COMMENSAL ISSUE 95

Dear Theo

Rick Street asks for clarification of the term ‘self’ (C94/33). Agreement is improbable, but I would like to offer the following:

My Oxford Dictionary defines 'self' as "a person or thing as the object of introspection or reflexive action". I think the difficulty may arise because this 'object' is taken as existing prior to the advent of the subject-object dichotomy. However, it is my contention that this dichotomy only arises with the advent of a reflexive process within a field. The self is thus a reference point that arises with reflexive awareness -awareness itself being a process that is only subsequently conceptualised in terms of subject-object relations - and is reified by language. Language obviously operates in subject-object terms, so in discussing this approach one has a constant tendency to betray oneself.

I shall try to explain why I say that the self arises with reflexive awareness - and that hence the self has no existence prior thereto - as follows:

To quote from Rick's C94 contribution: "The real problem is that a monkey can look down at its body and see itself. When it sees this body reflected in a mirror it should recognise it as its own."(C94/33-34). But what the monkey sees in the mirror does not correspond to what it sees of 'itself' directly. What it sees in the mirror is an image of an entity with a head, like the rest of the monkey-entities that it interacts with. Its direct experience of its own body is of limbs and a torso extending out of - as it were - a void filled with the world. How do I know? Because this is how I - as a fellow primate - experience myself in those moments when I am able to return to a primitive, or childlike, perception of the world. The idea of myself as a discrete entity with a head, of the sort that I see in the mirror, is not something available to simple, immediate perception. In this 'headless' mode 'I' am the totality of my perceptions: I am everything. There is no dividing line, no gap, between 'myself' and - to take some traditional philosophical objects - the table, or the 'tree in the quad' or whatever. The notion of myself as a discrete entity is a construction that arises with reflexive awareness, which is a complex process involving the cross-referencing of visual and tactile sense data. It thus requires a certain complexity of neural organisation, to a degree that only seems to have been attained in the 'great apes' and humans.

The needs, actions, and behaviour of an organism lacking reflexive awareness are an integral part of the organism/environment field. Within that field, however, we might speak of a potential for reflexive awareness: a gap, not between the organism and its environment, but rather a space that arises should the monkey realise (and here I am in danger of betraying myself once more) that the reflection that it sees is 'a-monkey-not-another-monkey'. But I do not acknowledge that the "monkey is in some way conscious that it exists and that it is a monkey". (C94/32). This is an interpretation of the position from a sophisticated, reflexively-aware point of view. 'The monkey' is aware of a perceptual field that is spontaneously organised around certain organismic needs. Within that field 'it' is aware of other entities with which 'it' primarily interacts, and which we call 'other monkeys' . But 'it', as a 'self' is subsumed within the matrix of relationships that, through our categories, we seek to sever and reduce to rationally comprehensible order. The monkey's awareness of 'its' limbs is not self-awareness. It is an awareness of part of a process of interaction in which 'it' is fully implicated.

If I may be permitted a quote from 'Human Groups' by W.J.H.Sprott (Penguin Books 1958): "The infant has no idea of itself as a separate individual ... Psychologists who have made a close study of children are agreed on this. A distinct awareness of oneself as a separate entity, says Piaget, is the 'result of a gradual and progressive dissociation and not a primitive intuition'."

And from the Eighth Duino Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke, as translated by Ruth Speirs (The Rider Book of Mystical Verse; Ed.J.M.Cohen,1983):

Once the organism/environment field has been interrupted by the advent of the self, the self or subject, being no longer a part of a self-organising totality, seeks to organise the world around itself, generally but not exclusively as part of a social process.

To pick up on John Stubbings’ C94/11 contribution, and earlier: Art is the process whereby the subject imposes itself upon the world. 'The world' can be broadly divided into social and material environments, the former subsuming the latter. When the subject imposes itself primarily upon the material environment, through the creation of the useful or decorative artefacts with which we surround ourselves, we tend to speak of a 'craft'; where its aim is to impose itself upon the social environment (via the material environment) we tend rather to speak of 'art' . To refer to an example used by John, Damien Hurst's works use material means to impose themselves on our social environment by exploiting our cultural preoccupation with death and so forth (or some might say by exploiting the cultural preoccupations of a cabal of influential critics: but we swallow it nonetheless).

Of course, the practical applications of science amount to much the same sort of thing.

On a topic related to art: 'beauty' is found in an object that expresses an integrity that the subject has lost. With reference to Vijai Parhar's criticism of Rick Street's C92/24 description of "beauty as a quality of the relationship between viewer and flower" (C94/20) I would say that, primarily, the awareness 'of the flower' does not pertain to the viewer any more than it does to the flower. There is an awareness in the context of which, or around which, the viewer and the flower are constructed as a result of the reflexive awareness that has arisen in part of the field: the human being 'who views' . The viewer then relates to the flower qualitatively as something that lacks integrity to something that is perceived as possessing it. I therefore agree with Rick's comment.

In seeking to conceptualise the world, the self is confronted with problems of dualism, which are grounded in a dichotomy of organism and environment resulting from the self's own interruption of the field. With the advent of the self or subject, the object necessarily follows, and the world is divided, understood, and manipulated by the subject in these terms and their correlates, mind and matter. The problem largely disappears when the obvious is rediscovered: the underlying continuum of being that the child loses through the above-mentioned process of "gradual and progressive dissociation".

I think this is what Roger Farnworth may be getting at by saying "light operates on both sides of the divide". (C93/40).The phenomenon and our experience of it are continuous. Except to the consciousness that arises with reflexive awareness, there is no 'in here' as opposed to 'out there'. What operates 'within' is no less 'light' than that which operates 'without'. It is the dualistic view of the world and its historical development through religion and science that insists, however usefully, on considering light - as 'objectively' understood by the physicist and the neurologist - as something other than our 'subjective' experience of it.

Roger Farnworth "would love to hear how members of PDG derive their moral imperatives" (C94/25). My response to this is that I do not derive or form moral imperatives, I am formed by or derived from them, or their absence. One more quote:

"The moral person is not an exclusive individual ... he is the organ of a common reason, and it is no mere metaphor to say that we are members one of another". (A. Seth Pringle-Pattison: 'The Idea of Immortality'; Oxford 1922).

Michael Nisbet

Michael : Thought-provoking stuff ! I’ll consider it (probably) in preparation for Braziers. No time now !

Theo