the question of the self

7/29/2019 The Question of the Self

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/the-question-of-the-self 1/23

What is the Question of the Self?

The Question of the Self as ’Who’ We Are

Part of the question of the question is the question of the interpretation of the

question, or more simply and more comprehensively the question of the question.

Interpreting philosophical thinking is notoriously difficult, yet philosophers in

general take great pains to speak as clearly as possible. That leads to the ques-

tion of what makes thinking, philosophical thinking in particular, so apparently

difficult.

To pose the question of the question is also to plot its course,

its processional development throughout the history of thought. It

is here that we trace the history of the question taken in itself as a

term through figures such as Freud, Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida,

in order to build a critical lens capable of refining the notion of the

question and bringing it into some clearer semblance of focus. It is

my contention that the question taken by itself has been given short

shrift in critical discourse, perhaps owing to its resistance to being

examined. Though questions are the common currency of theorists,

the question of the question has yet to truly emerge into common

view. Moreover, we cannot ignore the important metaphoricity of

the question itself, how it functions inlanguage, and the etymological

nuances it possesses. The linguistic standpoint will not become the

definitive aperture of this question of the question, but will function

as another point of contiguity that the question shares with bothlanguage and theory.

- Kane X. Faucher, What is a Question?

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Any question, posed as a question that includes the question itself, implicates

othr attempts to ask the question. The question of the Self has been posed vari-

ously in philosophy, theology and in the sciences. Today the scientific worldview

has the most immediate currency with many people, and while the question of

the question has to include other ways of posing the question, the following will

focus mainly on the scientific worldview and some of its attempts at posing the

question.

In terms of the question of the Self, and thus the question of the meaning of

Self-identity, a constant difficulty is terminological. We have a number of words

that refer to the being that one is, the I-subject, the Self, the Psyche, Spirit,

soul, mind, etc. Science has had particular difficulty with these terms as they

are difficult if not impossible to make into an ’object’ for ’objective science’.

Hegel, in his philosophical posing of the question, simultaneously implies the

question of science as science, and its logic, in the guise of modern science, as

logic.

Two different translations of the Phenomenology use the terms “Spirit” and

“Mind”. Hegel uses words in very specific manners, some of which have been mis-

translated, but more often translated correctly yet without really transmitting

the intent of the original. Part of the difficulty with the titles of two of Hegel’s

major works is that the terms are not easily determinable in translation or even

in the original language, this not only goes for terms such as spirit and mind,

where ’mysticism’ or ’religion’ is often posited as the reason for ambiguity, but

also for terms such as science and logic particularly within the sciences them-

selves, which as determining terms are themselves more difficult to determine

adequately. The usual title of the book published after the Phenomenology is

“The Science of Logic”. This simple title leads most to believe, without having

so much as opened the book; they pretty well know what it contains. Science

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is the pursuit of theoretical knowledge. Logic is the ‘law’ by which thinking is

judged. Thus “The Science of Logic” would simply be an investigative exposition

of Logic, its justification, and how to put it to best use.

Yet according to Sinnerbrink ”Wissenschaft or philosophical Science, accord-

ing to Hegel, refers to the self-organizing system of speculative knowledge, whose

introduction consists of phenomenology itself.” Without a good deal of ingenu-

ity “the self-organizing system of speculative knowledge” is difficult to reconcile

with the usual meaning of ‘science’. Looking at the other key term, ‘logic’, we

find a similar discrepancy: according to the shorter Logic, “ the different stages

of the logical idea are to be treated as a series of definitions of the Absolute,

the definition which now results for us is that the Absolute is the Notion. That

necessitates a higher estimate of the notion, however, than is found in formal

conceptualist Logic, where the notion is a mere form of our subjective thought,

with no original content of its own.”

What does this leave us with, were we to rename “The Science of Logic” along

these lines? The resulting title would be something like “The Self-organizing

System of Speculative Knowledge as a Series of Definitions of the Absolute”.

The case can be made that, at least in terms of ‘Wissenschaft’, in modern

German it does, for the most part, indicate the same thing as ‘science’ in modern

English. That would justify the use of the word, provided that Hegel’s meaning

was explicated clearly in the text as being more like the first part of the title

proposed above. A not too dissimilar case could be made for the term ‘logic’.

