The beginning and ending of self
Please do not read this thread, it will only upset you.
Read this one instead, it hasn't got me or god in it. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/3303/metanarratives-identity-self-consciousness
I was born at an early age - I don't remember much before that, and then I had a childhood, some schooling and various occupations until I became old. I'll spare you the details.
The details are what make me this particular individual, the way the details of the features of my face make my photo id unique. Without the details, you don't know me from Adam.
Long story short just as you have ignored my warning above, so Adam had to eat the the fruit. But compare you, me and Adam with a dog, a cat, or a cow. Their story, as WE tell it, is much the same. They are born, learn some stuff, eat some stuff, do some stuff and get old. The big glaring difference is that though they live that story, they never tell it, either to themselves or to each other or to us.
Psychologically, they do not live in time, but in the continuous present; memories they have, and habits, and these present themselves by association as appropriate to the present moment. Thirst provokes the memory of the way to the water-hole, but there is no story, so no particular individual, no self, and no time. Such is paradise, there is no death, because there is no narrative to end. There is no good and evil, because judgement requires time and there is no time, only the present.
The narrator is the omnipotent god of the story, without whom nothing can be or occur. There can be no story without a narrator, therefore there can be no story without a god.
So in the beginning, was the word. And the beginning was the beginning of psychological time which is the beginning of the story, the beginning of the narrator, the beginning of self. The story creates time, by recapitulating, and in recollection makes a judgement and comes to know good and evil. Judgement is always from outside - and therefore always of a story, always of a narrative.
We live in time - in history that dissolves into mythology as a continuous self that dissolves into birth trauma; and at the other end dissolves into apocalypse, death, and judgement. But let's not talk about that, until we have to.
[quote=John 1:1] 1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2The same was in the beginning with God. 3All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. 4In him was life; and the life was the light of men. 5And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.[/quote]
[quote=John 1:14]And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. [/quote]
One is always telling the story, or another story the meta-story, to oneself, the way the devout tell their beads, with obsessive yet inattentive repetition; 'this is the kind of person I am, and this is the world I have to deal with, and this is how I do it.' But one always stands outside the story as narrator to tell the story. One is absent from the story one tells, because the story is related, and even the closest relation is not oneself, in the same way that god is outside his creation.
The narrative self is always going back in time to tell the story of myself, as I did myself above briefly in the beginning of this post, sparing you the details. And in this recapitulation also, I am telling the story of my starting to tell this story as if from the outside. What could it mean for the narrator to enter the story? For the word to be made flesh?
And here, I'm afraid, I will lose you, if I haven't already, because I have to lose myself.
The world as history carries on; everyone continues their interweaving narrative selves as usual, except, for one man, the story has ended. This is enlightenment, the silence of the mind that is not absenting itself from itself in stories and histories. Not that they are denied or ignored, because they are all round in the people, the culture, but they are present, and outside. He responds, he speaks, he even tells stories, but his inner story has ended. He is fully present, and so fully absent.
When the story is complete, the self story, that is, it does not continue, though history continues, and the body continues - "After the first death, there is no other."
Only the story of self that is incomplete, fragmentary, suffers death, and all that can be mourned is the imagined continuation of that story. The imagination is one's own, and it is one's own incompleteness that one mourns. 'Send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.' So many human lives/stories/identities are begun, and so few are ever completed.
It appears, from our position as narrators of a story we are telling ourselves, that the silence before the story begins is the same as the silence after the story has ended. but this is so only if the story ends without being finished. Something has been accomplished, psychologically of great significance. If I can analogise we are children to be educated, babbling away and filling exercise books with our nonsense, until at last, we 'put away childish things' The enlightened have the mastery of language, whereas we are lost in it, and the dumb beasts have not even enough of it to make a story, never mind get lost in it.
You are lost in an endless forest of signposts all pointing in different directions. This long post is nothing but another bunch of signposts, making the forest even more impenetrable, including this little one here that says, unhelpfully, "you are here". But where are you going? {there is scope here for a play of words between "Whither away?" an archaic version of the question just put, and the answer the seeker after enlightenment might give, "To wither away".}
But more likely, you are not lost at all, but have discerned which signs are to be trusted and are marching forward. In that case, you already know to ignore all this childish nonsense, and will be putting everyone on the right road already. Good for you. Alas, I see many armies marching after their leaders, all confident they have found the path all heading in different directions, and putting up many signposts as they go. I am doing the same, but without many followers, I hope, because all my signs say "you are here".
In Aldous Huxley's Utopian novel, 'Island', less well known than the dystopian Brave New world, The wild mynah birds are taught to speak uplifting phrases - 'Attention!', and 'Here and now!'. Utopian novels are great big signposts, just as dystopian ones are warning signs.
Personally, I have a liking for old signposts. Although they are sometimes hard to read and covered in graffiti, they came from a simpler time when there were fewer signposts in the forest, and folks may not have been so well lost, and of those, the ones that have survived may have been more so the ones that lead somewhere.
Here's a bit of that graffiti from the appropriately titled '(What's the Story) Morning Glory.'
[quote=Noel Gallagher]Today is gonna be the day that they're gonna throw it back to you
And by now, you should've somehow realised what you gotta do
I don't believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now
And backbeat, the word is on the street that the fire in your heart is out
I'm sure you've heard it all before, but you never really had a doubt
I don't believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now
And all the roads we have to walk are winding
And all the lights that lead us there are blinding
There are many things that I would like to say to you, but I don't know how
Because maybe
You're gonna be the one that saves me
And after all
You're my wonderwall[/quote]
I'm hoping that by now, the only people still reading are those that feel the need to be maybe saved, from a life lived in a dreamtime story that just stops when the heart stops beating. The story so far is that we (humans) have fallen out of the present continuous of living, into a story that is always a moral story, always judgemental. We do not live in what is, but in what was, what might have been what could be and what ought to be and ought to have been.
There can be no return to the innocence of not knowing. But we live in the story of what ought to be, and it contradicts what is that we still also inhabit, willy-nilly and the only way to resolve that conflict is to make the word flesh; which is to say to make the life we lead the same as the life we know we ought to lead.
[quote=Matthew7][1] Judge not, that ye be not judged.
[2] For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
[3] And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
[4] Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
[5] Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
[/quote]
One is one's own judge, and it cannot be that one finds the world guilty, and oneself innocent unless one is either the Good Lord Himself returned, or else a corrupt judge lying to oneself and pretending to believe it.
So get your moral story straight first off, by being honest with yourself about yourself. Then follow your conscience as best you can, but do not expect another to follow it. This is a proper self-concern, that leads quickly to a calmer quieter inner life.
But it is not enough, because one's incomplete self is not enough to complete itself. Therefore one needs help, and when one sees of oneself that one needs help, that one is insufficient, inadequate, one asks, and waits for help. And if one has actually exhausted all one's resources, perhaps the silence responds, or perhaps the exhausted listening brings the silence into being, and perhaps it is the blessed silence at the end of the story, or the end of the post.
Read this one instead, it hasn't got me or god in it. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/3303/metanarratives-identity-self-consciousness
I was born at an early age - I don't remember much before that, and then I had a childhood, some schooling and various occupations until I became old. I'll spare you the details.
The details are what make me this particular individual, the way the details of the features of my face make my photo id unique. Without the details, you don't know me from Adam.
And the Lord God commanded Adam, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
?Genesis 2:1617
Long story short just as you have ignored my warning above, so Adam had to eat the the fruit. But compare you, me and Adam with a dog, a cat, or a cow. Their story, as WE tell it, is much the same. They are born, learn some stuff, eat some stuff, do some stuff and get old. The big glaring difference is that though they live that story, they never tell it, either to themselves or to each other or to us.
Psychologically, they do not live in time, but in the continuous present; memories they have, and habits, and these present themselves by association as appropriate to the present moment. Thirst provokes the memory of the way to the water-hole, but there is no story, so no particular individual, no self, and no time. Such is paradise, there is no death, because there is no narrative to end. There is no good and evil, because judgement requires time and there is no time, only the present.
The narrator is the omnipotent god of the story, without whom nothing can be or occur. There can be no story without a narrator, therefore there can be no story without a god.
So in the beginning, was the word. And the beginning was the beginning of psychological time which is the beginning of the story, the beginning of the narrator, the beginning of self. The story creates time, by recapitulating, and in recollection makes a judgement and comes to know good and evil. Judgement is always from outside - and therefore always of a story, always of a narrative.
We live in time - in history that dissolves into mythology as a continuous self that dissolves into birth trauma; and at the other end dissolves into apocalypse, death, and judgement. But let's not talk about that, until we have to.
[quote=John 1:1] 1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2The same was in the beginning with God. 3All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. 4In him was life; and the life was the light of men. 5And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.[/quote]
[quote=John 1:14]And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. [/quote]
One is always telling the story, or another story the meta-story, to oneself, the way the devout tell their beads, with obsessive yet inattentive repetition; 'this is the kind of person I am, and this is the world I have to deal with, and this is how I do it.' But one always stands outside the story as narrator to tell the story. One is absent from the story one tells, because the story is related, and even the closest relation is not oneself, in the same way that god is outside his creation.
