Myself In the Gaze of Another

Peter J. Leithart, December 03, 2005

This is not a paper, and that is not an ironic self-referential comment like Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe. This really is not a paper. It is a gesture toward a paper, a collection of fragments and notes. There is a goal here, a telos and trajectory: These pages contain bits and pieces of a larger project dealing with the doctrine of justification. I am heading toward the conclusion that the doctrine of justification, particularly as formulated by classic Protestant theology, has a peculiar relevance as a response to postmodern philosophers who have "decentered" the subject of modern philosophy. Justification avoids the problems associated with the "self-present" subject of Cartesian mythology, but also avoids the diffusion of the self lamented or celebrated in much postmodern thought. I should add that I realize that this is schematic and incomplete, and that both modern and postmodern conceptions of the self are far more complex than I have indicated.

The specific problem addressed here is the continuity of the self, the person, in time. What is it that makes the five-year-old Peter Leithart, whom I can barely remember, the "same" as the forty-five-year-old Peter Leithart, who can barely remember anything? Is there some persistent something deep inside of me that remains wholly unchanged through all my evident changes? And is that unchanging something the true referent of "Peter Leithart"? Or, is the unity a unity of a sequence or narrative? Or, is there in fact no unity at all? Do I cling to the fiction of "Peter Leithart" as a desperate but vain grasp for security against the void?

I. The modern self.
I.1. Modern philosophy, particularly the modern philosophy of the self, for all its variations, may be summarized as an exposition and extrapolation of what Robert Solomon calls the "transcendental pretense." Solomon writes,

"The leading theme of [the story of Continental philosophy after 1750] is the rise and fall of an extraordinary concept of the self. The self in question is no ordinary self, no individual personality, nor even one of the many heroic or mock-heroic personalities of the early nineteenth century. The self that becomes the star performer in modern European philosophy is the transcendental self, or transcendental ego, whose nature and ambitions were unprecedentedly arrogant, presumptuously cosmic, and consequently mysterious. The transcendental self was the self – timeless, universal, and in each one of us around the globe and throughout history. Distinguished from our individual idiosyncracies, this was the self we shared. In modest and ordinary terms it was called 'human nature.' In must less modest, extraordinary terminology, the transcendental self was nothing less than God, the Absolute Self, the World Soul. By about 1805 the self was no longer the mere individual human being, standing with others against a hostile world, but had become all-encompassing. The status of the world and even of God became, if not problematic, no more than aspects of human existence."

I.2. While the self was the obsession of philosophy from the time of Descartes, the self was not conceived in the same way by all modern philosophers. The problem of the modern self has been characterized by Louis Dupre as the challenge of combining self as "subject" and self as "substance":

"From the beginning a basic ambiguity had adhered to the science of the self. The object of the investigation was at the same time the investigating subject. The self was both knowing subject and the substance to be known. . . . Early Scholasticism had referred to God, the soul, and the world, as substances. Descartes continued to apply that term to the conscious self (res cogitans), but because for him consciousness functions as the source of meaning of all substances, that denomination created a major problem. How can what constitutes meaning be, at the same time, a substance endowed with a meaning content of its own? How can there by an objective science of what is supposed to be the source of all objective meaning?"

Modern philosophers have attempted to make sense of this problem in different ways, each seeking the center or core of the self that unites the two functions of the self – providing continuity through time and giving meaning.

I.2.a. The Cartesian Thinking Self.
In his second Meditation, Descartes applied his method of doubt to answer the questions, What am I? and Do I exist? The cogito not only establishes the fact of his existence, but also establishes the sort of things that exists. While body, sensation, imagination, and other faculties and activities are distinguishable from the I that Descartes discovers, his thought is not so distinguishable:

"I find here that thought is an attribute that belongs to me; it alone cannot be separated from me. I am, I exist, that is certain. But how often? Just when I think; for it might possibly be the case if I ceased entirely to think, that I should likewise cease altogether to exist. I do not now admit anything that is not necessarily true: to speak accurately I am not more than a thing which thinks, that is to say a mind or a soul, or an understanding , or a reason, which are terms whose significance was formerly unknown to me. I am, however, a real thing and really exist; but what thing? I have an answer: a thing which thinks."

For my purposes, the importance of Descartes' conclusion is that the continuity of the "mind" or "soul" or "self" is a continuity of a thinking thing that performs all the particular mental operations of Descartes' mind.

I.2.b. Rousseau and the Feeling Self.
Not all the heirs of the Enlightenment followed the rationalist program of Descartes. Rousseau and others claimed that feeling was more at the core of the self than thought. It is questionable that the romantic self is fundamentally different from the Cartesian self; both assume an autonomous self detached and abstracted from the world and time, a self in "midair."