After all, the rather long and not immediately comprehensible title we came up

with above seems a bit much as a title (perhaps as a subtitle?). That leaves

the other two words, ‘The’ and ‘of’. What of these? As it turn out a simple

and justifiable change in the second word, while not fully explicating the title,

immediately lends the first word, ‘The’, the correct intonation and meaning.

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Replacing ‘of’ with ‘as’ circumvents an apparently obvious but entirely mistaken

prejudgment as to the probable contents of the work.

The ‘obviousness’ of the probable content ‘The Science of Logic’ becomes

immediately puzzling when it is renamed “The Science as Logic”. ‘The’ changes

meaning and even pronunciation, becoming The Science pronounced “Thee”

rather than ‘The Science’. The Science separates what Hegel intends by Wis-

senschaft from ‘science’ as one or all of ‘the sciences’, leaving it on its own with

an obviously different, if immediately obscure, meaning. Pairing The Science

with Logic, not as an of, but as an as, results in a doubly puzzling title. If

The Science is unlike any particular science we may be familiar with, positing

that it can be discussed as Logic seems even more puzzling. Simple, naïve logic

could hardly be equivalent to The Science; commonly it’s considered an a priori

for any science whatsoever. The puzzling nature of the book itself, certainly

familiar to its readers, is quickly brought out in the title by changing one small

conjunction.

Hegel, as with many other thinkers, is most misinterpreted not due to lack

of acuity or intelligence on the readers’ part, but more often due to an excess of

those factors. Taking Hegel as literally as he often means something challenges

the ideology of the reader to the extent that the reader uses all of his acuity

and intelligence to redefine “what Hegel really meant”, when what was ‘really’

meant is written as plainly and clearly as possible on the original page. Trans-

lation of course offers an additional means of changing the meaning to one more

comfortable to the reader(s) involved.

In order to avoid words that may have had a more defined meaning at the

time of writing, but have since lost that meaning, and in some cases become

so vague as to have virtually no defined meaning, I have avoided words such

as spirit, mind, soul, psyche, etc. when speaking of various aspects of the Self.

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While that puts a lot of stress on the word Self itself, it avoids misunderstandings

that ‘tag along’ with such words. ‘Mind’ and ‘psyche’ for instance, immediately

bring with them the dualism between mind and body. ‘Spirit’ has become for

the most part meaningless, referring in a vague way to anything not physical in

nature. ‘Soul’ for many implies the tripartite distinction body-mind-soul: how

a Self is supposed to exist as some sort of glued together threesome of poorly

defined enough terms leads only to initial misconceptions and the creation of

pseudo problems.

The title of the book contains two basic words: horizon and identity. Iden-

tity here refers to self-identity, both as the goal of most attempts at self-

understanding and as the better accepted but less well defined antecessor to

‘personality’ within mainstream psychology and social theory. The question in

its bare form, then, concerns the relation between the horizon that limits any

given perspective, and the ways in which human beings posit their self-identity;

how they describe themselves (often only to themselves) as to who they are and

how they are as a being.

The nature of horizon is simultaneously part of the question of who we are

as individual selves and as the social Self. Horizon, like other determinants, is

itself not fully, or even to any great extent, determinable. That it is indefinite is

easily demonstrable for oneself; a related question is whether this indefiniteness

and indeterminacy equates to a potential infinity. Horizon ’isn’t’ in the sense of

a being and the way we understand a being, another way of understanding the

question of horizon as it relates to the question of who we are, individually and

in a shared way, is whether horizon, while not being an in-itself for us, is itself

a for-itself.

The correlate of the potential infinity in horizon is the notion of immortality

of the Self. At first sight this seems a contradiction, in the sense that the Self,

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both individual and shared, is radically finite. Immortality however doesn’t in-

tend an infinite temporality, but rather intends that in being-a-Self there is no

coming-to-be, because a thing can come-to-be in the sense of appearing only

within the world opened up by the Self. In the sense of the shared Self this is

easier to comprehend: without world in the sense of place opened by the social

Self, it cannot be said that beings come-to-be in the sense that we understand

the term being. The only way we can understand being is through a being’s

appearing in being-experienced. That things ’were’ in some sense ’extant’ tem-

porally prior to human beings is a necessity of our own historicality. However

we cannot project in what sense being extant without being-experienced relates

to the way we understand beings in their being, because we cannot project any

reality that doesn’t include our experience of it.

