Ego

Literally since childhood, I’ve been concerned about ethical issues involving ego or egoism in a plain ordinary dictionary sense. This involves a number of related aspects. At the grossest level, there is selfishness and arrogance. Beyond that, there are many kinds and degrees of self-centeredness. At the subtle end of the spectrum, there are various kinds of self-involvement that impair our attention to the concerns of others. What these all have in common is that with varying degrees of seriousness, they result in failures of reciprocity in social relationships, failures to apply the golden rule. As a young person, this led me to investigate various spiritual teachings about ego and self and what to do with them. This still stands as a backdrop to my philosophical interest in questions related to subjectivity, and in related questions of historical interpretation.

Philosophically, ego in the ordinary sense is not at all the same thing as a Subject, but the two are commonly confounded. Both are problematic, and require careful handling. Modern common-sense views of such things most often implicitly reflect a very specific historical “mentalist” philosophical view shared by Descartes and Locke, which tends to simply identify the two. In my view, this identification of ego-self-subject-mind as one simple thing is utterly wrong, and makes it impossible to adequately address the serious issues with each separate concept.

Historically, the rise of Cartesian-Lockean mentalism was closely tied to the rise of possessive individualism, of which Locke, along with Hobbes, was one of the main theorists (see Rights). This gave egoism in the ordinary sense a new kind of respectability that it did not have in premodern society. On this theory, people could claim ethical justification for egoistic behavior, and claim additional support from theories like Adam Smith’s invisible hand. This created a further slippery slope, leading to all manner of extensions and abuses of these principles that Locke or Smith would not have condoned. (See also Desire of the Master; Freedom Without Sovereignty.)

In sound ethics, reciprocity comes before self. This does not imply any extreme self-denial, just appropriate consideration of others, who should give the same consideration to us. (See also The Ambiguity of “Self”; Individuation; What Is “I”?)

Inferentialism vs Mentalism

Brandom’s “inferentialism” or emphasis on material inference effectively makes what I call ethical reason the most important thing in the constitution of subjectivity — not psychology, and not some putative immediate mental presence, or universal transparent representational medium, or supposedly perfect reflexivity.

This is not to deny that there is such a thing as immediacy; it is rather to specify that immediacy is not foundational, and has nothing to do with certainty. Immediacy has a very different role to play, in showing us the world’s “stubborn recalcitrance to mastery and agency” and providing occasions for learning. (See also Mind Without Mentalism; Psyche, Subjectivity.)

Augustinian Interiority

Among the hallmarks of historiographical seriousness is a concern to avoid over-generalization. In that spirit, since I have made quasi-polemical references to Augustine and Augustinianism in broad-brush sketches of the history of notions of subjectivity, it seems right to pause for a few caveats.

Augustine is the main early source in the Western tradition for a specific notion of mental interiority. However, at the very beginning there is a surprising twist. At least, it is surprising for us moderns conditioned by Descartes and Locke. For it turns out that for Augustine, when one looks within to the inner man, what one finds is the opposite of something private.

For Augustine, the inner man participates in a community of the spirit, and interiority opens out into universality. The inner man is a source of a kind of integrity more than individuality. It is rather our view of the external world that is the locus of what we might call subjective particularity. The idea that what is inner is universal puts Augustine much closer to Plotinus than to Descartes in this way. The inner man is not a modern ego. Augustine fused notions of mind and personality, but again, his variant of the notion of personality had more to do with trinitarian theology than with individuality. Even the meaning of his early strong voluntarism is modified by this.

Among the early Christian fathers, Augustine was among the most philosophical. According to his own testimony in the Confessions, his reading of Plotinus was a spiritual event second only to his conversion to Christianity, and remained important after his conversion. As much as he emphasized faith, he also emphasized seeking understanding. He clearly acknowledged a degree of bilateral accommodation of faith and reason, for instance in his writings on the interpretation of scripture.

It should also be noted that many of the later theologians I broadly characterize as Augustinian developed sophisticated hybrid positions on various philosophical issues, however much I might criticize, e.g., their voluntarism or their anti-Aristotelianism couched in Aristotelian vocabulary. (See also Ricoeur on Augustine on Time; Nature and Justice in Augustine; Mind Without Mentalism; Subject; Freedom and Free Will; God and the Soul.)

