Our Partial, Divided, and Shifting (but real) Selves
- Like a song, gracefully (cantabile, grazioso)
Alas, the poor maligned Self! We are told by some scientists that the self is a mirage and doesn’t exist, and Buddhists are said to say that there is no self. On the other hand, however, some famous philosophers have told us that the greatest knowledge lies in knowing ourselves, and parents are forever telling their children to control themselves!
In just what realm are we here? Are we to take the self as being, as we did with “God”, a human concept that does not necessarily refer to anything real, but that in being referred to and related to, becomes in a human sense “real” as we try to maintain stability in the chaos of events and stimuli surrounding us? Or do we really have a self?
It doesn’t make things easier to say that depending on just what we mean by the word exist, we might say that the answer to all of these questions might be ‘Yes’. ‘Yes’, for a neuroscientist looking at nerve cells and what have you in the brain under high-powered microscopes, it is hard to find a “thing” to call a self in the brain. Before we take such an assertion at face value, however, the (perhaps not so obvious) questions to ask of that scientist are: “Who, or what, exactly, is making that declaration that there is no self?", and "Who or what are they trying to convince, or to educate, with that assertion?"
‘Yes’, for a Buddhist, because for a good Buddhist, the self does not have “independent origination”, but is instead embedded in the many forces that it is part of and interacts with in the process of, as they put it, arising from multiple and mutual causation, and is therefore not something free-standing in and of itself; it is not one of Aristotle’s substances, some pure residual essence that can stand alone.
Nevertheless, the person who we call Buddha seriously believed in the self—why else would he dedicate his life to enlightening it? If it is not the self that would do the searching and learning and the gaining of insights, and then convert that into peace of mind and having compassion for other living things, including other people, then it would have to be the same thing that we refer to as the self, but under a different name.
In that sense, I believe that the philosophers who tell us that the greatest knowledge is knowledge of ourselves are also right. Finally, parents are also right, because left to themselves, our untutored and uneducated selves, like our untutored minds, tend to be narrow and self-preoccupied.
One answer as to what the self is, then, is that it is what is aware of the individuality of the particular body that it is responsible for overseeing and give positive direction to. I don’t know about you, but that sounds just a little, what?, dry? Some years ago, I wrote to a friend who was a skeptic in these matters that ‘the self is what knows what it is going to be doing tomorrow.’ He did not respond to that, so I am not sure what he thought about it, but he usually lets me know if he disagrees with something I’ve written or said.
In any case, it was not long before I amended that definition by saying that ‘the self is what knows what it will be doing tomorrow, and who, if anyone, it will be doing it with.’ Now, as I write this, I would expand that further to say that ‘the self is what knows what it will be doing tomorrow, and with whom, and is also what formulates a general path, or plan, for how to live its life, with and around other people, and can make adjustments or modifications to that plan.’
Others might say that the self is what recognizes itself in a mirror, and have no real problems in assigning or attributing selves to elephants and porpoises. If the hologram of Princess Leah, in Star Wars, had suddenly stopped reciting its message, looked around, and said something like “Oh, I don’t like this dress,” or “What a strange ship you have,” it would be because it had suddenly acquired a self.
Our partial selves
However. However, even if we agree that the self exists, that does not necessarily mean, given how prone we are to paint much more grand pictures of ourselves than is actually the case, that our conception of it is at all that accurate or useful. In fact, not a few thinkers have observed that our untutored conceptions of ourselves are not a small part or source of our biggest problems. That many of us tend to think of humans, or at least those humans who are like us in some way, as being “exceptional” just by being who we are, “right out of the box”, as it were, is a case in point.
(There is an interesting feature of human nature that has been discovered time and time again in surveys of various kinds, and that is that respondents have a tendency to rank themselves, or the people who they are around the most, or where they live or work, higher, on the average, than they do other people or communities in general. “I think Mankind is rotten,” you can almost hear them say, “but I and the people I am around are basically OK.” That is one sense of “partial” that is true of us—that we are “partial” to our own selves and people we are familiar with.
Our selves, though, are also partial in another way, and that is that no individual can be a complete manifestations of all of the possibilities inherent in the human genome; each of us is the product of a random or accidental combination of some of those possibilities. Even if it were theoretically possible for a zygote to represent all of the possibilities inherent in our genome, I for one can only begin to imagine what it would look like if it were to survive.
Although they are only partial expressions of human variety, our untutored selves nonetheless have a very strong tendency to think of themselves as complete, if not ideal, and to generally look down on anyone who is different as being incomplete, or inferior, or perhaps not even human. (Some others, as we well know, however, go in the other direction and see themselves as being very limited, quite imperfect, and as having little if any value. Those of us who have the most pride about our selves love to take advantage of these people.)
Science, it is to be hoped, can perhaps find a way to help us get past these tendencies, and, in particular, the “imprinting” that happens to us with respect to the cultures and beliefs that we are raised in, and the resulting fear, dislike, vilification, and hatred, of those who happen to be from different cultures, or have different beliefs.
Our manifested selves
One place to start is to relegate to the bin perhaps marked “Not in this life”, on its having no basis in fact, the idea that there is an ideal personality, or that a person has one “true” self that only needs to be discovered and allowed to come out: we are not born with a functioning, pre-fabricated, self, and there are a number of sets of habits and traits that a person can become comfortable enough with to be able to declare with conviction that ‘now I have found my true self!’
“The perfect,” as an Italian proverb has it (and repeated by Voltaire and General George Patton in slightly different words), “is the enemy of the good.” How many times have you not been satisfied with “good enough”, tried to improve on something that was “perfectly” acceptable and serviceable, and ended up “ruining a good thing”? As for our Selves, preconceptions of perfection may even be harmful or damaging. Improvement is one thing, perfection quite another. (As for Italian proverbs, there is another that goes “She who is born beautiful is not born poor,” revealing, pithily, another enduring aspect of human nature. You can learn a lot from proverbs.)
The simple fact is that our brains, and, therefore, our minds and our selves, are not unitary in nature, but are built up on different layers and types of “centers” of different evolutionary “ages” and performing different functions, with a multitude of connections with each other and with the body—which, as we know, has daily (“circadian”) and other cycles.
It is only the Self that pulls it all together, with approximately half of its particular characteristics, according to psychologists, the result of its functioning on a give-and-take basis in actual life, in interaction with other selves, as it is experienced. That is its function—not to be some fixed or static entity, but to perform its functions in the dynamic immediacy of life, in the daily rhythms and events and demands of that life. Knowledge of self does not come in “bullets”, or packets, but in the complex understanding of what causes what, what feels comfortable or “right”, and what works and can be relied on.
Our “Divided” Selves
In previous postings, I have discussed or mentioned four “divides” among people: optimist vs. pessimist, “Eastern” vs. “Western”, male / female, and, now, strong / weak (or perhaps self-importance / self-effacement) self-concepts (“strong” and “weak” here are only meant as labels, not evaluations, for the record).
There other such “divides”, over which we seem to have little control (not necessarily no control, just little control) that psychologists have identified as “basic” personality types:
Extraversion / Introversion
Agreeableness / Antagonism
Conscientiousness / Unreliability
Emotional Stability / Neuroticism
Openness to Experience / Closed to Experience
Other “divides” that we might be able to identify might include (some of these may be particular manifestations of the ones above):
o Awareness vs. Unawareness (or obliviousness)
o Active or purposeful vs. Passive (“drifting”, “bobbing”) approach to life
o “Freedom” as biological willfulness vs. Freedom as considered choice (action vs. thought, to some degree)
o Acceptance of one’s life vs. Disappointment or anger
o This-wordly vs. Other-worldly
o Acceptance of others vs. Differentiation from others
o Gregarious vs. Loner
o Power vs. Accommodation or cooperation in dealing with others
o Need for instrumental (accomplishment) vs. Affective (or symbolic?) personal validation
o Functional vs. Embellished life style
o Orderliness or structure vs. Sense of freedom or spontaneity
o Peripheral vs. Integral sense of belonging in society
o Seeing money as an end in itself vs. Money as a means
o Family (or kin) orientation vs. Wider social orientation
o “Hard line” vs. Compassion or understanding with others
o Emphasis on following rules vs. Emphasis on considered judgment in various situations
o “Performance mask” vs. “Real me” in social situations
o Time orientation: Past- or future-oriented vs. Present-oriented
o Fixed status vs. Continuing validation
o “Story”-oriented vs. Descriptive- or fact-oriented
o “Platonist” vs. “Aristotelian” (Abstract ideas or principles vs. Actual experience and insights)
o Either-Or thinking vs. Perspectival thinking (looking from different perspectives)
(There is an interesting etymological finding having to do with the verb “to be” that may be related to several of the above divides, and which I may bring up again in a later posting: The present tense forms am and is of our verb “to be” are seen as derived from the Proto Indo-European root, “es”, while the past tense forms were and was are seen as derived from another root, wes, meaning “to stay, dwell, pass the night,” but also with a derivative meaning of “to be”. The first clearly has a more active sense, and the second a more passive, more "permanent", sense. What I take away from this is that these two tenses—and senses—are apparently not from the same psychological origins. Another “divide”?)
