self-understanding – GV Loewen

The Hermeneutic Self

The Hermeneutic Self (Interpreting a life)

We are aware of the skill said of some, that they ‘read others’ well. But how do we read ourselves? We are also aware that our self-conceptions rest mightily upon not how others actually see us – this would be too harsh a portrait in most cases – nor how we see ourselves – too bright-eyed, most likely – but rather on how we imagine others see us. This projected otherness, the looking-glass self of Cooley, functions as a kind of Goldilocks zone for our personhood, somewhere in between the too-soft of solo self-perception and the too-hard of the authentic other. We are also told, on top of all of this, that we are generally ‘too hard’ on ourselves, no doubt to give us the sense that our imagined other, that constructed mirror, is more realistic than it might be if we had always patted ourselves on the ethical back. The echoist cares too much what others think or might think, the narcissist too little either way, and thus we are compelled all the more to seek some middle-ground which thence turns into a kind of groundedness for Dasein as a public self. Nevertheless, this attenuated and extrapolated selfhood still requires ongoing interpretation, not only to adjust its own expectations, reading its life-chances in the wider world, but also to process what are now becoming but biographical memories.

The manner in which we do this mimics a more general hermeneutics, the method and theory of interpretation, dialogue, and understanding. Verstehen into Deutung, one could remark, is the dynamic of our dialogue with the self. Understanding into meaning, with the third term being either comprehension, if one is of a more empiricist-rationalist bent, or meaningfulness, if one is taken by the more existential sensibility in life. For the hermeneutic thinker, however, the apical term in this personalist auto-dialectic is rather Selbstverstandnis, or with its double intent, ‘self-understanding’; understanding one’s selfhood but also being utterly conscious that one is also doing that work oneself; that is, it is an exercise in the self understanding itself. The combined effect of ‘standing under’ oneself occurs when we defer to experiences already committed to both an authorship and a memorial authority. On the one hand, we have done this or that in the past and it has ‘worked’ for us. On the other, we are said to, or say to ourselves, that we thus ‘own’ it; it is ours and we not only take responsibility for it in the casual and popular sense of ownership, but also, perhaps more obliquely but also more profoundly, we see it as part of our self-definition, a way to own not only our actions and thus take care, ideally, about their implications in the world and for others, but also the chief manner of identifying them with our own agency.

This volitional vector gains its verve not merely from whatever personal panache we bring to it as a kind of patent or insignia, but also simply from how consistent it appears to the others. This is, generally, also the most consistent feedback loop from the social world back to ourselves; we are regularly adjusting our self-presentation not only in accord with others’ rights and feelings as defined by both State and the state of mind of individual persons around me, but all the more so, in order to ensure that we ourselves do not fall out of the cultural frames as given and taken by the idealized other in its most ‘generalized’ and Meadian sense. I hijack George Herbert Mead’s surname not only because this conceptualization of the self’s agency is mainly his, but also to link it homonymally with the simple median; the moment in the graphic distribution of all actions wherein the most expected ‘cause-effect’ in the social world comes to be. Certainly, just as we are rarely our ideal self, our actions in the world can thus only approach what might be their idealized form. Even so, each of us confronts that same disjuncture, and the farther we are off the mark the more we generally feel it. Only those with a diagnosed mental illness or the unguarded criminal appear not to register the affront the remainder of us ourselves register with them, given their behavior. In both cases, however, the discourse suggests that indeed such an objection is taken in, it is just that both sub-sets of our fellow-persons are attempting to gauge, from moment to moment, just how much it is they can ‘get away’ with, not unlike the poorly socialized younger child. This pseudo-autism, if you will, is prevalent far outside the raft of so-labeled cases, and is better seen as a consistent function of neurosis. This takes its effect far beyond Bleuler’s original definition, which, as a hallmark early symptom of schizophrenia, did not carry any especial weight in either social or popular understanding.