The narrative self is always going back in time to tell the story of myself, as I did myself above briefly in the beginning of this post, sparing you the details. And in this recapitulation also, I am telling the story of my starting to tell this story as if from the outside. What could it mean for the narrator to enter the story? For the word to be made flesh?
And here, I'm afraid, I will lose you, if I haven't already, because I have to lose myself.
The world as history carries on; everyone continues their interweaving narrative selves as usual, except, for one man, the story has ended. This is enlightenment, the silence of the mind that is not absenting itself from itself in stories and histories. Not that they are denied or ignored, because they are all round in the people, the culture, but they are present, and outside. He responds, he speaks, he even tells stories, but his inner story has ended. He is fully present, and so fully absent.
When the story is complete, the self story, that is, it does not continue, though history continues, and the body continues - "After the first death, there is no other."
Only the story of self that is incomplete, fragmentary, suffers death, and all that can be mourned is the imagined continuation of that story. The imagination is one's own, and it is one's own incompleteness that one mourns. 'Send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.' So many human lives/stories/identities are begun, and so few are ever completed.
It appears, from our position as narrators of a story we are telling ourselves, that the silence before the story begins is the same as the silence after the story has ended. but this is so only if the story ends without being finished. Something has been accomplished, psychologically of great significance. If I can analogise we are children to be educated, babbling away and filling exercise books with our nonsense, until at last, we 'put away childish things' The enlightened have the mastery of language, whereas we are lost in it, and the dumb beasts have not even enough of it to make a story, never mind get lost in it.
You are lost in an endless forest of signposts all pointing in different directions. This long post is nothing but another bunch of signposts, making the forest even more impenetrable, including this little one here that says, unhelpfully, "you are here". But where are you going? {there is scope here for a play of words between "Whither away?" an archaic version of the question just put, and the answer the seeker after enlightenment might give, "To wither away".}
But more likely, you are not lost at all, but have discerned which signs are to be trusted and are marching forward. In that case, you already know to ignore all this childish nonsense, and will be putting everyone on the right road already. Good for you. Alas, I see many armies marching after their leaders, all confident they have found the path all heading in different directions, and putting up many signposts as they go. I am doing the same, but without many followers, I hope, because all my signs say "you are here".
In Aldous Huxley's Utopian novel, 'Island', less well known than the dystopian Brave New world, The wild mynah birds are taught to speak uplifting phrases - 'Attention!', and 'Here and now!'. Utopian novels are great big signposts, just as dystopian ones are warning signs.
Personally, I have a liking for old signposts. Although they are sometimes hard to read and covered in graffiti, they came from a simpler time when there were fewer signposts in the forest, and folks may not have been so well lost, and of those, the ones that have survived may have been more so the ones that lead somewhere.
Here's a bit of that graffiti from the appropriately titled '(What's the Story) Morning Glory.'
[quote=Noel Gallagher]Today is gonna be the day that they're gonna throw it back to you
And by now, you should've somehow realised what you gotta do
I don't believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now
And backbeat, the word is on the street that the fire in your heart is out
I'm sure you've heard it all before, but you never really had a doubt
I don't believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now
And all the roads we have to walk are winding
And all the lights that lead us there are blinding
There are many things that I would like to say to you, but I don't know how
Because maybe
You're gonna be the one that saves me
And after all
You're my wonderwall[/quote]
I'm hoping that by now, the only people still reading are those that feel the need to be maybe saved, from a life lived in a dreamtime story that just stops when the heart stops beating. The story so far is that we (humans) have fallen out of the present continuous of living, into a story that is always a moral story, always judgemental. We do not live in what is, but in what was, what might have been what could be and what ought to be and ought to have been.
There can be no return to the innocence of not knowing. But we live in the story of what ought to be, and it contradicts what is that we still also inhabit, willy-nilly and the only way to resolve that conflict is to make the word flesh; which is to say to make the life we lead the same as the life we know we ought to lead.
[quote=Matthew7][1] Judge not, that ye be not judged.
[2] For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
[3] And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
[4] Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
[5] Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
[/quote]
One is one's own judge, and it cannot be that one finds the world guilty, and oneself innocent unless one is either the Good Lord Himself returned, or else a corrupt judge lying to oneself and pretending to believe it.
So get your moral story straight first off, by being honest with yourself about yourself. Then follow your conscience as best you can, but do not expect another to follow it. This is a proper self-concern, that leads quickly to a calmer quieter inner life.
But it is not enough, because one's incomplete self is not enough to complete itself. Therefore one needs help, and when one sees of oneself that one needs help, that one is insufficient, inadequate, one asks, and waits for help. And if one has actually exhausted all one's resources, perhaps the silence responds, or perhaps the exhausted listening brings the silence into being, and perhaps it is the blessed silence at the end of the story, or the end of the post.
Comments (115)
"If you don't know where you're going, all roads will take you there."
In this game of hide and seek with the self, in this forest, the ignorant count to infinity, the curious stop counting and go seeking, the delusional say they know where to find it whilst erecting signposts, the arrogant say they've already found it, and the self?
Well, the self merely observes it all, counts nothing, says nothing. Just observes.
Interesting post! But I apologize for ignoring your warning, and getting-in over my head. I'll only comment on the quoted line, which corresponds to my own unarticulated & unscientific, notion of first person Self Concept : as the metaphorical recorder & narrator of one's own personal history (memory).
The older term "soul" may have implied a similar hypothesis : in that, when divested of the flesh (abstracted) the self-image information, presumably recorded in the immaterial mind/soul, is all that's left to stand before the Judge, and give account of its time on earth.
The scientific/philosophical problem with that religious notion, is "where is the personal history/memory recorded for self and posterity, if not in the brain?" Some may imagine that God or Nature is the master recorder of all events in the world. If so, how does that work? And, if the body-manipulating brain is gone, who pushes the "play" button to replay the story of an individual's life? And how do we know anything about all that non-self non-material preter-natural system?
Regardless of those picky practical details, it all makes a good story. :smile:
Well done.
Thanks for your interest. I assume it is recorded in the brain and the highlights written on the flesh, but also perhaps in the state of the world, the way the famous flap of the butterfly's wing is recorded in the subsequent hurricane. Beyond that I cannot speculate. But perhaps there is no record. Why should there be a record? I have made a story out of a very old story that echoes in your brain for a day, and mine for a week, and dissipates, or maybe in a thousand years someone will be talking about the mythic unenlightened one in conversation with the great Gnomon. and the profound wisdom they displayed.
But The story i am telling here is that the preservation of the story - of the self - is of no importance; what matters is the completion of the story, in which once is for all.
:fire:
There is much merit to the idea of what we ought to do and not expecting others to follow. The moral situation is simply overwhelmingly complex, in so far as we blame the world but are also part of it.
I believe that we have, to varying degrees, levels of hypocrisy in us.
Nice quote from Oasis, I also get a feeling that part of this post is reflected in another song by them, "D'ya Know What I Mean?"
:cheer:
This is where you lost me. I don't understand why the narrator must be outside the story. Isn't there such a thing as a first person narrative, in which the narrator is part of the story?
It appears maybe you are distinguishing between a person's real life experience, and the story one tells of it, the narrative being a story and the real life which the person is in, being something other than a story. Is that what you are saying here?
It's not an imaginary character, necessarily. One can be more or less honest in one's thoughts about oneself. But I think the internal monologue, once established, just tends to go on and on. There seems to be no situation, except extreme shock, where it does not think it worth commenting on things in some way. The nature of identification is that it is always social because it is linguistic. In identifying myself as human, I also Identify the non-human - I am English, they are foreign - I am good, the Nazis are bad. My narrative is as much about the world as about myself, and because it is possible in language to swap things abound to produce counterfactuals, one can make judgements and plans, which one can then try to act out. Or perhaps one does not act them out and they remain just fictions...
Yes indeed. Take a simple example: "I went to the shop and bought a bar of chocolate, and ate it all on the way home."
No doubt this story could be expanded to Proustian proportions, but never mind that. I am in the story, but I am also telling the story. Present is relating Past, so I am both in the story acting, and outside the story relating. but now I'll add another sentence: "I should have saved some for my wife."
Now there is another, counterfactual story, where I went to the shop and bought a bar of chocolate and ate some of it on the way home but saved some for my wife. And it is a better story than the true story.
Where am I now? In a state of conflict between narrative and meta-narrative between is and ought.
But the options continue to multiply. That second sentence could be part of the story, a thought I had when I got home, or it could be a new thought I had as the narrator not merely telling the story, but also hearing myself tell it, as if it were someone else's story.
Such is the tangle of identity produced by two short sentences; and I have a seventy year long narrative... according to my mother, my first word was "More!" I won't inflict the rest on you.
Aren't you just distinguishing two different types of narrative here? One is intended toward telling the truth, the other, the counterfactual, is fictional. Whether you think that you ought to have done the counterfactual is irrelevant, because you have no choice at this time, it is in the past. The true application of "ought" is when we look toward the future, where we have real choice as to what ought to be done.
