Interrogations

By Kassandra

An eclectic, literary challenge to everyday thinking.

Number Six: Who's In There?

'Fortune forbid my outside have not charm'd her!' Twelfth Night

What is the self? Consciousness plus a sense of 'mine not yours or theirs'? Or a bundle, to use Hume's word, of memories, ideas, attitudes, experiences, dreams and fantasies, inclinations and habits, stances and commitments. A tapestry or fabric or carpet of a very peculiar random unaesthetic design, with not a trace of a pattern, with textures and colours going off in all directions, tangling and clotting and snarling in one place, veering madly away from each other in another.

Opinions differ widely on the value and utility of this entity or illusion. The self can be the greedy demanding baby that needs to be tamed and civilized, or the engine of the economy, or an illusion of Western thought, or the whistle on the locomotive, or a stumbling block in the path of community, or the wellspring of genius and Art and creativity, or the source of authenticity and integrity and sincerity, or the source of pain and suffering and desire and turbulence, or the source of bias and delusion and prejudice and error and distortion, or all those and more.

But whatever it is, whether illusion or useful label for inner experience, for the experience of being me not you or them, one well-known aspect of the self is a sense of division, of having a true self and a false one. Again, of course, this is a metaphor or label for experience rather than a real entity or thing, but none the less useful for that. It is a widely expressed feeling that the self we show other people is different from the one we know ourselves. That, in a way, the 'me' that everyone else knows is the wrong one, because it's not the one I know. The one everyone else knows is, of course, the external one, the one that shows, the one people can see and touch and hear, the one that moves around and takes up space in the world. But the one I know isn't like that. It isn't external in that way; it isn't really an object; sight and touch and hearing are irrelevant because it isn't visible or audible or tangible, it's something else. It's the vaporous immaterial inner thing that is conscious, that thinks, that has ideas, perceptions, sensations, some of which it puts into words, which words it sometimes addresses to others. All very well, but now and then we notice that that airy nothing, that ghost in the machine, that homunculus that sits behind our eyes, is different from the one that other people see and talk to.

This realisation can be a shock, as when we see ourselves in a mirror unexpectedly, or on film or video looking completely different from our image of ourselves. It seems such an odd arrangement. Everyone else can get a good 360 degree view of us, everyone else can see what ridiculous things our face does when we talk or laugh, how silly or pompous we look; we alone--who are most concerned in the matter!--are debarred from this view. And there's nothing we can do about any of it. We can intend to convey one thing but other people are not bound by our intentions, they can interpret us any way they like. Here's me trying to project friendliness, authority, competence, wit, whatever it may be, and there's you seeing only nervousness or pomposity or ineptitude. Our performance doesn't seem to be working--so we try harder--and look even sillier. Is your mouth twitching? You're suppressing a laugh, aren't you?

At such times we are glad we have an inner self. At least we know we are not really such fools and knaves as all that, even if no one else does. It can be consoling to remember that the outside world doesn't, on the whole, care very much about our characters, however sincere or authentic; it cares much more whether we are polite, entertaining, compatible, useful. Public virtues are different from private ones. This is irksome but inevitable; all animals have to do it, have to fawn and grovel and bow when they'd rather defy and refuse, or bristle and snarl and fight when they'd rather have a nap.

But not being a nuisance is one thing; making a permanent doormat of ourselves because we're desperate for the approval of other people is quite another. The more we try to smooth ourselves out, scrape away the obtruding bits so as not to annoy anyone, the more we all make each other a lowest common denominator that no one is interested in. We need a strong, rich, complex, autonomous self for our own sake and for everyone else's too. To do that we need to have a stubborn, bloody-minded core of independence and indifference to what anyone else thinks. If we allow ourselves to disappear and be absorbed too completely into the realm of What everyone thinks and What the others do, we all end up with the same thin tame bland much of a muchness self, no one very different, nothing very shocking or odd or unfamiliar being said, no new territory being explored. In the effort to fit in with one another we impoverish one another. Mill said it best, in On Liberty: "It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it forth...that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation; and as the works partake the character of those who do them, by the same process human life also becomes rich, diversified, and animating..."

Kassandra is the pen name of Ophelia Benson.

She can be emailed here.

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Interrogations will next be updated early November 2002

Previous Interrogations

1. Self and Internet
2. Perfection Isn't
3. Homo Quaerens
4. Showtime
5. Thinking Makes It So

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