The Self
Iris Murdoch and Uncle William
Selves are everywhere. I myself and you yourself are but two of them. And they are the focus of much of our attention. We talk of self-abasement, self-awareness, self-belief, self-control, self-denial, self-disgust, self-esteem, and so on through the alphabet, past self-hatred and self-love to self-respect, self-searching, self-trust, and self-violence. My Oxford English Dictionary lists eighty-seven such hyphenations before the end of the letter c, but after that I lost count. Perhaps there should be more, since with a few exceptions we can have just about any attitude toward ourselves that we have toward other people, or even to things in the world. The exceptions only include such trivial things as my finding you in my way, which is possible, as opposed to finding myself in my way, which is arguably not, except metaphorically when perhaps it is all too possible.
Some moral philosophers give much of this very bad press. In passages such as the following, Iris Murdoch rails against the “self-assertive movements of deluded selfish will,” contrasting it with the way that love and truth put us on the right track:
The love which brings the right answer is an exercise of justice and realism and really looking. The difficulty is to keep the attention fixed upon the real situation and to prevent it from returning surreptitiously to the self with consolations of self-pity, resentment, fantasy and despair.1
Humility is a rare virtue and an unfashionable one and one which is often hard to discern. Only rarely does one meet somebody in whom it positively shines, in whom one apprehends with amazement the absence of the anxious avaricious tentacles of the self.2
There is nothing mysterious about the forms of bad art, since they are the recognizable and familiar rat-runs of selfish daydream. Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision. We are presented with a truthful vision of the human condition in a form in which it can be steadily contemplated.3
In this view, with attention to the self come delusions, inability to see situations as they are, avarice, fantasy, self-pity, resentment, and despair. Perhaps they do, although perhaps they come in other ways as well, as we shall see in chapter 4. But we can certainly be suspicious of people who cannot be “taken out of themselves,” for instance, through devoting attention to others, or even through being carried away by other things, such as great art, music, or spectacles of nature. People who cannot throw themselves into things because of the worm of self-consciousness, typically prominent during adolescence, labor under a serious handicap.
Iris Murdoch’s target, however, is far from clear. On the one hand we have the self-conscious adolescent, say, unhealthily preoccupied with the way in which he or she appears to other people. It is not difficult to find that state deplorable, and the cure, alongside simply growing up, may well be to pay more attention to other things. However, the self-conscious adolescent need not be particularly selfish, and selfish people need not be particularly self-conscious: indeed, sublimely selfish people are typically unaware of their elephantine footprints. A fixed disposition to safeguard or improve one’s own position, even at the expense of others, does not have to be conscious. It can manifest itself in a lifelong habit of absentmindedly taking lots of anything that ought to be shared more equitably, or backing away when there are unpleasant things to be done, or finding oneself certain that the rest of the family will also enjoy whatever you want to do. Sesame Street’s Miss Piggy can say “Selfish? Moi?” with sincere surprise. The businessmen we meet later may think of themselves as merely doing their job, simply servants of their calling.
Iris Murdoch’s recipe for avoiding either selfishness or self-consciousness is that we should pay serious attention to other things, which she casually identifies with achieving a kind of objective, God’s-eye view of the world and our place in it, and here too there is surely room for doubt. So, commenting on the last of the three passages, the critic John Carey mocks the alleged objectivity of great art:
Are the paintings of El Greco or Rubens or Turner objective? Or the poetry of Milton or Pope or Blake? Or the fiction of Swift or Dickens or Kafka? … Murdoch’s proclamation seems the exact reverse of the truth. If we had to choose between objectivity and her term “selfish daydream” as the principle behind art then it would have to be “selfish daydream,” though we might want to rephrase it as “individual imaginative vision.”4
An artist who erases his or her own personality is not going to be an artist at all. Carey is surely right to query the ideal of the innocent or impersonal eye, unencumbered with cultural or personal slants on things. All recent philosophy of perception has stressed the way in which expectations, emotions, moods, or a sense of opportunities and obstacles infuse our perception of the world. Indeed, supposing that we are free of personal elements, just seeing things as God intended them to be seen, or in the only way that it could be right to see them, might itself reasonably be classed as a complacent exercise of the “big fat ego” about which Iris Murdoch seemed so worried.5
We may be even more doubtful about the association between selfishness and lack of an objective vision. In 1968 at an auction at Aldwick Court in Somerset, a ring of art dealers conspired not to bid against one another to buy a hitherto unrecognized Madonna and Child by the great Sienese artist Duccio di Buoninsegna. They therefore paid only £2,700 (around $4,000) for it, and scurrying away they promptly sold the painting to the National Gallery for £140,000 (more than $200,000). Their vision seems to have been excellent: they saw the painting exactly for what it was, when other people did not. But their keen perception was also entirely at the service of their greed, and indeed criminally so, although by the time the ring came to light, the date for a possible prosecution had passed. Many a connoisseur will look more acutely at things when he anticipates possessing them. Selfishness motivates, and can sharpen one’s attention to crucial detail.