So I think that this state of conflict you describe is artificial, contrived, because there is no need to consider alternatives for the past narrative, like you suggest, because we have no choice at this time. However, my statement needs to be qualified, because when the past situation is relatable a the future situation, then there is benefit to considering these options, so that you do not make the same mistake twice. But that opens up a whole different problem for personal "identity".
If we look at the past, as a narrative, a true narrative, of what cannot be changed, and we look toward the future as possibilities where we need to apply "ought", then how does one relate the two to each other? If we assume a combination of past narrative and future possibilities, as constitutive of the person's identity at the present, you can see that there is a huge hole here, as this is completely insufficient to make up what we assume as personal identity. In fact, the essence of the identity is missing here because what we see as a person's identity is "the way" that a person relates the past to the future. Each of us has a particular way of relating the past to the future, applying the "ought", and I think that this "way" proves to be just as unique to the individual as one's physical appearance.
This is a sort of philosophical dilemma. "Ought" is one of the most general principles, there ought to be an "ought" for every possible situation that a person finds oneself in, a correct course of action for that person. And moral philosophers often want to say that no matter who the person is, and no matter what the situation is, the applicable "ought" (the specific correct action) ought to be the same for everyone. But this can easily be seen to be a completely wrong-headed way of looking at things. To create this counterfactual scenario which places a different person in the exact same situation as another, would be to deny that the two people are actually different, thereby negating personal identity, and creating a fictitious inapplicable scenario.
So in reality, each person is unique, each situation that a person is in is unique, and each correct action, or "ought" which is applicable at that time, is also unique. This fact of the true narrative, is what turns moral philosophy on its head. We ought not look at "ought" as a general principle, but we must look at it as unique to each and every different person, who all have a unique "way" of relating the past to the future. This is the only way to apply "ought" to the true narrative. That each person's spatial-temporal location is unique, is proof, through application of the special theory of relativity, that one's relation of past to future (one's present) is also unique. Therefore one's "ought" is unique and particular to that individual. The idea that there is a general ought is a false ideal created from the fictional narrative which looks at distinct individuals as the same.
Well I would say that there is no need for any of the stories; but people do make theses stories and identify with them and they feel guilt and shame in relation to the past, because they identify with the past, and in fact I think that this identification with the past is the necessary first step to a projection into the future. It is the self constructed out of the past that ought to do better next time. There can only be any idea at all of the future as a projection from the past. that is the story from the bible of the fall from the paradise of the present into time, full of regrets of the past and worries for the future. the two arise together.
Nice thread Un...
I'm reminded of a not so nice thing I've said to people...
Whatever you need to tell yourself in order to make sense of the world(and yourself).
It seems to me that you're completely missing the point.
It's the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world around us that constitute the self.
Given enough of that, the person could very well believe that they are more considerate of others than they actually are/were...
However, it could also result in being so, should one prioritize such things.
Your post reminds me of a passage I read recently in Dewey:
People do that too. "I am totally innocent". Sound familiar?
I am telling a meta-story which I believe to be Let's say 'realistic', instead of 'true', . It's an abstract metaphorical account of the human condition intended to cover Jesus and Hitler and Richard the Lionheart, and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. You seem to be telling a different story, of what someone ought rationally to say or feel or not in relation to a past and future which by my account are created by the story. Past then present then future; that is the narrative of every narrator, including you and me both.
{I just googled that made up quote, with slightly random results - visas taxes and death feature.}
No Peter Gabriel?
Nicely worded. Is this the crux of your narrative?
Quoting unenlightened
Indeed. Always.
Interesting story. Unfortunately as someone who has not privileged philosophy and is a fairly crude thinker, I'm not sure what this story is about. Can you dumb it down? (I did read your comments above)
Yes, I think that's the point, without that first step, which is to relate the past to the future, all those past stories are pointless. They are only meaningful with respect to the future.
Quoting unenlightened
This is where we disagree. I would take the opposite position, claiming that we get an idea of the future prior to getting any memory of the past. Wants and desires are the product of a being looking forward in time, toward the future. These are a manifestation of an intrinsic respect for the future. And, it is only when it becomes evident that past experiences may assist in getting what is wanted, that memory is produced, and goes to work. So a child for example is born with wants, but no memory. This is the nature of being in time, when a being comes into existence it has a future but no past. So in reality we are born with an inherent view toward the future, existing as wants and desires, and then the story or narrative of the past is derived from this view toward the future, as a tool to help us deal with the future which we already have respect for. That is why intention has such a big influence over the shaping of a narrative.
Quoting creativesoul
I think you are missing the essence of the self. The self is nestled within intention, which is a view toward the future, getting what is wanted. This means that the defining feature of one's self is one's decision making capacity, the way that a person selects. Story telling is nothing but an amusement, though a person might use it to help get what is wanted sometimes.
I agree with this, but what can one possibly want that one has not experienced in the past? Only unnameable novelty. But we call that emotion boredom, not desire. Desire as a thought is always for 'more'.
Sure. Who are you?
Quoting Tom Storm
I'm sure you could say a lot more, but you have said something very similar before, and I guess it is a fairly honest summary of how you identify yourself in relation to the other folk on this site, who in general have more so privileged philosophy and are more subtle thinkers.
This is an idea you have of yourself that you identify with, and claim as your self, in relation to some meaningful others. There must be many other relations, familial, professional, neighbourly, social, from which you derive all sorts of other characterisations the joker of the family, the only one in the office who actually does anything, the fight defuser at the bar, the guy who always came top in metalwork at school. And the sum of these various ideas is your 'narrative identity'. and all your experiences are the experiences of that identity, and your response are the responses of that identity, which develops through time with experience. And this self is always comparative and thereby judgemental - I am smarter than a brick and faster than a snail, but not as beautiful as a sunset.
A non-linguistic animal cannot form a narrative identity; they learn things - not to eat the yellow snow, but they never form the identity "I don't like yellow snow", they just avoid it when they see it. So they do not live in time, psychologically. they are always just here and now, with whatever they know, which is nothing of themselves.
And the crux of all this as you have correctly identified, you crude thinker, you, is that I propose a state of enlightenment, where the self is 'transcended' and one again lives without time and without the comparing judgement that becomes morality, but retaining the glorious creative potential of language. This is the fulfilment of human potential, and the end of the narrative self that otherwise has to end in mere death.
? Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
I find this really annoying, please never mention it.
Quoting unenlightened
Yep. Good, all this is something I have considered for many years.
Quoting unenlightened
I see. Yes some of this resonates fairly well and is not dissimilar to positions I hold (and were probably influenced by Narrative Therapy; my background is in community work). I was unable to glean this from your OP. The most difficult thing most of us carry around with us are our personal stories - generally understood as judgments about who we are and who we are not.
I am unclear how 'comparing judgment' becomes morality.
Do you have a view about how language maps onto reality or do you see it as 'glorious' metaphor?
I am a bit unclear myself, and thank you for your perceptive comments and questions. Here is something one can hear from time to time on the streets:
"Be good for Mummy." We know what this means; stop jumping in the puddles, putting sweets in the trolley, commenting loudly on that man with no legs, 'look, Mummy he's got no legs, why hasn't he got any legs?' and hold hands while we cross the road.
We learn not to do what we want to do in the moment, but to do what Mummy wants, because we are dependent on Mummy. That is, not to be what we are - that is bad - but to be good, which is what mummy wants us to be. Self-denial is born as 'the good', and self-indulgence as 'the bad'. and this judgement that is the (M)other's judgement is internalised as part of one's identity.
Genesis.
1 In the beginning Mummy created the home and the child.
2 The child was without self, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of Mummy was hovering over the face of the waters.
3 Then Mummy said, Be what i say; and the child was what she said.
4 And Mummy saw the child being what she said, that it was good; and Mummy divided the child from himself.
5 Mummy called the repressed child 'Being good, and the spontaneous child She called Being naughty. [b]So the evening and the morning were the first day of the moralising child.
Nicely done.
Well, I think Dewey is acknowledging the discontinuity of the 'narrator' as you describe it but sees the activity to be grounded in a process where we belong rather than a condition of exile.
This may be the only part I disagree with your post.
I recognize everything you have said because it has been said through the ages from the people we call enlightened. And all those people spoke exactly of the return of the innocence of not knowing.
So if you deny this return then you deny their enlightenment and so the conclusions of your post.
Au Contraire. At that point, we chuck the pack of Gitanes and hike toward the tree line with a sharp tool and a foolish grin.
Well Tao Te Ching is basically about wu wei, no-knowing.
All the stories of Chuang Tzu deal with this state.
It is implied in many stories in Zen and Buddhism.
In the positive religions like Christianity and Sufism it is expressed in a positive manner as The Will of God, "I am no more, God is".
[i]Matthew 18:3: "Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."
Emperor Wu:
What is the first principle of the holy teaching?
Bodhidharma:
Emptiness, no holiness.
Wu:
The who stands before me?
Bodhidharma:
No knowing.
