CHAPTER SEVEN. THE STRUCTURE OF THE SELF.

A. THE SELF AS ONE.

Though composed of many elements, I am one self, one person. I recognize that I am one in several ways.

Consider: When I adopt the phenomenological viewpoint, I find myself at the center of the world. The world extends infinitely in all directions from me.1 I speak here from the phenomenological point of view; the question as to whether the Objective universe is finite or infinite, either spatially or temporally or both, is irrelevant, because what I observe from that point of view from which no extraneous interpretations are allowed to influence my observing is the world extending away form me, in all directions, without limit. There is no clear-cut end to the world; it fades off into misty indeterminacy where I cannot clearly see, but no matter how far I travel in any direction, and no matter how long I wait, the same state of affairs is evident. No matter where I am located in Objective space and time, I am always and everywhere at the exact center of the world revealed to me. At this most fundamental level, then, I am one in that I am at the center. Placing in abeyance the belief – at this level, irrelevant – in the reality of other persons who are equally centers of their worlds, I find that I am one because there is only one center of my world, the world revealed to me in my experience; that center is here, where I am.

It may well be that this fundamental state of affairs is founded on the fact that I am (in part) a body, physical and Objective. For the empirical phenomenologist it is sheer speculation to try to imagine a disembodied moment or stream of experience. I suspect that a disembodied self would still find itself at the center of its world, but I do not assert that because I have had no first-hand evidence. It is clear, however, that by virtue of being embodied I find myself in one place, here, as opposed to the many places which are there. Moreover, I experience myself as one thing among many. My own investigation of my experience of my body has only begun; it is an area to which calls for much more inspection than I have accomplished. The way I experience my body is quite complicated, because I experience it from the “inside,” so to speak, but my experience of it is pervaded with schemata based on how I take for granted that others experience me. Even in the beginning stages of the investigation, however, it is evident that I am located in one spot and that I am one in that I am not any of the other Objects around me. Alan Watts notes that “the ‘I’ feeling, to be felt at all, must always be a sensation relative to the ‘other,’ to something beyond its control and experience.”2 His use of the terms “feeling” and “sensation” is loose, but it is clear that one way I know myself as one is by contrast to the many other physical things surrounding me.

There is another way I know myself as one by contrast to many. Leaving aside the question of the genesis of the knowledge, it is clear that I know that I have a zone of privacy, my subjective experience, which is not directly experienceable by anyone else. I take for granted that others have their own zones of privacy as well. I am one as against not only the many other physical things that I experience, but other persons as well, who experience and act in the world typically in much the same way I do. Many types of intentional objects that I experience have or can rationally acquire the sense, “me,” because they are me-and-not-someone-else, or at least mine and not someone else’s, in that only I experience them directly.

James speaks of this state of affairs as “personal consciousness.” We may read “experience” instead of “consciousness”:

The only states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in personal consciousness, minds, selves, concrete particular I’s and you’s.

Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself. . . . Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law. It seems as if the elementary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that thought, but my thought, every thought being owned. Neither contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of quality and content are able to fuse thoughts together which are sundered by this barrier of belonging to different personal minds.3

The same is true not only of thoughts, of course, but of all of my immediate experience; you don’t see the world from my vantage point, don’t feel my emotions and bodily sensations, don’t think my thoughts, etc.

I am one in contrast to many not only in single moments of experience, but continuously, over long periods of time, indeed throughout my life. My self-sense, vague and unnoticed but continuously present in the background of my experience, gives me a feeling of familiarity with myself such that whenever I think about it I recognize myself as more or less the same person that I have been. Most of the time I don’t think about it, of course; I simply feel like me. The self-sense is founded on the fact of continuity in my experience. There are no abrupt discontinuities in my experience, because everything I experience leaves its traces in the form of retentions, at least, and often memories. Even something that bursts abruptly into my experience, like a loud noise, is experienced along with the retention of what immediately preceded it. Says James:

Does not a loud explosion rend the consciousness upon which it abruptly breaks, in twain? No; for even into our awareness of the thunder the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it.4

Moreover, I experience myself as continuously me across lapses of consciousness, such as sleep. When I wake up, I recognize that I still feel like me because I remember what I felt like before. My memory is tied to the experience(s) of which it is a memory by “a continuous series of retentions,” as Husserl says,5 which provide the peculiar feeling of intimacy to which James refers regarding this point: Even where there is a time-gap, he says, “the consciousness after it feels as if it belonged together with the consciousness before it, as another part of the same self;” and he illustrates his point by giving the example of two people who fall asleep and wake up together. Peter remembers his own experience, not Paul’s, and vice versa, even though each may have a correct idea of what the other’s experience was:

He remembers his own states, whilst he only conceives Paul’s. Remembrance is like direct feeling; its object is suffused with a warmth and intimacy to which no object of mere conception ever attains. This quality of warmth and intimacy and immediacy is what Peter’s present thought also possesses for itself. So sure as this present is me, is mine, it says, so sure is anything else that comes with the same warmth and intimacy and immediacy, me and mine.6

Even though I am constantly changing and my experience is interrupted by sleep or some other form of unconsciousness, I recognize myself (always in contrast to other things or persons) as continuous, as a state of affairs that endures through time.

