OTHER PROBLEMS ABOUT THE SELF

Stephen Theron*

*University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.

In this paper I endeavour to focus attention upon considera- tions which commonly occur to men, but which have not com- monly been subjected to philosophical t reatment, largely because it is very difficult to adumbrate a conception of some- thing which is contra-distinguished against all of which we can form concepts, I mean existence as the traditional polar oppo- site to essence. Opposite or not, it certainly differs from essence. To compound the difficulty, every word in our language in a sense asks to be treated as the name of a concept. Nonetheless, judgements of existence are possible, and one can well argue that all judgements are judgements of existence {cf. Joseph Owens, 'The Content of Existence', 'Logic and Ontology', ed. Munitz; E. Gilson, On Being and Some Philosophers, chapter 'Existence and Knowledge'; Schmidt, The Domain of Logic ac- cording to St. Thomas Aquinas, The Hague, 1966, pp. 229-237}.

These considerations offer an opening in philosophical theol- ogy not only in that they bring considerably closer to home a variant argument made up out of the first cause argument and the argument from contingency, into the stuff of consciousness, its lived quality, in fact; they also and for the same set of rea- sons switch attention away from the, in the theological context, somewhat abstracted notion of causing Ino one ever jus t causes anything, except as an aspect of doing something more partic- ular) to the more concrete and indeed personalised idea of giv- ing. We speak in geomtery of the given, but it was Euclid who gave us the axioms. My question would be, who (or what} gave us ourselves. However I do not here get so far, but focus rather on the aspect of giveness itself, which may seem to load the dice in advance in favour of an affirmative theology, when com- pared with more "essential is t" accounts of the self, but which 1 argue is nonetheless a better account than these, whatever

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the consequences of it. If each man is his own self there is no essence of that self as such, yet nothing else is so int imately present to him, with the possible exception I mention noted by St Augustine, viz. the divine as giver of what is found given.

On a point of method I would ~dd that we risk stul t i fying ourselves here if we insist on gett ing clear in advance how much of this amounts or does not amount to any kind of proof. I am proposing a new approach (and incidentally, but only inciden- tally, a new 'language') to the question of the self. My sugges- tion is tha t this approach, in contrast to most others which merely t reat the self as a condition or point of departure for 'experience', brings attention to bear on the origin of the self as being something apart from jus t another contingency, though not at all in the direction of necessity. There is a parallel, though I have not drawn it, with Newman's t reatment of the voice of conscience. I invite, that is to say, to a type of self- understanding one might call 'existentialist ' , though I imply no hostili ty to essences, of human nature or of any other na- ture. This self-understanding, I suggest, is difficult to at tend to at the same time as one maintains a secularist world-view. As Chesterton said, there has to be someone to say thankyou to, but I would add to that tha t there even has to be someone, in his sense, to blame, if one judged this more just than grati- tude. The alternative is to let go of the principle of sufficient reason, as, however inconsistently, many do. But where it is one's own existence as subject which requires explaining it is yet more difficult to carry through an account of tha t principle as merely 'regulative'. For my whole point is that we are not here dealing with an instantiation of a concept, in discourse or anywhere else, and so the extent to which it fits or does not fit into a given conceptual scheme is of no more than marginal relevance to its explanation, i.e. to the explanation of the ex- isting and thinking self.

Hume made the point that on idealist empiricist premises we have no reason to admit a self enduring through the succession of impressions which, relying on memory, we call ours. But of course it is o u r memory, not someone else's, we rely on. The

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self is at the very least a condition, a postulate, for the unity of experience, say rather for having any material to talk about.

Analyses like these, however, ignore or evade the conscious- ness of self. The self is a postulate for the uni ty of experience merely because the notion of experience itself is jus t the no- tion of that which one or more persons are conscious. Experience is the name for the content of consciousness and it is only in a narrowed-down sense that it refers exclusively to what is a posteriori. As Locke pointed out, an innate idea I never ex- perienced {of which I was never conscious} would be chimerical.

The problem of the self, then, is inseparable from, perhaps identical with, the problem of consciousness of self. To be cons- cious of a unified experience in space and time is to be a cons- cious subject of tha t experience. Nor is this to make memory of the criterion of personal identity, as if amnesia excused. The typical self does not suffer from amnesia, but it can. All remem- berers are selves, but not all selves are rememberers. Memory is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for the continuity of self.