Evolution as Being-Historical

In being-historical we retain things from the past as present, and only in the

way that they are retained can they be said to have being. Being historical

in this sense implies that the historical in part be determining for who we are,

and as such be as a precondition for who we are. Human history is understood

implicitly in that way, the actual insight of Darwin’s Origin of the Species, lost

by the neo-Darwinists, is that we only experience nature in this manner, as a

retroactively posited history that as precondition has an intrinsic directionality

and teleology.

The implicit understanding we have had of nature as historical grounds the

idea of evolution. As one of the oldest ideas known, evolution is an observation

and an obvious way to interpret the world in that it is always historical for

us. ’Nature’ has the sense, within metaphysics, of reality as created, but even

this is grounded fundamentally on nature as a experience of world as historical.

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The early notions of evolution were based on what we would now term ’natural

selection’ as a random process:

"The first animals and plants were like disjointed parts of the

ones we see today, some of which survived by joining in different com-

binations, and then intermixing, and wherever everything turned out

as it would have if it were on purpose, there the creatures survived,

being accidentally compounded in a suitable way" - Empedocles, 490

BC

However, random change fails to account for what we implicity intend by the

very term ’evolution’, which is growth as increasing complexity, as is seen in the

ability to distinguish ’evolution’ from ’devolution’, something that would not be

possible if the change were simply random. The theological view expresses this

quite clearly:

We transcend ourselves by becoming more than we are now. Evo-

lution is a process of becoming more. We achieve a greater fullness.

Our self-transcendence includes the notion of newness because we

are drawn into something higher. We are not changed into totally

different beings but we surpass ourselves and our emptiness is filled.

The history of the cosmos is the interconnected history of its mate-

rial elements, its living elements and the conscious life of its human

elements. This history is not merely a continuation in time but it

is primarily the development of that which is more and greater. In

this history, something which existed earlier surpasses itself in order

to become something more. If humanity is the self-transcendence of

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living matter, then the history of matter and of spirit form an in-

trinsic unity in which matter has developed towards humanity and

then continues on in us as our history.

Hussey, M. Edmund (2012-11-06). The Idea of Christianity: A

Brief Introduction to the Theology of Karl Rahner (Kindle Locations

682-689). . Kindle Edition.

This ’becoming more’ is the fundamental difficulty that mechanistic causality,

whether via natural selection or via multiple means, has in attempting to ac-count for evolution as observed reality. By contrast Darwin posited evolution

precisely as historical interplay of life, something lost in the attempt at a return

to pure mechanism by neo-Darwinists:

The neo-Darwinists such as Dennett appear to follow the former

path, portraying nature in the image of a machine, thus achieving the

same result as the one Alexander Koyre ascribed to Newton – a syn-

thesis which substitutes for our world “. . .in which we live and love

and die, another world – the world of quantity, of reified geometry,

a world in Darwin and Vygotsky on Development: An Exegesis on

Human Nature which, though there is a place for everything, there

is no place for human being” (quoted in Costall, 2001, p. 474). At

the end of his magnum opus, Darwin solemnly stated that “[t]here is

grandeur in this view of life...” (Darwin, 2009/1859, p. 649). Indeed,

there is. However, it is not an easy task to grasp this view because

doing so entails going beyond the habitual dichotomous thinking in

terms of two rigidly opposed and irreconcilable core metaphors –

that of nature as a machine versus that of nature as a divine cre-

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ation. The grandeur of evolutionary thinking suggests giving up

