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Are we a Self or a Self-Concept?
Pragmatism was a philosophy that emerged directly out of The Enlightenment that initiated the “modern revolution” and it helps when thinking about Pragmatism to think about it in relationship to The Enlightenment and the new ways of thinking that emerged from it.
Prior to The Enlightenment human beings lived in a largely inexplicable world. Things happened and there was not yet any understanding of why. Explanations were developed to explain why things happened, but to our modern ears these explanations seem magical, mystical and unscientific.
Hosts of gods were imagined to control all of nature – lightening, rain, sunshine, plant growth, etc. And everything – including human beings – were thought to be possessed of an inner essence, spirit or soul that was the initiator and controller of action.
With the scientific revolution came the beginings of an objective, experimental and scientific understanding of how things work. The world became a machine of mechanical workings that could be understood and controlled. Weather was no longer controlled by a god – it was the result of the mixture of air pressure, humidity, wind velocity, etc. There was no longer the need to imagine some supernatural intelligence at work behind and above it all.
In the human being the same thing began to occur. The functioning of the body and the brain was increasingly recognized as the real cause of human action. And the newly discovered tool of human reason was proving itself capable of understanding – given sufficient time – everything. Human beings began to lose their need of gods – or even a single God – to explain the way things are.
The Enlightenment brought with it the advent of ways of thinking that turned many against religious notions because they seemed superstitious and unsupported by empirical evidence. The Traditional world of religious belief was becoming the Modern secular world.
The pragmatists- although to differing degrees – believed that philosophy – especially that of the French and German idealists (Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant, Hegel, etc.) – had retained too much of the superstitions habits of earlier thinking. These thinkers were certainly challenging the traditional ideas of The Church, at the same time they still retained ideas of a priori understanding, and absolute realities that somehow existed beyond and outside of the mind – this was too reminiscent of God for some.
The Pragmatists were following in the path of the English Empiricists by insisting that knowledge had to be directly connectable to that which was within experience. No supernatural essences were allowed (again the degree to which the different pragmatists held to this view varied considerably – James strongly, Peirce and Dewey much less.)
This is why the conception of “the self” came under scrutiny. It still smacked of a superstitious belief in “spiritual” essence or soul. Instead people like William James wanted to explain the existence of a “sense of self” by appealing to our actual experience and not to a supernatural “beingness.”
Pragmatism along with other modern philosophies were criticized with the advent of post-modern thinking for throwing out the baby with the bath water and for adopting a purely (or nearly so) materialistic relationship to reality. (In truth the early Pragmatists Peirce, James and Dewey were all trying to guard against this, but perhaps it was unavoidable for the pendulum to swing beyond center once it had started its arc.)
I believe there is a wisdom to the view – that while “self-concept” is real a “self” is not – that offers a rich vein of exploration still. In evolutionary terms we as human beings have tens of thousands of years of habitual experience of assuming supernatural essences to exist within physical things – so it may take some time before we stop unconsciously attributing an essence to things – especially ourselves.
Wow! What a beautiful and succinct description of a tectonic shift in the way educated people saw themselves, and the implications for our current understanding. Thanks, Jeff. I’ve been studying these topics on and off for almost 40 years and your post clarifies and puts into simple terms things that I have long understood but not really grasped altogether until now. Of course your account sets the stage for an integration or alignment of current day behavior science with a philosophical understanding of who “we” are in a very helpful way.
In Nashville we like to write songs, play guitar, and sing. I wrote this little piece. Here’s to adding The Arts to the blog:
Can I draw you a picture?
To show the way I think
Can I fix you a sandwich?
Get you something to drink?
What’s that over there?
At the dark end of the hall
Could be a whisper or a prayer
Could be nothing at all
If body, mind, and spirit are one
What are you going through now?
I know exactly what needs to be done
The only question is how
They gave you the power
You’re calling all the shots
So you showed me the door
I guess I get what I got
So now I’m living upstairs
I do whatever I choose
I keep my options open
Rock, country, or blues
Can I draw you a picture?
To show the way I think
Can I fix you a sandwich?
Get you something to drink?
I never knew how much I resonated with the pragmatist view. It’s interesting to discover that there were philosophies emerging in our own cultural heritage that were grappling with empiricism before the strictly materialistic version of empiricism became so pervasive in our world view.
To be honest, I find a lot of truth in the materialist or “naturalist” view but I can’t go all the way with it. I’m still a hold-out for something else and I’m trying to figure out why. What is it exactly in my own experience that makes me suspect that there is more to the picture than what the naturalist claims? Slowly they are chipping away at all my cherished beliefs but I’m not willing to take the leap of faith with them.
Of course the materialist would not call it faith. They point to all the science that indicates how deluded we are about ourselves. The scientist stimulates a part of our brain and our right arm goes up. He asks us why we lifted our arm and we come up with a very good reason for why we “chose” to lift it at that moment. In fact, we didn’t choose anything. We just filled in the blank in our experience with a sense of our “self” and our “free will.”
I think when we insist on a self and our own free will we are inserting a cause where there is none in our experience. Something happens, we respond and we don’t know why, so we make it up retrospectively. Maybe we responded out of our individual or cultural conditioning, or we responded instinctively, intuitively, spontaneously, whatever it is, we don’t really know why.
I think about how deeply inclined we must be to look for cause and effect in the world. Fifty thousand years ago, if you were walking through the woods at dusk and you heard something large rustle in the bushes, you would probably be very interested in the cause of that noise. The inductive reasoning that we developed out of this basic instinct to survive has become so honed that it’s almost unrecognizable. Out of our survival instinct we developed interest, out of interest we developed culture, out of culture we developed values. And as these values develop the noise in the bushes gets more subtle, integrated, inter-subjective, universal, but in a sense it’s the same noise, and we’re still looking for the event that caused it. Not because we’re still struggling to survive like early humans (although in a way we are), but because our consciousness formed back then to be incredibly sensitive and interested in effects and their causes.
