With a Fitting Confidence?

Introduction: With a Fitting Confidence?

            The unexamined self is not worth being. But in saying this, are we not also aggrandizing that very selfhood, comparing it to life in general, also to be examined? How much of a life is, in other words, worthy of examination in the same way we might attempt to explicate life in general? This other level is surely more a question for the sciences, especially those of nature. For though living is of the human, life itself is not. Life is shared by vast minions of species, all of whom live within its natural embrace. But living-on in the manner we humans accomplish it is something quite different from any other known form of life. This is so because we have to live life as a self.

            What does it mean to be a self, and a self which lives? At first, we would seek to alter the ‘which’ into a ‘who’, giving us the sense not only of agency but also of individuality and even perhaps that of purpose. Who is the self who lives? But a distinction must be immediately made; that between self and selfhood. For if we share life with other creatures grand and miniscule, we also share the conception of self with all other persons, and extending in two directions; those predecessors to me who are now passed and constitute the once-living component of the past, as well as those successors, those to come who will also live as human selves. At least unless or until we develop into a new species which has no need for either self or selfhood, this is what human life is as existence and not merely life. Existence is ipsissimous, life, only autochthonous. The one belongs to itself and is also ‘owned’, while the other simply arises from itself and thenceforth is only as it could ever be.

            Yet given that my predecessors are passed and my successors yet to come, I must inevitably but also compassionately turn to my contemporaries to gain an understanding of not only what it means to live a human life, but also the purpose of being a human self; the meaningfulness of selfhood. After all, I live with them if not as them. And they live with me though not as myself. We share both life and self but never living nor selfhood. We imagine that it is through love alone that our nascent but wondrous contiguity of beings become as Being. Yet even here, being in love prompting a more existential rendering as being-in-love, or the being-which I am in love, distracts us from its more ontological marker, being-as-love, or being as is the love we imagine transfigures the mere quantities of a human life and thereby gives it its unique quality.

            We are challenged in our own time by such quantities, perhaps as never before. It often appears we are content to rest within the selvedges of self, perhaps salvaging a modicum of objective grace but losing anything to do with the challenge which mortal being confers upon us. The window-dressing of the self can never lead to selfhood, just as identifying with a group or a structural variable such as race or class can never lead to the person who I am. It is an ethical error to imagine that the personal is only the political; such an idea rests upon the conflation of self and selfhood. A ‘self’, by itself, that which is shared through a ‘Das-Manic’ dynamic, if you will, gives us the impression that it is wholly defined by its life-chances and through the gaze of the generalized other. It is intent on avoiding intention. It is an agent of the agency at large and thus has none of its ownmost. We have rather a bifurcation of self in lieu of selfhood, and the question for each of us thus is, how do I navigate what are entanglements for the Dasein which is both mine own but also mine ownmost selfhood?

            This book is, in the face of this question, itself divided into two parts. The ‘examined political self’ contains essays and queries about the relationship, strained as it so often is, between who I am in the world and how that same world frames my being within its objective ambit. Here, the ‘who’ tends to retreat in front of forces which seem to it larger than life. Yet because they are historical and political, they have long since been divorced from the life of nature, so much so that we cannot even identity precisely when this parting of ways occurred. Culture is, for us, larger than nature, and has been so at least since the domestication of fire. Just so, it is also larger than any single selfhood, since it is made up of the total quantity of selves, living and dead, that there may ever have been, though the vast majority of these remain unknown to us in any personal sense. This too is a factor, and, I believe, a perduring one; we cannot know the dead as they knew themselves. They once were as I am now, and for now, and I am to be as they now are. I am now a selfhood to myself and perhaps to a few intimate others, and as well, seen as a self politically and in the world, but my destiny is to repeat the dissolution of the former and the ascendency of the latter. In death, mine ownmost life as a selfhood abruptly vanishes, and the memory of me as a mere self in the world takes on the mantle of life which is no longer living.

            This process is an element of the facticity of Dasein, yet we overdo it whilst still alive by engaging in the entangled pretense, as well as the simply tangled pretension, of seeing ourselves as augmented selfhoods, extended by the same basic, if brute, ‘practitioning’ of the habitus of ‘identities’. This volume argues stringently against this fashionable practice, which is at once a flaneur and a regression. We play at being anachronists, imagining that the Enlightenment never occurred, and that we can, or even should, be better off living as if it actually did not. In part two, the ‘examined social selfhood’, the second set of essays speaks more directly to the ‘who’ of whom I am. If the first part’s tone is itself pitched politically and critically, the second’s cleaves to us at a most personal level, intruding upon our intimate spaces and clearing not so much a ‘lighted space’ but the more so; a spatiality alit with self-understanding, for that is the ultimate aim of this brief collection. Selbstverstandnis is the outcome of an hermeneutic interrogation, both of the self, its more public thesis, as well as the selfhood, its more private antithesis. The synthetic sensibility that arises from all authentic attempts at self-understanding is a Phronesis of the political and the personal. Neither, as stated above, can wholly be identified with the other, and beyond either we are called to action by both the collective conscience and our own Anxiety-impressed ethical compasses to respond to their conflicting presence.

            In doing so, this Phronetic sense gradually becomes itself ascendant, expressing the Aufheben of being-there as lensed through Polis and Psyche the both. In doing so, perhaps we can engender for ourselves a fitting confidence in our responses, if not directly to any ‘great questioner’ who may yet exist, then at least to the great questions posed by human existence itself; those surrounding notions of its purpose or its lack thereof, that regarding its ultimate destiny as both a species and as individuals, the character of its species-essence and, more incisively, mine ownmost ethical character; who am I and how can I know this? And it is not so much self-knowledge that is at stake, because of course that selfsame being undergoes much change over its brief tenure as a selfhood, but rather what develops is an ongoing process of self-understanding; here, the method is, as it were, more important than the truth. For the truth of our being-present is never yet the presence of Being, never larger than the life which is granted to the who that I am. Let us hope that our present penchant for conflating self and selfhood, the political and the personal, and even nature and culture, are but passing testaments to an age wherein the truth of selfhood may seem to some to be an overburden of that very Being to which we owe both our human conscience and our historical calling.

                                                             – GVL, Winnipeg, May 2024.