I.2.c. Hume and the Deconstructed Self.
The "romantic" self of feeling is an unstable entity, but Hume, who addresses the issue of Personal Identity directly in his Treatise on Human Nature (Book 1, chapter 4, section 6), argues that the enduring Cartesian self is a fiction that rests on a fundamental confusion:

"We have a distinct idea of an object, that remains invariable and uninterrupted thro' a suppos'd variation of time; and this idea we call that of identity or sameness. We have also a distinct idea of several different objects existing in succession, and connected together by a close relation; and this to an accurate view affords as perfect a notion of diversity, as if there was no manner of relation among the objects. But tho' these two ideas of identity, and a succession of related objects be in themselves perfectly distinct, and even contrary, yet 'tis certain, that in our common way of thinking they are generally confounded with each other."

Humans are constantly changing, and thus the notion that I am the "same" as I was twenty years ago is simply a fiction constructed by the imagination. To call this "identity" is to confuse this sequence of closely-related selves with something that is truly "self-identical," that is, unchanging over time. What is called the "self" is thus nothing more than a "bundle or collection" of perceptions, not some perceiving-thing that can be assumed to lie behind the perceptions.

I.3. Conclusion.

Descartes expresses neatly what Gilbert Ryle called the "official doctrine" concerning the mind-body duality, concerning the nature of man, and concerning the self, a concept that Ryle described as the "ghost in the machine." What provides continuity and unity to the Cartesian self is that we are persistently haunted by the same ghost. Yet, the Cartesian self did not go unchallenged in modern philosophy. The challenges of modern philosophy have, however, been greatly intensified in certain branches of postmodernism.

II. Postmodern assault.
II. 1. The Postmodern Self.
According to Calvin O. Schrag, the postmodern conception of a "decentered" self is a function of the postmodern celebration of difference. There is a multiplicity of language games, and the self that enters into these diverse language games is an inherently disunified self:

". . . the grammars of unity, totality, identity, sameness, and consensus find little employment in postmodern thinking. Jean-Francois Lyotard . . . makes this quite clear when he announces in his postmodern manifesto that "consensus does violence to the heterogeneity of language games" and that we need to "tolerate the incommensurable," "wage a war on totality," and "activate the differences." Heterogeneity, multiplicity, diversity, difference, incommensurability, and dissensus become the chief interpretive categories of the postmodern mind. . . .

"The consequences of this stance for an understanding of the self or the human subject are considerable. For the most part, questions about the self, and particularly questions about the self as subject, are deemed anathema. As there is no longer a need for the unification of the diverse culture-spheres, so the problem of the self, at least as traditionally formulated, is seen to evaporate. Questions about self-identity, the unity of consciousness, and centralized and goal-directed activity have been displaced in the aftermath of the dissolution of the subject. If one cannot get rid of the vocabulary of self, subject, and mind, the most that can be asserted is that the self is multiplicity, heterogeneity, difference, and ceaseless becoming, bereft of origin and purpose. Such is the manifesto of postmodernity on matters of the human subject as self and mind."

Let us call this concept of the self the "diffused" or "vaporous" self.

II. 2. Sources of the Vaporous Self.
What are the arguments for this disunified self? And who makes them?

II.2.a. Sociological sources.
In part, the diffused self has arisen in response to sociological changes that are characteristic of modernity. Zygmunt Bauman has characterized modern life as "liquid," the unstable, constantly shifting, elusive pursuit of novelty. Personal habits are no sooner formed than they become unfashionable, and cultural habits do the same. Advertisers urge one desire this week, a completely new desire next week. Premodern man was a raftsman, carried along by the currents of his culture, responsible for guiding his craft away from the rocks; modern man is a sailor, who has to decide his own course in uncharted seas. Bauman's sailor is a vivid way of describing what Peter Berger has described as the "heretical imperative," or Marx's "all that's solid melts into air." There is something of this sociological dimension in Lyotard's emphasis on the heterogeneity of language games.

What is intriguing about Bauman's analysis is that the instability of the diffused self is not a product of postmodernity but of modernity. What is new, perhaps, in postmodernity is the elevation of the modern "sailor" to philosophical pre-eminence.

II.2.b. Philosophical sources.
There are several possible arguments that would support the notion of a diffused or vaporous self, or, more modestly, that undermine the modern self inherited from Descartes.

First, human beings are beings in time, never static or unchanging, and the historical character of human being goes "all the way down." To attempt to find some unchanging core of selfhood behind historical particularities is to deny the creaturely contingency of human existence.

Second, Descartes' cogito (well, maybe vice versa) works as a strategy against skepticism (which is the way that Augustine uses the argument), but it cannot do as a metaphysics of the self. Hume is right (as are the phenomenologists): We can discover no thinking thing that is not thinking something. And if it is thinking it is at least to that extent determined by particular, and changing, content.