Mind Without Mentalism

In spite of the excellent work of many philosophers, socially dominant views of mind today remain in the thrall of narrow mentalist, representationalist conceptions originally promoted by Descartes and Locke. What are implicitly Cartesian and British empiricist views of this sort largely inform what passes for common sense. Our minds are in here, and things are out there. What seems to be immediately present to the mind has special, privileged status, mostly sheltered from the doubts that may be entertained about things out there.

This notion of special privileged status traces back historically to the Latin medieval notion of an intellectual soul, which has an Augustinian heritage, and gained favor as a perceived solution to historically specific theological concerns that emerged from the late reincorporation of Aristotelian learning into the Western tradition in the 12th and 13th centuries CE.

While a degree of support for something like an intellectual soul can be extrapolated from Plato, it was counterbalanced by his strong emphasis on discursively articulable form as the basis of intelligibility. Plotinus added an alternate emphasis on immediate presence in the soul, about which Plato had been much more circumspect. Building on Plotinus as well as Christian doctrine, Augustine further accentuated this tendency, fusing previously separate notions of intellect and personality.

Earlier, Aristotle had moved in the opposite direction, anticipating something like Hegel’s emphasis on mediation. In the immense scholastic florescence of the later Latin middle ages, many complex hybrids developed that are still little known and understood. But all this was abruptly discarded in the transition to printed books and modern languages. Printed books in modern languages promoted one-line dismissals of scholasticism, and also failed to distinguish it from the historical Aristotle. (See Aristotle: General Interpretation; Aristotle: Core Concepts; Languages, Books, Curricula.)

Although Spinoza and Leibniz were great philosophers and partial exceptions to the mentalist trend, it was not until Kant and Hegel that a new, major alternative to Cartesian/Lockean mentalism clearly emerged. This was such a big event that it has taken until recently for this aspect of Kant and Hegel to be adequately understood and foregrounded. Numerous independent nonmentalist developments after Hegel can now be seen in this added light. (See also Intentionality; Inferentialism vs Mentalism; Ego; Subject; Matter, Mind; Radical Empiricism?; Primacy of Perception?; Structuralism; Imaginary, Symbolic, Real; Archaeology of Knowledge.)

Radical Empiricism?

The nonstandard “radical” empiricism of the American pragmatist William James has important points in common with the nonstandard rationalism I have been putting together here mainly from Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Brandom. Both an influential psychologist and a philosopher, James originated the term stream of consciousness, while denying the existence of any separate Subject entity. “That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are,” he wrote in the essay “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?”. What peculiarly distinguishes experiences from other kinds of things is better explained by their specific relations to one another than by appeal to a different kind of (“mind”) stuff. James thought these relations were also directly experienced, and emphasized that relations are as real as anything else.

I would go a little further, and also say that names of putatively nonrelational “things” in the first instance designate bundles of relations. Once a name is invoked, it becomes a kind of shorthand that can then be mistaken for a reference to a simple entity. But at the same time, things are also more than just ephemeral reified names. They are involved in further, counterfactual relations that give them a kind of persistence and resilience, allowing us for practical purposes to re-identify a “same” higher-order structure as the “same” thing again. (See also Substance; Potentiality; Aristotelian Identity; Identity, Isomorphism.)

While I would thus certainly agree that we experience relations as directly as anything, I want to say that no experience is direct in an unqualified way. Putatively immediate relations are only intelligible in terms of additional non-immediate relations, and until they are intelligible, they are not “what” they are.

The bad, basically Cartesian “rationalism” of external imposition on experience that James rejects is something I have rejected with at least equal vehemence. The essential role of non-immediate relations in the constitution of practical intelligibility, however, makes me think that “empiricism” is not the best word for a relations-first point of view. (See also Empiricism; Primacy of Perception?)

James wanted to view “direct” experience as always-already relational, but not as always-already involving concepts, mainly because he did not see concepts purely in terms of content. Brandom, for whom the American pragmatist tradition is an important reference, has argued at length that concepts are better understood as purely a matter of content, and that such content should in turn be understood in terms of its role in potential inferences. He uses this to help explain the arguments of Kant and Hegel that our experience does always already involve concepts. (See also Kantian Synthesis; Substance Also Subject.)

