully manages to become
self-transparent to itself is entirely irrelavant to
the Cartesian sense of self. What matters is the
self-relation that treats this as its identity. To
treat self as the ideal of full transparency is
already a way of acting in the world, it's already a
means of distributing what will be of value to it and
what will not. In other words, the self IS precisely
the sort of thing where "saying makes it so." A vast
part of being what I am consists in how I relate to
myself, how I produce myself within language, with how
I PERFORM myself.
<Just because they (whoever the "they" may be)
understood it as one, does not mean that it was ever a
actualizable ability.>
Quite the contrary... But keep in mind here, were not
talking about entities. Again, a self is not a thing,
but a way of relating to time and the world, and
others around us. To understand oneself in a
particular way, to say oneself in a particular way, is
already to perform oneself, to actualize oneself after
a fashion. However, this said, it's also fair to say
that the reasons we give for our nature as a self
might be very different from the reasons that led to
the genesis of this type of self. Nietzsche and Freud
demonstrate this in an exemplary fashion.
<It could be that it was always fighting against a
mirage.>
What could this possibly mean? Unless one's adopted a
representational view of self... That is, a view in
which there's a true notion of self over and against
all of our conceptions of self, such a position makes
very little sense. If the self is something
performed, acted, created, fostered, developed, then
the notion of a mirage seems to break down. Perhaps I
should here add the caveat that self does not
necessarily include everything that belongs to the
person... Self and person are not identical. Rather,
self is that which is in the person more than the
person... A principle of organization and selection
within the person.
< Just as this new they (whoever
the "they" may be) who understand that we may get rid
of this self and replace it with a new self,
overcoming it now with this totally Other
self. It seem to me, that there also some potential
totalizing omnipotence at play here, in the latter
case, as in the former.>
Absolutely! And this is precisely why we ought to be
concerned about the sort of self were creating. It's
always possible to create the fascist, totalizing
self. In a Nietzschean vein, we ought to ask what
sense a particular type of self contains or embodies.
This requires a geneaology of selves that would seek
to determine their type... A symptomology of self.
<And not realized here, as then, that it is just as
much a fantasy. It would seem that if one is able to
change, one has to conceptualize what one was before,
and what one is going to become.>
Right, which is what I'm trying to get at with the
notion of self as something we perform and develop.
The performance of self always relates/develops a
certain relation to what one was and what ones
becoming in its process. Here we might think of
Proust or even Plato where the becoming of self is
related to the warrior image of self as its past, and
the rational self as its future.
<Well, I agree. And Hegel is not the only choice.>
Of course not... Again, examples, examples. Who
knows what the future may bring, or other
possibilities that have already been explored?
> If this doesn't seem like a very
> serious matter, one need only take a look at the
> encyclopedia _Philosophy of Mind_ where Hegel
applies
> this methodology to geography and nationalities.
<I also think his concept of self and society is
tyrannical. Just like the same image leading all the
way back to Plato and Aristotle, as the ideal forms of
totalitarian dictatorships. Between the
three the self is the same.>
No way, there are vast differences in the
self-relation as outlined by Plato, Aristotle and
Hegel, all of which lead to very different ways of
feeling and seeing. For instance, the Hegelian self
is a recuperation of one's alienated essence, while
the Platonic self is a progressive taming of appetites
through reason. Very different ways of performing the
self here... With very different ways of feeling as
well.
> In
> another vein, problems of self can be seen to arise
> with respect to the ego (as understood by
> psychoanalysis) where ego as a structure of
> identification stands at the root of group
psychology
> and fascist movements.
<I disagree with this as the only concept that the ego
is to be defined by. Though, at the ego is defined by
the Freudian psychoanalysis that we have seen, Freud
does idealize of collapse of the self/ego, which
undoes his very concept of the development the self.
That ego that requires the mirror of the social
organization, or the fascist state. Or any state. The
state itself. The individual has not self apart from
the state.>
Well the ego is, after all, something that must be
developed. Don't forget that Freud adopts an
ontogenetic approach rather than a structural
approach. Personally I find it inconceivable to image
a self that didn't develop within a social
organization... Whether this social organization is
that of the fascist state is another question. D&G
try to sidestep this problem by opening up the family
to the socius as a whole. For D&G, the Oedipal
triangle is not a given, but something that is
"applied" to the subject in the course of its
development, something that the infant is forced to
submit to. At any rate, part of the way in which we
develop/perform a self consist in our interpersonal
relations with others, in our way of displaying self
to others.
On the issue of developmental theory itself... I
think it's great, with only one reservation: It still
tends to treat self as something we simply have, as
something arrived at through some sort of
conditioning. It seems to miss the dimension of
performing self, it seems to miss the purely
evaluative and selective nature of giving a self to
self. There's a way in which self can't be an object
of scientific study.
> With that said, nearly everyone belonging to the
> Western philosophical tradition (including Deleuze)
> has understood that the self is not something we
> simply have, but something that we must foster and
> create within an essentially ethical sphere (cf.
> Taylor _Sources of Self_ and Deleuze's _The Logic of
> Sense_). The question, then, is one of how to go
> about this fostering of self in such a way that we
> avoid these horrors of self.
<But here is where we quite decidedly disagree.
