A Map of Selves

Beyond Philosophy of Mind

N.M.L. Nathan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032228501
• eBook ISBN: 9781000583243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

A Map of Selves defines a concept of selfhood, radically different from the Cartesian, neo-Humean, materialist and animalist concepts which now dominate analytical philosophy of mind. A self, as this book defines it, is an enduring substance with a quality which is its constant possession, which it does not share with any other substance, and which is often remembered by it as its own. The author maintains that we are selves as so defined. He criticises the panpsychist theory that material objects are composed of selves analogous to ours, and argues, further, for the existence of at least one transcendent self, whose activity explains both our own existence and the existence of the natural world. He ends by considering whether things would be worse for us if selves as the book defines them did not exist, and we were, as some philosophers suppose we are, just brains, or sequences of mental events, or hylemorphic structures, or subjects which last no longer than the specious present.

Nathan's carefully argued and original book will be of interest to researchers in metaphysics and philosophical psychology, and to their students.

1HUMAN SELVES

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003274483-2

Selves, as I define them, are enduring substances of which this is true: for each, there is a quality which is its constant possession, which is never shared with any other substance, and which, if not remembered as its own, still has an affinity with a quality that someone remembers having had. Do selves, as thus defined, exist? Well, we exist, and first I maintain that we are selves as thus defined. Our embodiment and our freedom I turn to after that.

1.1 A Remembered Quality

If you are a self as I define a self, you have a constantly possessed quality. By a quality, I mean a non-relational property, an instance of which can be experienced, imagined or remembered. A property is relational if that a particular has it entails that some other particular exists. My overcoat has the relational property of being shabbier than yours. When you are conscious, you have a relational property. When you are conscious, your consciousness is about something: it has an intentional object. This intentional object may or may not exist. If you wish you were in London, the intentional object of your consciousness does exist. If you are thinking about Neptune or a unicorn, it does not. But whether or not your consciousness has an existent intentional object, there will be a way in which that object is presented to you: your consciousness will have an intentional content.¹ And, as I assume, this intentional content is a particular, distinct from you but dependent on you for its existence. Scarlet is a paradigm quality. You may object that for something to be scarlet is for it to look scarlet under normal conditions, and that nothing can look to be some way unless there is someone other than it to whom it looks that way, which makes scarlet relational. But then what is meant by ‘x looks scarlet under normal conditions’? ‘That under normal conditions x looks to be what looks scarlet under normal conditions’? A regress beckons which can only be halted if ‘scarlet’ is at some point given a non-relational sense.

Suppose you see a scarlet poppy and afterwards remember seeing it. Then you remember not just what was seen, but, as well, what saw it. And if you remember what saw it, then what saw it can only have been you. But if you remember not just what was seen but what saw what was seen, then you will cognise a property F of what saw what was seen, a property other than the property of seeing the poppy. Is this property F a quality? It, or an instance of it, is remembered. So, if it is non-relational, then it is a quality. And it is non-relational. That you saw the poppy entails that the poppy existed as well as you. That you had the property F does not entail that any particular existed besides you. Or suppose, if you like, that you have a visual experience as of a scarlet poppy, and then afterwards remember not just the content of this experience but, as well, that by which the experience was enjoyed.² If it is a case of memory, then it was by you that the experience was enjoyed. However, if you remember not just the content of the visual experience but what had the visual experience, then you will remember a property F of what had the visual experience, a property other than the property of having the visual experience. Is this other property a quality? Yes, if it is non-relational. And it is non-relational. That you had the visual experience entails that the content of the experience existed as well as you. And the content of the experience is a particular distinct from you. But that you had F does not entail that any particular existed as well as you. Did you have F before you saw the scarlet poppy or had the visual experience as of a scarlet poppy? Do you have F still? You may well think that F has been yours for as long as you have existed and will be yours for as long as you continue to exist. I can find no cogent argument which shows that you would be mistaken.