both of these metaphors to instead view nature as a continuous and

limitless process that stretches from the past into the future without

breaks, thus uniting all living forms into one inter-related process,

one web of connections without constrains imposed from outside by

any rigid commands or predetermined design specifications. There

is no mechanical analogy to this process because no machine is in-

timately related to all other machines that are and ever were in

existence, and that co-depend on each other while co-adapting, to-

gether with others, to the world. It is precisely that there is no

algorithm according to which life unfolds – instead, its course is an-

chored in a confluence of a de facto infinite number of forces of such

different order and of such dynamism and constant change that it

is impossible to apply any algorithm to describe, model, or predict

this process. In other worlds, the grandeur that Darwin’s approach

implies has to do with an intimate interconnectedness of each and

every form of life with all of life; the interconnectedness of all that

is alive with all that ever was, is, or ever will be alive. This is the

grandeur of a mutual interdependence of all forms of life with all

other forms, where the world itself is entangled with the unfolding

life and co-implicated in its dynamics and its history. This is the

grandeur of life and nature that are seen as being, at one and the

same time, contingent and unpredictable, ever-changing and contin-

uous, open-ended and ordered – with all of these polarities ceasing

to be irreconcilable dimensions that exclude each other. It can be

said that there is a place for humans within this view of nature be-

cause nature, thus understood, entails a human (ideal) dimension –

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the world in which “we live and love and die.”

This is in line with notions from systems theory of self organization and self

optimization as the driving forces of evolution, and natural selection as the

limiting factor, or brake, on self optimization. The ground of self organization

/ self optimization remains obscure, even though we can demonstrate both, and

strong emergence of higher level systems as its ultimate manifestation, even

within purely algorithmic formulations. In some sense self organization / self

optimization / emergence in open systems that can take in energy appears tobe the correlate of entropy in closed systems, and the ground of the interplay of

appearing / passing away that we experience in things as enduring ’for a time’.

In extending the notion of evolution to system itself we are positing historical

directionality, first to life in biological evolution, then to non-living reality as

systemic development and emergence of higher level systems. While seeing

reality as the historical world is teleological, directed in the sense that everything

seen as historical is seen as still-present sustaining precondition, as precondition

the teleology is retroactively posited, and necessarily so. This isn’t limited

to the self-aware positing of human beings in terms of their own history - by

creating a boundary a cell implicitly posits what is ’outside’ as its precondition,

even though initially what is ’inside’ is identical to what is ’outside’, and only

through the boundary having been established does it begin to differentiate itself

as a cell with an environment. What needs to be noticed in this setting of a

boundary is not simply that the organism didn’t exist prior to that, but neither

did its environment. Reality seen specifically as historical precondition is what

we mean by ’environment’, as opposed to ’nature’, which views reality in all the

possibilities of the historical as such. Environment only becomes environment

by the retroactive positing of the self-differentiating organism. Nature becomes

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nature by interpreting the experience of world in a historical manner. The

problem of reductionist mechanistic causation, aside from the simple issue that

algorithmically it doesn’t work even for cellular automata as the simplest state

machines, can be seen in Dawkins’ idea of the ’Selfish Gene’, where not only is an

anthropomorphic ’as-if’ necessary to sustain the ’explanation’ (the notion that

there is some sort of ’hard science’ behind the verbal explanation is nothing

more than scientific occultism), but the very notion of a gene being a gene

and not a randomly complex molecule implies that in its being it is posited as a

precondition for an organism, and posited as such retroactively by the organism.

Subjectivity and Self-Identity

A human being, as stated in the preview, is self-aware, which does not in itself

require the posit of the I-Subject or subjectivity in any sense. One’s Self is in

each case particular to the particular human being and simultaneously shared,

to a greater or lesser degree, with every other human being. One’s perspective

and horizon is, to some degree, different from that of any other human being.

Although this immediately brings to mind some sort of ‘absolute’ postmod-

ern relativism, the fallacy in the latter is located in the closed-off view of the

individual that underlies the analysis.