"In the time of the Yellow Emperor, humanity lived in a state of blissful ignorance, untouched by the burdens of ambition, greed, and power. They knew not of war or conflict, for their hearts were filled with love and understanding. It was an era of true enlightenment and unity, where the boundaries between individuals blurred and a collective consciousness emerged."[/i]
The whole point of true religion (not-organized) is bringing back the person to the Garden of Eden, the transcendence of dualism. Without the turn to the state of no-knowing there is no enlightenment.
The emptiness of consciousness is the cessation of identification as the narrative self, not the forgetting of self and language and everything that characterises Alzheimers. I think it is appropriate to say that the transcendence is a moving forward not a return, certainly not a return to a prelinguistic awareness. But I'll give you the definitive answer when enlightenment is attained. :flower:
Enlightenment doesn't mean going back to animal but transcending it.
Quoting unenlightened
Evolution to enlightenment is not a moving forward but a circle, yes you return but you are not the same.
The camel say yes the lion saysno and the child says the sacred Yes.
Quoting unenlightened
I would argue that a non-linguistic animal lives in the interface of past, present and future just as humans do. Watch a squirrel be interrupted in its pursuit of an acorn by a stray sound, and then return to its goal. This reorientation is only possible because animals interpret the present though a richly integrated web of memories that project expectations for the future The present now is the interaction between this remembered history and anticipations that point to the future. Its not that animals live more in the now than humans, but the reinterpreted and reconstructed past out of which their anticipations deposit their now is less complexly organized than in humans. But this is not solely due to linguistic narratives. Pre-linguistic infants are also goal-oriented anticipatory sense-makers. As far as self -knowledge is concerned, the self is just an ongoing correlation of events taking place in time. The idea of self as identity is just a construct, useful
for different purposes in different situations. For instance, correlating the changes in the position of perceived objects
in relation to the movement of ones body produces the construct of self as body , as zero point of interactions with an environment A hawk has this pragmatic construct of self as bodily zero point. This allows it to maneuver so precisely in flight.
Yes, they have memories, I said that. but the interface of past and future is the present. I'm not clear what you are saying different? I think I have made the time difference fairly clear. A cat sits by the mouse hole waiting for a mouse; there is anticipation but it is now. there is memory, but it is now. Now there is the acorn, now there is a sound, now there is the acorn. Never do you get the story of the pursuit of the acorn, an interruption and the return to the acorn - that is the human narrative, and resides nowhere in the squirrel.
Well, given Un's reply to me, it's clear that I did not fully understand... So... open mouth, insert foot. :confused:
My apologies Meta. For all I know, you understand Un's message better than I.
And he was alone
And this was a wound.
Out of the wound came a child
who was born separated from her creator
And this was a wound.
To heal it, she built a stairway into the heavens
She built and climbed, and built and climbed
And one day, standing on the top step
She looked around to see that there had never been a staircase.
So she set about playing in the creek
Making friends with the crawdads
In the evening she would watch the sunset,
her heart filled with its beauty.
And one day she became tired and laid down to sleep
And as she drifted, she remembered a voice
But she couldn't remember if it was her own voice saying
"I want to live."
Or was it God's voice, saying
"I want you to live."
And now, she looked again into the darkness and said
"God. I hope this is what you wanted. I did the best I could."
And then, up from a deep, deep wound, came a voice.
"I know you did your best." said God.
"But be at peace now child and know:
"That you never cried, because you never smiled.
"You never lost your way, because you never left home.
"Look around you child: see that your world is gone.
"But it was just a world of dreams
"And there's more where that came from."
The child looked around herself and thought of her home.
She thought of the creek.
She remembered the crawdads
And the sunset, her heart filled with its beauty.
And then she remembered a statue she had made. A statue out of the clay.
A statue of a child.
She laughed now and turned to her God.
"You're right, she said.
"I never left home.
"And you, my almighty friend, were never alone.
"Because it's not me who is the dream.
"We are."
And in the silence she never noticed that the pain was gone. Because so was she.
Once upon a time, there was a god.
Apology accepted, but I'm still trying to understand, maybe not even as well as you do. Unenlightened seems to talk about a losing of the self, I prefer to think of the same thing as a finding of the true self. So the self which gets ditched in what they call enlightenment was not the true self in the first place, and this allows the true self to emerge. And while Unenlightened and I seem to agree pretty much, we still manage to use words in opposing ways. What Un calls "completion", I think of as a beginning.
I don't recommend trying too hard to understand unenlightened on the topic of enlightenment. It's all projection and imagination on my part. Losing illusion and finding reality are kind of the same thing; from the pov of the self though, it is losing everything, so that's the aspect I have to face. Likewise if I have completed a story, I can put it aside and begin to live, but again, from here it is a completion, and an ending that I face.
To speak of what lies beyond the ending as a new beginning would be I think to imagine self continuing beyond its own end. * mumbles something about squeezing camels through the eye of a needle*
The interface of past and future is past, present and future together as an indissociable structural unity . If you try and split off the present from retention and protention, the present vanishes. There is never just this acorn right now in this moment for the squirrel. The present acorn is only what it is right now in the context of what it just was and what the squirrel expects it to be. This reaching into the past and future is inseparable from the immediate now, and makes it possible for living systems to be goal-driven anticipative sense-makers. This is a central principle of time consciousness in phenomenology. If memory and anticipation are now for an animal, this is just as true for a human being.
I disagree. The narrative is a retelling of what was present is present and will be present, that is available at any moment. there is nothing whatsoever in the animal that corresponds to Quoting Joshs
That is a narrative. and my thesis is that identity is narrative and that is where we live, not an extended present. "I was born at an early age..."
Why do you think it is a matter of losing everything? This is not the necessary conclusion. And this is the conclusion which makes you think that there is nothing left of the self, to continue after the narrative ends. The way I described it, it is a losing of the narrative self, but the narrative self is not the true self, that is an illusion. So the true self is allowed to continue after the end of the narrative self.
Consider what you said about how the narrator is not a part of the narrative. The true self is the narrator, , the self in the narrative is the illusionary self. When the narrative ends, so ends the narrative self, but the true self, as the narrator remains.
Is a non-narrating narrator of a self-narrative not a straightforward contradiction? Your suggestion goes against anything i have read of spirituality anyway, so I will not go there myself. I think your contrivance here just continues the narrative and does not end it, just adding an extra identification "true".
What evidence do you have for this? New stories crop up in the strangest of places...
Although, speaking of evidence, I once saw a spirit. But I couldn't provide you with evidence for that - not for the life of me.
Yes, you can, very clearly, think of things in this way. What I described to you, is done so with words, so it is impossible for me to end the narrative in this way, and it will appear to you that I practise self-deception, because I am trying to deceive you by preaching other than what I practise. That seems to be unavoidable.
Quoting unenlightened
When our attempts to say what we want to say end up in contradiction, even though there is no contradiction in what is meant, there must be a reason for this. The reason in this case is the nature of temporal existence. The narrator has narrated, and continues to be the narrator of that narrative which has been narrated, despite no longer narrating. So, the self-narrative has ended, and through the separation you described earlier, the narrator continues to be the narrator despite no longer being in the operative mode of narrating.
Again, the nature of temporal existence is pivotal here. The only true narrative can be of the past. But we can make fictional narratives of the past just as well, like you explained, counterfactuals. Likewise, we can make fictional narratives of the future. The narratives of the future are all fictional because the future is as of yet undetermined. Yet, they are "fictional" in a different way from the way that the counterfactual is fictional, because some could turn out to be true predictions.
Now, since all narratives of the future are necessarily fictional, in that sense, despite the possibility of a true prediction, "narrative" is unsuitable for use in describing one's position relative to the future. And, as you yourself indicate, one's relation to the future, wants and desires, is what is primary, the animalistic aspect of the human being: Quoting unenlightened
So when we apprehend the fact that animals, plants, and other things have "an identity" just as much so as the human being has an identity, we see that the self-narrative is not the identity of the thing. And, when we apprehend that the thing's position relative to the future is just as much a part of the thing's identity as it's position relative to the past, we understand that narrative is insufficient for identity. Now the narrative as self-identity must end because it is determined as insufficient. But the self, with its identity remains. Identity, and self, are simply understood in a way other than narrative.
Anything is whatever it is, but to have an identity is not merely to be what one is, which any rock can manage., but to identify oneself as being some particular thing. This is what plants and other animals do not seem to do, by and large. At least that is my story, you may prefer your story.
None. It's a story; it resonates with you, or it doesn't. Make a new story if you like; tell it in a thread; see what odd questions people ask you.
I don't like your story, it doesn't make logical sense to me. I don't see why a thing must make the reflective action of self-identifying, in order to have an identity. Why would you think that identity is dependent on reflection? Put it this way, how do you think that reflection could create identity, when the nature of reflection is just to throw back on itself what was already there prior to being reflected?
Hence I do not argue; you can think what you like.
I would say that your idea of identity, as identifying oneself, is one step better than identity as identifying another. Yours is the identity which one gives to oneself, while the other is the identity which others give to you.