So we have excessive attention to the self, or self-consciousness, and excessive demands on behalf of the self, or selfishness, as things to avoid. But we should also remember that a sense of self is a precious thing. Envisage someone losing it, not knowing who she is. We might think of Iris Murdoch’s humble saint who “never thinks of herself,” but we might think instead of the terrifying state of those who have lost any sense of their own self, and cannot seize on any self to think of. This might be through advanced Alzheimer’s disease or some similar incapacity. Take away someone’s memory and you leave them bewildered, lost, living only in the present, surprised, frightened, or even angry at the constantly unfamiliar scenes they remain able to perceive but not to remember or place in sequence. Our identities are the lifelines used to guide our journey: even knowing where we are implies enough of knowing who we are to keep our bearings. Otherwise, experience becomes what Kant called “a mere kaleidoscope of sensations, less even than a dream.”6 King Lear’s tragedy is largely one of the terrifying loss of this lifeline, the disintegration of the self. Under the impact of terrible traumas, such as those of disaster and battle, survivors have to struggle to put the fragments back together, to rebuild themselves. Lear is reduced to animal cries, and the victims of severe psychological trauma often cannot speak:
Like most of the 4th I was numb, in a state of virtual dissociation. There is a condition … which we call the two-thousand-year-stare. This was the anaesthetized look, the wide, hollow eyes of a man who no longer cares. I wasn’t to that state yet, but the numbness was total. I felt almost as if I hadn’t actually been in battle.7
To recover himself would be to recover his voice, his ability to attend to the world around him, to rejoin the activities and conversations of others.
Philosophers have found it puzzling that the central character in all this drama is surprisingly absent from the stage. David Hume put it like this:
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity.8
It sounds as though Hume had hoped to find a constantly present “thing,” only to find that there is no such constant presence as we go our everyday ways. There is only the ongoing life of the one animal, and the thoughts and desires and intentions that make up that life do not include the self as an element in the scene, in the way that the Albert Hall or Statue of Liberty might be. These have an independent existence: they are there whether or not we notice them or think about them, and there is something new and identifiable in our experience when they literally come into view. But selves seem to be creatures of consciousness. Without self-awareness in its various forms, there is no self left. Yet what is it of which we are aware? Not just the body, because one may be aware of one’s body without being aware of it as one’s own, as when we see a momentarily unrecognized fat person in a mirror. What then is the “I” behind my eyeballs, the subject inhabiting my brain and body, the being who survives life’s changes, that wakes up afresh every morning, and that hurtles or falters forward to its inevitable end?
If Hume is right, the self has disappeared, in which case perhaps we cannot think about ourselves at all. Some versions of both Buddhist and Hindu religions hold this. They both have “anatta” or “no self” traditions that deny the reality of the self, and see this discovery as liberation from chains of self-concern and self-love that otherwise fetter us and weigh us down. It would be nice for moralists if the fact that the self is elusive did have this moral implication, freeing us without effort from Iris Murdoch’s tentacles of selfishness. But unfortunately, it does not do so: there is no royal road from anatta to agape, or diffuse, general love of others. The illusion or fiction of a self, if that is what it is, leaves us capable of excesses of self-love or self-interest, just as it leaves us capable of deficiencies of self-knowledge or self-confidence. And in spite of his difficulties over finding a “self” of which he was aware, Hume almost immediately followed his discussion with an analysis of pride, an emotion that is only identifiable in terms of a pleasurable belief in something admirable about oneself. He was too well grounded to think that self-centeredness would wither because of metaphysical puzzles, although other, more hopeful philosophers have argued that whether or not it does, it certainly ought to do so.9
The problem is that even if, from the point of view of the universe, your toothache is exactly as bad as my toothache, it is inevitable that the latter matters to me and motivates me in quite a different way from the former. However much compassion I can summon up for you, the one is quite different from the other. I might recognize that from the point of view of the universe, it is just as good if my twin brother goes to Venice as if I do, and if I love him like a brother, I might be just as happy if he does. But it is still different if he goes and not I, and in the ordinary desires and motivations of life, that difference matters. No metaphysics is likely to erase the distinction between “mine” and “thine,” although moralists can certainly urge us to soft-pedal it whenever we can.