I experience myself as continuous in another way. At any moment and over a period of time the various elements of my self are not sharply isolated from each other, but pervade and interfuse each other and have a reciprocal effect on each other. My emotions and moods, for example, arise correlatively to the intentional objects of which I am aware; they are present constantly as a shifting and dynamic background in my experience, “coloring” my perception of myself and the world and provoking me to act in various ways. My beliefs are constantly operative as the interpretive element in my experience; they contrive it so that I recognize significant patterns in what I am aware of. This recognition is no mere cold, intellectual process, but is experienced in the form of emotional reactions to what I perceive, imagine, think, etc. My self-sense and feelings of my body are present continuously, though often overlooked; my self-concept, including beliefs about what I am and am not capable of doing, exerts an influence on what I perceive as significant, and in what way.

The way the different types of elements of the self interact, combine with and influence each other such that they form a whole and not just a disparate collection of objects can best be seen by paying attention to the way they function together to promote the well-being of the self as a whole. The self, as I have noted, is a teleological unity, and the telos, the goal is two-fold: self-preservation or survival, and happiness. It is not unreasonable to think of the self as an organism, living and growing, with the many elements functioning to promote its health.7

The health of the organism consists in the proper performance of the two basic functions of the self to which no particular experienceable object corresponds: experiencing and acting; all the components of the self contribute to my experience and action. When I experience the world and myself fully and accurately, when I am not blind to certain aspects of what is before me and when I recognize significance correctly enough to act fruitfully on it, then my action is effective and I can achieve the goals that I reasonably set for myself. The subjective emotional concomitant to such proper performance of these functions is a specific emotional state called “happiness.” It could equally well be called “pleasure,” “satisfaction,” “contentment,” “well-being,” “fulfillment,” or “feeling good;” the label doesn’t matter as long as we know what we are talking about.

We all have some acquaintance with the emotional state to which these words refer. Like all feeling-states, happiness is nameable, but virtually indescribable, except metaphorically; happiness is warm, full, tingly, etc., and unhappiness is the opposite. Happiness is also distinguishable from its opposite by its practical effects. If I am happy, I am content with myself and my situation, I experience no impulse to change myself, my subjective state or my surroundings. This does not mean that I experience no impulsion to action; I may well be impelled to continue doing what I am doing. The point is that I am not impelled to change what I am doing. If I am unhappy, however, if I feel pained or frustrated or unsatisfied, then I do feel an urge to change my situation, to alter it so that I’ll feel better. Of course happiness may be more or less intense and more or less modified by an admixture of contrary feelings such as dissatisfaction, etc.

That the self is a single organism can be seen in the following way: when each type of component is performing its function well, such functioning facilitates the proper functioning of the other types of components and the health of the organism as a whole is promoted, that is, happiness is experienced. But when one type of element I functioning poorly, that has an adverse effect on the other elements and the organism is less healthy and less happy. It is not my intention here to outline how the components of the self interact in any great detail. That would involve too much involved description of particular situations and is not necessary to make the general point. I shall list only some of the typical ways in which the elements interact both harmoniously, so as to promote happiness, and inharmoniously, so as to produce frustration and pain. Remember that when I reflectively apprehend my experience, I find all the types of components interacting with each other all at once; but the limitations of language force me to speak of them one at a time, so what I say has unavoidably a certain abstract character.

We have seen that what I believe to be true of the world and myself structures my perception of the world and myself. Vice versa, my perception influences my beliefs. This happens harmoniously when my beliefs are true and my perceptions are accurate, and they reinforce each other in the direction of correctness. It is sometimes the case, however, that mistaken beliefs may blind me to certain aspects of what is before me, or to think I perceive something that is not there. Racial and sexual prejudice are examples of this. Although belief and perception generally reinforce each other, in cases of mistaken belief or perception or both, it may happen that unexpected perceptions cause me to revise my beliefs or that further learning which corrects my beliefs in turn yields different and more accurate perceptions. The more I find women acting competently in areas that I had thought were exclusively male domains, the more I am provoked to think of them as individuals equal in stature to myself and not as somehow inferior. The more I learn of the history of black oppression, the more I am enabled to perceive black people as human beings caught in a desperate situation and not as somehow alien.

Correct beliefs and perceptions enable me to act effectively. When I act on true beliefs, I am successful; when I act on falsehoods, I experience failure and frustration. It is obvious that the organism that is my self is healthier and happier in the former case than the latter. Moreover, in this area the self has a natural tendency toward health and proper functioning; it is a natural function of the self to acquire and hold on to true beliefs and perceptions and to annul and discard false ones. As Husserl says, “the life of consciousness has an all-pervasive teleological structure, a pointedness toward ‘reason’ and even a pervasive tendency toward it – that is: toward the discovery of correctness . . . and toward the canceling of incorrectnesses . . . .”8 Thus, the natural tendency of the self in this area is toward happiness.