Though it is actually far more complicated than a
simple binary of this situation, which I will get to
in a moment.>
As far as I could tell in your email, you never tell
me where precisely you disagree. I assume that you
are protesting my term "fostering a self." Again, for
me this is a question of how we go about performing a
self, of developing a self.
> On the issue of trusting the self to root out its
own
> fascism, it seems to me that this is a variant of
> meno's paradox: How is inquiry possible if learning
> requires me to both know and not know that which I'm
> seeking? It seems to me that this problem is neatly
> dealt with if we understand learning to always take
> place between two series constantly in exchange with
> one another.
<There is a lot going on here, but I'll try to
synthesize it down into two brief comments otherwise
I'll get carried away. The first is, I do
think that learning can overcome this paradox. And I
would describe it in terms of developmentally again,
that the self is capable of certain kinds of learning
and further inquiry upon crossing developmental
thresholds, which makes what paradoxically impossible
at prior levels possible.>
I cited Meno's paradox with exactly the point in mind
that you're making here. Paradoxes can be one of the
finest ways of uncovering the structure of a
particular form of phenomena. They need not be
statements that something is impossible. Meno's
paradox describes a feature which belongs to learning
as such... The fact that it is a generative
process... As you go on to describe.
<Should we also remember Zeno's paradox about the
arrow never arriving. But would anyone like to stand
in front of the archer's bow on the point of Zeno
argument? I would argue that Zeno's argument was a
limitation of conceptual understanding, one at a lower
level of human development. The same could be said of
Meno's argument.>
Give me some credit here. As Bergson has shown,
Zeno's paradox is very useful for uncovering the
nature of movement as well. To use the common sense
argument "well, given this paradox, would you be
willing to stand in front of the arrow?" is to simply
pass over that which gives us to think. Paradox is
not simply a mark of conceptual limitation, but is
rather that which sets thought in action, which
challanges conceptuality and demands the production of
new concepts. Whitehead, Einstein, and Bergson all
spent a great deal of time with Zeno's paradox for
precisely this reason.
<The other side of that is to say that when you say,
"requires me to both _know_ and _not know_ that which
I'm seeking," as a series in constant
exchange, is that you are talking about the
metaphysics of the object of which we are knowing.>
Careful, I said series, not objects. Serial structure
is a matter of problems, not of solutions as are
objects. It's a question of forming a structure
capable of generating new ways of seeing and
encountering the world. THis is precisely what takes
place in learning... One generates a morphological
essence, a sense of phenomena where none was before.
That said, you are correct to question my use of the
language of "knowledge." This, was done, of course,
out of deference to Plato's articulation of the
paradox.
< But really you are talking about the
metaphysics of two object: the object we "know" and
the object we "not know." In fact, there is a
particular concept of what the metaphysics
of object of knowledge are, what the mind is, what the
objects that enter the mind do, how the metaphysics of
mind works.>
Hmmm, I don't recall mentioning anything about mind?
< I would argue, that such a series here is a series
within a complete metaphysics of operationality. The
self, too, is a self that operates by these
metaphysical laws, presumed whether they are
explicitly
stated or not.>
The brief and crude account of self I've outlined
above seems very far from this metaphysical notion.
One cannot be guilty of claims they do not make.
< Moreover, these are physical laws, because they
operate by those rules of causality. Therefore, the
same rules of physical objects rules these
object of mind.>
Again, I said nothing of mind, but it's peculiar that
you would claim that self operates by metaphysical
rules of causality... Especially since you adopt a
particular developmental account of self that is
highly causal in character. Incidently, ought we say
that self and mind are the same a priori? I don't
make this assumption.
> Both the reflective self and the identificatory
> ego apprehend themselves as being fully transparent
to
> themselves and in fully control of the contents of
> their consciousness (incidently, listening to my
> students leads me to believe that this is also a
sort
> of spontaneous ideology of how we apprehend
ourselves
> in day to day life, as well... Hence it's not
simply
> a critique of Descartes and Freud, but something
very
> real in our socius).
<We might say that it is not something "in" our
socius, as in "ours" alone, but is something that
human beings
universally seem to come to the mistaken conclusion
about. Or, at least, looking at this
cross-culturally, this appears to be how I've come to
see
it. But this too can be explained developmentally.>
You accuse me of holding a metaphysical view of self,
yet you make a claim like this? If humans can have a
mistaken view of self, as you claim, then this implies
that there is a true self lying beneath the simulacra
of self. How is this true self not a metaphysical
entity? A soul-pellet, or a bit of substance beneath
the illusion? Moreover, assuming that everyone
*universally* (whoa, how do you get to this claim I
wonder? could be that this is just a historical state
of affairs proper to our time and culture after all),
this would seem to be a significant fact worth
accounting for. We'd have to ask, "what are the
conditions for the appearing of self in this way?"
When you suggest that this view is mistaken, you seem
to fall back into the same old essentialism, dividing
between the world of appearances and the world of
essences. I for one think the world is sufficient in
itself... That is, that sense belongs to the world
itself and that the conditions are immanent within the
appearances.
Well, that's all I have to say for now... Perhaps
I'll comment on the remainder of your post later.
Best Regards,
Paul
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger.
http://im.yahoo.com