However, there is another step yet to be taken, and that is the identity which one has, inherently, simply by having existence, without any act of identifying required by anybody. This is the ontological sense of "identity" referred to by the law of identity ('a thing is the same as itself'), which recognizes that no act of identifying is required for a thing to have an identity. Simply being is enough to have identity.
Yes, i understand what you are saying, but I think you are conflating what one is and what one identifies oneself to be - being with idea of being, territory with map. one's idea of oneself can be realistic or unrealistic, but never real.
It wouldn't be accepted by the mods lol
Well, if we assume this distinction, between "what one is and what one identifies oneself to be", we can see that there might be quite a difference. And the issue is that what one identifies oneself to be is often an incorrect representation of what one is. So if what one identifies oneself to be, is meant to be a true representation of what one is, then there can be no difference between the two, and one's true identity is found in what one is. If we allow that what one identifies oneself to be is one's identity, and this is meant to be a representation of what one is, then we allow for falsity within one's identity. And if we open that door, then one can falsely represent oneself, intentionally, and we'd have to say that this intentionally false identity is the person's identity, because it is how one identifies oneself.
It appears to me, that what you are requesting is that there be an act required, the act of identifying, as prerequisite to having an identity. I think that simply being is all that is required to have an identity, but you think that an act which identifies is required in order for a person to have an identity. You seem to think that a person's identity is created by this act of identifying.
We can make some sort of compromise, or compatibility between these two senses of "identity", by assuming that this act which creates a person's identity is the act which creates the person. Then the person's identity would be something like the first, second, or third (whatever) son, or daughter of such and such couple. But you can see how this would be incomplete. For completion we'd have to identify the parents, and the parents of the parents, etc.. This form of identity is important in some religions, and you can find this type of narrative in the Old Testament, so and so is son of so and so who is son of so and so, etc.. It's difficult if not impossible to trace this narrative to the end/beginning to complete the identity, so they posit something like Adam and Eve with the initial act, or even a "primordial soup" with the initial act being a bolt of lightening or something like that.
The problem with that sort of identity is that it gives us all the very same beginning, but "identity" is understood as what each of us has that is different from each other. So in spite of each of us having one's own distinct act which brings one into existence, giving oneself one's own identity in that way, when we try to complete that identity, it comes around to being a matter of something which makes us all the same.
What we are left with is two incompatible principles which are both equally essential to identity. These are the being of the person, what one is, and this is a principle of sameness for us all, and also the particular acts which makes each of us different, and this is the principle of difference.
The problem I have with your perspective, is where does the required act of identifying fit into this? Why do you think that having an "identity" which is what makes each of us different, yet also the same in some way, requires a special act called "identifying"? When we move to identify, don't we assume that the person being identified already has an identity, or else the act of identifying would prove fruitless? When we "identify" aren't we trying to determine something which is already there, rather than create something which could be completely imaginary and fictitious?
This is much more interesting to me, because it is a conflict that people, especially teenagers go through, and some have more trouble than others. If my brother likes blue, I have to like red, just to differentiate myself. If my parents like jazz, I have to like punk, but at the same time as I seek uniqueness, I seek fellowship, and we are family, or class or nation, or whatever.
Physically, there is no problem, because one has unique DNA, unique fingerprints, and a unique history, but also we are all one species. But it is in our constructed relationship with ourself and with others that difficulties arise - in the idea I have of me, and the idea I have of you, and the idea I have of the idea you have of me, and the idea I have of the idea you have of yourself, and vice versa, and how we both perform and communicate and negotiate these ideas. And notice that all these ideas include value judgements - that unenlightened - too clever for his boots, but at least he's not as confused as [censored].
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The act is not special to us, it's what we are always doing in thought, such that it creates a centre of thought as the self that thinks. Everyone thinks they are somebody special, and also that they are one of the people.
One names one's child to give it an identity and the name is written in a special register, and a certificate awarded, thus psychology becomes bureaucracy. You have to know your name, sign your name, identify with your name, respond to your name being called. Without your name you would be no less a person, except that socially you would be nothing, a non-person, of no (bank) account, stateless, etc etc. When someone steals your identity, they do not steal you, but socially they act as you, and take over your social life.
So it is clear that what I think I am is my personal identity, and what society thinks I am is my social identity, and these do not always align, and the physical being that I am is heavily influenced from without and within by these ideas that I have and other people have.
The importance of family name tends to be overlooked by those for whom it is unproblematic, but ancestry tracing is big business, and typically, foundlings have a strong feeling of something missing in not having that family history and connection to known ancestors. Region, tribe, ethnicity, nationality, gender, religion, all serve to locate a person in a social network, and to a great extent it is the network not the individual that forms the identity. But these things are all social constructs - words made flesh.
But property is also made flesh by identification - scratch my car and you have wounded my body. Thus it becomes clear that identity is everything - me in my world.
Now, bracket off all the above, and call it a story, (or a meta story) of how we humans come to be what we are and do what we do. And now you want to argue that it must be otherwise because this and this of evidence and logic. So that then is your meta-story, where identity is fixed and real - or perhaps not quite that - you tell your story. And so we can disagree about our stories and our meta-stories and our identities. But in the main, things are a matter of culture, and not physics.
I would say that while we seek uniqueness we rely on sameness, as sameness is what we tend to take for granted. And maybe its because of the overwhelming commonness of this commonality which is so basic and taken for granted, that we seek uniqueness. If that makes any sense. Though one's DNA is said to be unique, it is over than 99 per cent the same.
Quoting unenlightened
This is where I see the basic problem with associating identity with an act of identifying. I will identify you in a way which is other than the way that you identify yourself. By what principle do you say that self-identifying is what gives you identity rather than someone else identifying you? It wouldn't be right to say that they're both your proper identity, because then you'd have as many identities as there are people who know you. And it might seem correct that you know yourself better than anyone else knows you, but doesn't "identity" refer fundamentally to how others know you?
So, you propose a distinction, personal identity versus social identity. And, since your subject is "self", it is personal identity you wish to deal with. Here's the difference I think, social identity is your name, and what that name carries with it, while personal identity is your body. Or is it? You say that it is how you identify yourself, so this is attributed to your mind, and not necessarily related to your body. In reality, your body is attached to your name, so it is an aspect of your social identity.
I might therefore ask you, how do you think your body is related to your personal identity, your self? Surely you don't see yourself as a body, in the same way that others see your body, but how do you relate to your body? Do you feel like you have a body? Are you inside your body? Do you have control over your body? Is your body something which is there for you to use as a tool? Is it the source of pain? Is it the source of pleasure? What is pleasure and pain? Why do you even have a body? Do you need it? The questions are endless, from the perspective of personal identity, even though from the perspective of social identity, the body is just taken for granted.
Quoting unenlightened
So, when a self thinks "I am special", how is this thought grounded, or what is it based in? From the social identity perspective, you appear as a unique body, but really it's almost the same as everyone else. If we are almost the same, over 99 per cent of DNA being the same, then why does everyone think that they are different?
Quoting unenlightened
Why then, is flesh and body important to personal identity? I can see how it is important to social identity, but I do not see how it fits into personal identity. Is one's what rationalizes "I am special", by being a reflection of how others see us, as a unique body? We see the names of others as referring to unique bodies therefore we think of ourselves as unique bodies. Is the end of your story to give up on the importance of your body, quit thinking "I am special", and quit identifying with how others identify you for your own personal identification, as a unique body?
Well you have a problem because you are looking for a 'true' or a 'proper' identity. I don't have that problem, because for me, identities are marks on a map, or labels, not facts about the world.Identity is all talk. Now in a general way, we believe labels and maps and talk. Ready meals have ingredients lists, but occasionally one finds a 'foreign body' in the pie. The label does not know. Sometimes the label knows that it does not know - 'may contain nuts'. Sometimes the label has official permission to be economical with the truth - peanut butter may contain a percentage of ground insects but doesn't tell you. Sometimes completely the wrong label gets put on by design or accident. But whatever it says, don't eat the label, and have a look and a sniff at the contents too.
It simply is the case that people label each other all the time; even here on TPF, some people think I'm a very stable genius, whereas I think I'm absolutely innocent. Even the Deep Mods cannot agree, which is why I'm still here. Or is this all fake news? Will the real Slim unenlightened please stand up?
As my previous thread seemed to arrive at, the story (label, map) of the powerful is the one that tends to be imposed on everyone as dogma. If Hitler says you are Jewish scum, it doesn't matter what you or your granny think, or what the truth of matter is, off to the extermination camp you go.
We've just circled around now, back to where we were. What I said at the beginning is that I think identity is more than just the narrative. That is because I think that if we take away the narrative there is still a self remaining, the self which looks toward the future. The narrative is associated with the self which looks toward the past. And if there is still a self, when the narrative is removed, i.e. the self which looks only toward the future, that self must have some sort of identity itself.