Nobody denies that each one of us can say, of every experience enjoyed by that one of us, ‘whatever it is like for me to have the experience, it is for me that it is like that to have it’.³ But some writers go further. ‘What-it-is like-ness is properly speaking what-it-is like-for-me-ness’. And the for-me-ness of experience does not ‘consist simply in the experience occurring in someone (a me)’. Rather, it is a bona fide phenomenal dimension of consciousness’.⁴ Thus Zahavi and Kriegel. And according to Zahavi, ‘one does not grasp for-me-ness by inspecting a self-standing quale, in the same way that one grasps the taste of lemon or the smell of mint…the “me” of for-me-ness is not in the first instance an aspect of what is experienced but of how it is experienced; not an object of experience but a constitutive manner of experiencing’. Does he mean that when you remember what had a visual experience as of a scarlet poppy, there is no quality of what had the experience that you remember but only a for-me-ness manner in which the experience was enjoyed? If so, I disagree. Zahavi holds that this ubiquitous dimension of first-personal self-givenness is to be identified with ‘the experiential core self’, and that this identification gives us ‘a kind of middle position’ between the two opposing views …that the self is some kind of unchanging soul-substance …distinct from and ontologically independent of the mental experiences …it is the subject of, and that the self is ‘a bundle of experiences’.⁵ I cannot see that even if there is this ubiquitous dimension of experience, our recognition of it would provide us with an alternative to these two opposing views. We still have the question: What owns or is the subject of an experience with for-me-ness? Is this experience owned by what has a quality, or is it owned just by a bundle of experiences of which the experience is a member?

How do you know that what saw the poppy had a quality unless you know that you remember seeing the poppy and that you do not just seem to remember seeing it? How do you know that you remember seeing the poppy, and do not just seem to remember this? And even if you do somehow know that what saw the poppy had a quality, how do you know that this is a quality that you yourself now have, or had before you saw the poppy, let alone a quality that you have whenever you exist? I reply that I do not aim to show that we know that we each have a constantly possessed quality. I aim rather to explain the doctrine that we do, and then, having explained it, and affirmed it, to rebut the one plausible argument that I can find which concludes that it is false. It would be beside the point to object that I am assuming the workability of a perceptual model of introspective knowledge or assuming that knowledge of our constant qualities is obtainable by ‘inner sense’. Knowledge is not my topic.

How would things stand with us if it were false that we each have a constantly possessed quality? Would the falsity of that doctrine exclude your moral responsibility for past actions, or prevent you from planning for the future? Would the falsity of the doctrine license that belief in our merely fleeting existence which in the East is sometimes seen as a precondition of our final escape from all suffering? Such questions are deferred until Chapter 4.

Nobody will allege the falsity of the doctrine that we each have a constantly possessed quality just on the grounds that we do not know that it is true. Are there more plausible arguments for the doctrine’s falsity? I can find just one. ‘…When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception’.⁶ Presumably, Hume also thought that when he entered most intimately into what he called himself, he never caught any quality but that of which he had a perception, and never caught a quality of what had the perception. Someone might say this: if there really were a quality of what had the perception, then Hume would have caught it; he did not catch it; so, there is no such quality.

An objection to this argument is that although some people say that they have the same negative experience as Hume, others have, or say they have, a different, more positive experience. In an often-quoted passage, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote of ‘my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnut leaf or camphor…’.⁷ If you say that Hume’s negative experience can be explained only if there is no quality to be caught, then why can I not say that only if there is a quality to be caught can the seeming experience of Hopkins be explained? The answer, I am afraid, is that there are ways to explain both kinds of experiences without assuming that either is veridical. We might say that Hume thought he did not catch the quality not because it was not there but because it was too familiar for him to notice. He would have noticed it had some striking contrast been available between it and some different quality of the same general kind, as between the scarlet of a poppy and the yellow of its surrounding wheat. But in the case of your own constant quality, there is no such presented contrast. Even if other selves have constant qualities different from the quality of yours, neither Hume nor anyone else is aware of the quality of any self other than his own. If you were never aware of more than one colour, then that colour would be too familiar for you to notice. What about the experience that Hopkins thought he had? Someone might say that he thought he caught the quality not because it was there but because he wanted it to be, and that he wanted it to be there because he thought that only if we each have different constant qualities can we be many. I affirm then, without claiming to know as much, that we each have a constantly possessed quality revealed by memory.