There is, as I stated ealier, no “perfect” or ideal personality; the best we can try for is to understand ourselves, try to be balanced and consistent to some degree, and try to understand what “those other” selves are like. Most if not all of them, we will probably find out, did not ask or plan to be the way they are, either. Much of the everyday life that some writers wax sentimental over from their youth, I feel, may have to do with a practice of having forbearance for the ways that others selves are manifested—provided, of course, that there is no harm done, and that there is reciprocity.
The list given here is by no means meant to be exhaustive or “scientific”, and some divides on the list may even fall out or fold in with others, on closer inspection and analysis, but I hope that they are at least suggestive and fairly representative of what you may have seen in life. Two points to get across are simply that our selves are manifested in the way we live our own lives and the way we interact with others, and, for the most part, they are all functional or can be made to be functional to some acceptable degree. If someone has a pretty good idea of where they fall out on the 30-some “divides” listed above, and if they have a good idea of how they are seen by other people in their lives, that would seem to be a good start towards “knowing” oneself.
Our Shifting Selves
On top of these kinds of natural tendencies of ours, there are also different “modes”, and different moods, that we might be in, often in the course of a day. The “modes” that we might be in include an “instrumental”, or getting-the-job-done, mode; a learning mode; a casual interaction mode, a vacation mode, a restorative mode (perhaps including what some, including me, might call a spiritual mode, the taking of personal quiet time to restore one’s sense of inner peace or harmony), a “taking charge” mode, a “being entertained” mode, and, I am sure, any number of others that we might list.
About these “moods”, I am quite sure that I can’t tell you much that you don’t already know, including the insight that the different preferences we have for different kinds of music at different times are indicators of how many different “moods” we might have or be in. And we can’t overlook normal circadian rhythms, either. (Or have I already said that?)
Some writers, both of fiction and nonfiction, speak of the natural occurrence of sub-personalities. (My first experience of this was in reading Dostoyevsky’s The Adolescent.)
The “Beleguered” Self
As if all of the above were not enough, our Selves are perhaps more under attack today than ever before. If my generation of adolescents complained bitterly that we didn’t have enough options, or enough freedom, or anything exciting to do, with lots of people telling us what to do and not to do, or how to live our lives, now it is far different: very possibly too much stimulation, too many options, too many possibilities for “specialization”—perhaps just plain too much.
In the midst of this plethora of possibilities, we can still speak, paradoxically enough, of the isolation of the Self. There are some who may gnash their teeth and lament that we are losing our values, or losing our place in the world, but I gnash my teeth and lament that we may be losing our Selves.
The one ray of hope that I have comes from the fact that in addition to the organizations that have labored for many years, some even a century or more, to help people who have reached, or are on the verge of reaching, “the bottom”, there is in Psychology, long since labeled as a “dismal” science, a growing study of what is called Positive Psychology, oriented to helping individuals “grow” stronger and more mature Selves, proactively, and not just when they run into serious problems. This doesn’t come any too soon, in my estimation.
The Moral Self
After all is said and done, the moral self is the self that acknowledges the equal basic standing of other selves (their ontological reality and equality), and acts accordingly—including, and this is part of that, protecting one’s own equal status. We are all, all of us, “I”s from our own point of view, and we are all “You”s from others’ points of view.
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