~by
David Aiken~
We are
often told, or perhaps it is just that we hear it so very often said, that we
should really just try to be ourselves, that this is what is truly important in
Life. But then this injunction seems, in turn, to park us high-and-dry on the
horns of another dilemma, which is: What precisely is this self that is supposed to be the true me, which everyone says ‘I’
should really just try to be? And how do I find it? And how can I know for sure
that this is the real me?
§ Private Man
and Public Man. It is an obvious
entry into our reflection to consider the possibility that, generally speaking,
there are two of me wandering around the world. (Good Grief! As if one of me were not more than enough…).
Anyway… to the great dismay of many, there seem to actually be two meandering
MEs kicking around the universe. There is the me that fusses around the house
fixing reluctantly (un)-flushing toilets, and using rather colorful language to
encourage the reluctance away; the me that sings silly and even completely
inane ditties to the dog and the wife (— but certainly not to universal
acclamation, although the dog does not seem to mind overly much); the me that
wanders around the house, bewhiskered and hair hirsute, wearing long-out-of-fashion
clogs and 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 have
forgotten to do. This is the me at home, the me that is not for public
consumption, the Private Man-me.
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 careful language to convey more
formal concepts to rapt audiences of youthful disciples of philosophy (—actually,
this may in fact be the me-in-a-dream variation of me); this is the me that
saves the silly ditties for the more appropriate private and therefore captive
audiences at home. This is the Civic Me, the me for public consumption, the
Public Man-me.
So,
at the very least, there is one same individuum,
which is me, but this individuum
wears at least two distinct masks, it acts out at least two personae.
§ Self (le soi/moi, das Selbst). Amidst this growing
collection of apparent selves, I am mindful that I
In
reality, this last question is rather tricky to answer. Because it does not seem
quite correct to say anymore, as we used to confidently assert in my more
youthful days of Nietzsche-inspired hippyism, that I am trying to find my ‘center’
or that I am trying to get centered —the (conceptual) center does not hold here
in this Heraclitan articulation of my-Self. So, it is neither truly nor even metaphorically
possible for me to get ‘centered’. Nor is it necessarily correct for me to say
that I am the sum and totality of my days—the clear end-time of my own personal
History; but rather, it seems that each fleeting day is making its own particular
little contribution to each of my preceding days in a deceptive layering effect.
And yet there does not seem to be any fixed or permanent underpinning to me
that collects and stockpiles all my accumulating days together in just one
place at any given time, no bottom layer in the layer cake; but it seems rather
that there is just a flowing transience that is the me-locus (location, geography) where events happen, for a very brief
while, in terms of this body-version of me. And while it is undeniably true
that there is this Body-locus, which
right now lives and teaches philosophy in this place, it seems equally accurate
to affirm that “I” am not exactly equal to the simple material presence of my
body parts in this time and in this space.
There
is also another element of me, which lives together with this body and which
seems to loom out from behind its apertures—a rather mysterious and complex Mental
Persona, yet a third mask, a psychological vitality that one tends to call 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 body-information into choate Mind-meaning.
For the most part, it is
certainly true 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 learning 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 then the child begins to learn how
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
tapestry. 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. The
Oedipal ‘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 over the
course of a lifetime. So, in its most fulfilled and authentic form (existentially
speaking), a human life is the creation of Self as Life-Art.
§ Nouns and
Verbs. Continuing to reflect upon
this murky idea originally suggested by 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’
during and 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 to think it as Verb-process, as
active and doing—as striving and struggling to be truly Quickened (a verbal idea, as in ‘the quick and the dead’) during 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 clear notion, however, 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 Verstandes-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 and metaphysical;
but all our beliefs do not change either the uncompromising reality concerning
the fleeting seconds of our body-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 an interesting self at the heart of this
fleeting shape of me will not be quickened into existence; and this haphazard and
default version of me will never experience, or only in the most fleeting of
instances, the flight of personal creation into the beauty of Life-Art. At the
end of such a body-life, if I have neglected the labor of weaving a personal
and therefore substantial and quickening history into a work of art, which
could be hereafter called the-story-of-my-life, then there will truly be nothing
more significant in my casket than a dead body that no longer geo-localizes for
the World of Men. And the Greater Art-history of Mankind 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 try to make plausible arguments
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?
(Modified
from an original essay published in August 2012)
Further Phrontisterion reading around
Heraclitus:
