More Truly and More Strange: Thoughts on the Self

by Steve Neumann

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

—Wallace Stevens, Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

What are we? We know we are an intelligent and confoundingly complex species of primate, but what are we at bottom? More specifically, what is this thing we call our “self”? Is it even a single thing? Is it even a thing, much less one and whole? 

The combined evidence of our various neurosciences — biological, pathological, psychological, cognitive, etc. — convincingly demonstrate that there is no traditional self as postulated by the diverse religious imaginations of our species throughout the millennia. And even our own experience often lends itself to a denial of a monadic seed implanted deep within our existential soil, whether we practice various types of meditation, succumb to brain injury or disease (including mental illness), or simply reflect on our life over relatively long spans of time. 

And while neuroscientists like David Eagleman provide pragmatic arguments in support of the Obama Administration’s plan to invest up to $3 billion in studying the human brain, perhaps that investment will pay off in philosophical dividends as well. In the meantime, I’d like to take a look at how our understanding of the self can change under various scenarios. 

I. The Solipsistic Self 

Working intimately with dogs for the past decade has confirmed for me a suspicion also held by George Santayana in his 1923 book Scepticism and Animal Faith:

So far is solipsism of the present moment from being self-contradictory that it might, under other circumstances, be the normal and invincible attitude of the spirit; and I suspect it may be that of many animals.

I have a unique opportunity in my career as a guide dog mobility instructor: I get to delve beyond what the average pet owner experiences with her dog at home. The dogs I train are exposed to situations and environments no pet dog will likely encounter. 

What I’m really doing when I’m training, essentially, is trying to understand how dogs experience the world. I need to be aware of how they react, both cognitively and emotionally, to various stimuli so I can tailor my methods and my approach. Like human learners, each dog is different; each dog has it’s own “style” of learning and of responding to the world of experience. But unlike humans, dogs don’t seem to lament the past or fret about the future. 

For example, if one of my dogs has anxiety about riding on an escalator in a department store, I’m fairly certain he isn’t ruminating about it on our walk back to the training facility. He’s engaged in his perceptions of the moment. Likewise, the next time we walk to the department store, it’s equally clear that he isn’t anticipating the appearance of the abominable Moving Stair Monster, even though we are walking the same exact route to it. In fact, he doesn’t react until he sees or hears it. 

Using Santayana’s conception of “animal faith” we can say that dogs have an innate, arational belief in the world. He goes on to say that

[A creature] might keenly enjoy the momentary scene, never conceiving himself as a separate body or as anything but the unity of that scene ... nor would he harbor the least suspicion that it would change or perish, nor any objection to its doing so if it chose. Solipsism would then be selflessness and scepticism simplicity.

So while a dog certainly has a “personality” and can engage in seemingly voluntary actions much the way people do (though certainly not to the same degree), it’s very likely that it doesn’t have a “self” as we conceive it. 

We all tend to anthropomorphize our pet dogs; and we do this, I think, because it’s easy to do so: dogs are very expressive, and they are social pack animals like us. And though they lack the voluminous repertoire of facial expressions we possess, we can nevertheless detect when our dogs are happy, sad, frustrated or scared. And, just as most of us find it impossible to believe that we lack a metaphysical free will, we find it almost as difficult to believe that dogs don’t have selves, commonly conceived. 

Now, it probably isn’t lost on you that some humans have desired to achieve just this state of selflessness, in an attempt to be free from the vicissitudes of life. The first Buddha is a case in point. Many people want to “live in the moment” without the shadow of the past or the specter of the future. Though there is some disagreement about Buddhism’s conception of the self, I think it’s safe to say that it denies that there is a permanent, immutable entity behind the flux of existence. 

Anyone, with enough persistent practice, can experience being a “no-self”, in addition to intellectually accepting that there is no self. The primary vehicle for this phenomenon is mindfulness meditation. I used to be a regular meditator, though now I find myself distracted by many personal projects. And while my motivation for a long time was just this type of existential exploration, I actually began meditating as a way to combat an episode of clinical depression.

II. The Depressed Self

I’ve experienced three episodes of clinical depression in my forty-one years of life. The most striking thing about it, at least to me, is the feeling of total powerlessness that accompanies it. It’s something that overtakes you, that sneaks up on you, and you’re in it before you really know what hit you. There are two common remedies for it: a palliative like an antidepressant, and talk therapy of various stripes — and there seems to be a consensus that a combination of the two is most effective. 

Being already philosophically-inclined, I began mindfulness meditation as a way to separate what I thought was my depressed self from my real self, to separate my thoughts from my self. I can’t say that meditating in this way was a quick fix or even a permanent one. And it certainly wasn’t easy: under “normal” circumstances the mind is flooded with thoughts and sense impressions when you try to focus on one thing only. And when you’re depressed, these thoughts and sense impressions are of an exclusively negative nature; there are no pleasant reveries of fond memories or future expectations. But it became clear to me that my depressed self is also my real self, just in a different state; and fortunately a passing one. 

The Venerable Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, in a 2003 article for Shambhala Sun, says that when we’re in a “normal” dispositional state of mind, we are “charmed by the world, under the spell of samsaric entertainment.” The idea here is that we normally don’t see things, including or even especially our self, as they are. It’s when we’re in a depressed state, he says, that we can see through the troubling illusions of life. 

While I believe Rinpoche’s conception of depression, especially severe depression, is somewhat inaccurate, I think there is a type of depressed or enervated state where one does consider existence in a different, and perhaps even helpful, light. As Rinpoche says

We are talking about the kind of depression that makes us stop and think and re-evaluate our lives ... For all these years we may have been thinking, “I'm this kind of person,” “I'm that kind of person,” “I'm a mother,” “I'm an engineer,” or whatever.