Quoting unenlightened
When I look to the future, I see that it is filled with 'things' which cannot be labeled, because they are unknown. We can label them in a general sense, as undetermined, unknown, possibilities, etc., but we cannot label them in particular because the particulars are unknown completely. And we can identify specific possibilities, and even bring them into the narrative, assigning "probability" to them, through some form of statistical analysis, or even apply a stronger form of logic supported by inductive premises and principles of continuity, to make very accurate predictions concerning these possibilities. Nevertheless, these accurate predictions apply only to a very small part of the overall "future", and therefore do very little to calm my anxiety concerning the vast undetermined, unknown possibilities of the future.
I've come to the realization that the narrative cannot tell me why I have such an uneasy attitude toward the future because my anxiety is associated with a part of reality which escapes the narrative, the future. And now I see that the narrative is actually very limited in its scope and capability for predicting the future, compared to the realm of real possibility for the future. This makes me even more uneasy. Furthermore, you describe my identity and consequently my "self" as being limited to that narrative, and this seems to be the norm in our society. Therefore, I must apprehend a vast part of my own personal self as escaping my identity, that part of me which is anxious about the future. This adds a whole new level of uneasiness to my preexisting anxiety concerning the unknowns of the future, by telling me that this part of me, my anxiety toward the future, cannot be comprehended as a part of my identity.
Quoting unenlightened
I'm very tempted to tell you to fuck off and die. Are you trying to increase may anxiety, you fucking bastard? Are you saying that there are some elites who actually exercise control over my future, through the use of dogma? Are you saying that though my future is unknown to me, because my narrative cannot give it to me, these elites have a secret narrative which actually lets them control my future? And are you insinuating that these elites have a tendency to act like pricks?
Relax, I am. As you can see, I do not buy that bullshit. I do not limit my self and my identity to "the narrative". The real me escapes the narrative.
[quote=Eminem]So I have been sent here to destroy you
And there's a million of us just like me
Who cuss like me; who just don't give a fuck like me
Who dress like me; walk, talk and act like me
It just might be the next best thing but not quite me![/quote]
Of course it does! All this is only a story! there's nothing real about it. But when you tell me about the real me and how it escapes - that's just a story too. So have you escaped the narrative, or are you still in a different narrative?
Please do not read this comment. You won't like it.
:grin:
Why then don't you remove all that you have written and just leave the reference alone? :gasp:
Because that would deprive you of the freedom to ignore my suggestion, just as Adam and Eve ignored god's command. Explaining the joke rather spoils it, but human psychology is what it is. I don't mind your comment at all, we're all human, it turns out, even God. :wink:
So, I did well to obey your "command" and not read your description of the topic. Thus I will not be cast out of Eden! :grin:
(BTW, God is not human. It is created by humans.)
So we just went around in a circle. After making that big circle, do you see now why the narrative of the self cannot comprise the identity of the self? If the self knows that there is nothing real about the narrative, it's just a story, then it must also know that it cannot identify itself with that narrative which is just a story.
Sure, what I say is just a story as well, but it is a story with a lesson to be learned. If you see the self as distinct from the narrative, as you clearly do, then you must also see that you cannot use the narrative to identify yourself, because that which is in the narrative is not you and therefore cannot provide you with your identity. Nor can you find your identity in the narrative in any way, because that is not you in the narrative, it's just a story, so it cannot be your identity.
Yes. And shall we go round the circle again, or shall we stop here? The next step is that you tell me what real identity is... again.
I'll just demonstrate this time. I'll stop the narrative, and the real self with its real identity will live on. The only problem is that since you only know my identity through the narrative, you'll never know. So the demonstration is bound to be useless.
But to me they are all just fingers. Including Mr and Mrs Thumb who look and feel very different than the others. The important fact that the wonderful and precious digits usually overlook (except when theyve had some wine or pot or are simply feeling mystical and childlike) is that they are deeply connected. So connected in fact, that they couldnt function or even exist really without the hand. They sometimes talk amongst themselves about whether a hand really exists, or is just a theory.
What would they think if they knew the same blood flowed through all of them? And muscles, bones, and nerves. That they, all the fingers on one hand, are so radically connected as to almost be a single being. Likewise they are even connected to those faraway fingers on the opposite hand.
Little left pinky finger (feeling very deep and philosophical) once suggested this very idea. That all of them were deeply connected even to those very odd and stinky ones called toes. This idea was met with much skepticism from the other fingers, who assumed Pinky must be either misguided or joking. The others gave the entire notion a thumbs down, and went back to their chores.
I would have been impressed if you had stopped, and that would have been a demonstration, but unfortunately you didn't. What I have presented here is the logic of Zen.
Quoting unenlightened
What you needed to do was put your slippers on your head and walk out, or post a flower emoji, anything that would communicate without continuing the narrative, but you continued the narrative.
I don't see how the timing of when I walk out makes any difference at all. The end comes soon... but not yet.
[quote]All of the organs are deciding who should be in charge:
"I should be in charge," said the brain , "I run all the body's systems, without me nothing would happen."
"I should be in charge," said the heart , "I circulate oxygen and nutrients all over."
"No! I should be in charge," said the stomach, "I process the food that gives us energy."
"I should be in charge," said the legs, "without me the body couldn't go anywhere."
"I should be in charge," said the eyes, "I allow the body to see where it goes." "I should be in charge," said the anus, "I am responsible for waste removal."
All of the other body parts laughed at the anus and insulted him. So he shut down. Within a few days, the brain had a terrible headache, the stomach was bloated, the legs got wobbly, the eyes got watery, and the heart pumped toxic blood. They all decided that the anus should be the boss.
What is the moral of the story? Even though everybody else does all of the work the asshole is usually in charge./quote]
Right, I see. I think I could accommodate the story continuing after death, it is a commonplace of some Eastern traditions that the soul evolves over many lives, for example. But I wouldn't say that the story finishes on death, but rather stops - mid-sentence as it were in most cases. If there is a chance after death to continue to a proper completion -"and they all lived happily ever after", that would be wonderful, but I have no experience or expertise in any other realm but this world so far as i can remember, so my story has to stop at death for now. If I discover that death is not the end, I'll endeavour to appear as a spirit and let you know.
I think if we could agree that there has to be a continuation of consciousness in some form for the narrative self to continue, and that consciousness can continue without the narrative when the tale is 'completed', and that this completion and continuation is very rare in this world, then that is all I would seek to defend as my belief here.
There's a lot here I agree with. Narratives are an important part of how we think of ourselves and the world around us. But aren't there complications? For example, biographies are actually constructed by a biographer who selects and arranges; often the unity of their narrative is broken up by themes and/or episodes. Perhaps a third person's narrative about me is not what you have in mind. But autobiographies are not reallly any different. In any case, I'm not sure that anything much unifies my actual life apart from the continuity of my consciousness (I'm being generous there, since sleep and unconsciousness are interruptions in some way.)
Perhaps you mean the narrative I construct as I go along, even though I may forget or abandon those drafts?
It isn't. WhatI have in mind is this sort of thing:
Quoting Ludwig V
Paradoxically, your narrative gives continuity even as it suggests discontinuity, of the approximate form - I am awake, then I sleep and then I am awake and then ... and that is my actual life.
Sorry to be personal, but in this topic personal is clarity, I hope and think.
That clarifies a good deal. Sleep and unconsciousness are not really interruptions, but part of a narrative - a cycle in the case of sleep, and an incident in the case of unconsciousness. Fair enough.
Still, it seems to me that when you speak of a narrative, you don't mean a log of my experiences, but something more structured with successes and failures and diversions and so on. Is there a reason why we can't find more than a single narrative in our lives?
If there is more than one narrative, one has intrusive thoughts and maybe starts hearing voices. "There's someone in my head, but it's not me."
It happens...
In a sense this whole thread, my contributions at any rate, are my ongoing narrative self exposed for the world's entertainment. The train of thought runs on and eventually runs into the sand, and another train of thought sets off and then another train reflects on these trains and integrates them into a new train. Any train can reconnected to any other train with the word 'and'. Think child typical narratives I got up and I had breakfast and mummy took me to school and teacher was boring and we had fish-fingers I hit Jimmy because he said I smelled and...
I wrote all that and then... self fades in and fades out, but is always the same, except on the Dark side of the Moon.
Your account of a train of thought as we experience it is a good one. The saving grace is that a train does at least connect internally and can be connected externally. So it's different from the stream of consciousness. I like that.
Whether the self is always the same is a good question. Your account of the train of thought suggests not, doesn't it?
I'm not sure there's a good definition of the self, apart from whatever I recognize and/or assert (which may be inconsistent!).
I'm not certain; I am inconsistent and my account of myself changes.
But that is the account of myself, which is entirely self-consistent. At this point I am in a postmodern nightmare where the narrative is all there is and that is all the truth there is because that is the narrative and that's all there is. As if the map is all there is of the territory - which makes the self a fiction from start to finish, and yet a persistent one if not always consistent..
If your map has no territory it is not a map. Or if it is a map, it is a fictional map and consequently not your narrative.
I'm tempted to suggest a Zen cure. Go for a walk, have a cup to tea and a good night's sleep. Or perhaps Hume's cure for scepticism would suit you better. According to him few days' living a normal life would sort you out, though he clearly preferred a game of billiards.