The same considerations apply to my beliefs and perceptions of myself. The self-concept may be correct or incorrect or partially so, and it strongly influences the way I perceive myself. I treat the self-concept separately from beliefs in general for two reasons. First, it is all too easy to go through life with an incorrect self-concept and not even know it because it determines (in large part, but not completely) my self-perceptions. If my self-concept is really (for instance) only a concept of myself as I should like to be, only an ideal “picture” of myself that leaves out my faults, I may never think to question it because possible disconfirming perceptions are barred. I may enjoy thinking of myself highly, but I am likely to get into situations in which I act inappropriately, try to do something or behave in a way that I cannot. This produces frustration and pain; the functioning of the self-concept in this respect is a special case of the functioning of belief in general. The only different is that it is often harder for the self-concept to get corrected through disconfirming perceptions because it is highly charged emotionally. The self-concept is the basis of self-evaluation, and the pleasure of approving of myself (even though I am mistaken with regard to what I am approving) makes it harder to correct my idea of myself.

When the self-concept is correct, it contributes to my happiness in two ways. First, like all true beliefs, it facilitates my action. Second, I enjoy feelings of self-approval; or, if I do not approve of myself, at least I know what is wrong and in what direction to change myself. The feeling of self-approval based on an accurate self-concept – and this is the second reason for treating it apart from belief in general – is far more secure than self-approval based on a mistaken self-concept. A good and respecting self-concept is an inexhaustible source of energy and enthusiasm, and the opposite is true for a negative self-concept, one laced with disapproval of myself. But a really good and respecting self-concept is one that includes knowledge that it is accurate. If that knowledge is absent, I have no assurance that I shall continue to think well of myself; but if it is present my satisfaction is enhanced through being able to act effectively and through self-approval. In this dual way, a correct self-concept contributes to the health and happiness of my self. As is the case with belief and perception in general, the natural tendency of the self is toward harmonious functioning and the concomitant feelings of happiness.

Incidentally, we should not despair of the possibility of correcting the self-concept. Even though it generally determines perceptions of myself so that possible disconfirming perceptions are barred, this need not always happen. Others can point out to me aspects of myself that I have overlooked. Frustration of my plans may lead me to re-examine myself, just as surprising success may. And I can make a deliberate effort to “see” myself unencumbered by my habitual concepts and interpretations of myself; that is, I can adopt a phenomenological point of view with respect to myself, and this not only with regard to the general structures of the self, but also with regard to those features that are idiosyncratic to me. This paper reports just such phenomenological self-inspection.

I have already touched on the place of emotion in the over-all functioning of the self in speaking of approval and disapproval of the self. Since emotions are an all-pervasive feature of my experience, their proper functioning contributes to the well-being of myself in several ways. The function of emotions is two-fold. They arise correlatively to experienced intentional objects; thus they reveal qualities of the object and of myself. Second, they call for expression, for some outward manifestation through bodily symptoms or overt action. The effect of these two functions is reciprocal; the more I pay attention to my emotions, the more I am likely to express them adequately, and the more I express them well, the more I am likely to be conscious of them. Indeed, if I am in the habit of expressing how I feel directly, my emotions are often revealed to me in the very process of expressing them. Conversely, if I do not pay attention to how I am feeling, I do not fully express my emotions. The less I do so, the more the capacity both to feel and express atrophies.

Since emotions reveal qualities of the world and myself to me, it is clear that when I pay attention to them I facilitate the process of gaining knowledge of the world and myself. When emotions are functioning well, that is, they facilitate the functioning of belief and perception, and the elements of the self interact harmoniously toward the goal of the well-being or health of the self as a whole. Conversely, when I do not pay attention to my emotions they do not perform their revelatory function as well, and the process of coming to know and accurately perceive myself and the world is inhibited.

The same is true of the other function of emotions, the urge to get expressed. If I make a deliberate effort to express them fully, I facilitate their revelatory function and thus facilitate knowledge. Conversely, if I repress them, I inhibit the revelatory function and reduce the possibilities of acquiring correct beliefs and perceptions. But there is a more direct way in which full performance of the expressive function contributes to my well-being and happiness. It is a natural tendency of the self to express emotions; if I repress them, the effort to hide them goes against the natural urge to express them. I have two contradictory impulses, each frustrating the other; and the felt concomitant of this state of affairs is pain. I am at odds with myself; it is as if the energy that should have been released is kept contained and churns around somewhere inside me, building up pressure and getting sour. Thus, in this area too, the natural tendency of the self is toward happiness; unhappiness results from inhibition of this natural tendency.