But we set aside for the moment all the problems of continuity because they are not fundamental to our concept of conscious- ness. The present moment occupies a privileged position. The conscious man is the man who can now say and think 'I'.

But what is it tha t he thinks? He certainly does not merely make use of the most general of all universals, even though it is true that every man refers to himself as 'I ' . For the way that every man refers to himself as 'I ' is not the way that every man might refer to himself as 'man'. It is much more like the way Margery Kempe used to refer to herself as ' this silly creature'. Yet being created does not seem part of the meaning of 'I ' either.

So, looking at the Cartesian heritage, it seems tha t long be- fore Husserl, rather than rely on a good God who would not let him be deceived, put the world into brackets, i.e. shelved questions about its existence, those philosophers, like Husserl himself, who treated the conscious 'I ' merely as a condition for the unity of experience, had put into brackets that self the dis-

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covery of which on the plane of certi tude gives that exul tant quality to Descartes ' Second Meditation.

But this was never justified. The two bracketings differ in type. For every man's experience remains his own and yet the cardinal fact about it is that it is. ~This is where Sartre 's nifty playing off of the phenomenon of being and the being of the phenomenon might find its serious point. Each use of 'I ' refers to a different being, not jus t in the sense of an individualized nature, i.e. of some individualized nature or other, as man must refer to some man or other, whether it is myself or not being an irrelevancy, but always to the being of the man or spirit who utters it. No two men can give 'I ' the same reference.

Nor does T merely refer to the speaker in the way he might refer to someone else, though this is only brought out in cer- tain contexts, e.g in some uses of the future tense. This may be because I do not know my intentions in separation from in- tending whatever I intended in the way that I might know another man's intentions, e.g. when I tell you he won' t let you down. But whenever I refer to that being which is I my inten- tions are, at least not excluded from the reference, since there is no ground on which to exclude them. To put this mat ter another way, in referring to myself I do not, unless by a spe- cial extra operation, make myself an object, like any other, of my own consciousness. It may even be doubted whether such a extra operation is logically possible except in some such case as saying 'The only man in this room with glasses on' where it is not so much that I refer to myself qua myself but to a man I happen to be.

Descartes almost immediately turned his attention away from what I am trying to focus on here. He was anxious to give some characteristic, some essence to the 'I ' he had discovered as cer- tain before all else, and he fixed on thought, exposing himself to the criticism that this move presupposes a world of shared language and notions, such as the notion of thinking, and to the criticism that though the 'I ' is known in thinking it does not follow from that that it is always or essentially thinking. But even if I am a thinking thing the question may be raised, and it is my question, what is it to be this I which is a thinking thing or which is conscious?

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Am I perhaps asking, why am I numbered, why do I find my- self, among actual consciousnesses? Or better, how is it that the world has become, quite recently, a world for me? Why am jus t I that child born of my parents at that time and place? Why, to star t from the other end, are those philosophical no- tions expressed in terms of a universal, necessary thought, a divine n o u s , seen to be insufficient or off the point where the problem of the actual personal T , sitting by a seventeenth cen- tury fire, is broached? I t is evident, said Aquinas, that it is this man that thinks, and there he exposed an error all right. But this is only evident in the way it is evident tha t it is this dog which has fur. We are not concerned here with the error of monopsychism but with its evasiveness, with what remains for them and Aquinas to consider after the error is corrected.

Is it the problem of contingency? I may say, intelligibly enough, of a tree, that there ju s t happens to have come to be this tree in this place, such that I now see it, bu t can I intelligi- bly say that there jus t happens to have come to be a conscious- ness in such and such an ambience such that I am aware of it and it is mine? It seems not, as an answer to the problem, the problem perhaps of what the problem is, since the 'I ' with all its difficulties has simply been shunted into a subordinate clause.

I t is mere perversity to say there is no world apart from the self. For I can give the year of my birth and others may one day know the year of my death. People ask, quite legitimately, why there is a world, but I do not think this is jus t the same question which each man asks of himself, what is it to be T ? For I, as subject, am not object, even though, we have insist- ed, I am not jus t the limiting condition for the experience of objects. I am to myself something which is, bu t which is not an object of experience.