“Postmodern relativism is precisely the thought of the irreducible

multitude of worlds, each sustained by a specific language-game, so

that each world “is” the narrative its members are telling themselves,

with no shared terrain, no common language between them;” – Slavoj

Zizek, the Parallax View

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A parallax view of world, where each Self has its own perspective and hori-

zon, does not disqualify the observation that by and large the reality perceived

by different individuals is the same, that in most ways the self-narrative is a

shared story about a shared world. The closer someone is to you, in terms of

background, culture and experiences, the closer the shared view of Reality will

match the personal view. Being-one’s-self always means being-with-others such

that the shared Self is more determining than the individual. At the same time,

the views of the shared Self, projected as they are by each individual, have a

tendency to not describe the shared world in an involved manner. The ‘every-

day’ way of viewing the world, as analyzed by Heidegger, is less authentic than

the individual view, leading to the inescapable conclusion that society’s view

of itself is largely psychotic. However the inauthentic view of the ‘nobody’ is

far from being something a given human being occasionally finds themselves in,

but is the initial state any person finds themselves in, and one to which they

inevitably return again and again no matter how strenuous their struggle to

individuate may be. As a result, this everyday view, ascribed to everybody and

nobody at once, is a positive phenomenon of any given parallax view of world

and the partially shared Self that needs to be understood.

Self-identity, then, has to be understood initially out of the everyday situa-

tion in which the particular person is not always self-identical, where he or she

is for the most part their own projection of how the context around them to

wants them to be. One is initiated into one’s society initially as a ’one’, not fully

perceiving what is intrinsically accepted in the initiation, by not perceiving it.

Things within-the-world have specific meanings, meanings we learn as part

of our initiation into society without being able to question their appropriateness

or even their provenance. Thus our initial views on society, the things within it,

the people it comprises and indeed ourselves are determined by the world-view

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or ideology current in the complex of subcultures that we are initiated into.

A world-view is not a matter of theoretical knowledge, eitherin

respect of its origin or in relation to its use. It is not simplyretained

in memory like a parcel of cognitive property. Rather, it is a matter

of a coherent conviction that determines the current affairs of life

more or less expressly and directly. A world-view is related in its

meaning to the particular contemporary Dasein at any given time.

Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology

The more transparent the world-view the more effective it is. The unquestioned

assumptions form a specific frame within which things and events are given

a prescribed meaning, and the more invisible the frame the more difficult it

is to demonstrate that what is taken as simply “ how things are” is in fact a

conglomeration of unquestioned, while highly questionable, assumptions that

one has simply been given from the time one learns to understand language.

The distortion inherent in every worldview lies in its pretense to be able to fully

determine the ’current affairs of life’.

Subjectivity and the Self: the Failure of Cognitive Science to Appre-

hend its Topic

The Self in its questionability is supported by many such transparent assump-

tions. Viewing the Self as identical with the I-Subject, while a relatively new

understanding historically, has become such an embedded assumption that it is

difficult to dislodge the automatic equation of the two. A recent set of articles

in The New Scientist under the heading “The Illusion of the Self”, attempting to

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popularize cognitive science’s inquiries into the Self, ended with the contradic-

tory result that the Self is an illusion. The result is contradictory because while

experiences the Self may have contradict the identification of the I-Subject with

the Self, they do not therefore invalidate the Self, they merely demonstrate that

the Self is not identical to the I-Subject, but something more complex, and not

fully determinable. The actual results of the various tests cognitive science had

performed that were looked at in the article were not particularly surprising

from a perspective a priori distinguishing the two. The apparent paradox was

a result of a basic mistaken assumption. If the point was to simply invalidate

particular assumptions about the Self, the articles might have had some merit,

but since (admittedly, perhaps in part in order to garner readership by stating

something more ‘shocking’) the title of the series was “The Illusion of the Self”

and not “ Invalid Assumptions about the Nature of the Self” or something of

that sort, the way the results were interpreted and expressed was ludicrous.

One of the articles discussed the experience of the “present” as a construc-

tion, therefore illusory. Our experience of temporality as stretched from the past

to the future, however, is not the same as the metaphysical notion of time, as a

series of now points. Since time outside our experiencing it can only be posited

through changes in state of other things, there is no simple way to “normalize”

this perception, against which our experience could be judged as illusory. Philos-

ophy has understood “the present” to be a nominalization of something verbal,

“presencing”, for some time, which in itself makes the cognitive tests somewhat

redundant, since they are only demonstrating what has been demonstrated with

better evidence phenomenologically. The logic that since my perception of the

present can be distorted by illusions the present is illusory is equivalent to the