Yet how can this be so if the self is elusive to the vanishing point? Perhaps the clue to the conundrum lies in those endless hyphenations: the noun “self,” with its elusive object, is perhaps an unnecessary if tempting abstraction from all-too-real processes such as self-assertion, selfishness, self-doubt, and the others. Just as we do not need to look around the world for “sakes” in order to make sense of doing something for the sake of someone, so we may not need to look for selves to make sense of the processes that we use the word to describe.10 We do not need to believe in souls in order to find some people soulful.
Cognitive scientists and philosophers reflecting on their work like to think of the mind as evolving from the interactions between a large number of unintelligent components, just as the working of a computer can derive from a large number of individually dumb transformations of strings of zeroes and ones. The mind is like a club or nation, an aggregate that emerges from the relationships between the elements that make it up. Our minds, or we ourselves, emerge from this swarm of dumb happenings. But there need be no central control room, no inner manager to whom messages are delivered and from whom instructions emerge. There is just the activity of the whole, but nothing constant or unchanging. There is an organized orchestra but no conductor; a government, but nobody sitting on a throne receiving messages and issuing orders. There are processes, but no inner agent guiding and directing them. When the processes happen properly, then we as agents do things and decide things, but we are the upshot of the processes, not the sovereign who controls them. We are the lumbering and all-too-physical animals, not the ghostly controllers upstairs in their attics. An animal needs no such thing; its own control of its own actions lies in the multiple interactions of its neural circuits and chemical messengers.11
The elusive self that Hume could not find is sometimes called the self as “metaphysical subject,” the “I” who thinks and acts and perceives and rejoices or suffers, and who is thought of as set over and against all the rest of the world. Asked what it is, the Buddha is said to have replied by remaining silent, suggesting that it somehow defies description or analysis. Thinking of the self as a kind of thing is making the subject into an object. It is making it a thing in the world, and I agree with those philosophers who suggest that this is an illusion. It is in this vein that Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote:
There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas.
If I wrote a book called The World as I Found It, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book.12
The self, in this story, is like the eye that cannot be a given in its own visual field. Its elusive nature can usefully be compared with the elusive nature of the place from which you see things, or the time at which events are happening. Thus, suppose you find yourself in an instant transported to the middle of a desert or ocean. You can see in all directions—but unless you have other clues, what you see does not tell you where you are. Or suppose that like Rip Van Winkle you regain consciousness after a long sleep or coma. You see what is happening around you—but that does not tell you what time it is. Time and place function as points of reference from which things are experienced, but are themselves no part of the experience. Perhaps selves are like that.
Wittgenstein drew an interesting conclusion from this:
Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality coordinated with it.13
It is rather wonderful to think that solipsism, the monstrous limit of egoism, the idea that I am the only entity in the cosmos, with everything else being only part of a virtual reality spun out of my own consciousness, coincides with “pure realism,” or confidence in the everyday, commonsense, independent world that existed before me and will exist after me. Solipsism seems to be the ultimate limit of skepticism, but rather as extreme communism comes to seem uncannily like extreme fascism, according to Wittgenstein, solipsism evaporates into simple realism. It does so just because the “metaphysical subject” or self of solipsism cannot be given as a “thing” in the world. So the “I” of solipsism diffuses, and all one is left with is the world as one experiences it.
Curiously, however, Wittgenstein himself retained a hankering for reading his equation the other way around, reducing realism to solipsism. One of the more profound, or perhaps annoying, of his gnomic statements is: “so too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.”14 This has a highly solipsistic air, for a normal realism about the world would say that it is simply false. When people die, the world goes on, and knowing that this is true might be one of the things we dislike about the prospect of dying, and might even resent about the world. It is so tragically, unbearably unfair that there will be other springtimes with flowers and sunshine and birdsong, other festivals, other songs and jokes I shall never hear, panoramas I shall never see, after I am in my grave.15 If only I had been lucky enough to have been born twenty-five years later, and have a corresponding extension of time to come, it wouldn’t be nearly so bad.