The problem then is not solved by there being thinking things. The problem is that each man can in his own case verify that these thinking things do not collectively const i tute an ideal consciousness with which, like any other general notion, philosophy could deal in the good old way. Certainly my mind is of the same nature as all other human minds; indeed it is in- dividuated in jus t the way that they are. But all this could have

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been so without my being there at all, not merely in the sense of the individual reading this paper not being there. That is a banal truth; but in the sense that every actual human being whoever he is knows that he is part of the spectacle he beholds. The world includes my awareness of it, not as a logical condi- tion, but in fact, and it need not . /~nd if this is true of each in- dividual it is also true of the collectivity. To generalize the T is not as such to universalize it or make it " transcendental" . One man counts for as much or as little as a hundred billion men. An infinite multitude might be a different mat ter bu t the development of natural history studies has taken our interest away from that problem.

In this regard one can wonder whether philosophy has assimi- lated the fruits of these studies. When the Greeks looked back and imagined human nature endlessly reproducing itself against a static geological background it is clear that the problem of individual consciousness not merely could have no importance but could not easily arise. To be one of an infinite number is, it might be thought, not to be at all as we understand it. And in the modern notions of the world becoming conscious of it- self in humani ty we find philosophy hankering back to these ancient notions, at least if it is then the world which is seen as somehow necessary and infinite, imposing iron laws of de- velopment on human kind into an endless future. But the world too, under investigation, at least appears highly fortuitous and finite. Why should the world ever become conscious of itself, supposing such an idea to have meaning? Really it is only we mean, in our limited numbers, who can become conscious of the world and the efforts we make seem to presuppose an ability to attain, had we but time, a consciousness reaching right up to the reality. It is this belief, of course, which clashes so awk- wardly with that awareness of our contingency to which the Greeks hardly attained. If they had it would have been much harder for them to reach what I am convinced is a true state- ment of Plato's, properly understood, viz: 'All nature is akin and the soul has learned everything', a statement we under pres- sure of our own known contingency are so tempted to deny.

Perhaps all that can be added to this line of thought is that each man, each I-sayer, can only rationally express wonder and, let us say it, grat i tude at his being there to take part in the

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drama and spectacle of the world. This, however, is a matter of appreciating one's creation, which means appreciating that one came to be, to exist, can one say gratuitiously? But this seems to suggest that one was there beforehand, although lack- ing this particular gratuitous benefit, which is plainly false. Reincarnation is a non-starter. Although it is worthwhile notic- ing a} Lhat if there was a first incarnation the same puzzle re- mains, b} that even if the process had been going on eternally it would make very little difference: I might still ask why I am one of these eternal existents and find in myself no sufficient reason. I am not a part of God. So it is not so much a matter of a temporal beforehand as of a gift being given to an other- wise non-entity.

The appearance of paradox might be weakened if it was sug- gested that the existence which is given is precisely the proper or distinguishing at tr ibute of the being tha t gives it and which alone exists by nature, is identical with its own act of existing. This of course is an invitation to step outside usual essentialist modes of thought where what things are is most naturally con- t rasted against the mere question whether or not they are, so tha t we might rephrase the idea of a gift being given to a non- ent i ty as if that thought intended that existence, the charac- teristic good of the Creator {called life in the context of living things}, be given to what lacked it, understanding 'what lacked it ' as somehow different from being there before one is there.

But how can it be different? Certainly what has life, to switch the notion slightly, can receive more abundant life, and in a con- text of miracles what has lost life can be thought of as having it restored to it without too much difficulty. But 'what has lived' is more than a non-entity. A non-entity can ' t be any sort of "wha t " at all. As the theologians say, in creation the thing created does not undergo change, is not passive to a divine ac- tion. In creation there is no real relation of God to the creature.

A receiver of a gift is eo ipso autonomous, separate. Here I cannot be that. For what is given just is myself, and not in the first instance to another, but to myself. I am given to myself. Taking that formula seriously, and understanding the identity of ' I ' with 'myself', we should be clear it does not say that I exist before I, i.e. my existence, am given. That would be a con-

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tradiction arising out of taking the meaning of the formula from its inevitably conventional grammatical form, rather than at- tending to the terms used, the entities named. I am given to myself and therefore it is in tha t gift of myself to myself that my existence is consti tuted as something with which the crea- tor may be in a relation, though in this act there is as yet no relation. Since it is premised to it that one of the terms does not yet exist, the meaning of the act being that it begins to exist.