The blind side of this lack of confrontation with one’s own actions is of course that interpretation both holds little sway over our personal sensibilities but as well, marking this hic draconis against others unwary, any diagnosis would suggest a deliberate avoidance of becoming a selfhood in the first place. It is well known how the schizophrenic, or even those with lesser challenges such as authentically independent autism, suffer from a lack of ability to develop the self in relation to others. Indeed, ‘self’ has no real meaning outside of this relationship, an element of the social bond more generally. Which in turn suggests that the rest of us also incur an ongoing challenge in understanding just what it is this or that subset of fellow-persons needs from us, or what it is they cannot, or are unwilling, to give in return. The lesson for one’s own self here is, I think, that we must be aware, astutely and even acutely, of the regular disconnects between our expectations of others and what they are actually able to give us of themselves. It is also germane at this moment to give impetus to the idea that those with ‘two-spirits’ or ‘multiple persons’ in the fashionable sense are simply trying out various versions of the self’s division of social labor; one part of me adjusts to the world-as-it-is and another, perhaps seen as more authentic, does not. The ‘theyness’ of this yet other subset of human contemporaries in Schutz’s sense, views themselves as a more-than-one due to the lack of cohesion they observe between social ideals and realities, a tremendously troubling problem each of us must confront, perhaps on a daily basis.

It is likely that this phenomenological explication of theyness is what is actually occurring, but just so, each of us bears this same intersection of selfhood, either aligned in a crucial crucis of motive and action which in turn is authored by the singular self of those who decide that their authorship denotes as well an authority upon social relations, or those whose division of agentive labor connotes a sense that the world authors them overmuch. In older terms, this would have been interpreted along the lines of ‘strength of ego’ versus ‘presence of superego’ or the like, but today we might suggest rather that the two-spirited selfhood is attempting to split the difference amongst competing ideals and social contexts, and is thus perhaps taking the sense of role conflict too literally, or perhaps actually experiences this conflict too sharply to thence too-closely adjoin these competing roles or role–sets. The expectations which others have on ourselves must then be adjudicated, reorganized and redistributed in a manner suggestive of those who subcontract their efforts or, in managerial language, ‘delegate’ tasks and are therefore able to reallocate their attendant resources, even if all of this action is internally defined and only externally observed as skirting the theatrically ‘schizoid’.

Even so, none of this exempts any specific person from the purely human questions of ‘what I am’ or ‘who am I’ as the process of self-interpretation must needs continue, perhaps with a heightened sense of urgency in all those who work to divide and thus conquer, as it were. For most of us, the history of hermeneutics works itself out much as it had done in History ‘proper’, from the generalization of textual exegesis in Schleiermacher to the world as text in Dilthey, through the ontology of Selbstverstandnis in Heidegger to the effective historical consciousness of the selfhood approaching its own ‘fusion of horizons’ in Gadamer. For others, this more patent lineage is adjusted or yet skewed, though in wholly patterned ways: the sacredness of selfhood is conserved and made into a reliquary only for the individuated modernist soul, preserved from role-conflict and competing expectations by being held aloof from textual generalization as well as from the world. For the ‘theyness’ of being, it is Heidegger’s instanciation of hermeneutic ethics that is taken most to heart, excerpted from its own wider pedigree both past and future and caressed as would be the chalice of amethyst Richard Strauss has his singer extoll in one of his most famous songs, ‘Take my Thanks!’. For the multiplied persona, the divided selfhood is, quite literally, thanking itself for preserving what it of its utmost; their ownmost Being-aside-the-world. In our most personal moments, we too understand, belatedly, what it means to be ‘two-spirited’; the effect of retreating into our own singular self, even if just for a moment, placid and at peace with existence, bereft of world and of history but for the most noble of self-understandings: that in running along toward death I am also living mine ownmost life.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, aesthetics, education, religion, social theory and health ,as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

On the Act of Understanding the Other

On the Act of Understanding the Other

“…we must remember this, that the art of understanding adversaries is an innovation of the present century, characteristic of the historic age. Formerly, a man was exhausted by the effort of making out his own meaning, with the help of his friends. The definition and comparison of systems which occupies so much of our recent literature was unknown, and everybody who was wrong was supposed to be very wrong indeed.” (Dahlberg-Acton 1906:202 [1895]).

