On Masks.

 

We are often told, or perhaps we just overhear it in other’s conversations, that we should just try to be ourselves, that this is what is really important in Life. But what precisely is this Self that is me, which everyone says we should be?

Private Man and Public Man. It is an obvious entry into our reflection to consider that, generally speaking, there are two MEs wandering around the world. (Good Grief! As if ONE of me weren’t enough…). Anyway… to the great dismay of many, there are actually two meandering MEs. There is the Me that fusses around the house fixing reluctantly flushing toilets, and using rather colorful language to encourage the reluctance away; the Me that sings silly, not to say completely inane ditties to the dog and the wife (albeit not necessarily always in that order); the Me that wanders around the house, bewhiskered and hair hirsute, clad in warm flannel-y house pants with black & white polar bears on them … thinking about some book in hand or muttering about things I’ve forgotten to do. This is the Me at home, the Me that is not for public consumption, the Private Man.

Then there is the Me that stands in front of the classroom correctly shoed (for the most part anyway) and trousered (the polar-bear pants become a wishful and wistful Distant Thought…); the shaved version of Me that has generally managed to put some orderliness to hair; that uses more formal language to convey more formal concepts to rapt audiences of youthful disciples of philosophy (this may actually be the Me-in-a-dream variation of Me); the Me that saves the silly ditties for the more appropriate private and therefore captive audience. This is the Civic Me, the Me for public consumption, the Public Man.

So, at the very least, there is one same individuum, but two masks, two personae.

Self (le soi/moi, das Selbst). Amidst this growing collection of apparent Selves, I am mindful that I have somewhere asked the (for me) rhetorical question: “what is man if not himself a nexus drifting toward forgetfulness, if not himself an elusive apparition in the time continuum… a junction of converging lifecurrents?” So for the sheer playfulness of it, let us pretend for a moment that, behind the Masks, both Public and Private, I am/have no fixed Self, no immutable and stable ‘thing’ that is just simply Me, no real ‘thing’ or ‘essence’ that corresponds to the idea of Who, when I am asked to respond to the question, ‘Who do you think you are?”

In reality, this question is rather tricky to answer. It would not be accurate to say that I am trying to find my ‘center’, as we used to say in the days of Nietzsche-inspired hippy-ism—the (conceptual) center does not hold here for Self; so it is neither truly, nor even metaphorically, possible for me to get ‘centered’. Nor is it truthful for me to say that I am the Sum of my days (the clear end-times of my own personal History), but rather, that each fleeting day is making its own particular little contribution to each of my preceding days. For there does not seem to be any fixed or permanent underpinning to Me that collects and stockpiles all my days together in one place, but rather just a flowing transience that is the Me-locus (location, geography) where events happen, for a very brief while, in terms of this Me. And while it is undeniably true that there is this Body-locus, which right now lives and teaches philosophy in this place, it is equally accurate to affirm that I am more than the simple material presence of my body parts in this time and in this space.

There is also another element of Me, which lives within the apertures of my body—a rather mysterious and complex Mental Persona, yet a third mask, a psychological vitality called Mind. This Mind-Me is the interpreter of the world that is rushing into Body-Me, non-stop, through the data-collecting tools that are my Skin, Eyes, Ears, Nose, and Mouth; it is the Mind-Me that endlessly organizes the information collected by my body, that shows Me ways of making sense of my passage through space and time and the continuum of the World of Men, and that translates and thus transforms inchoate and muddled information into choate meaning.

It is certainly true, for the most part, to say that an infant begins its life as a rather passive ‘knowledge-gathering animal’, accepting all the randomness of information that comes its way. This is the way education happens for the very young and the young. However, as the child grows in knowledge and understanding, discernment and judgment follow on the heels of information; and the child learns to separate out (aus-legen for readers of German hermeneutics) among the pieces of the world and among the shards of interpretation that have been fed to him – the child begins to grow into an awareness of the shifting and transient ‘edges’ of a self/not-self sort, it begins to lay out and knit together the first interlaces in its own personal weave. This marks the beginnings of the child’s move toward autonomy, independence, and personal freedom—toward it-self. In the process of child-becoming-adult, educators normally expect a certain degree of “seeing” to begin taking place – of a partial but ever-increasing understanding about where an individual’s personal weave can fit into the greater tapestry of the entire world that is given to us. ‘You “see”, don’t you?’ is really a loaded question; and Nietzsche was right to see in us, in the creation of Self, the work of an artist. So in its most fulfilled and authentic form (existentially speaking), a human life is the creation of Self as Life-Art.

Nouns and Verbs. Reflecting upon a murky idea found in the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, one of Nietzsche’s later contributions to the Great Conversation of Ideas is that individuals should continually strive, each and every day, to think themselves into creation. Now while it is accurate to say that we derive the initial contours of our-Self from the particular cultural soup into which we are plunged at birth, and which gives us the rudiments of language, relationships, and values, that soup does not determine finally who we ‘are’ nor who we ‘can be’ through our becoming. Who we can be in the world flows out of continual acts of our own willing and doing; and the Self we create is both measured by and limited by, the strength of our desire to sculpt our-Selves into an Image that we dream or envision. This is the psychological import of Nietzsche’s Will to Power – and this Willing lies at the heart of our own personal Affirmation of our-Self. So it is more helpful as well as more accurate philosophically speaking, to understand our-Self not as Noun-idea, as some substantive, fixed ‘thing’ that is some-Thing in and of it-self, but rather as Verb-process, as active and doing—as striving and struggling to be truly Quick (a verbal idea, as in ‘the quick and the dead’) in all the minutes of our days, paying attention to create our-Selves dynamically beautiful during each of the days that attend us.

It is also Nietzsche’s contention that in the individual’s creation of its personal weave pattern, there is no room to incorporate materially into our design the various tag-along creatures left-over from our western mythological heritage, such as the Soul or the Un- or Sub-conscious, not because philosophers think to disprove their existence (some do, others do not), but rather because such creatures, and whether or not they truly exist, are finally irrelevant to the living-out of our days. Obviously, we may believe all the things we wish about things mythological; but all our beliefs do not change either the uncompromising reality concerning the fleeting seconds of our life, the sheer insubstantiality of each of the days through which we journey, or the absolute incumbency that rests with each individual to do the job of creating himself by himself. The reality surrounding our ‘situation’ is quite down-to-earth: if I do not create my-Self, then a self at the heart of this fleeting shape of Me will not be quickened into existence; and this version of Me will never experience the flight of creation into the beauty of Life-Art. At the end of such a body-life, because the labor of weaving a personal and therefore substantial and quickening history into a work of art has been neglected, there will be nothing more significant than a dead body in the casket; and the Greater Art-history of Men will be the poorer for it. More is the pity.

Hide and Seek. Finally, in addition to de- and con-fining purposes, masks are also for hiding. In the study of ancient philosophy, for instance, Socrates is the de facto mask behind which Plato hides himself. This has created untold confusion in Plato studies, because Socrates is the protagonist that Plato puts on stage; and yet it is only with the greatest difficulty that philosophers make their arguments trying to separate Socrates the philosopher, and his individual thought, from Plato the philosopher and his individual thought—or is Plato’s Socrates really just the vocal platform for Plato’s own ideas? Quite messy stuff all in all; but it makes all the more pertinent the high questions of philosophy: What is real about the world? And how do I fit into that picture?