A different, although compatible, diagnosis of the elusive nature of the self is found in post-Kantian philosophy, and particularly in existentialism. In this tradition there is no description of the self, or the core or essence of a person’s being, because we are always free to cast off or reject any such description (well, let’s rein back a bit: you can’t reject the description of yourself as, for instance, medium height, English-speaking, overweight, balding, twenty-first-century, middle class, and so on. You are not, and can never be, a Roman centurion, Spanish conquistador, or a native of the Amazonian rain forest with no contact with Western civilization. You cannot shake off the description of yourself as none of those things). Nevertheless, taking a cautious, skeptical, or transgressive stance toward any of the categories that others apply to us is a prime duty of “authenticity,” whereas denying one’s own ability to do so is the hallmark of an inauthentic, fettered existence tied to the conventional roles into which society has forced us. The authentic person takes control of his or her aims and goals, and thereby takes control of his or her very identity. The undeniable romantic attractions of this ideal occupy us later, as do its considerable difficulties.
Meanwhile, we should reflect that, whatever their elusive nature, selves do not give up easily. Perhaps it would be better to say that thinking in terms of a self that owns experience is a kind of construction of our brains, a mode of organization of the living animal that enables it to cognize other things, although as it does so, its own self remains outside its field of vision. But even that metaphor is misleading, since what lies just outside the field of vision can be brought within it if we turn our heads, while the metaphysical self, apparently, never can be. It is always behind the camera, never in front of it.
Some philosophers have followed up these thoughts by suggesting that the self is a kind of “narrative construct,” an illusion of individuality invented in something like the way that a fictional character is invented. The teeming brain somehow turns itself into a novelist, and spins a story about the abiding and permanent self that owns experiences and directs actions. It is as if the advice “pull yourself together” is the advice to write a story rather than the advice to become focused on decision and action. But it is not clear that this view is intelligible, nor that it very accurately maps what most of us are like. The story is doubtfully intelligible, because the storyteller responsible for the fiction is already—what?—surprise, surprise, it is a little self! It has purpose, intentions, command of language—it is just like me, in fact. And it is surely incoherent to suggest that I myself am a fiction in a story that I myself tell—and tell to whom? Why, to me, to myself, of course. I am narrator, audience, and fictional character in the story being told, all rolled into one. Imagination boggles, and rightly, for the story is only fitted to remind us of Tweedledum and Tweedledee’s failed attempts to convince Alice that she is but an element in the dream of the sleeping Red King: “ ‘If that there King was to wake,’ added Tweedledum, ‘you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle.’ ”16 “ ‘I know they’re talking nonsense,’ Alice thought to herself, ‘and it’s foolish to cry about it.’ ” Yet even poor Alice wasn’t told that if she herself stopped telling her own story, she would go out—bang!—just like a candle. She did, however, begin to worry about that possibility later: “ ‘So I wasn’t dreaming after all,’ she said to herself, ‘unless—unless we’re all part of the same dream. Only I do hope it’s my dream, and not the Red King’s! I don’t like belonging to another person’s dream.’ ” Part of Carroll’s delicious mischief is, of course, that the Alice who says this—the one who has the adventures in the Looking Glass world—is indeed doubly a creature in a dream. She is first a creature in the supposed dream of the real Alice Pleasance Liddell, whom Carroll adored and who lived in Oxford and owned a kitten.17 But then the plot thickens, for that dream, the dream of the real Alice, was itself not a real dream but only a fictional dream in the story written by Carroll. Fortunately, I, writing this, am not a creature in my own dream nor those of anyone else, and neither are you, reading it.
The idea of the self as a fictional or literary construct has other problems. For many of us, a “novel” about our lives, told, for instance, in order to chart a coherent character visible throughout our somewhat chaotic recollections and contradictory aims, is hardly an imperative. The lying Josiah Bounderby in Dickens’s Hard Times tried to pass himself off as the hero of a particular kind of narrative, telling exaggerated stories about the hardships of his childhood and the extraordinary courage and perseverance that enabled him to overcome them. But most of us do not need to do this.18 We can be happy with life being just one thing after another. The Greeks pictured “psyche” as the embodiment of the human soul, as a butterfly, a creature of beauty, but also one of inconstant flutterings, flits, and bobs, and that is at least as apt a model as anything enduring that persists through the changing scenes of life.