1.2 Introspection?

Can your constantly possessed quality be revealed not only by memory but also by introspection: can it be revealed by an awareness simultaneous with what that awareness reveals? Sometimes, when I have a visual experience as of, say, a scarlet poppy, I seem also to have an experience as of an inner something now having that visual experience. Is this experience as of an inner something veridical? Is it an experience of an inner something? It is not quite easy to see how what has the experience can be identical to what the experience is as of. As we are reminded by proponents of the ‘systematic elusiveness of the self’, a knife cannot cut itself, nor a fingertip touch itself. But things can be made clearer if time references are introduced. At time t1, I have a visual experience of a scarlet poppy. At time t, I have an experience of an inner something having an experience of a scarlet poppy. I am the subject of the time t experience, and I was the subject of the time t1 experience. The inner something of which, at time t, I have an experience, is me as I was at time t1. My time t1 experience of a scarlet poppy is seamlessly followed, without any interval of unconsciousness, by my time t experience of an inner something having an experience as of a scarlet poppy.⁸ It is true that if at a certain time you have a visual experience as of a scarlet poppy, then you cannot at that same time also be aware of now having that visual experience, and so be aware of yourself as you now are. To avoid the dubious postulation of a single subject of two different simultaneous experiences, we might postulate a single experience with a complex intentional content. One part of the content will represent a scarlet poppy, another part will represent your experience as of the poppy. But since at a certain time you have an experience of the poppy, you cannot at that same time have a complete awareness of yourself as you then are without having an awareness of your experience as of the poppy. Suppose that you do then have a complete awareness of yourself as you then are. Then you must have an awareness of your experience as of the poppy. And cannot have a complete awareness of yourself as you then are without also having an awareness of your awareness of your experience as of the poppy. And so on ad infinitum. It looks then as if you cannot have a complete awareness of yourself as you then are without having an experience with an infinitely complex content. But so far as I can see, this does not mean that you cannot be aware at t of a quality that you have at t.

1.3 Unconsciousness

Striving to sustain in the face of our ostensible intervals of unconsciousness the Cartesian thought that we are essentially and always conscious, one philosopher has speculated that we ‘…exist in a time order different from that in which [we] are deemed to have periods of unconsciousness’, and that, though undergoing periods of seeming unconsciousness by virtue of intermittently participating in physical time, we are, in our own time order, always conscious.⁹ But suppose that if, as I maintain, the quality revealed by memory is one that you possess whenever you exist. Then by having this quality, you can continue to exist not only in a period in which you are deemed to be unconscious but also in a period in which you really are unconscious. It is not necessary to speculate that you exist in a time order different from the one in which you are deemed to be unconscious. It is not necessary to embrace either the Cartesian doctrine that you are somehow always conscious, or the Humean doctrine that ‘when my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself; and may be truly said not to exist’.¹⁰ It is equally unnecessary to suppose that all entities akin to you are even sometimes conscious. An entity may exist and then finally cease to exist without ever having been conscious. Since one cannot remember anything without being conscious, this forever unconscious entity cannot itself have remembered having had any quality. But for as long as it existed, this entity may have had a quality with an affinity to a quality which someone remembers having had. And for an entity to be a self, as I defined selfhood, it is necessary not for it to have a quality which it remembers having had, but rather for it to have a quality with an affinity to one that someone remembers having had. A forever unconscious entity can then be a self. Nor, for an entity to be a self, is it even necessary for it to have a capacity to be conscious.

1.4 Volition

You see a scarlet poppy and then afterwards remember the quality of what saw it. This quality, I affirm, is always yours. When I used this example in the Introduction, I said that I could as well have taken a case not of seeing but of deciding: having decided, say, to drink more brandy you remember the decider as well as what was decided, and remembering the decider, you remember a quality, a quality that is always yours. I think, however, that in the case of deciding, you may remember not only a quality which is always yours but also something perhaps best described as an intensification of a quality which is always yours. A comparable occurrence would be an increase in the brightness or saturation of a constant hue. Deciding is a species of willing. Other species of willing include trying or making an effort, attending, judging or mentally assenting and forming an intention. Common to these different species of willing is a certain quality. When one has an experience as of something, the experiencing is as it were transparent: what has the experience has a qua...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Human Selves
• 2 Ulterior Selves?
• 3 At Least One Transcendent Self
• 4 If Selves did not Exist
• Excursus
• References
• Index