The effect of emotions and beliefs is reciprocal, especially with regard to the self-concept. Just as proper functioning of emotions facilitates self-knowledge, so self-knowledge facilitates emotional functioning. If I believe that I never get angry, that I am always affable and easy-going, then I tend to repress my hostile emotions, which leads to frustration and pain; but if my self-concept includes knowledge of that aspect of myself, then I tend to express myself adequately. It is all too easy to ignore and not express emotions that conflict with the image I have of myself as I should like to be. But it is more important to have a correct idea of myself as I should like to be. But it is more important to have a correct idea of myself than one that pleases me for some extraneous reason but is not correct, for the pleasure of thinking well of myself in that case is outweighed by the painful consequences of my ignorance of myself. An emotion expressed is an emotion that lives; unexpressed emotions cause frustration and inhibit spontaneous action. Again, when one type of component of the self functions well, the functioning of the others is enhanced, just as poor functioning of one diminishes the possibility of the others functioning well.

I have already alluded to the way deliberate action interacts with the other functions of the self in my talk of paying attention to and deliberately expressing emotions. The function of deliberate action is to achieve goals. We have already seen that when I have correct beliefs and perceptions and when I am fully conscious of my emotions and express them well, I am able to act effectively. Conversely, through my deliberate action I can either augment or frustrate the other functions of the self. I can, for instance, make a deliberate effort to acquire knowledge of myself and my world. When I do so, I augment the natural function of the self to acquire correct beliefs and perceptions. I can influence my emotional functioning quite directly by making a deliberate effort to pay attention to how I am feeling and to express myself. I can, of course, act in the opposite way, against my natural tendencies, but when I do I experience the pain of conflicting impulses.

Since the function of deliberate action is to achieve goals, and since the overriding goal of the self as a whole is self-preservation and well-being or happiness, it seems that the natural goal of deliberate action is, above all, to promote my well-being. But it is notoriously the case that I can and do act contrary to my natural tendencies. Although happiness is the natural goal of the self, that goal is not rigidly “programmed in,” so that I have no choice about it. The self is not completely determined, biologically or any other way; I am free, although my freedom is not absolute either. I shall return to this point at the end of this chapter. It is clear, however, that I can attune my deliberate action to my other functions and facilitate or enhance them, thus promoting my well-being and the health of the organism that is my self as a whole.

Deliberate action is only one kind of action; there is also habitual action. The formation of habits is a natural and automatic function of the self, one that occurs whether I deliberately intervene or not. It seems to me, although my investigations in this area are far from complete, that everything I do, overtly or covertly, on purpose or unthinkingly, is at least incipiently the beginning of a habit, that unless something else intervenes – unless I deliberately intervene, perhaps, or unless the action results in failure or pain – I tend to repeat the action. In a fascinating note in the Crisis, Husserl remarks, “Naturally all activity . . . gives rise to its habitual acquisitions.”9 He goes on to restrict his remark to the context of the acquisition of knowledge through observation and reflection, but I think what he says applies equally to all of my habits: “But all knowledge in general, all value-validities and ends in general, are, as having been acquired through our activity, at the same time persisting properties of ourselves as ego-subjects, as persons, and can be found in the reflective attitude as making up our own being.”10 As I say, I think this is true of all my habits; as I reflectively apprehend myself (over a period of time, of course, not at any one moment) I find as elements of myself, as “making up my own being.” My habits, the repeated patterns of action that I perform.

Now, habits add a kind of secondary facilitation to the other functions of the self. The more I perform a pattern of action or comport myself in a certain way, the more habitual that pattern or style of comporting myself becomes. Habits have a kind of inertia, and the longer they have been in effect, the harder it is to “break” or change them. Thus, the more I make an effort to perceive accurately and to find out the truth, the more habitual the functioning of my correct beliefs and perceptions becomes. The more I pay attention to and deliberately reveal my emotions, the more habitual that way of being becomes. But habits almost equally well facilitate poor functioning; I can get into the habit of repressing my emotions or deceiving myself. If the self is functioning well, then the formation of habits augments that functioning. If it is functioning poorly, my habits augment that. But again we can see that the natural and inherent tendency of the self is toward health and proper functioning, for habits continue of their own accord only so long as nothing else intervenes. One of the primary things that can intervene to stop a habit is pain or dissatisfaction. If some component of myself habitually functions poorly, sooner or later it is going to make me feel bad enough to experience an impulsion to change, opening the possibility of breaking that habit. So, although habits facilitate my other functions whether they be functioning well or not, functioning well facilitates the continuance of the habit, but functioning poorly tends to counteract the habit. The other elements of the self interact with the formation of habits, and generally in the direction of happiness or healthy functioning.

One specific way that this happens that is worth noting is the role that the self-concept plays. If I have an accurate self-concept and if I know that it is accurate, that is, if I have self-knowledge, then I can more easily change bad habits than if I did not. A habit is an automatic pattern of behavior that tends to repeat itself. Correlative to the “outside,” the behavior, there is the “inside” of beliefs, emotions, and impulsions to action – in short, the correlative attitude. Corresponding to the inertia of the behavior-pattern, there is an inertia of the subjective concomitants. For instance, I know that smoking cigarettes is bad for my bodily health; nevertheless, when I feel an impulse to smoke, I tend to envision only the immediate gratification of my desire and do not think of the detrimental long-range effects. Correlative to or “inside” the pattern of action is a pattern of being conscious (in the mode, “having it in mind”) only of the immediate gratification and not of the pain to come. In order to change my bad habit, I must exert an effort of will, and, as James says, the crucial element in exerting an effort of will is to keep the idea of what I want to do clearly before my mind.11 But the more established the habit is, the more there is a tendency for the idea of the immediate gratification to arise before my mind and crowd out or overshadow the idea of the detrimental consequences. Clearly, self-knowledge facilitates forming good habits, for if I have knowledge of what is good and bad for me based on good evidence, I have a powerful ally in the struggle to replace the idea of the immediate gratification with the idea of what is better for me in the long run. The value of the kind of phenomenological investigation that I myself have pursued and am reporting here is evident. If I have knowledge of myself based on originary absolute evidence, to which I can at any time return, whenever I have doubts I can return to the evidence, reassure myself, and strengthen my resolve. Whether or not I pursue a phenomenological investigation into myself, my inherent tendency to acquire true beliefs tends to counteract my bad habits. Again we see that the natural tendency of the interaction of the components of the self is toward healthy functioning and happiness.

I think I have said enough to indicate in a general way that the self is a teleological unity. It is an organism composed of many elements, each of which performs a specific function, and how well each functions is dependent on how well the others function, and vice versa. The goal of each and the goal of the self as a whole is that of self-preservation and healthy, harmonious interfunctioning, the emotional concomitant of which is happiness, or well-being, satisfaction, etc.

I should emphasize again, however, that although the natural tendency of the self is toward health and happiness, it is not predetermined that this goal will be achieved. Some degree of deliberate guidance of my actions is needed to ensure (as much as possible in a world that constantly confronts me with novelty in the midst of repetition) that the goal will be achieved. No doubt people differ in the amount of deliberate intervention needed. Some seem able to go through life cheerfully and unthinkingly being happy and taking things in stride; others must struggle long and hard to overcome ignorance and the inertia of bad habits. But all of us – if my analysis has general truth – have an inherent tendency toward health and happiness, a tendency that makes it easier, once a fruitful deliberate start has been made, to achieve that end.

B. THE SELF IN RELATION.

We have seen that the self is a unity, that I am an organism composed of many elements, each with its proper function, and that the elements function together to promote my health and happiness. We should not commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, however, and think that the self can be fully understood in isolation from its context. When I reflectively apprehend myself I find myself related to my surroundings in various ways. In particular, I find myself related to my world, to my fellow human beings, and to myself. To conclude this paper I shall describe briefly these three forms of relatedness. This is not an exhaustive or complete description; regard what I say as beginning notes pointing the way to areas for further investigation.

I am related to my world; indeed, as we have seen, I find myself in the exact center of it. But my relation to my world is not merely an external one, such that I could just as well be isolated from it and remain as I am. No, the effects of this relation are manifest throughout the “inside” of myself, to which only I have direct access. It is obvious, for instance, on an elementary level, that I experience the world that we all typically experience. My sensations are interpreted as being qualities of intentional objects out there, external to me and publicly available. Moreover, I never find myself not in the world. Even in moments of sheer introspection or abstract thought, if I reflectively apprehend all of my experience I find the pressure of my body against the chair or the floor, I find random noises, perhaps smells, all interpreted as revealing something external to me. I need not mention such extra-phenomenological considerations as that I need food, air, water, shelter, etc., to stay alive.

Not only do I experience the world, I act in it. The cardinal function of my thinking is to orient me to my world so that I can act and pursue my goals effectively. My noeses contrive it so that I experience a relatively stable world and recognize significance in it; my perceptual judgments let me know, without thinking about it, what is before me, what it is good for, and what I can do with it. More than just abstractly recognizing that certain patterns of action are possible, I am impelled, through my emotional reactions to the world, to action of various sorts.

Although my perceptions reveal the world in which I live and act most directly, the effect my world has on me is revealed through my emotions and moods. Both exhibit the Principle of Correlativity; they arise correlatively to the intentional objects of which I am aware. Emotions arise, in general, correlatively to single objects or states of affairs, especially other persons. I’ll treat them in more detail when I describe the relatedness of the self to other selves. My moods arise correlatively to my world or situation in general, not any one thing or state of affairs but the broad character of all or most of what I am aware of or in relation to over a period of time. Moods only sometimes occupy the focal point of my attention; they are broad, vague, all pervasive and continuously present. Their effect on me is great. Though not often very intense, they last a long time, changing for the most part rather slowly. They are thus very real elements in my subjective state, very real components of my self-sense. Because they make up a large part of who I am at any time, and because they arise correlatively to my world, we can see that I am related to my world in a quite intimate way. My world has an effect on me not just superficially, but deeply, continuously and pervasively.