Secularists are bound to say there cannot be a giving if there is no giver. Nonetheless it seems to me the analysis s tands in- dependently of the theistic overtones which so naturally rever- berate. Some other process has to be found in this case to replace the giving, if indeed we are not to speak of the world giving myself to myself, remembering however that the analy- sis of self-consciousness I offered is incompatible with notions of each self arising by some sort of necessary genesis out of the world. I am as contingent as, in my view, the world itself, and yet my contingency cannot be reduced to a mere function of the world's contingency. And in that case the non-theist has the difficulty of saying what he could motivate or activate the world to give me to myself.

A way out of it might be to say that self-consciousness is a product of the social process. After all, the newly created hu- man lacks it. But this says little since the meaning of this self- consciousness is that it is a knowledge of one's contingent ex- istence, its unexplained or gra tui tous nature, however that knowledge is come by. Not only so, bu t this knowledge could in principle occur to any member of any tribe, even if beliefs such as tha t in an infinite mult i tude of men might make such awareness less acute.

Someone might say that the myster ious formula 'I am given to myself ' is the reverse of an improvement upon the clear for- mulation of creation given by Geach, viz.

'There is just one A; and God brought it about that {Ex} {x is an A}; and for no x did God bring it about that x is an A; and c is an A' {God and the Soul, p. 83}

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Geach comments: 'The part of this proposition that express- es the creative act (namely the first three conjuncts) does not mention c, and explicitly denies that in creating God acted upon any individual' (ibid.}.

But our two formulae have different functions. Geach's is to make logically perspicuous what is said when creation is assert- ed. But if it is true tha t I cannot talk about myself as an ob- ject, since if I do tha t object will not be myself and anyway when I say 'I ' this is not what I do {as in 'I feel sick' or 'I won't let you down'} tha t formula, about the object c, cannot be ap- plied by anyone, without some modification, to himself. To be sure I can substitute 'I am' for 'c is' and then the formula states the truth that God created me, just as I can say I am a chess- player as well as tha t Johnny is a chess-player.

But what we were t rying to explore was the meaning of be- ing I phenomenologically or as seen from the inside. This is not to be reduced to a mere a t tempt to give the psychological feel of it. If we agree tha t the cogito accompanies all experience, tha t all experience (of objects} is had by some subject, the ques- tion of the way of being of tha t subject can become for us, with only an appearance of paradox, a target for objective knowledge. And if, further, it is fundamental to tha t subject to know itself as existing without sufficient reason or even cause Ifor why it is just this subjectivity which is mine which has been caused?}, then that properly contingent existence, as an object of experience, is best ascribed, perhaps, by saying I am given or, on a secularist hypothesis, impersonally delivered, to my- self. To put it another way, what Geach's formula states is ex- perienced in this way, experienced, that is, not as a mere seeming, to be contrasted with scientific knowledge (as seem- ing to see a small sun is contrasted with there being a very large sun}: rather, in the case of men creation is a reality of experience as the knowledge of one's self being given to one's self. At least obliquely this is related to not finding in one's self a reason for one's existence (why I am the son of my parents?~, i.e. this is a condition of it, since no one whose self is given to himself in this way exists beforehand to provide such a reason.

Yet it can' t be denied that the formula recedes a little from the real situation in making a concession to a mundane way of

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speaking. It would improve it to say ' I t is given that there shall be myself', not meaning it is taken for granted, as in a theorem, but rather the opposite, that we can' t take it for granted and can't explain it, except as the fiat of a supremely free provi- dence, however interpreted. But this improvement again side- steps the experience of the subject. The human subject in a sense cannot conceive of the world apart from himself. He thinks of the reign of Queen Victoria as a world waiting for him to be born, s i tuated at a certain distance from his own impend- ing birth. At the same time he has to concede that this particu- lar categorization is a distortion, a mental phenomenon veiling the noumenon. This distortion inherent in the created intellect's perspective in present conditions is best corrected by present- ing a formula which clearly instances an application not nor- mally allowable to its main verb in a language, the human, shot all through with this main distortion. It is true that nothing in myself determines that I should have come to be and it is true that I have come to be. Not jus t my existence but I my- self am given to myself.

I would like to end with an insight of St Augustine 's drawn, presumably, from similar considerations. He says, 'There is one closer to me than I am to myself', and what I said about the use of 'given' perhaps applies generally to his 'closer'. What can be closer to anything than itself?

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