It is time to leave these deep waters and pursue more ordinary themes. A better clue to the nature of self-consciousness may be given by everyday examples of people in whom it seems pleasantly absent. We have already touched on Iris Murdoch’s saint, but here is an engaging example in which Gwen Raverat, Charles Darwin’s granddaughter, writes of his sons, her uncles:
They were the most unself-conscious people that ever lived, those five uncles; but Uncle William was the most unself-conscious of them all. He hardly knew that he had a self at all. There is a story about him at my grandfather’s funeral at Westminster Abbey. He was sitting in the front seat as eldest son and chief mourner, and he felt a draught on his already bald head; so he put his black gloves to balance on the top of his skull, and sat like that through the service with the eyes of the nation upon him.19
Gwen Raverat is right that the word “unself-conscious” seems apt to describe this. But paradoxically, as the rest of her narrative makes clear, Uncle William and the other Darwin children seem to have been relentlessly hypochondriac, which implies an overdeveloped concern for one’s own state of health, a kind of self-consciousness that can readily consort with selfishness: a species of egoism. And Uncle William’s indecorous conduct might also come closer to implying a more serious defect: Is there not something a little bit shameless about him? If he really has no consciousness of how he stands in the eyes of others at the very moment of taking such an important part in this grave and dignified ceremony—was he not embarrassed faced with the no doubt pained expressions of the officiating clergy?—then while it may be unworldly and lovable, would it be so good if, for instance, he had decided to take off his itching trousers or accompany the majestic organ by playing on a kazoo?
In other words, taking no notice of the eyes and thoughts of others could be the hallmark of the abandoned villain as much as the lovable uncle. Might not an unself-conscious person monopolize the conversation, unconscious of how he is boring others to death, or for that matter, unself-consciously run away on the battlefield, or unblushingly pocket a dropped purse? Hume said that the minds of men are mirrors to one another, and this mirroring is the constant check we have on our own behavior. Internalizing the actual or potential gaze of others is an essential component of decency. In case this all sounds a little priggish, Hume gives a splendid example:
A man will be mortified, if you tell him he has a stinking breath; though it is evidently no annoyance to himself. Our fancy easily changes its situation; and either surveying ourselves as we appear to others, or considering others as they feel themselves, we enter, by that means, into sentiments, which no way belong to us, and in which nothing but sympathy is able to interest us.20
Of course, the suggestion that one of the intensely upright, Victorian children of such a well-regulated house as that of Charles Darwin might be less than perfectly moral, let alone indifferent to the disgust his bad breath might provoke in others, is outrageous. But we might wonder whether it is good training and long habit that keeps him on the straight and narrow rather than an ability to integrate himself with the perspective of others.
Cicero, the Roman politician and writer, thought that decorum was an important part of virtue, and worries about Uncle William give us a clue into ways that perhaps he was right. Good manners are a small but constant adjustment to the reasonable expectations or needs of others, little tokens acknowledging their right to a certain space, the offering of a certain security in what they may expect from one. They are at the very least a training school for more celebrated virtues like honesty and justice. They are not to be despised, although they can engender their own anxieties and problems. One of the confusing moral lessons children have to learn is to adjust the quite frequent collisions between honesty, which they are taught as absolute, demanding, and inflexible, and the small hypocrisies of decency. The honest child who truly tells his doting grandparents, aunts, or uncles that their birthday present is rubbish in his eyes gets a smart rebuke, and his howling protestations of honesty are dismissed by the outraged and embarrassed parents. That kind of honesty is not required, or even tolerated. Social life requires a good amount of acting. Courtesy trumps honesty, which must give way to deference to the feelings of others. We disguise this from ourselves, saying that we must tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, yet voicing every belief that flits into our minds is catastrophically far from the way to win friends or keep them.21
So however things stood with Uncle William, the rest of us can certainly monitor ourselves, sometimes obsessively, as all those hyphenated terms in the dictionary reminded us at the outset. But it is not quite like thinking of other things. Uncle William’s charming deficit suggests that our sense of self is intimately tied to our sense of our place in the eyes of others, or, in other words, in the moral or social world. Contrary to the existentialists, we might sympathize with the idea that what we are is fully exhausted by who we are: husband, father, citizen, teacher, soldier …. The Oxford philosopher R. G. Collingwood put it admirably:
The child’s discovery of itself as a person is also its discovery of itself as a member of a world of persons…. The discovery of myself as a person is the discovery that I can speak, and am thus a persona or speaker; in speaking I am both speaker and hearer; and since the discovery of myself as a person is also the discovery of other persons around me, it is the discovery of speakers and hearers other than myself.22
The power of this idea to compromise the rival ideal of authenticity occupies us later. Meanwhile, it suggests that our sense of self is reciprocal with our sense of other people, and their sense of us. We discover ourselves only in the social world. Hence, moral notions enter into the most important dimensions of self-consciousness, and our sense of self is largely made up by them. They compose our identity.