logic of saying that since I can experience optical illusions such as a mirage all

visual perception is illusory, which contradicts the simple fact that we can in

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various ways distinguish optical illusions from accurate perceptions. The fur-

ther fallacy is that even given that the present may be illusory (in a nominal

fashion, as objective) that the Self is therefore also an illusion. It is not simply

flawed logic, but paradoxical in that it leaves undetermined what, if anything,

is experiencing the illusion and experiencing an illusory Self as accompanying

the experience. That the being of the Self capable of experiencing both the

present it does in usual circumstances, and that the illusions created in the

cognitive tests contradict the assumptions about the nature of the I-Subject,

demonstrates only that the basic assumption that the I-Subject is the Self is

invalid.

The explanation is that rather than extrapolating into the future,

our brain is interpolating events in the past, assembling a story of

what happened retrospectively (Science, vol 287, p 2036).

This seems paradoxical, but other tests have confirmed that what

is perceived to have occurred at a certain time can be influenced by

what happens later.

All of this is slightly worrying if we hold on to the common-

sense view that our selves are placed in the present. If the moment

in time we are supposed to be inhabiting turns out to be a mere

construction, the same is likely to be true of the self existing in that

present. (Jan Westerhoff, New Scientist, February 20, 2013)

In that particular article, at least, the caveat is made that it is ‘worrying’ only‘if we hold on to the common-sense view’ in question. However in some of the

other articles the invalid assumptions are stated as factical reality.

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CLOSE your eyes and ask yourself: where am I? Not geograph-

ically, but existentially. Most of the time, we would say that we

are inside our bodies. After all, we peer out at the world from a

unique, first-person perspective within our heads – and we take it

for granted. (Anil Ananthaswamy, New Scientist, February 20, 2013)

“. . . we peer out at the world from a unique, first-person perspective within our

heads”. Do we? We can posit that perspective, certainly, and when we ‘step

back’ from our involvement in the World to look at it theoretically we often doposit such a perspective, but do we actually have that perspective ‘most of the

time” or even firstly? When I wake up, for instance, I’m first aware of world as

the in-which I’ve awoken, often in the sense that it is different from whatever

I was experiencing during sleep. I am aware of the world and things within

it in sufficient detail that I can stumble to the kitchen, start a pot of coffee,

and in interacting with things in the world in that manner I become aware of

interacting with the world as myself, prior to having posited an I-Subject in any

way.

Ironically the I-Subject was already seen by Kant to be illusory, based on

the same Cartesian assumptons, it has simply taken cognitive science this long

to re-arrive at the same junction.

This “concept or, if the term be preferred, the judgment ‘I think’”,

says Kant, is something that is itself transcendental and cannot be

an object. It is only in transcendental illusion that “human reason”

takes this vehicle of thought itself as an object, as a ‘substantial

thinking being’; it is only in illusion that this vehicle of thought

signifies the object of the rational psychologist:

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[Of] the simple, and in itself completely empty, representation ‘I’

[. . .] we cannot even say that this is a concept, but only that it

is a bare consciousness which accompanies [begleitet] all concepts.

Through this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing further

is represented than a transcendental subject of the thoughts = X.

It is known only through the thoughts which are its predicates, and

of it, apart from them, we cannot have any concept whatsoever, but

can only revolve in a perpetual circle, since any judgement upon it

has always already made use of its representation. And the reason

why this inconvenience is inseparably bound up with it, is that con-

sciousness in itself is not a representation distinguishing a particular

object.

In general I posit the I-Subject if the questions of why or how I’m doing what

I’m doing, as theoretical questions, come up. At that point I “ step back” from

my involvement in the world, in which I experience myself in a multitude of

ways as in-the-world, in-time, etc., but I experience what I see, hear, smell,

feel in a multitude of spatio-temporal ways. Since the author of the article

doesn’t inquire into what happens prior to experiencing the “ I” as ‘in my head’,

‘peering out at the world’, i.e. what occurs when we ‘step back’, since we

obviously don’t literally step back, the assumption that we experience the world

in this manner ‘most of the time’ is invalid. If asked about what we are doing

in such a way that we step back and look at it theoretically, we might say

that, but while we are actually functioning in the world in an involved way,

not looking at it in a theoretical way, we would not describe our experience

of ourselves alongside our experience of the World in that way. Interestingly

the phrase ‘peering out at the world’, while it doesn’t describe our everyday

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ordinary experience of world, does describe very well the peculiar relation to

the World that people with autism, or in a more extreme case, people suffering

from complete depersonalization display. This is an unusual manner of world

experience, though, and results in difficulties for those that experience world in

this way when required to functionally interact with other beings in it.