My moods, of course, have an influence on my action. They do not provoke particular actions, but govern the over-all style of how I act. They are intermediary between the world revealed to me in my experience and the world upon or in which I act. The same is true of my emotions, of course, and also of my noeses, which structure my experience into recognizable patterns and inform me of possible ways of acting. Let me make a tentative and somewhat metaphorical capsule summary of this state of affairs: I am the center of my world not just in the sense that it extends away from me in all directions without limit, but in that I am a point at which energy is processed. I receive energy from the world in the form of sensations; I process it or transform it through the functioning of my noeses, emotions and moods; then I emit energy in the form of action. I find myself at a point of energy-exchange, a point of dynamic tension between the polarities of experience and action. We may regard experiencing as a somewhat passive process; initially, the world impinges on me. The automatic functioning of my noeses, emotions and moods is activity, of course, but is not something that I do deliberately. The upshot of the energy-transformation, the automatic functioning of the components of the self, is impulsions to action or overt (sometimes covert) action itself. I am at the point at which passive reception of energy gets transformed into active emission of energy; I am at the mid-point between two poles of my self-in-the-world, experience and action.

Just as I am related to my world, and not just externally, so am I related to other persons, and the influence of this kind of relatedness is found deep in the recesses of my subjective state. Relations to others are integral aspects of the self, and this is true not only in particular cases at particular times, but as a general feature of the self. Being-with-others is a fundamental mode of my being, a fundamental ontological characteristic of the self.

There is evidence for this assertion in all aspects of the self which we have considered, except perhaps with regard to those functions to which no specific experienceable object corresponds, experiencing and acting. I assume, with Whitehead, that every actual entity in the world is at least minimally aware and active.12 That I experience and act does not distinguish me from other actual entities; the characteristics that make me a specifically human self and reveal the fundamental relatedness of myself to other human selves are found in the empirical self, specifically in the realms of thought, feeling, and the self-concept.

There is evidence of being-with-others as a fundamental dimension of the self in the realm of thinking and perception. Much of my thinking is verbal, expressed in language; indeed, were I limited merely to pictures and other sensory “images” for the material qualities of my thoughts, my intellectual grasp of the world and myself would be much poorer. But language is essentially an intersubjective phenomenon; it is public, shareable by everyone within the same linguistic community. We noted in Chapter Three that different linguistic communities have (sometimes radically) different “pictures” of the universe and different modes of experiencing the world. Because my thoughts and concepts merge into the operative noeses of my perception and other modes of experience, my language has a significant effect on my experience. That is, the structure and quality of the world that I experience and thus the quality of the subjective feelings that arise concomitantly with my perceptions are fundamentally influenced by language. Thus, a fundamental characteristic of the self, one of the chief elements in my self-sense, is influenced by my language. Relations to other people, via the language that I share with them, are thus essential to my sense of who I am.

We have seen that my self-concept includes ideas about myself not only from my own point of view, but from the point of view of others as well. Since my self-concept is a fundamental determining factor in how I perceive myself and how I evaluate and feel about myself, a fundamental factor in my self-sense, it is clear that in this area also being related to other people is an integral element in my self.

We have seen that emotions call for expression. But what is expression if not expression to someone? Not only do I automatically and often deliberately express my emotions to others, I automatically and sometimes with deliberate effort understand other people’s expression of their emotions. Furthermore, much of my emotional life arises correlatively to my perception of other people. The strongest emotions – love, hatred, disgust, compassion – and the commonest and most pervasive – interest and disinterest, admiration and disdain – are ways I am conscious of others or media through which I am conscious of them. Thus, most of my feeling life is related to others, and much of the activity prompted by my emotions is directed to them. Indeed, we have noted that the urge to express myself is not limited solely to my emotions. I have an urge to express my thoughts as well, and to tell others what I see. Any time I have an idea that seems important or experience something with great intensity, I am impelled to tell others about it. It is revealing that in Plato’s allegory of the cave, the man who has gone outside the cave goes back to tell the others what he has seen.13 The urge to express myself, to let others know what I feel, think or experience is so pervasive that I am impelled to chat about trivialities if I have nothing important on my mind. The realm of emotions reveals my relatedness to others in much the same way that my moods reveal my relatedness to the world. My emotions are integral elements of my self; thus relations to others are integral elements of my self. And this is no bare, insignificant fact, but something that provokes me to act, to express myself.

Indeed, in a sense I have been taking such relatedness for granted all along. The decision to observe and analyze that portion of the world revealed to me which is subjective, available directly only to me, presupposes that I can and do distinguish myself from others, that I know what they can and cannot immediately experience. I have identified elements in my experience or classes of objects present to pure consciousness as being me, my self, by simply noting that they are me-and-not-someone-else. Such is the case, for instance, with my habitual actions. I do not deliberately do them, but I do them nonetheless, because it is I and not someone else that is the source of such actions. I know who I am, both in particular idiosyncratic ways and as a self with a structure common to all selves, by comparing myself to others.