Although this goes some way to undermining the idea of untrammeled freedom, Collingwood’s insight is in fact echoed in Sartre’s account of recognizing another person as being a subject, as having a point of view. Within that other person’s point of view, one is oneself as much an object as he or she may be for oneself. Being an object for another person includes being subject to his or her evaluations. Hence, recognizing another subject is potentially a destabilizing experience: the recognition that the sovereignty that it is natural to claim for oneself is no better founded than that which other people are also going to claim for themselves. It also involves the possibility of being ashamed, as falling short in the eyes of others, of needing to hide oneself. In one of Sartre’s celebrated vignettes, a man is sneaking a look through a keyhole at some interesting scene within. He is wholly absorbed, and his own self is absent from his view and from his thoughts. But a creaking floorboard behind him changes everything. He is now conscious of himself as appearing to another, and, of course, as not appearing to best advantage, in fact, to being revealed as a Peeping Tom. With interpersonal consciousness comes the awareness of evaluative perspectives within which one is not automatically on a pedestal, but on the contrary always at danger of being an object of judgment or even of derision or contempt.
A very nice psychological observation shows the power of this idea. In Newcastle University Psychology Department, there was a communal coffee room in which there was an honesty box, with an ordinary piece of A4 paper (about 21 by 29 centimeters or 8 by 11 inches) indicating the modest schedule of payments people were expected to make for their tea, coffee, milk, and so forth. Unfortunately, it appeared that not nearly enough money was being placed in the box: psychologists are just as good as everyone else at freeloading. The member of the department in charge of the system, Melissa Bateson, decided to vary the notice by indicating the sums due, not by adding capital letters or threats, but just by varying a little banner illustration along the top of the notice. On some weeks it would be a neutral frieze of flowers. On other weeks the picture showed the eyes of a face looking directly at the viewer.
The notice was not particularly conspicuous, but on weeks with the eyes looking at them, people stumped up nearly three times as much as on weeks without them. The mere possibility or mere idea of being seen to be defecting from a social duty was enough to change behavior dramatically. Similar results have been found with students who are given an opportunity to cheat on a test. “Primed” by being told casually that the room in which they sit is thought to have a ghost, fewer people cheat than if there is no such priming. Even an invisible agency looking at you is enough to motivate you back onto the straight and narrow. This is presumably one of the adaptive functions of religions that often emphasize God’s all-seeing eye.
Of course, if one is sufficiently shameless, brazen, brass-necked, unimaginative, insolent, or in the limit psychopathic, there is no internalization of the point of view of others. Their view of you has no authority for you. We return to this sinister list later when discussing the insidious mechanisms we have for discounting the actual or potential gaze of others.
Returning to identity, what really makes you the individual you are is given in your unique history, the stream of experiences belonging to you and nobody else, surveyable by you in memory but crucially extensible by you through your choices, decisions, and aims for the future. You are someone with a country, family, history, particular social life, set of projects, and set of boundaries within which there are things you will do, and beyond which lie things you will not do. You have habits of behavior, and you have claims on others and expectations of them, just as they have in regard to you. All these things make up your social and moral world. Your identity, in fact.
The word “moral” may sound rather serious here, and it is natural to be suspicious of too much talk about it. But we need not mean anything unduly high-minded. Consider a normal day, not one on which you are bent on saving the world or rectifying its injustices. You get up, perhaps because you must, since your job or family requires it. You compliment one child on his homework and sympathize with another for some setback. You are grateful to your spouse for thoughtfully showing you where you left your keys. On the journey to work, you suffer a flash of anger as someone disrespectfully barges past you, but you suppress the desire to retaliate. You are plunged into despair because a colleague whose work is inferior to yours has been given a promotion over you, and you vent your resentment at lunchtime, taking consolation from the sympathy of your audience.