Modern philosophers still sometimes fall into the error of thinking that all there is, is language. They forget that language consistently, insistently, point "beyond" itself. There is no beyond, it is just that language exists in a world, which continually impinges on it. Your narrative is about something outside the narrative - you - and it is continually broken into and messed about by reality. That's what sits behind my nit picking. How about you are what disrupts your narrative?
I do take you seriously, but straightforward argument is not going to get you back to normality, is it?
Yes, I have been there. There is a life afterwards, when you get the right balance.
You misunderstand. I say "I" and you offer me respite, but it is mere distraction. I have spent many days crafting this thread and the previous one that laid the groundwork for it, and the zen is built into the laying out of the problem. And here it is again:
Quoting Ludwig V
Take this as a universal truth. Now, who are you? If you do not answer, you go straight to hell, but if you answer you continue the fictional map.
Now I don't expect any sartori to result for anyone, but I am interested in the philosophy and psychology of identification, and I think this process of identification is what humans do that creates the self as an artefact or 'sprite' of the psyche, with all the suffering and trouble that results. I think it is unnecessary. So I will at least lay out and face the problem as best I can, and when a cup of tea is appropriate, I can make a cup of tea as well.
One cannot do philosophy and Zen at the same time, except perhaps in something like the manner of the early Wittgenstein. (The unanswered (and unasked) question is whether he continued that way in his later work. But that tells us nothing.)
Quoting unenlightened
If I go straight to hell, I continue the fictional map. Unless I'm already there.
Quoting unenlightened
I'm not sure about that. What does "necessary" mean here? Some Western philosophers have propounded the answer that there is no self. Buddhism is quite clear about why it is necessary (and how it is not).
I can talk about narrative, though. Here's what bothers me.
What kind of narrative are we talking about here? Whose narrative are we talking about? (You said mine, but I can adopt someone else's and I will probably have more than one narrative about myself.)
Narratives are often disrupted. Sometimes someone else's narrative collides with mine. Sometimes I disrupt my own narrative, whether deliberately or accidentally. Sometimes "events" disrupt my narrative. We can modify our narrative or throw the old one out and make a new one. Whatever we say or do, there is always something "outside" our narrative and narratives are never permanent, even when we are dead. What are we to make of this?
I distinguish between a narrative and a log book. A log book is a series of dots. A narrative connects those dots. Is a log book a safe and satisfactory option?
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That is your narrative, and this is mine, and they both derive from a shared language and culture and are personalised, edited, and brought into contrast and comparison here. or perhaps it is a log book, I don't know the difference. One always stands outside the narrative to describe it, but it is always oneself one is describing so it is always a narrative self (or a log-book self) and one is never outside it
I underline the contradiction here to make clear that there is something wrong with the narrative of "I", whoever is the centre of attention.
And no one sings me lullabies, and no one makes me close my eyes.
So I throw the windows wide and call to you across the sky. Happy to echo that.
:grin: Excellent! Glad to add something useful.
(That video is excellent imho. Made using AI, but it flows with a unified purpose and color theme. It feels like I took a pill that contains the whole internet in it, filtered through the lens of that song. Or something lol).
Yes. So one is always two selves. Or perhaps one self stands in two incompatible relationships to the narrative. Or perhaps there is no outside and no inside because that's a metaphor which is misleading in this context.
I suppose the title of this thread is referring to the brief existence of the self-conscious Self : non-being . . . being . . . non-being. Which is a core theme of Religion and Philosophy, but not of Materialistic Philosophy, which knows only non-self : selfless matter. The squirrel is an earnest scientist in pursuit of substantial sustenance, not of essential story. Live for today, because tomorrow does not exist. By contrast, the Myth-makers and Wisdom-seekers find permanent Past and fabricated Future more interesting/important than the fleeting Present : "it is what it is, deal with it!"
As far as we know, humans are the only animals who construct a narrative as they do what the physical body mandates. That self-narrative, as recorded in memory, and in story & song, is the Self. Perhaps the selfish Self motivates the Body to take serial "selfies", to serve as an objective record of the Self-story. We know about the brevity of Self, only because so many of us have left behind objective narratives of a story interrupted. Most of us don't mourn the ending of a squirrel's self, perhaps because we don't know its story. But we do mourn the ellipsis of a loved-one, including a non-human pet, because we are emotionally invested in their story.
Ironically, emotional investment (cathexis) in one's own story may cause us to fear (pre-mourn) the end of the narrative & narrator. That painful bummer in the middle of the story has been evaded by ancient sages in various ways : acceptance, denial, sequel in heaven, etc. But some would have us imitate the innocence of animals by living in the moment, and ceasing to explain & judge ourselves as protagonists in the Self-story. But for humans, that would mean losing the most important thing in the world, Me. :smile:
That seems like a good summary, but I worry about complications.
Quoting Gnomon
There are cases where fear and pre-mourning may not happen, don't you think?
People who risk their lives sometimes seem, at least not to fear or pre-mourn their death. You might argue that's not really the case and some of them may be putting on a brave face; I wouldn't want to rule out the possibility in advance.
People who are dying slow agonizing deaths may welcome the end and even choose to walk before they are pushed, so to speak. There may well be fear there, but the mourning appears to be more for the process of dying than the death.
I guess you're saying that fear and pre-mourning are the usual, normal, default situation. Maybe.
Quoting Gnomon
I agree that for most people that is the usual situation. It depends what you count as the end of the story, and maybe whether each person's story can consists of several episodes, link by continuing consciousness. There is an alternative:-
Quoting unenlightened
Quoting Gnomon
I agree that the innocence of animals implies no judgement. But whether we can cease to explain and judge ourselves" only by imitate (acquiring?) the innocence of animals is another question.
Quoting Gnomon
I wanted to respond that of all the things in the world that you cling to, your self is the one thing you can't escape, for better or worse. But One can lose oneself in a number of ways. Temporary loss by absorption in some activity or spectacle. Episodic loss by multiple personality (though I admit that is a contested concept). Permanent loss by amnesia. Loss by life change, as in becoming a priest or a monk or other major change - would entering witness protection count?
There is much to be said for the narrative about the self-narrative (in one form or another). But isn't it a mistake to mistake it for the whole story? The many varieties of narrative and the many disruptions of narratives that get into self-narratives show that they cannot be the whole story.
Yes, but those rare cases seem to be the exception rather than the rule. In my personal case, I take a Stoic attitude toward the cessation of Self : "don't worry about things that you can't control". But then, I suppose some people act as-if they believe they can ward-off death with prayers, or with accumulated positive Karma. :smile:
What did Marcus Aurelius say about death?
The longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.
Quite so. There are two strands to those stories. Wishful thinking and control of the population. IMO. I've never found them particularly interesting or effective. After all, people often still fear death even if they believe in an after-life, and seldom show much relluctance to do what they believe will bring eternal punishment.
Quoting Gnomon
Yes, I'm very fond of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. It's hard to believe he could hold down his job and think like that.
Thought produces that conflict whenever it turns inward. So the tradition of meditation is to be aware of the flow of thought without further comment or judgement until the flow ceases. Thus the Zen koan is unanswerable, so as to block the road of thinking: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" When the flow of thought ceases, the conflict of the self that is not itself ends.
And then it starts again because there is always another thought, like this ... until one has one's 'every minute zen', at which point, if anyone asks you about the sound of one hand clapping , you give them a hearty slap or some such.
Anyway, I'm about out of borrowed wisdom on this topic, so I'll bow out here, but feel free to continue, and thanks for your contributions.
All quite sound, and something I have long taken as a guidepost to wisdom. But the thing I'm now wrestling with is that Zen wisdom (as Buddhism generally) was very much a product of a monastic life, whereas I myself, average middle class guy, has the possessions and encumbrances that don't just pass on, like our thoughts do. Or rather, they are the externalised form of our thoughts and desires - just those kinds of things which the homeless monks and wanderers have renounced. And outside that context it has another meaning.
Don't get me wrong - I am thoroughly on board with the principle - but walking the walk is something else.
Very interesting. Can we really say that it ended then? Or is it just always like that, punctuated, with various lengths of punctuation? Punctuation is not an end and a beginning, because something carries through, some kind of continuity, so that we say the parts are connected as one. The narrative is punctuated, but the story continues through the punctuations where the narrative is absent. What part of the story is this, an essential part of the story which connects the parts of the narrative, but not itself part of the narrative? And how is it that the story itself is something other than the narrative?
There is actually a Buddhist answer to that question, in form of the principle of 'nirodha' (cessation. It has been compared to, and might actually be the source of, 'epoche', or 'suspension of judgement' according to the suggested connection between Buddhism and Pyrrhonian scepticism.) Nirodha is, in some contexts, a synonym of Nirv??a - the cessation of any sense of 'I and mine', through insight into dependent origination grounded in meditative awareness of the psycho-physiological activities of the body-mind. What 'carries through' are the impulses and desires that continue to seek embodiment - until such time as they don't. (Hence the designation of various grades of realisation as 'once-returner', 'never-returner' etc.)
Can we really say it began?