The naturalists say that our need to assert an immaterial “self” as a cause is folly. And this makes sense. But then they take a leap of logic (some might call it hubris) and claim the cause of everything we do is everything that happened before. They point to science and say, we’ve explained everything else so far. We’re going to explain consciousness some day. I’m reminded of the speech that some renowned scientist supposedly gave claiming that all the mysteries had been explained and science was very close to wrapping it up. Ten years later quantum physics emerged and nobody has understood anything since.
How could your will be free, the naturalist says? How could you be an uncaused cause, an unmoved mover. Is there anything else in the world that has this kind of independent origination? What makes you think human beings are a special case?
And yet something miraculously creative does seem to emerge from human beings that cannot be explained by anything that came before. The best athletes, the best musicians, the best artists, the great teachers, tend not to claim that they themselves are acting in their moments of greatness. They say something else is acting. Think about it. They need to find a cause for something in their experience that they don’t understand, but even though it would be completely plausible to assert their own self as the actor, as talented as they are, they don’t. They say something else is acting through them, or it is all just happening, or they are in the flow.
The naturalist would say that in these moments years of training take over and the individual experiences the fruits of their practice. But look what’s being expressed! It’s not a particularly good version of everything that that came before it’s entirely new, altogether creative. That’s what makes it so fascinating.
Even more interesting is the fact that those of us who are not particularly well trained in anything can experience the same thing. When we are at our best, when we trust life and forget about ourselves, we seem to have an ability to tap into something powerfully authentic, naturally spontaneous, at times even profoundly caring and courageous. So intense is this newness that comes out of us that we barely recognize ourselves in it. Of course we are prone to credit the “self” with these actions and get big headed. Ironically, in a materialist culture, we have no other way to explain these events.
My point is, there is more sound empirical evidence for a mysterious uncaused, cause in this world than we are admitting. Spontaneity definitely seems to point to something miraculous. If we could start to look with humility at the world, I’m sure there’s plenty of other evidence as well. The world is more than energy and matter.
Jeff, your blog is great. I’m very inspired to read what some of the early American philosophers were saying about all of this particularly because they were responding to the materialist view as it was newly emerging. Keep it coming.
Is it possible that there is an alternative to dividing the universe into material and immaterial? How about if there is only one thing? Skinner said that there is only “behavior,” by which he seems to have meant both activity that we perceive to happen in space (including our “seeing” of objects) and our inner or “covert” thoughts, feelings, perceptions and so on. The traditional view is that the latter are “immaterial,” but what if both things are merely what is “arising” in any moment, neither material nor immaterial? It’s just what is, and arises is one continuous explosion of movement that started with a bang (at least most recently, in this cycle, if we believe the Universe has always happened in cycles) and continues. Maybe we don’t need to look for something “other” than material because the concept of “material” is itself unnecessary. Whatever the “causes” of events might be, they are all part of the same stream. Do we really need to think that there is a “cause” that is somehow outside of that stream, something that causes the stream itself?
Carl,
I thought this quote from Rudolf Steiner was on topic. Sounds similar to what you’re describing as Skinner’s view:
“For naïve consciousness, the picture of the phenomena of the world sketched by a thinker does not count as something integral to the things of the world, but as something that exists only in the human head; the world is complete even without this picture. The world is complete and finished with all its substances and forces; and human beings make a picture of this finished world. To those who think like this, we need only ask: ‘By what right do you declare the world to be finished without thinking? Does not the world bring forth thinking in human heads with the same necessity as it brings forth blossoms on the plant? Plant a seed in the earth. It puts forth roots and stem. It unfolds into leaves and blossoms. Set the plant before you. It links itself to a specific concept in your soul. Why does this concept belong to the plant any less than leaves and blossoms do? You might reply that leaves and blossoms are present without a perceiving subject, while the concept appears only when a human being confronts the plant. Very well. But blossoms and leaves arise in the plant only when there is earth in which the seed can be laid and light and air in which leaves and blossoms can unfold. Just so, the concept of the plant arises when thinking consciousness approaches the plant.”
I am so on this right now. I am reading more Skinner and also seeing that he is so close to what Pragmatists especially Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey were saying about the relationship between man , action and environment. I feel like I have to work this into my head a little more – but occasionally I get a sense of a completely different way of thinking about reality as one singular movement.
The radio show “New Dimensions” has a great leader to their weekly and great programs, that the personal and the cosmic are inter-related. For those who recognize this, it becomes clearer that the material and the immaterial, the mundane and the metaphysical are ingrained in humanity, in us personally and collectively. To deny the metaphyical, the spiritual is to deny a part, not insignificant, of our psyches, our Selves.
Can I posit there’s a Self and then the idea of self held by the individual. The Self is usually described as the authentic Self, one known to yourself in your heart of hearts. The other self is the one created by conditioning, all the accretion of life’s experiences. Some of the accretions are more authentic than others. We speak of pretensions and pretentioiusness don’t we, what is not authentic?
There are those who have come to a realization of the wisdom and trueness within ourselves our Selves, not something external. To come to a spiritual understanding of that realization is what makes for authentic beings, not people who go around seeking for approval and shaping themselves by what others think of them.
Jeff: Playing with the idea of (Self) / (Self concept)
I believe there’s a Self differentiated from self (small s), where Self is the Awakened Self and self is still unrealized.
I submit that it’s not so much what you believe you believe but how you behave. Awakened people are more spiritual though being Awakened isn’t necessary to be so. Being Awakened commits one more consciously to spiritual behavior for the long haul, for life–no turning around.
The Self is who we humans are at our best spiritually.