Thursday, March 1, 2018

Who is That Masked Man?



~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
have somewhere [in “Hermeneia. An Anatomy of History and Ab-Wesenheit (1996)”] asked the 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 life-currents?” So for the sheer playfulness of it, let us pretend for one Heraclitan 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 core ‘thing’ or ‘essence’ that corresponds to the idea of Who, when I am asked to respond to the philosophically stroppy question, ‘Who do you think you are?”
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: