by Simon Smith
Apologies once again for the extended interruption to our
usual service. This time it was cause by a) Christmas and all its associated
indulgences (yes, I had a slight hangover); and b) the contraction of foul and
hideous diseases (I had a cold). Having now fully recovered from both a) and b)
we may now proceed with our sexy adventures in cosmological consciousness. Oh yeah!
Oh wait, it looks as though there may actually be some
consequences to all this hot and dirty philosophical business. Uh oh.
Part 4: Where
Do Babies Come From?
Analogical thinking rests on our ability to
recognise other modes of reality as being active agencies. But how do I know
what active agency looks like? From my own case, rebounds the echo of
ego-certainty. Perhaps; but in such truisms, lurks pernicious circularity. How
did I come to be an agency capable of recognising its reflection in others?
Where did “my own case” come from? Where else, P. F. Strawson observed, if not
those others? A “case” is not a single integer. Arguments “from” are really
arguments “back to”; they return us to the simple ontological facts of human
existence.
Logical philosophers will doubtless
remind us that we have known as much since Strawson and Wittgenstein located
the primary conditions for any thought at all in those who taught us how to
think. Unearthing the roots of thought and action, however, it becomes clear
that, as vital as their corrective was, those logical philosophers still
somehow missed the point. After all, Farrer observed, ‘[i]t is not as though we
believed in our neighbour’s personality because logical philosophers are
able to exhibit the self-contradiction involved in denying it’.[1] Such intellectual conceit surely
adds the insult of unnecessary demonstration to the injury of inexcusable
doubt: bad faith atop faulty inference. “The other” is no philosophical puzzle
for rational minds to solve but a matter of real practical urgency.
This is because our first encounter
with others finds us supremely helpless. John Macmurray (Farrer’s tutor at
Balliol) put the point with paradoxical perspicuity. We are, he said,
‘“adapted”…to being unadapted,’ that is, ‘“adapted” to a complete dependence’
on others.[2] The nursling has no control over
her bodily movements, no capacity to initiate action or deliberately do
anything. Her basic experience, therefore, cannot be the exercise of her own
agency; for she is not an agent. Rather, that experience can only be of the
agency first exercised on her by others. Therein lie the analogical
foundations upon which our understanding of other agencies must rest.
Indeed, our primitive experience of
another’s ‘disturbance-effect’ is likely why psychological development begins
with the objectified ‘I’. The child conceives herself first as an object,
innocent as the philosophical realist and as devoid of any other possible
perspective. She is a thing in a world where all perspectives are one
perspective; that is, her own; though, again like the realist, she does not
know this. Her subjectivity, she later acquires as part of the process of
learning that neither she nor her world are so ontologically or psychologically
transparent.
This marks a subtle but important shift
in personalist schematics. Traditionally, we are told that persons arise only
in dialogue, between I and Thou. In a sense, however, studies in
developmental psychology suggest otherwise. It seems that an I only
develops when a Thou encounters an It and transforms it into and I.
To such subjectifying transformations
we are well “adapted”; indeed, perfectly so. In Macmurray’s words, we are ‘made
to be cared for’; and cared for we must be if we are to survive long. Being so
“adapted”, how fortuitous then that we are born into a manifold of personal
agencies or, to warm the face of such schematics, a world of families and
friends, of inherently personal love-relationships. Farrer concurred with his
former teacher: ‘[f]rom first infancy,’ he said, ‘our elders loved us, played
us, served us and talked us into knowing them’. Had they failed us, we would
not be.
Consciousness, then, is awakened,
better still invested, in us by those who supply the mental resources
with which we explore our world and ourselves. By means of such investments,
the enquiring mind, takes its first steps. Our parents and teachers give us the
tools with which we shape our own part in transactions: physical and
metaphysical, cosmological and psychological. Before that, however
We
learnt to talk, because [others] talked to us; and to like, because they smiled
at us. Because we could first talk, we can now think; that is, we can talk
silently to the images of the absent, or… pretend to be our own twin, and talk
to ourself.[3]
Others supply the conditions of our conduct,
both mode and circumstance of developing personality. I can think, that is,
talk to myself, because they first talked to me and taught me to reply. I can
even think “objectively”, that is, abstract from the immediacy of my
experience, because they taught me rules for consistently organising and
interpreting it. These rules, they called theories: scientific, philosophical,
psychological, etc.; they mitigate the particularity of my perspective by
co-opting me into a community of explorers, so make me one of them.
In Farrer’s words, ‘[t]hought is the interiorisation of dialogue’.[4] Staking its claim to the terms and
the structure of those transactions, the image of the other is thereby
internalised, instilling the “self” with what Feuerbach called ‘the inner life
of man’, our social self, our ‘species being’.[5]
The seemingly “objective” self of our
psychological infancy is thereby displaced. Internalised otherness contrasts
itself with that “externalised” or “objective” self. The nascent “self”, its
needs, activities, and perspective, are passed through the image of the other.
Being “filtered” in this way, the “self” is (re)evaluated and (re)constructed
in relation to the other. In short, I learn to double myself so as to play the
part of another within myself.[6] Colloquially, one might say I
become a “self” by learning to put myself in the place of the other. The I
is formed by re-enacting that place, that primary otherness. Being Thou
unto others, the “self” is, to reiterate a favourite Feuerbachian phrase, essentially
‘species being’. Thus, the transactional structure of social conscience and
conscious action are built-into the mode and act of self-construction by
the other.
This overrules any ontological
privilege or priority the ‘I’ might claim over interpersonal connections. Prior
actuality, as Farrer dubbed it, cannot belong to the “self” for ‘mentality always
was a social, not a solitary, thing.’[7] Metaphysically and psychologically,
priority resides in the other for that is where my “self” is born. The “self”
becomes a “self” only by being appropriated by others and learning to
appropriate them in turn.
Oh yeah!
That’s what I’m talking about! And I’ve been talking about it for ages! Now I’m
trying to make it sound sexy by talking in this exaggerated way with lots of
exclamation marks and playing 70s guitar wah-wah music in the background! Mmm,
sexy metaphysics!
So come back
next week – almost definitely next week, or the week after at the latest – for another
instalment in Metaphysics: Down and Dirty Business!
[1] Farrer, Faith
and Speculation, 129, my emphasis.
[2] Macmurray,
J. Persons in Relation, (New
Jersey/London: Humanities Press International Inc., 1991), 48.
[3] Farrer,
‘Thinking the Trinity’ in A
Celebration of Faith, ed. Leslie Houlden (London: Hodder & Stoughton,
1970), 74.
[4] Farrer,
Faith and Speculation, 126.
[5] Feuerbach,
L. The Essence of Christianity,
trans. George Eliot, (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 2.
[6] Feuerbach,
83.
[7] Farrer,
‘Thinking the Trinity’ in A Celebration of Faith, 74.
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