Your self even can be tricked into hovering in mid-air outside

the body. In 2011, Olaf Blanke at the Swiss Federal Institute of

Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne and colleagues asked volunteers tolie on their backs and via a headset watch a video of a person of

similar appearance being stroked on the back. Meanwhile, a robotic

arm installed within the bed stroked the volunteer’s back in the

same way. The experience that people described was significantly

more immersive than simply watching a movie of someone else’s

body. Volunteers felt they were floating above their own body, and

a few experienced a particularly strange effect. Despite the fact that

they were all lying facing upwards, some felt they were floating face

down so they could watch their own back (see "Leaving the body").

"I was looking at my own body from above," said one participant.

"The perception of being apart from my own body was a bit weak

but still there." "That was for us really exciting, because it gets

really close to the classical out-of-body experience of looking down

at your own body," says team member Bigna Lenggenhager, now

at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Further support came

by repeating the experiment inside an MRI scanner, which showed

a brain region called the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) behaving

differently when people said they were drifting outside their bodies.

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This ties in neatly with previous studies of brain lesions in people

who reported out-of-body experiences, which also implicated the

TPJ. The TPJ shares a common trait with other brain regions that

researchers believe are associated with body illusions: it helps to

integrate visual, tactile and proprioceptive senses with the signals

from the inner ear that give us our sense of balance and spatial

orientation. This provides more evidence that the brain’s ability

to integrate various sensory stimuli plays a key role in locating the

self in the body. (Anil Ananthaswamy, New Scientist, February 20,

2013)

The idea that the Self is skin bounded appeared at the same time as the notion

of the I-Subject as the Self. As a result it’s no surprise that from the perspective

of the Subject this kind of experience is unexpected. However the spatial nature

of the Self has barely begun to be clarified. We can say with some certainty that

we experience ourselves as being-in (the world, society, my body) but in what

way being-in is spatial is indeterminate. We first experience the “ in” as place,

but place doesn’t always correspond with abstract dimensional space. When

I’m on the phone while driving, in some sense I am “in” the car, and I’m able to

continue to functionally manipulate the car “in” traffic, “in” the area I’m driving

through, but simultaneously I am sharing a “place” through my being-with the

person on the phone that is not spatial in any way, and I’m more immediately

aware of that place, more “in” that non-spatialized place, than “in” my physical

surroundings, although I can access my awareness of those surroundings and the

sense of my being-in those surroundings if I care to, but this requires a directed

mediation that redirects my attention. This in itself demonstrates that I am

aware of myself in a situation even when my attention is otherwise occupied,

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and can be aware of being-in multiple situations simultaneously, although my

self-conscious attention may be directed to only one of them. The assumption

that my being “in-my-body” as the place I’m most immediately aware of is

not valid, then. When I pay attention, in a non-theoretical way, to something

across the room, my immediate awareness of myself is as alongside the things

I’m paying attention to, not “in-my-body” across the room. It’s only as the

I-Subject, in a theoretical mode, that my perspective “from-my-body” becomes

primary. Oddly though, precisely when we experience ourselves as the I-Subject

“in” the body, “peering out at the world”, our ability to be bodily is impaired.

We become awkward, ‘self-conscious’ in the common use of the phrase. Our

habitual, familiar ability to function bodily in the world is no longer seamless.

Our everyday involved sense of ourselves as bodily is not “in-the-body”, as a

kind of entity-container, but “as” a body. As a body, we body into a room

when we are not feeling ‘self-conscious’ of how we are appearing to others. Our

experience of the outlines of the bodily self also changes in different situations.