Third, the self is not separable from the world. Human being is being-there, not being nowhere nor being in midair. Self and world are correlative, mutually determining. My self is an American self.

Fourth, the self is not separable from other selves. Human being is being-in-relation. Self and others are mutually conditioning.

Fifth, along similar lines, the Cartesian I is not Descartes himself or any other specific historical or bodily human: "The ‘I' who does the doubting and who reflects upon itself in the cogito is just as metaphysical and hyperbolic as is doubt itself with respect to all knowledge. It is, in truth, no one."

Sixth, Nietzsche mounts a rhetorical attack on the cogito. Language is inherently figural and rhetorical, so that Descartes does not, his pretensions notwithstanding, get past all his inherited prejudices to some unmediated contact with truth. He is not able to draw back the veil of language and see his naked self thinking.

II.3. Why the vaporous self cannot be the whole story.
Some radicals might revel in the conclusion that there is no "identity" in personal identity, no kind of sameness or endurance of a self. But that radical conclusion is difficult to sustain, and entails unpleasant consequences.

It is difficult to sustain because we do have a sense of continuity of the self. Memory is (as Hume argued) not a final ground for a stable self (since we assume that there is an identity through time even when memory fails), but memory is an experience of identity. I remember tearing my Achilles' tendon several years ago, and I remember this as something that happened to me. That experience has to be accounted for, and it is difficult to believe that it is simply a widespread, even universal illusion.

As for the unpleasant consequences, many writers have pointed to the ethical consequences of a completely non-identical self. If I am not the same man who killed my neighbor yesterday, it is unjust for me to suffer punishment for that other guy's crime. This ethical point has obvious political consequences, and it is unimaginable that a civilized society could be maintained without a notion of accountability that assumes some type of identity of the self in time.

Finally, Calvin Schrag argues that the vaporous self of Lyotard and others is not true to actual experience of the modern world. The language games that we play are various but not in fact hermetically sealed, and this overlapping and intertwining of games prevents a slide into "a radical heterogeneity of events of discourse and an accompanying pluralization of selves that would attach a different who to every different portion of discourse." There is a "who" with a certain kind of self-presence and self-identity that "tranaverses" the various discourses, and this "transversal dynamics" provides the "unity, presence, and identity of the self" that is concretely manifested in "the telling of the story by the who of discourse, emplotting the multiple and changing episodes of her or his communicative endeavors."

II.4. Continuity of the vaporous self.
There have been various efforts to recollect some unified and continuous self from the diffused self of postmodernism. Descartes finds few defenders today, and most of the thinkers who reject postmodern dissolution of the self concede that the postmodern assault on the Cartesian subject is justified and successful.

II.4.a. Narrative identity.
Writers such as Stephen Crites, Alasdair MacIntyre, and others have suggested that narrative conceptions of identity provide a way to both acknowledge the reality of change over time and yet affirm that the self that changes is one self. The unity of the self is not an unchanging ghost or thinking substance; the unity is the unity of a sequence, the unified story of the self. To describe myself at six and at forty-six as "Peter J. Leithart" is not, then, a mistake (as Hume might have it). But neither does "Peter J. Leithart" name some unchanging core of the narrative. Rather, "Peter J. Leithart" is who is the agent of the sequence that moves from six to forty six (and, I trust, beyond). I find this narrative conception of the self extremely useful, but I do not quite find it sufficient.

II.4.b. Augustine.
A more overtly theological account of the persistence of identity is found in Augustine. Few writers have expressed as intense a sense of the diffusion, vaporousness, and elusiveness of the self as Augustine does in Confessions. Augustine's ultimate conception of his self, as I read him, is radically decentered, since at the core of his being he finds not himself but another, the Other, the Triune God, His Creator:

"By the Platonic books I was admonished to return into myself. With you as my guide I entered into my innermost citadel, and was given power to do so because you had become my helper. . . . I entered and with my soul's eye, such as it was, saw above that same eye of my soul the immutable light higher than my mind – not the light of every day, obvious to anyone, nor a larger version of the same kind which would, as it were, have given out a much brighter light and filled everything with its magnitude. It was not that light, but a different thing, utterly different from all our kinds of light. It transcended my mind, not in the way that oil floats on water, nor as heaven is above earth. It was superior because it made me, and I was inferior because I was made by it. The person who knows the truth knows it, and he who knows it knows eternity. Love knows it. Eternal truth and true love and beloved eternity: you are my God. To you I sigh 'day and night' (Ps. 42:2). When I first came to know you, you raised me up to make me see that what I saw was Being, and that I who saw am not yet Being."