Note that it is not illegitimate to take for granted that other selves, indeed the whole world, exist, for we are constructing a theory of the self grounded in phenomenological evidence, but we do not remain in the phenomenological attitude when we do so. Speaking strictly of what is reflectively apprehendable in experience, I should say that there is originary evidence of the relatedness of that complex of objects that I take to be me to intentional objects that have the sense “other persons.” But as Husserl notes more than once, when we step outside of the phenomenological standpoint, our findings remain and with exactly the evidence with which they were presented in phenomenological reflection.14 In empirical phenomenology, the adoption of the phenomenological point of view is a heuristic device only, a way of finding out about features of experience ordinarily overlooked, and with absolute evidence. When we drop the phenomenological point of view and go on to interpret what we have “seen,” go on to incorporate our findings in a conceptual model of the self, we can speak of the relatedness of the self to other selves without further ado.

It is a fundamental ontological feature of myself that I am related in many ways to other people; on an ontological level I have being-with-others no matter what I do, even if I become a hermit. The most obvious manifestation of this feature of the self is the urge to communicate, to relate to others, to talk to them, express my feelings, thoughts and perceptions to them, to receive and understand their expressions of themselves, to judge myself in part by reference to what they think of me, etc. But this feature of the self is balanced by another feature of the self, equally fundamental, a feature that Ortega calls “radical solitude.”15 In a manner analogous to, but not the same as, the way I am at the mid-point between the polarities of experiencing and acting, passivity and activity, I am always in a kind of dynamic, perhaps dialectical, tension between my radical solitude and my being-with-others.

I am radically alone because I am a self that only I have immediate and direct access to. No one else experiences the world from my vantage point; no one else experiences me from the inside, as I do; no one else can acquire my knowledge for me; no one else can perform my actions; no one else can live my life. I am fundamentally radically alone, but I am urged equally fundamentally to be in communion with others, to share as much as possible my solitude with theirs and theirs with mine. From the depths of my aloneness, I experience an urge to communicate with others, to share my life with theirs, to alleviate “that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss.”16

It is not within the scope of this paper to describe all the many ways I interact with others. The phenomena of adopting social roles, of intimate face-to-face communication, the subtle interplay between the urge to reveal myself and the urge to hide myself in my solitude, the wonderful ways cycles of energy are created between two and between many, the poignancy of their distortion and destruction – all these are areas for further investigation, further places to look in my on-going quest to know myself. In some of them I have made some progress; in others I have only just begun. I wish to do no more here, however, than to indicate that the self cannot be fully understood in abstraction from its concrete context of relatedness to other selves and that one of the fundamental tensions and sources of motivation for my life is just this tension between my radical solitude and being-with-others.

I am in relation not only to my world and to others within it, but to myself as well. But my relation to myself is peculiar; I both simply am myself and transcend myself. Whenever I perceive myself, whenever I am conscious of myself in the mode “it itself,” I am always more than the self of which I am conscious, that pervasive mass of body, thought and feeling which is constantly present in my experience. I am more than myself for I am that which is conscious of myself, and that I, that Self which experiences and acts, cannot in principle be an object for me. I cannot perceive I-who-perceive-and-act.

But I can act on myself. By virtue of being able reflectively to apprehend myself in the mode, “thinking about myself,” which is founded on direct perception of myself, and being able to “see” myself as I am in contrast to what I might be but am not, I can create myself, at least in part. That is, I can decide to start acting in a different way, start doing different things, start comporting myself in a fundamentally (or only slightly) different mode. Correlatively my subjective state and self-sense will change. This is obviously true when I deliberately initiate a habit. My habits are fundamentally me, as we have seen, for they not only influence but largely are my mode of action, and their subjective correlates are a major component of the self-sense. If I start a new habit, I create a different empirical self, a different complex of objects subjectively available to me with the same sense, “me, myself.”

I can exert an influence, have an effect by virtue of my deliberate actions, not only on the empirical self but on the transcendental Self, or, if you prefer, on the way I experience and act as a whole. I can, if I wish, get so drunk that I cannot even stand up; I can ingest drugs of the amphetamine class that increase my energy and activity; I can take drugs of the psychedelic class that alter the way I experience the world and myself. That is, I can augment or inhibit those functions of the self to which no particular experienceable object corresponds. I need not take drugs to do it. By altering my diet I can make myself more or less vigorous and active; by exercising to the point of fatigue I can hinder my basic drive toward action; by meditating in various ways I can alter the way I experience things, my so-called “state of consciousness;” etc.

I am in the peculiar, ultimately mysterious, relation to myself of both being and not being what I am. When I transcend myself in a moment of self-perception, I am not myself which is perceived; and yet I am the empirical self which I perceive, and I am I-who-perceive-and-act, for I can make a change in either and when I do I know that I have changed. Words fail to catch this peculiar relation of transcendence in immanence which I am; the state of affairs that they are meant to refer to can be grasped in evident “seeing,” but it present a roadblock to the understanding.