In other words, in these types of states we begin to question who or what we are: we begin to question the very nature of our self. We begin to transform a little bit into Santayana’s sceptic. And whether we do that through an informal self-reflection (no pun intended) or a more disciplined mindfulness meditation, we can also choose to pursue this line of inquiry beyond our typical social categories of “mother,” “engineer,” “dog trainer,” etc.  But, of course, if we carry our skepticism too far, we may end up finding nothing at all.

For the wayward sceptic...it accustoms him to discard the dogma which an introspective critic might be tempted to think self-evident, namely, that he himself lives and thinks. That he does so is true; but to establish that truth he must appeal to animal faith. If he is too proud for that, and simply stares at the datum, the last thing he will see is himself.

—Santayana

III. The Nietzschean Self

In the spirit of finding a “middle way” à la Siddhartha Gotama, somewhere between a self being all there is and there being no self at all, I think Nietzsche’s conception of the self is an adequate model. Mark Alfano, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon, has published a draft of a forthcoming paper on Nietzsche at his blog. His aim is to show empirical support for some of Nietzsche’s thought; and the most relevant part for my purposes relates to the fragmentation of the self: 

Is the Nietzschean self merely a congeries of desires, drives, and affects that inhere in a given body, or is there something more to it? The correct response, I contend, is that both answers capture an aspect of Nietzsche’s full position. He thinks of the self as minimally the collection of desires, affects, and drives inherent in a given body, but he reserves a special, honorific status for selves that exhibit wholeheartedness.

The idea of wholeheartedness has to do with one’s approach to organizing or constructing one’s self, or one’s will. For Nietzsche, it’s not a matter of a free will or an unfree will, but of a strong will or weak will, a healthy will or a sick will. I realize I seem to be switching from “self” to “will” here, but in Nietzsche-speak it makes sense because one’s self is comprised of various drives or wills. 

As Alfano says, “the extent to which one is a self is a matter of degree, not an all-or-nothing affair.” And for Nietzsche, the extent to which one can harness and arrange one’s multiplicity is related to the strength of one’s self, the “quantum of power” one is: 

The great synthetic man is lacking, in whom the various forces are unhesitatingly harnessed for the attainment of one goal. What we possess is the multifarious man, perhaps the most interesting chaos there has ever been, but not the chaos before the creation of a world, but that after.

In a previous post, I reviewed Julian Baggini’s investigation and summation of the philosophical and empirical evidence that shows our selves to be “bundles of psychosomatic activity, albeit highly organized and remarkably stable ones.” Alfano draws primarily on Daniel Kahneman’s work stretching over decades, with special interest  in his notion of human thought operating on two systems: a “fast” one that aids our survival but is beset by a potentially destructive impulsiveness, and a “slow” one that is more rational and considered but can be easily overwhelmed in the heat of the moment. In addition to this, Kahneman presents us with the idea of two selves, an experiencing self and a remembering self. Whereas Ian Pollack considered the ethical implications of Kahneman’s hypothesis here, Alfano focuses on the significance for empirical confirmation of Nietzsche’s conception of a disunited self over 125 years ago. And what Kahneman’s work clearly shows, according to Alfano, is the disunity of the self. 

IV. The Path of the One (Self) 

In The Matrix Trilogy, our reluctant hero Neo starts out believing he knows who he is, but it turns out everything he thought he knew about himself and the world is wrong: he’s been living inside a massive computer simulation created by a race of sentient machines who need to enslave humanity in order to provide themselves with an endless power source. 

Neo starts out as a kind of solipsist: his entire life has been lived inside his own head, in a sense; so he can say with the eponymous Hoon of Stevens’ poem that “I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw/Or heard or felt came not but from myself.” Then, however, with the help of some rebels from the last human city, Zion, Neo undergoes a type of Buddhist “awakening” where he realizes the fictive nature of his existence and the world in which he lives. Unfortunately, realizing that one has been living a lie — and a big one at that! — one’s entire life is depressing. When Neo asks Morpheus, the leader of the rebels against the machines, if he can go back to living inside the Matrix, Morpheus replies:

No. But if you could, would you really want to? I feel I owe you an apology. We have a rule. We never free a mind once it's reached a certain age. It’s dangerous, the mind has trouble letting go.

But after Morpheus takes Neo to see the Oracle, Neo has a new lease on life; he’s found what he believes is his true purpose: he is the One who will end the war between humans and the machines. However, in the second movie, it turns out that the whole idea of the One was just another ruse by the machines to further placate the humans: Neo’s entire life has been manipulated — or, more charitably, guided — by the Oracle to fulfill his role as the One. The Architect, the father of the Matrix, puts it to Neo this way:

The Architect: The function of the One is now to return to the Source, allowing a temporary dissemination of the code you carry, reinserting the prime program. After which you will be required to select from the matrix 23 individuals — 16 female, 7 male — to rebuild Zion. Failure to comply with this process will result in a cataclysmic system crash killing everyone connected to the matrix which, coupled with the extermination of Zion, will ultimately result in the extinction of the entire human race.

Fortunately for the human race, this turns out not to be entirely true — the system crash isn’t immediate. Neo, in defiance of his role as the One, chooses not to return to the Source but to continue fighting. 

So not only does he reject his first illusory self that was thoroughly ensconced in the Matrix, he also rejects his second self that was chosen for him by the machines. By the end of the trilogy, we see that Neo, as a result of being human but with apparently some computer programming inside him, truly is a “congeries of desires, drives, and affects that inhere in a given body,” as Nietzsche suggests. And, just as in Nietzsche’s conception, Neo discovers that he can direct his fate to some degree, that he can harness his multifarious nature and create himself. And by doing so he finds himself more truly and more strange. 

And this is all my creating and striving, that I create and carry together into One what is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident. 

—Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra