the self – GV Loewen

Others, The Other, Otherness

Others, The Other, Otherness (Forms of what is not myself)

The Cartesian sense of what a selfhood is remains our modern baseline of how we experience consciousness. It does beg the question, ‘what is thinking?’, addressed much more recently by Heidegger, for instance, but at the same time, it proposes that in whatever form does thought produce and reproduce itself, this event phenomenologically precedes being. It is one of the first instanciations of the idea that existence comes before essence and indeed, is in itself a necessary precedent. Over the ensuing decades, we find that culture (Vico), history (Hume), and eventually, evolution (Darwin) and even the unconscious (Freud) find their way into this precedent-setting existential amalgam which is humanity as we know it. Yet, what does not deviate within this rather self-interested pedigree is how the other is defined. Almost as an afterthought – and in this Buber’s criticism of Heidegger actually extends much further back in the history of ideas; Heidegger, perhaps unfairly, is seen as representing only a specifically dangerous form of auto-ontology – the other-to-self is simply seen as that and not much more. We must wait until the early years of the twentieth century to begin to understand the nuances of the other as a conception which not only markedly departs from that of the self but in fact stands alone without it.

The first systematic attempt to reexamine ‘the other’ comes, ironically in some ways, in Cooley’s 1902 Social Organization. Here, it is at first and once again the self which occupies much attention, but with a difference. His conception of the ‘looking-glass self’, through which the self defines itself as not how I imagine myself nor how others actually imagine me but rather how I imagine others think of me, opens the door to an entirely new way of perceiving the other. Here, the other has become an active agent in my mind. I have no access to her actual thoughts – generally a blessing, one imagines – nor does my own self-image identify with them in any exact manner. Instead, I imagine myself through the lens of the equally imagined other, and the only consolation to this double jeopardy, Cooley tells us, is that everyone else is doing the same thing. Yet this imagined otherhood is not made up of any singular person. G. H. Mead, a colleague of both Schutz on the one side, and the behaviorist John Watson – his Theory of Modern Advertising, 1925, marks the birth of just that; the shill we know today wherein it is the self which is sold on the basis of what others think of us; mark that! – on the other, supplements Cooley’s new definition by understanding the other to be an abstraction of everyone who is not me. He calls this amorphous presence the generalized other.

This conception is not only the source for an imagined social selfhood, Mead argues, but is also the station of socialization in general. This conception embodies, in an indistinct yet homogenous mass, everything we understand to be part of being a self within the folds of the particular society in which we live. The generalized other is the on-the-ground version of both a superego – it is the space of moral suasion, the press of the manual on how to live in this culture – and indeed, also the libidinal limits of the desiring self – it contains the objects of my desire but as well ‘contains’ them in a second sense, that of self-other limitation; she is not me and thus must be treated accordingly. Mead’s novel widening of the aperture of the other away from simply another individual who is too like myself to provide either a morality or, for that matter, a sexuality, combines with his sense that the looking-glass self is yet too partial to navel-gazing to account for the presence of society as a whole, even if it does do an excellent and indeed, even self-sartorial, job of analyzing how I myself engage in self-perception. The generalized other is today the accepted understanding of ‘others’, plural and undifferentiated, coming, akin to the cogito, before the ‘sum’ of consciousness as given to us.

But there are two further distinctions to be found in twentieth century discourse which have contributed to our fuller understanding of what is not myself. First, The Other, in capitals, is taken to refer to what has supplanted, in an invidious manner, the older and pre-modern conception of Godhead. And this characterization could be taken as well advised, for it is both unpleasant and unfair to imagine that what is uncanny for its own sake should somehow ‘replace’ either divinity or yet infinity. Stepping back for a moment, let us recall that it is along phenomenological lines that ‘The Other’ establishes its ‘presence’ as non-presence. Originally hailing from the otherworld, this presence is both sudden and irruptive to our own and the social world in which our mundane lives are played out. It appears to us as part of the irreality of another kind of being, and it is in Husserl that we discover the most dedicated analysis of this form of being, which can take on the aspect of non-being or even that of Parousia. Certainly, I judge myself in this second worlding, which a moment before was unknown to me. Yet our modern millennial is self-contained, and appropriately given the rest of our general focus; thus its uncanniness rests within itself and does not refer to any evaluation at all, let alone one that is both fatal because final. Instead, what is perceived as radically other to myself occurs as momentary rather than momentous, as hallucinatory rather than as visionary, and as being sourced most likely in the altered perception of my own state of mind. For modernity, Godhead is, quite literally, in one’s head.

Since this is an oddly unfulfilling terminus to the career of this second concept, that of The Other, we have populated source-points of this once radical other in extraterrestrial visits (that is, not visitations), or, less logistically demanding on the part of these others as well as being predicted by and predicated from the quantum theory, the presence of interdimensional limens, only seemingly irruptive because they are relatively rare and rattle our reality-cage with a glimpse of what lies just adjacent to it. Quantum cosmology presents an anonymous version of Heidegger’s sense of ‘what is closest to us’. It is impersonal and wholly non-human, and takes on the mantle of a remanential resident only due to our unthinking expectations of what the day-to-day world should be like. Even so, in taking another step back from the astonishment an alternative universe might present to both the senses and to our own biographies given the corresponding fetish associated with the Doppelganger – who is, in this case, more truly a Hinterganger if anything at all – we realize that both extraterrestiality and interdimensionality are neither uncanny nor irruptive, and in fact are mere quantitative extensions of the reality which we already know as generally ‘real’. This too, is somehow disappointing, for it robs the radicality of The Other as previously conceived. To be fair, there must also be some kind of relief present as well, for no alien or double appears in judgment of ourselves.

The third and final guise of the other in modernity is defined as the at first unknown version of the generalized other, and this is, simply, otherness. This concept is originally associated with the phenomenology of the social world, as per Schutz, and is best understood as characterizing a number of zones to be found in his contoured cartography of how the self perceives that same world. What is ‘at hand’ to me as a Dasein is, in Schutz, a presence which denotes something available to me but not necessarily known by me in any detail. If we imagine ourselves looking out from the apex of a perceptual height, as we gaze outward and downward, we trail away from the intimate and then the familiar, off toward the cognizant and thence the unfamiliar but not yet truly strange. Yet further, and approaching the very horizon of my vision, lies the hinterland of my knowledge; things, people, and ideas that I know exist, but of which I have no further interest or knowledge. Beyond this is utter ignorance, mirroring our species’ lack of general knowing about certain reaches of the cosmos. At the same time, I am aware that this space, however alien, remains in the category of the ‘possibly-to-be-known’, either to me or to my fellow-persons. If there actually is anything yet more distant, something which would forever be beyond human comprehension itself, I tend to dismiss it, not only along the lines of a cumulative science – in this epistemological stance, all that is at present unknown is simply something which is yet to be known – as well as along the more personal lines of a ‘need to know’ basis. In this dual take, we redefine the infinite as merely the indefinite.

This, in a word, is the function of the concept of otherness, with perhaps the additional remark that through this quantification of ‘the other’ as an idea, we as well redefine human finitude as merely finiteness, with all that this reduction implies. Oddly, we have come almost full circle: the Cartesian cogito exists only as long as does an agentive consciousness. This consciousness is, in its self-posited existence, conscious only of its own measure as a finite form of being-aware. What is gained by our contemporary tripartite understanding of the other as ‘others’, ‘The Other’, and ‘otherness’, is that we are no longer by default either neurotic or xenophobic about the novel which may obtrude upon our lives. There is a temper of mundanity attached to each of these three conceptions in turn, and, indeed, one by which I can myself participate in their othering capabilities. But what is lost to me, and to my culture more generally, is both the experience of the meaningful uncanny and the ability to create meaning in the face of not only human finitude as an essential element of the species-historical project but as well in the face of mine ownmost death, the completion of my Dasein’s thrown project. In order to reorient myself to this recent condition, I must take what is at first merely unknown to me and somehow reinsert the experience of facing down its momentarily irreal presence as if it were in its essence unknowable.

To do this, to traverse an empirical threshold while maintaining the wonder of transgressing an uncanny limen is no mean trick. To see the other in her radically alien quality and yet immediately lend to her the humane and ethically necessary succor of being recognized as a being like myself, is also a canny challenge. But in either case, whether that cosmic or intimate, what passes for the other today, in its also necessary secular pragmatism, invokes a daring deontology which may yet be premature.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Modernity’s Fragile Selfhood

Modernity’s Fragile Selfhood

“Here there speaks no fanatic, here there is no ‘preaching’, here faith is not demanded; out of an infinite abundance of light and depth of happiness there falls drop after drop, word after word – a tender slowness of pace is the tempo of these discourses. Such things as this reach only the most select…” (Nietzsche, 1888).

In his foreword to his final work, completed mere weeks before his genetic neurological condition overtook him, Nietzsche’s absolute affirmation of personal character in the face of the fate modernity had proclaimed upon itself is yet mitigated by its reliance, albeit indirect, upon the very antithesis to his own philosophy, that of the ‘tragic recurrence’. This is so because to affirm the self as ‘what one must become and what one is’ is to take seriously the ancient notion of the intrinsic value of the self and of each person’s selfhood. Nietzsche’s anti-Christian and anti-Buddhist sentiments are not sabotaged by this ethical kinship, but rather made into obverses thereof, for the Nietzschean self hypostasizes the selfhood first introduced in the East and then the West by these then novel world-systems. But we must ask first, what is this radical affirmation of being-oneself working against, given that by the time of the fin de siécle no antique religion could have had such suasion to prompt the much touted ‘reevaluation of all values’.

Let us then suggest that Nietzsche’s target is not religion at all, but rather everything that at first denied and then overcame the religious sense of both selfhood and fate alike. It is well known that Nietzsche, though he accepted Darwin’s understanding of the origins of life as a fact, was most dismayed by its discovery. That evolution during the nineteenth century was seen as a radical denial of creation – today, we realize that cosmic evolution must understand itself, with a certain irony to be sure, very much in the cast of the old metaphysics; infinite in terms of the cyclical universe or yet the multiverse: there is no ‘starting point’; both of these are ancient ideas that pre-date by far the religions of intrinsically valuable selfhood – suggested to Nietzsche the idea that God was now ‘dead’. Discursively, such an ‘event’ must be back-dated at least to Hume and Vico, who between them relativized the conception of both culture and history and hence as well all contents as might be found within these. However unwitting this murder may have been in the 1730s, by the 1880s the divine corpse had been retrieved and the mourning begun.

But Nietzsche asks, what is, who is Man without God? ‘Man’ too, now lives on borrowed time and indeed, 1914 put an end to the culture which exonerated mankind from its undue and vain fixation upon the sense that progress and evolution not only went hand in hand but were more or less the same thing. In our own time, beginning in the 1920s, the personalization of religion was undertaken in earnest. Today, the conception of God is as is the conception of Man; for Western believers, God is one’s own God, and each of us is said to have a ‘personal’ connection to such a divinity that was utterly unknown historically. Conversely, ‘Man’ has become ‘men’, or, more politic, ‘humanity’. Because of its indubitable link with organismic evolution, the term humanity has within it an undeniable species reference and thus is difficult for many people to identify with. It seems to denote our animal form, though at a distance from nature, rather than connote the spirit which was understood as animating that form. As such, our contemporary conception of ourselves does not make up for the loss of the divine definition of the locus of our being.

And this is, in essence, the entire issue within the ineptly named ‘culture wars’. There is nothing within modernity that can equal, let alone better, the ancient understanding of humanity as divinely endowed, not just with grace, but also with reason. And Nietzsche was the first thinker to realize this. In the face of this insoluble problem which he also understood as inevitable, he offered instead the absolute affirmation of the self-as-it-is: Godless, finite, but subject to the eternal recurrence of the same and constantly willing itself into being through ‘the will to power and nothing besides’, as he famously intones. It is a bold, courageous and altogether necessary maneuver, but can it ever be more than a ‘quick fix’? Nietzsche’s ‘Dionysian’ tone, especially vivid in his final works, implies that it cannot in fact be anything more. What was ‘more’ was lost forever when humanity decided to make decisions for itself, by itself. This condition was foreshadowed in the Hebrew account of the expulsion. To speak somewhat metaphorically, what the serpent didn’t count on was being ejected along with the unhappy couple and thence was also left to fend for itself. Evil, in a word, had thus also been personalized.