The great challenge of our own age, that which imagines itself as verging upon post-historical, remains an historical challenge. The shock of the other, her very existence, both promotes this challenge into an orbit that appears dauntingly distant, but also demotes the value of taking up this challenge as something unworthy of our collective efforts. For the other is at first no friend. And yet the stakes could not be higher. Even in Lord Acton’s period, which is still very much our own as modulated from imperial colonialism to economic neo-colonialism, from biopower presumed to biopower desired, from sex to gender, from race to ethnicity, from labor-based classes to those status-based and so on, people were well aware of the historical cost, not so much of misunderstanding, but of deliberate disagreement for the sake of political opportunism and messianistic adoration. Like moving to the relative minor from the nineteenth century’s dominant major key, our own time has been modulated by these structural forces so that the otherness of the other is much more apparent to us, and much more troubling. There no longer is a ‘white man’s burden’, and if anything, fashionable discourse says to us the opposite: that the white man has imposed a burden upon the world that reaches out from beyond his own recently dug grave. Yet it was this very personage who invented the concept of understanding, after many painstaking millennia. Almost all of our philosophical ideas which aid us in coming to both the understanding of the other and what is also of the utmost, one’s own self-understanding, emerge from the ethics of the West, authored and thought out loud by the best of what is often considered a bad lot.

If this sounds apologetic in any way, it is because abandoning this discourse means that we are thrown back over into a pre-modernity that is too sure of itself; its religious beliefs, its sense of social order, its political reason, its morality. The Enlightenment, the penultimate fruit of the tree of reason that was first planted some 2.6K years ago in Greece, is the source of historical understanding and also that ethical, for it goes beyond the sense that tolerance alone is a good enough showing to otherness as a principle, just as it makes larger the compassion that was to be shown, in Christian ethics, to the other as an individual. This is one of the reasons why Acton refers to understanding the other as an ‘art’. Art simultaneously participates in the universal and the individual. It brings the cosmos to the person without presuming to personalize it. It allows the intimate to experience the infinite without aggrandizing what occurs between persons into a universal force. Similarly the art of self-understanding, which too must attain a new intimacy in the face of an overwhelming and anonymous world, let alone the incomparably larger cosmos.

If this is an ideal, let me suggest that before one can attain art, one must task oneself with the more modest act. The act of understanding the other is a beginning, but in our own day, even this appears to be often absent. We hear popular writers speaking of ‘reaching out’ to one another, of tolerance, compassion, even acceptance, but are any of these, or can any combinations thereof, truly generate an authentic understanding of the other as a vehicle for otherness? Here, I am using the term to connote neither the untoward nor the uncanny as such. Yes, both are present in the encounter with the other insofar as the first may be the case if we fail to understand something of her – she may end up presenting a threat to our own parochialism, which is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself – and the second occurs simply because of the shock of realizing that another human being can in fact be so different from me that I am stretched to recognize her as human. The untoward is what we seek to avoid, but the uncanny cannot be expunged. We simply have to accept this in ourselves through the other as part of the act of understanding. For otherness also resides within, from the metaphoric rhetoric of the unconscious life, to the role stress and conflict that occupies our waking hours. It is quite enough most of the time and for most of us, to nod again to Acton, to ‘make out our own meanings’, oft enough without any help at all, from either friend and certainly not from foe.

Just so, just now, we see that friend and foe are becoming all too clear, so much so that if one is not the one, one is the other. This is the very essence of pre-modernity in all of its diverse organizational forms. From hunting and gathering, through horticulture and agrarian means of production, the stranger could not be one of us. It is a long-germinating resonance of the second Great Awakening period (c.1790-1840) in the USA that American politics – ironically heralded as the most ingenious, reasoned and liberating if experimental dynamic in world history by De Tocqueville at the very moment it was about to turn inward and fold back upon itself – has seemingly regressed into a bipolar pre-modernity; one is either friend or foe and there is nothing, and more importantly, no one, in between.

The art of understanding is the culmination of a series of acts which direct themselves toward a sense of self-recognition, thence further, toward a more risky comprehension that the other really is her own person who is under no obligation to agree with me about anything at all. Coming to terms with the other is at first a mere political exercise, but right now we appear to be lacking even this. Such terms are necessary in order for a society to function in its basic sense. We do seem to be starting at a zero point, or rather, restarting. This is due to the fact that what were originally very small populations west of the Alleghenies – it is important to note that the first railhead through this range was only accomplished in 1857 – grew at a rate similar to their political disenfranchisement. When agriculture and ranching became themselves marginal to the emerging industrial economy, these Americans had already girded themselves with a century of ‘awakened’ ideas. If the Puritans were intolerant and neurotic, those whom they pushed westward were idealistic and victimized. This victimology, present from the moment the new republic recognized itself in a post-colonial core, urban, commercial, capitalist, and seeking its own culture, has come down to us as a wider Western culture as the song of all those who suffer from yet larger forces; chief amongst them, globalization. But while Western economies are downshifted by the intense competition afforded by yet further others – those yet more distant and far more strange than even the neighbor who votes for the other party – the deeper source of marginality is the very history of internal colonization and the sheer geography of a land unlike anything one’s ancestors could have imagined. A big land required a big god, required a big man, required a big stick. But did it require a big State, a big heart, a big purse? Perhaps in contradiction with itself, the USA got all of those aspects of largeness, amongst others. ‘Very well, I contain multitudes’, Whitman famously writes at the moment the Alleghenies were pierced by the new industry. Whitman is known as the first truly modern American artist precisely because he recognizes the other inside of himself. In our own age, and contrary to any idea that emanated from that previous, otherness is not something distant, obscure, inhuman, and necessarily defined by existential threat, of whatever nature the corresponding variables may have been in one historical context to the next. But both the language and the countenance of this Great Awakening promoted the old ideas once again to the fore. With just as great an irony, the nation that was once the radical hope of the enlightened world in two centuries would risk becoming a caricature of itself.

This is why the act of understanding the other must come before that very other, in reaction to our malicious mocking and vindictive vitriol, makes herself into the very caricature we had all along presumed her to be. The rioters at DC were the self-fulfilling prophecy imagined by all those who had marginalized them over the decades. We tend to make our own enemies, most especially, of ourselves. This is why the act precedes the art, just as an apprenticeship comes before any supposed mastery. We are not asking each other to become such masters overnight. Rather, we are proposing the modest endeavor of authentically trying to comprehend what the other really needs, what they think of the world, who they imagine themselves to be. That this is the essence of any human relationship should not be lost on us. For the others are also married, are also working, are also trying to ‘make their own meaning’ in the face of powerfully anonymous forces which are far beyond any individual’s control. The sense that globalization is alone the wedge that drives the West apart from itself is simply another way of pushing off on a yet stranger other the responsibility for self-understanding. If my neighbor is, after all, not my enemy, then the Chinese person is, the Indian person, the Muslim. These ‘strangers at the gates’, to allude to Kipling once again, have, like the rioters, found their way into our way of life. But they are who they are, and not caricatures, not neighbors in the narrow sense. So we must extend the sense of self-understanding, and the only manner of doing so is by augmenting what was originally a religious ethics with that of post-religious thought.

In book three of my new trilogy, the newly conjoined Queen Guinevere’s final words to the major narrative heroine, telling her at once of the state of her own lover as well as the state of our contemporary love in general, are as follows: “She is alive but you must not delay. The power she has is munificent, but the power they have is not based on one soul, however great. It is known that Dvorak said of Brahms, ‘such a great man, such a great soul, but he believes in nothing.’ Take heed of this mischance, modernity, and choose carefully your nothing.” Our conception of love, and who is worthy of it, are endangered. It is because we have severe doubts regarding our own worthiness and on both counts; are we deserving of love and our we the ones who can love? ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’ always carried this deeper caveat: it assumes one can love oneself. This is the ‘as’. Then again, to imagine that only we are worthy of love, our own or that of another, is to conflate the abstract ethic with the practical act. It is to submerge a revolutionary sensibility back into a revelationary discourse. What is appropriately ‘revealed’ by relatively freeing ethics from metaphysics is not religion but rather otherness, both internal to self and external in the other to self. Loving oneself includes the task of understanding that we are not one thing, singular, stable, secure in our knowledge of the world. Our global rivals have shed their own parochiality enough to step onto the world stage. Is it either reasonable or ethical that we shrink back before their example and turn inward, replacing what they were with ourselves?

Enjoin then the act of understanding, which discloses to one’s own being not merely the presence of the other as if she were a distraction or an annoyance, a threat mortal or otherwise, but in fact the authenticity of humanity in its diversity and in its similarity. For in the end we are both like and unlike the other. We may also like and dislike them, just as we already know that we too are likeable on one day, the other on another. Choosing carefully our unbelief includes the ability to comprehend that belief of some sort remains relevant. Even so, of whatever ethic it may promote, the otherness of the other, the difference within, must become a part thereof. The currently faithless faith in ourselves travels with us only until we reach the limen over which otherness dwells. Today, that threshold is what separates the neighbor that must be, and not the stranger that she has previously been.

Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of over forty books in ethics, education, aesthetics, health and social theory, as well as more recently, metaphysical adventure fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for two decades.