And so on and so on, in an endless dance of social interactions, mediated by emotions of sympathy or resentment, thoughts of what is proper, what is annoying, what is a grievance, what you deserved, what others deserved, what needed doing, what was acceptable, and what was or would have been out of line. Meanwhile, in your head you rehearse the sayings and doings, real or imagined, of friends, family, politicians, or people you have heard of. This pattern of reactions to such events and such thoughts make up your day, and every day (we could go on: James Joyce’s Ulysses gave 265,000 words to an ordinary day in the life of Leopold Bloom, an ordinary man, whose memories and daydreams flit and bob along in their butterfly-like way). The pattern in turn gives other people their sense of who you are—your character or personality—your very self. And you are self-conscious as the owner of thoughts, even if the thoughts are not about yourself.
Even after we abolish the idea of a metaphysical subject, we can after all describe ourselves by finding ourselves in our world. We do so in James Joyce’s way. After six hundred pages or so, we know Leopold Bloom—and we know him as well as he knows himself. Joyce did not find something different from the living man—something inside him, as it were, that pulled the strings or determined the course his thoughts took. He just described his life, which included the things he found himself doing, and the thoughts that came, unbidden, into his head. These are processes, things that happen, one damn thing after another. There was nothing else to describe, and it is these processes that we remember and reflect upon when we think about who we are.
So I can after all loom large in my own thoughts. I may dwell on my own past doings, with shame or pleasure. I can dwell on my own prospects, with hope or fear. If I do this too much, then I am self-obsessed and may be self-destructive. If I do it too little, then I may be charming, unworldly, and spontaneous like Uncle William (let’s give him the benefit of the doubt), or perhaps thoughtless and careless, if, myself having too little self-concern or self-awareness, I am also unconcerned and careless about others around me.
I can be more or less sympathetic with the similar hopes and fears, shames and pleasures of other people, although never quite in the same way. For after all, if it was I who did that embarrassing thing, the memory makes me blush, whereas if it was you who did it, the memory may be more likely to make me laugh (although we can also blush with embarrassment at the shame—or even at the lack of shame—of another person). If it is I who am to undergo a serious operation, I feel different from if it is you, however much my compassion may bridge the divide. And this is partly because I may have to decide things if it is me, whereas if it is you, then it is up to you. We cannot make others’ decisions for them.
Hence, selves have a perfectly good place in our thoughts. Just as there is a difference between my friend Fred going to Machu Picchu and my friend George going there, so there is a difference between I myself going there and either of them doing so. I am a person among others, so how can there be any error in my taking account of that fact in my thoughts and desires?
Of course, sadly, the elderly man who gets to Machu Picchu may not be much like the sprightly youth who anticipated going there. His connection with the sprightly youth may not be through any identity of interests, hopes, intentions, abilities, or habits. His memories will be very different, and who knows how his personality may have been altered by time? There may only be a thread of biological, animal continuity, a long process of cellular division, change, and death, connecting him with the earlier youth. Perhaps he is going not because of the excited anticipation that animated the youth but from a kind of weary loyalty to a plan he dimly remembers forming long ago. The times change, and we change with them, and it is futile to look for a self that does not change while all its properties and relationships do so. “My self” is better thought of as “my life,” a process that is extended in time and embracing the whole sequence of static instants from birth to death. And the most important things about this process are the relations it has to the social environment: the circle of those others whose takes on me so infuse my take on myself.
Sonnet 62, quoted at the beginning of this book, continues with a complex reversal of the flamboyant admission of self-love:
But when my glass shows me myself indeed
Beated and chapped with tanned antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
’Tis thee, myself, that for my self I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy days.
The author looks in the mirror, which gives the lie to his vanity. He recovers, in a manner, in the final two lines, addressing his beloved as a “second self,” an integral part of his own self, and borrowing reason to be happy with himself from the beauty of his beloved. The general moral we can draw is that by drawing other people or other things into our lives, we can gain more reason for self-contentment, or even self-love, than mere “introspection” can ever provide.
Iris Murdoch was writing in a venerable, philosophical vein when she bemoaned the intrusive self. Whether it is the Christian abomination of pride as the root of all evil, or the Stoic preaching of self-mastery, or the preceding Buddhist teaching that we should study to transcend ourselves, all seem agreed that many of the hyphenated states we mentioned at the beginning are a Bad Thing, and that to become truly wise or happy or content, we must learn to liberate ourselves from the shackles of the self. Uncle William should after all be our model. Perhaps it is time to look further at why we might think that this is so.