With the individuation of both good and evil it could only be a matter of time before the entire system that was constructed by the moral apparatus of a great chain of being broke apart. It was given impetus, certainly, by the ‘discovery’ of global cultures of which no canonical narrative could take account. The ‘lost tribe’ sensibility carried one only so far. How many lost tribes, again? Beyond this, the perduring resistance to any specific world-system by its competitors – today, the half billion plus Buddhists number the very smallest of the four major religious oriented architectures, for instance – frustrated any attempt to argue that one specific faith had actually latched on, even by happenstance, to the truth of things. And beyond this, the rise of scientific method and result, conquering the vast majority of explanatory territory that used to be the sole preserve of religious explication, ultimately felled the now hollow idols that Nietzsche, in an almost reminiscent manner, discusses in Götzendammerung (also 1888). All of these world historical factors occurred, however, long before Nietzsche was writing anything at all, and it is a simple error of displacement to associate his work with the reality of our mutable, if loosely shared, condition, either at present or centuries ago.

Instead, Nietzsche today looks more like an ally for a kind of morality than anything else. The ethics of the ‘Overman’ are their own super-morality, one to which the finite and discontinuous beings of a humanity made base by evolution might aspire. But we cannot be naïve on such a profound score; the path before us is not one of a humanity evolving into something which is ‘beyond’ itself. This sensibility echoes the tradition, wherein transfiguration was an active mechanic. Today, the desperate rush to invent an ‘indefinite human’, a cyber-organic-stem-celled-artificially-intelligent ‘thing’, is a symptom not of aspiration at all, but rather of anxiety. And it is not death per se that animates this inauthentic anxiety, but rather, and once again, vanity. It is almost as if the brash among us say to themselves, “If God has been dead, perhaps even since the incarnation – this is why the Father left the Son ‘hanging’, so to speak; the former was already dead – and now Man as well has passed, then those remaining are destined to become the new divinities”, ‘Men as Gods’, to borrow Wells’ title. Vanity, yes, but also a kind of neurotic compulsion to mechanically metastasize mortal desire unto infinity.

Nothing against the passions, we must note. They have their place, especially for youth, as part of a phase of ever-changing human existence, even within the singular life. But obsession denies that life, just as delusion obfuscates the life of the species-essence more generally. For a mature being, the very definition of growth is to place each phase’s form of being within its own existential envelope, and desire, anxiousness, even recklessness, all ‘the passions unabated’, as Goethe has it, belong with youth and to youth alone they must adhere. A great scandal of modernity is, to my mind, how we have extended youth indefinitely – it is surely our own ‘adult’ fetishization of youth, something we ourselves have lost, that motivates us not only to keep youth young for overlong as well as imagine being ourselves eternally young as a consciousness housed in a future machine – at the cost of other phases of the human experience. We hear of evangelicals coercing young adults as if they were still small children, including physically coercing them in certain sects. And though this is deplorable, to focus our critique upon it alone is a mere decoy and projection, exuding from us, and as such constitutes a denial of how the larger society seeks to keep all persons childish, ideally for the entire life-course, simply because we are more easily manipulatable in that form. We can thus be sold almost anything, from irrelevant toys to equally irrelevant, but all the more dangerous, politicians.

So Nietzsche’s exhortation must also be seen as an argument against any sense of ‘beyond’ at all, whether one traditional or one hypermodern. The Overman is manifestly not a superior being in terms of mechanism or dispassion. Rather it is the maturity of being that recognizes that existential change over the life course is our way of ‘dying many times to become immortal’. No zealot, no ‘fanatic’, speaks of or to this kind of being. Within its changing course, we are as is the neighbor figure; spontaneous, shunning the status and esteem of social role, reaching out to others in distress as by self-definition and as a creative ethics. Hence there is also no sermon, no ‘preaching’, of such a spontaneity. It is as we are, thrown into the world very much against our individual will. Indeed, one could still argue with some merit that this existential thrownness – none of us asks to be born and this is as well why no ‘faith’ as such is required, at least at first – bears the imprint of the afterlife of all Godhead, or perhaps it could be experienced as a kind of ‘afterglow’; life as the outcome of what remains an astonishing miracle of birth. And we are, sectarian or no, all of us born again and again over the life course, if we allow ourselves to be so. Those who are lucky enough to grow old accomplish this marvelous feat, with more or less elegance and aplomb, and with it begin to know the truer grace of Being as self-created in the face of the void.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over fifty books in ethics, education, social theory, aesthetics and health, and more recently, fiction. He was professor if the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.