Passion, Balance

Plato and Aristotle would not have endorsed the Stoic idea that passion is simply a bad thing to be mastered and exterminated, and that the sage should therefore be completely unaffected. While excess is bad, the right kind of passion can be good, and passion in general can contribute to good. This is even more true for general emotion, and still more so for what I have called feeling. Rather than striving to eliminate passion altogether, it is better to let it be moderated through balanced perspective — seeing things from multiple angles, and stepping outside of one’s immediate reactions to take in a bigger picture. Balanced perspective is a relative thing associated with what I have called emotional reasonableness. It is a moving target; each new situation may present different challenges. (See also Dialogue; Obstacles to Synthesis.)

Microperceptions

In New Essays on the Human Understanding, which was a sort of very long Platonic dialogue critically discussing Locke’s landmark Essay, Leibniz took a fascinating and extremely unexpected approach to defending what he took to be the old doctrine of innate ideas that Locke had begun by rejecting. In so doing, he completely transformed its meaning.

Leibniz describes us as inhabiting (or perhaps floating on the surface of) an immense sea of tiny perceptions below the level of conscious awareness. He says that these microperceptions are always ongoing, even in sleep.

This seems to be the first major anticipation of later notions of the unconscious. Perhaps microperceptions might more accurately be called preconscious, as one might say about the Kantian synthesis of intuition, which could be considered to use Leibnizian microperceptions as part of its material. On the other hand, even the Freudian unconscious has been reinterpreted in an expansive way no longer tied to metaphors of depth and containment, which seems to mitigate the difference. (See also Kantian Intuition.)

One may imagine how unconscious microperception might be explained in terms of Leibniz’s monadology, as always-ongoing perceptions of tiny monads included by our larger monad, in his famous image of monads within monads in series without end.

Microperception in the New Essays seems to be attributed to us as natural beings. This is different from what he says about high-level apperception, which was mainly developed in the very different context of his work Principles of Nature and Grace. There, he attributed apperception to participants in what he distinguished from the realm of nature as the community of spirits subject to grace. In terms of the development being pursued here, that would mean that we have apperception as ethical beings directly concerned with normativity, whereas the hypothesis of microperceptions would belong to biological and psychological explanation that is only normative at a methodological level.

Primacy of Perception?

Having mentioned Merleau-Ponty in passing the other day, I should say a bit more. Merleau-Ponty was the leading exponent of existential phenomenology in the 20th century. One of his most central theses was what he called the primacy of perception, developed in his most famous work The Phenomenology of Perception.

The Husserlian and existential phenomenological traditions generally put strong emphasis on immediate consciousness or something like it as a universal common-denominator medium of all apprehension and experience. This is a stance quite opposite to that of Hegelian phenomenology, in which “Consciousness” specifically names the lowest and least adequate of many stages of development, and mediation rather than immediacy comes first in the order of explanation. Nonetheless, there is much of interest.

For Merleau-Ponty in particular, perception was the favored term. He was also especially concerned with our experience of embodiment. “The evidence of the perceived thing lies… in the very texture of its qualities…. We experience in it a truth which shows through and envelops us rather than being held and circumscribed by our mind.” (Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, p. xii.) This is a nice alternative to the narrow mentalist, representationalist views of Descartes and Locke that still tend to dominate, even today.

Merleau-Ponty’s investigations of perception occupy the same general territory as Kant’s synthesis of intuition, but are concerned with a yet much finer-grained level. They show perception already in itself to be anything but simple and direct. I think Aristotle would have welcomed such elaboration.

From my perspective, the primacy of perception is superseded for us talking animals by a primacy of normative reason and meta-ethics, but most of the detail of Merleau-Ponty’s investigations can stand independent of what happens with the primacy thesis, and thus can be incorporated into a larger perspective framed by meta-ethical considerations. A more limited primacy of perception might apply to the at least analytically distinguishable organic layer of our being — what Aristotle would call the parts of the soul that talking animals have in common with other animals, and Brandom would call our sentience.