By virtue of this peculiar relation to myself I am free.17 Inanimate things, irreal objectivities, and even animate objects such as plants and animals that are not able (presumably) to be self-conscious are facticities, they simply are what they are and cannot change themselves. But I can change what I am, crate myself; I am not limited to being simply what I am at any one moment. (This freedom is by no means absolute. It is limited not only by the laws of nature but by the force of habit as well – no mean force indeed!) And yet it is a fundamental and unalterable characteristic of what I am that I am free. As Sartre’s translator puts it, “The facticity of freedom is the fact that freedom is not able not to be free.”18 The self is an ultimate mystery, not simply something unknown, like how many stars are in the Andromeda Galaxy, but something inherently ungraspable in its totality. Not only can I not become conscious in the mode, “I myself,” of all that I am (for I cannot be conscious of I-who-experience-and-act), but I cannot even grasp all of myself in the mode, “thinking about myself,” for I am constantly changing and am always free to influence the direction of that change. How can I be sure of what I shall be in the future? I both am and am not what I am; I am free and yet not free not to be free.

Whatever roadblocks to the understanding that this state of affairs presents, it is clear at least that I am not limited solely to being what I am at any one moment or to what I have been throughout the history of my life. I can change myself, create myself; in short, I have a choice. Because I have a choice the whole realm of ethics has relevance to me. Normative ethics, within the Socratic framework that has motivated this quest for the self, is the discipline whereby I tell myself what I should and should not do in order to be happy and fulfilled. By virtue of the peculiar self-transcendence of the self to which I have at least tried to point, if I have not succeeded in fixing it in words that make much sense, I can take my own advice and create myself according to the principles that I determine, principles which, if followed, will yield happiness.

The determination of such principles is beyond the scope of this paper. Hence, abruptly, this must end. But one final word: At the temple of the Oracle at Delphi it was written, “Know Thyself.” Knowing myself is a task that will occupy me for the rest of my life, and I expect it to be a continually intriguing one. It has already been rewarding to me, both for satisfaction of my curiosity and for finding out how to live well, for I have been able to discover and put into practice various principles of conduct based on my analysis. It is fitting that I do not tell you what they are, for you must find out how to live your life for yourself.

If I have provoked you to turn afresh to yourself and to try once more to find out who you are, then my task has been doubly rewarded.

###


1 Describing the natural attitude, Husserl notes that “What is actually perceived and what is more or less clearly co-present and determinate (to some extent at least), is partly pervaded, partly girt about with a dimly apprehended depth or fringe of indeterminate reality. . . . Moreover, the zone of indeterminacy is infinite. The misty horizon that can never be completely outlined remains necessarily there.” Not only spatially is this true, but “so likewise is it with the world in respect to its ordered being in the succession of time. This world now present to me, and in every waking ‘now’ obviously so, has its temporal horizon, infinite in both directions, its known and unknown, its intimately alive and its unalive past and future.” (Ideas, p. 92).

2 Alan Watts, Does It Matter?, p. 85.

3 James, Psychology, p. 138.

4 Ibid., p. 153.

5 Husserl, Ideas, p. 218.

6 James, Psychology, p. 138.

7 Organism: “1. Biol. An individual constituted to carry on the activities of life by means of organs separate in function but mutually dependent; any living being. 2. Philos. Any highly complex thing or structure with parts so integrated that their relation to one another is governed by their relation to the whole (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, 1960 edition, p. 592).”

8 Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 160, emphasis omitted.

9 Husserl, Crisis, p. 109.

10 Ibid., pp. 109-110.

11 James, Psychology, pp. 393-394.

12 Whitehead, Process and Reality, Part I, pp. 4-54. This is a speculative metaphysical assumption, not one grounded strictly in phenomenological evidence. A more coherent and adequate “picture” of the whole of reality is attained by assuming that every actual entity is aware and conscious, at least to some extent, than by assuming that some are and some are not. But note that Husserl believes that “an inanimate and non-personal consciousness is conceivable, i.e., a stream of experience in which the intentional empirical unities, body, soul, empirical ego-subject do not take shape, in which all these empirical concepts, and therefore also that of experience in the psychological sense (as experience of a person, an animal ego), have nothing to support them, and at any rate no validity (Ideas, p. 152, emphasis omitted).” That is, it is not inconceivable that there may be other kinds of transcendental Selves than the human kind. This essay is not the place to pursue this line of thought, however.

13 Plato, The Republic of Plato, 516-617, tr. F. M. Cornford, pp. 230-231.

14 Husserl, Ideas, pp. 8-9, 241.

15 José Ortega y Gasset, Man and People, p. 46.

16 Bertrand Russell, What I have Lived For, Ramparts, April, 1970, p. 36.

17 This paragraph freely paraphrases Sartre’s often very obscure discussion in Being and Nothingness, pp. 21-45.

18 Sartre, Being and Nothingess, translator’s “Key to Special Terminology,” p. 630.


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