I wonder what you mean by "really say"? I did really write it, and it seems to me that a train can really stop, and then start again. A process like identification can begin, and can end, and can begin again. I can stop smoking and then start again, or I can stop smoking and never start again. what's the problem?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I have bee quite clear from the beginning that the thread and the topic is all narrative and none other.
Quoting Wayfarer
To walk to the very end of self is arduous; one tires, one is in pain, and it seems hopeless. and when all hope is exhausted, one lays down.
Is there not a difference to you, between stopping and starting again, and stopping and never starting again? The problem is, that when it stops, how can you know whether it will start again or not, in order to say the right thing about it? Someone says "I quit smoking" and two weeks later they're smoking. Another person says "I quit smoking", and five years later they still have yet to smoke. One might be inclined to say that the latter has stopped and will never start again, but then the next day you might find them smoking.
To stop and then start again, and to stop and never start again are two very different things. But when something just stops, how do we know which is which?
Quoting unenlightened
So maybe I misspoke to ask "can we really say it?", but the question would be "what does it really mean to say this?". If we allow that whatever ended might at any moment begin again, then we need to justify that the thing which just started is that same thing as the thing which already ended, and not simply something similar, if this is supposed to be an "identification". That's where the difference lies, if it starts again, as the same thing, there must be something which connects the two instances or else they are similar occurrences of distinct things, and not the same thing starting again.
If the "thing" in question is a process, we can attribute that process to something else, and the something else can provide the means for the proposed continuity. In your examples therefore, it is you who stops writing and starts again, you who stops smoking, and starts again, and the train which starts and stops. So the subject, you or the train, of which the process is predicated, provides the required continuity of existence. You have provided a subject, and are speaking of your activity, the train's activity, and we assume that you continue being even though the activity which describes you through predication, stops.
This is the way that Aristotle describes the capacities of the soul, self-nourishment, self-movement, sensation, intellection, etc., as potentials. Each is an activity, something that the body does, which consists of stops and starts. Since no specific activity is active all the time, he designates these powers of the soul as potentials, requiring actualization for each occurrence, or start-up. There is therefore the need for an actuality which provides the continuity, and is the source of actualization for each start-up, and this is the soul itself.
Quoting unenlightened
The glaring problem in what you have been quite clear from the beginning about, is that you have been incessantly trying to assign identity to the narrative. And this is where the narrative inevitably fails. The stops and starts, punctuation, of the narrative indicates that we must assume something else, behind the narrative to provide for the assumed continuity which makes "the narrative" appear as a coherent whole. This is "the story" which the narrative tells, and the story is distinct from the narrative.
If identity was all in the narrative, then how would I distinguish one subject from another when you write in this thread, or another thread? Instead, I assign identity to the author, and look at any narrative as an activity of the author. This allows me to see unenlightened, with one identity, as the author of many narratives, instead of concluding that unenlightened has many identities, according to the many narratives.
We don't, not until the end of the story. Stopping is like dots at the end of the sentence, or the fading out of the music as the end of the song. You can't be sure that the story has ended - yet. And "yet" can be postponed indefinitely. There's a nice complication. Arguably, the end of a narrative is always, in a sense, arbitrary. Part of the art of the novelist/story-teller is providing an ending that is, somehow, satisfactory. (The same, of course, applies to beginnings) That's what makes a narrative artificial, in a sense. Is there, perhaps, an awkwardness about idea that narrative is identity. Not that it's wrong, exactly, but that our narratives and consequently our selves are constructed or adopted (like a role).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There's another complication here, (which I was about to trip over at the end of my last paragraph. unenlightened's link between narrative and identity focuses on the stories we tell ourselves. But other people tell their own stories, not only about themselves, but also about us. If our identity was entirely up to us, those stories would be irrelevant. But we are social (even if we are hermits). Worse than that, our very first identity is landed on us (or, as some would have it) we are "thrown" into our world, and we learn that identity and so learn what identity is. We adopt it for lack of choice; sometimes we rebel and seek to end that narrative and create our own. Others may go along with that, or may not.
I don't know how to articulate the next point properly, so I shall ask questions instead. What ensures that there is a single narrative throughout a biological life? What makes it impossible to live more than one narrative at a time? If the answer to those questions is Nothing, and a narrative defines a self, doesn't it follow that multiple narratives and multiple selves are possible? Apart from our legislation, what makes that conclusion paradoxical?
But the whole point was, how do we know that it's the end of the story, rather than just a pause? Even when the story teller makes you think it's "the end of the story", a couple years later there will be another one, which is really a continuation of the old one, and it will turn into a series.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, unenlightened's self-identity narrative seems to be a sort of self-describing story. Maybe an autobiography?
Quoting Ludwig V
This is one of the problems I brought up, with associating identity with the narrative. Not only does it make it possible for multiple identities, but the difference between how one describes oneself, and how others do, (which you mentioned), necessitates multiple identities. We might say the the self-describing narrative provides the true identity, but we still get the possibility of intentional deception and multiple identities by accident, or through ignorance of oneself.
To be able to flush out the deceiver as presenting a false identity, or the ignorant identity, we need to be able to look at something beyond the self-describing narrative as the true indicator of identity.
Yes, there is all the difference in the world. I know, because i have done both. The first is difficult and painful because one is in conflict the whole time, whereas the second is easy because there is no conflict.
One knows when there is no internal conflict. If one is unsure, there is conflict.
Quoting Ludwig V
Not all songs fade out, the best reach a harmonic resolution that completes and satisfies. Not all lives peter out incomplete; not all stories end in dots of unfinished business and regrets.
"It was in that moment that Hirem Pawnitof, the highwayman, attained enlightenment."
"And they all lived happily ever after."
H'm. I'm not sure that there is, or has to be, a "true" identity. Certainly, if you consider the multiple roles played by most people during their lives, it wouldn't be appropriate to insist that just one of them was the truth and the rest, in some sense, ancillary.
It's different with a sequence of narratives, and there is a temptation to treat what X accepts as X's life as primary or more important than other narratives. But consider Hitler's version of his own life and death with that of history. (He never accepted that he did anything wrong and blamed others for all the disasters.) Which is the truth?
Quoting unenlightened
True. I didn't mean to imply that they all did, and most of them end with a harmonic resolution - completing and satisfying is not, I think, automatic. But my point was that the resolution doesn't just happen (although it may appear to). It is designed, constructed, not automatic.
A life that reaches a completion of some sort followed swiftly by death may well occur from time to time, but it certainly isn't automatic. I'm not sure that an incomplete life is necessarily ending in regret. I suspect that most lives end with unfinished business; life goes on until the end, and while life is on-going, business is on-going. There's bound to be unfinished business. Though, of course, opinions might differ about whether certain business is unfinished or not.
May you find genuine contentment within you my friend...
...and for whatever it's worth... the bit of scripture you mumbled about camels and needles... the term "needle" does not pick out a sharp metal piece of sewing equipment... not in that context. It's some kind of architectural detail, I think, similar to an archway. So... it's hard... but not impossible... if you believe the scripture, of course.
This account seems too reductive to me. For me, it is simply loss of egoic attachment, a kind of "flow state", and there is no explanation that can reliably specify what is required or effective for that to occur. I know it is a possibility, that it is basically what is described as a flow state, since I have experienced it. I often get into that state when painting, playing music, woodworking, hiking, exercising, or writing. Whether it can be permanent is another question; by some accounts it is possible, but I have no way of knowing unless it happened to me and I didn't revert.
There is nothing rich about a rich man apart from his riches. Which 'you can't take with you', as every grave robber will attest. But for my part, I have never intended, in this thread or on this site, to make any claim as to what if anything lies beyond this world or beyond the the grave. But I do attest that I have stopped smoking without the least regret or desire to restart. And this is not a boast, because it is not an achievement at all, but an honest report intended to be helpful to others in conflict about their habits.
There is nothing smokey about a smoker apart from his smoking habit, and the practice is the result of a habit of mind. What I have discovered is that the way one looks inwards at oneself needs to be different to the way one looks outwards. Outwardly, one needs to to distinguish the edible mushroom from the poisonous, and eat the one and avoid the other. But in looking at oneself in this way, in distinguishing beneficial habits from harmful habits, one creates a division and a conflict in oneself. In condemning the habit of smoking in myself, I am creating an imaginary non-smoker wagging his finger at the imaginary smoker. And then I can act out the conflict between them for many years a stop-start addiction, of self resentment and complaint. Whereas if I change my mind, I see without that conflict and without that division that tobacco is poisonous to me, then there is no difficulty.
I think this act of inward seeing without division might be what you mean by 'true self'. For fifty years I have been a smoker, or a smoker in remission, like a man trying to cross a ravine on a narrow bridge, but desperately holding onto the post at the beginning, knowing he has to let go in order to get across, but even in letting go, unable to take a step because the urge to grasp the pole again is so strong. And then I realise that the post I think I need is not helping me cross safely, but preventing me from crossing at all. I need the bridge, not the post. And with that realisation I set out, and the post is left behind.
Sweet!
Funny. I lasted smoked a month ago... Congrats. I agree with the habits of mind bit... very much so. The power of thought and words is like magic.