THE WALKING MAN AND THE PLAYFUL SPIRIT

2009-03-15T11:21:00.000-07:00

Cassius: Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?’
Brutus: No, Cassius, for the eye sees not itself, but by reflection, by
some other things.
Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare, I ii 51, 52, 53

The debate about what constitutes identity or self is not new. Gotama said, some 2,500 years ago that he was swimming against the current by asserting that there was no Atman, no absolute, immutable, enduring self, but only a complex of conditioned processes.

Psychology is currently engaged in a similar debate, struggling to understand whether the self is a construct comprising conscious and unconscious elements, a product of social perception, a number of different selves responding to different social situations, none of these things or all of them. The truth is that psychology does not know what the prime subject of its study is, and it wants to find out.

I propose to put forward certain ideas about the nature of self and consciousness in this blog and with time develop those ideas.

My starting point is Shakespeare's statement above, that the I cannot see itself. The logic behind this is simple and indisputable. The self, or the I, being what is looking, can never see itself because it is, quite literally, behind its own perspective. By logical extension, everything that the I can see is 'not I', and this must include all of the I's properties, qualities and attributes, including its consciousness, perception and identity.

This of course raises the question of whether the I and the identity can be different things. It is central to my proposition that they can be, and that they are.

In addition to this idea, I want to take Descartes' dictum, ‘Je pense donce je suis,’ (later ‘Cogito ergo sum.’), though hailed as the birth of rationalism, as the ultimate empirical statement establishing beyond all possible doubt the existence of the I, and the fact that the I is conscious. Consciousness emerges here as a property of the I, and this has a number of important implications.

But before I go into these I want to establish the basis of the idea which I want to develop. I propose that the I, or the self, is an unknowable, undefinable fact: the fact of being. Latent in the I is all the potential of all the realities which we as individuals generate. Surrounding the I (and I use four-dimensional, spacial and temporal images here though they are wholly inappropriate) is an event horizon where the I's environment collides with the self. On this horizon dynamic tensions and stresses are aroused, which develop into unique dynamic processes and these define the identity of the individual. This event horizon of dynamic stress is the I's field of perception, and it is what we commonly think of as ourselves. It is here that our personality, our conscious and unconscious minds arise, develop and unfold.

But what is crucial to this dynamic event horizon is that it is informed with the potentials and properties of both the I and its environment. It is a complex, dynamic matrix formed and shaped by both, and as an irresistible consequence of this it follows that this dynamic construct is inseparable from its environment. In fact one must go further and say that everything that we think of as our identity is a part of the environment if the I.

A little thought will show this to be true, as, though it is easy to think of things that we definitely associate with ourselves, and things that we do not associate with ourselves, it is all but impossible to establish unequivocally where the division lies between ourselves and our 'external' world. This is because that division does not exist. Physically, mentally and emotionally we are inextricably interwoven with our environment, and our minds, emotions, feelings and body are as much a part of the I's environment as are the air, the grass and the trees.

The Walking Man and The Playful Spirit

THE WALKING MAN AND THE PLAYFUL SPIRIT