To go back to the driving example, once we have learned fully how to drive we

no longer experience ourselves as a body “ in” a car, but as the car. Yet when

driving an unfamiliar car for the first time, for the first short while we experience

ourselves as “in” the car again, as we did when we were first learning to drive

and not yet accomplished at it. This points to how habit and the familiarity it

brings is the origin, not of the Self, but of how the Self spatializes itself, and

how it experiences itself as a body to begin with.

Self as System vs Self as Set of Attributes

We began with the notion that the Self, like any other thing of which we can say

it is in fact ‘one’ thing, is systemic in nature. The word ‘systemic’ has the advan-

tage of clearly indicating that it has to do with system, without implying a false

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systematic nature to the multitude of systems that are not systematic; systems

that are full of contradictions, oppositions, and random anomalies. Badiou’s

notion that there is no ‘one’, using set theory as his demonstration, misses the

point that a system is not simply a set. Sets are arbitrary collections, whether of

elements in older set theory or other sets in newer set theory. The accumulation

into a set doesn’t fundamentally change its members – as part of the set they

are simply what they were, albeit now collected. Systems on the other hand

are functional arrangements – they have the ability to function as one thing.

For this to occur the relations between members of a system are determined as

to their structure, whereas in a set the members may be moved, swapped etc.

in any desired fashion. This arrangement of ‘parts’ of a system gives systems

specific structures, structures that lead to the formation of aspects (systemic

features found only in the system as-a-whole when it is functioning), as well

as emergent features (features that appear due to relations between subsystems

and substructures of subsystems). As a result, while a set is simply the sum of

its members, along with any implemented functions that work on all members

(such as an appropriate way to sort them), a system is generally more than

the sum of its parts. This ‘more’ comes about both as functionality found in

the relations between members that don’t exist in any individual member and

through emergent features triggered by relations between substructures of the

system. Further, these emergent features, within a complex system, can form

their own systemic structures leading to functionality not found anywhere in

the original system, or even in the original system as a whole at the scale of its

implementation. The result of this latter situation is that the higher-level emer-

gent system becomes determinative for the behaviour of the system or systems

that comprise it. A system cannot be fully determined, though, from within it-

self, as Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem adequately demonstrates. Since we are

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our Selves, there is no meta-system available from which the Self could be fully

determined. Since a necessary aspect of the self involves being-in-the-World, but

it is only an aspect, the Self and World are equiprimordial, they require each

other but neither is the meta of the other, the World as a system is similarly

not fully determined.

The question of the Self, as to what it is, thereby gains an initial determina-

tion that can assist us in pointing towards the areas that need to be looked at in

order to gain a fuller, more explicit determination of the Self. The question of

the question of the Self concerns how, methodologically, one might approach the

Self, given that the Self is in each and every case “who we are” and thus some-

thing one cannot simply look at from an external perspective, whether spatial

or temporal.

With the caveat implied by this inability to “get hold” of one’s Self in its

totality, can the question of the Self retain validity as a question? As a guiding

idea, a temporary way of holding off the question’s full impact until we have

more familiarity with how the question of the self works itself out, we admit

that any answer will be at best partial, perspectival and horizonal, but that it

can still deal with truths that are not purely personal or solipsistic, due to the

shared nature of the Self in question, and the resulting ability to look at the

shared Self in a manner where individual perspectives can be checked against,

and modified by, other individual perspectives that have the same reality in

view.

Words such as spirit, soul, or psyche have accumulated a wealth of disparate

meanings determined by subcultural modifications of the assumptions that came

to underlie the usage of the words. Disentangling the Self from the other words

that at first glance appear either synonymous or at least closely related is an

initial necessity in order to ask the question of the Self as it is in itself.

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A further problem lies in the fact that in most types of questioning, we

adopt a questioning, or theoretical stance prior to actually asking the question.

However this ‘stance’ is itself a specific mode of the Self, with the result that

what is actually observed, even within a careful phenomenology, is the Self as

it is only in that mode. Heidegger’s inquiry into the nature of the being in

question in its everyday mode, rather than its theoretical mode, demonstrated

that the theoretical mode was not the ‘usual’ mode of the Self, but an abstract,

artificial mode in which we look at things rather than involve ourselves with

them.

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the question of the self

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