As is also the case with Husserl, in spite of a misguided core commitment to an immediacy-first strategy of explanation, Merleau-Ponty’s actual accounts of things are full of subtlety and nuance, and of lasting value for their rich detail. Intellectual honesty led both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in spite of themselves to exhibit what I would interpret as abundant evidence for the always-already mediated character of what presents itself as immediate. They were both already sensitive to the shortcomings of empiricism as it is usually understood, while embodying the best strengths of what might very broadly be considered an alternate vision of empiricism, somewhat related to what William James called “radical” empiricism. (Husserl explicitly adopted a number of notions from James. Merleau-Ponty’s focus on perception and non-adoption of Husserl’s Ego concept brought him even closer. See also The Non-Primacy of Perception.)

Unity of Apperception

Kant’s notion of a unity of apperception seems very useful. The too-easy gloss for this is that it is what properly says “I”. I call it too easy because in ordinary speech, this is typically deeply confused with the empirical, factual “me” for which we also say “I”. Kant rethought personal identity in ethical rather than psychological terms. A transcendental “I” is wholly constituted by a totality of simultaneous implicit commitments.

The term apperception had been used by Leibniz for a reflective apprehension of content. Apperception for Leibniz — in this way like intellect for Aristotle — was neither an intrinisic characteristic of soul as such, nor continuously present in a given soul. It thus seems already to have had an implicitly normative character. We would, I think, speak of a failure to apperceive rather than a bad apperception. Apperception seems to carry a built-in notion of relative rightness for its context. Nonetheless, one Leibnizian monad’s apperception of a given content would not be the same as that of another, due to inherent differences in the total constitution of each monad. To use a Hegelian word, apperception is all about mediated apprehension.

Unity of apperception is a result of the highest of the three kinds of synthesis Kant discussed, formed from a coherence of many apperceptions that are themselves already syntheses. This seems like a more refined, clearer notion of what Plotinus obscurely anticipated in speaking of a sort of microcosmic counterpart of the One in the soul. In Aristotelian terms, unity of apperception is a form and an end. Brandom has particularly emphasized the status of such unity as an ethical goal, rather than something that just factually happens. The movement toward such unity at each moment has to continually try to integrate new content, so whatever unity is achieved is in a way born anew at each moment. I think this process involves something like the free play of reflective judgment in the Critique of Judgment.

The phrase “unity of apperception” also makes it nicely explicit that we are talking about something that corresponds in the first instance to an adverbial expression, and only derivatively to a simple noun. “I” is like that. I have argued that this is generally true of what is conventionally translated as Aristotelian “substance”. (See also What is “I”; Psyche, Subjectivity.)

The One?

Whether or not there is a One, it and the Others are and are not — and appear and do not appear to be — all manner of things in all manner of ways, both in relation to themselves and to each other.

Such was the cryptic conclusion of Plato’s dialogue Parmenides. The Parmenides provides the most extensive and technical example of Plato’s concept of dialectical argument, which revolved around thorough exploration of both sides of binary alternatives. Some early Platonists and a number of modern readers thought it was mainly a logical exercise.

Plotinus followed the lead of the neo-Pythagoreans in treating the One far less equivocally, as the main theological principle. He explicitly identified it with the Good from Plato’s Republic, and made it the source of all things. In the wake of Plotinus, later neoplatonists read the Parmenides as a theological treatise.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 Phenomenology of Perception argued that Plotinus was misguided, and really there is no One. Foucault’s 1969 Archaeology of Knowledge was devoted to questioning presumed unities of all sorts. Other pluralists from Aristotle to William James have made broadly similar arguments.

Talk about whether there “is” a One gets tricky. Plotinus associated Being only with his second principle of intellect (nous), not with the One. The 20th century theologian Paul Tillich gave a nod to this when he humorously suggested that to attribute to God the same existence we attribute to objects in the world should be considered blasphemy. In the middle ages Thomas Aquinas went somewhat in the opposite direction, identifying God with pure Being, and therefore he felt no need for a One above being. But the pure Being Aquinas spoke of was a new and innovative concept that is not the same as any worldly existence, so perhaps the two could be reconciled after all.

“The One” has historically been said in many ways. Usually it does not refer to any sort of entity, but rather to a sort of cosmic fusion in which all things participate; or, more properly, to a pure Platonic form of such fusion, perhaps even the form of something slightly anticipating Kantian unity of apperception. Sometimes on the other hand it seems to be beyond form altogether. Plotinus himself largely invented negative theology, and at one point even said the One was just a conventional name for the utterly ineffable. (See also One, Many; Identity, Isomorphism; Univocity; Theology.)