Augustine is often celebrated or derided as the founder of Western interiority, the distant precursor to Descartes. But Augustine's introspection is inverted into the most radical kind of extra-spection, the vision of the light of God. Augustine's self is elusive, mutable, protean and problematic to Augustine. But no matter. Because Augustine is Augustine in his union with God.

John Webster, I think, captures exactly the point that Augustine is aiming for:

"To be human is, on a Christian account, to have one's being outside of oneself, to owe one's being to the being and activity of the triune God. True humanity is thus not possessed identity but rather life in a perpetual movement of receiving and responding to a gift. We are humans as creatures of the heavenly Father in whom we have our being; as those reconciled 'in Christ'; and as those led toward perfection in the Spirit. . . . Human being is certainly a-centric, 'never centered in itself,' and so free from 'the circle of appropriation and possession.' But this does not spell the end of subjectivity . . . but rather its existence in (by virtue of, through the mercy of, out of the absolute generosity of) the triune God. That, of course, is why life and faith are strictly correlative. . . ."

Talk of faith leads us to justification.

II.4.c. Justification, the Vaporous Self and the Gaze.
According to Protestant theology, the righteous are righteous not intrinsically but extrinsically, righteousness being "extra nos." Our righteousness is "decentered," a gift of God through Christ, a function of our union with the Risen Christ.

Protestant theology has, however, unfortunately been vitiated by frequent acceptance of some version of the modern, Cartesian self, whether or not that acceptance is acknowledged or explicit. In a Cartesian setting, the self is separated from the world and from others. The Cartesian self cannot be defined by anything outside itself. When this version of the self is assumed, then justification, which involves extrinsic righteousness, cannot determine the "self" but only the self's status.

If we reject the Cartesian self, however, and assume instead the Augustinian self that is never centered in itself to begin with, then the problematics of external righteousness evaporate. In fact, the extrinsic character of justifying righteousness becomes a peculiar strength of the Protestant doctrine. Our being, our self, is not on this view a matter of our own inherent qualities, which are shifting and evanescent as mist. The steadiness of our being, the endurance of the self, is not to be sought in ourselves, but in the favorable judgment of the unchanging God.

Postmodern philosophy has been deeply suspicious of "the gaze," associating it with instrumental reason, totalization, objectification of other persons, and many other evils. But the eyes are ultimately the salvation for the diffused self, the self who has been dispersed to the winds like chaff. For we are what we are, and endure as we are, only because of what we are in the gaze of God. For postmodern man swimming through the liquidity of late modern life, there is no better good news than this: That we might find favor in the eyes of Yahweh.

References:
Robert C. Solomon, Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self (Oxford: OUP, 1988), p. 4.

Dupre, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (New Haven: Yale, 2004), p. 46.

Meditation II. Great Books of the Western World, 31 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), p. 79. “Cogitare? Hîc invenio: cogitatio est; hacc sola a me divelli nequit. Ego sum, ego existo; certum est. Quandiu autem? Nempe quandiu cogito; nam forte etiam fieri posset, si cessarem ab omni cogitatione, ut illico totus esse desinerem. Nihil nunc admitto nisi quod necessario sit verum; sum igitur praecise tantùm res cogitans, id est, mens, sive animus, sive intellectus, sive ratio, voces mihi priùs significationis ignotae. Sum autem res vera, & vere existens; sed qualis res? Dixi, cogitans” (Latin taken from http://www.wright.edu/cola/descartes/meditation2l.html#l6).

The status of the cogito has been subject of much debate. Some, like Spinoza, read the cogito in the light of the proof for God in the Third Meditation, a reading that undermines the foundational character of the cogito; the idealist tradition, however, took the cogito as a self-grounding ground from which other truths would be derived. As Paul Ricoeur puts the dilemma: “either the cogito possesses the value of a foundation, but it is a sterile truth which nothing can follow without breaking the order of reasons; or it is the idea of perfection that founds it in its condition of finite being, and the first truth loses its aura of first foundation” (Oneself as Another [trans. Kathleen Blamey; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], p. 10).

See Solomon, Continental Philosophy, pp. 16-21; Dupre, Enlightenment and Intellectual Culture, pp. 53-67.

This is one of the important themes of Roger Lundin, who focuses specifically on American thought and culture.

http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/texts/Hume%20Treatise/hume%20treatise1.htm#PART%20IV.

For a sharp critique of Hume’s argument, see Terence Penelhum, “Hume on Personal Identity,” in V. C. Chappell, ed., Hume: A Collection of Critical Essays (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 213-239.

Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949), pp. 11-12, quoted in Calvin O. Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity (New Haven: Yale, 1997), p. 11.

These are all quotations from Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.

Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity, pp. 7-8.

Bauman, Liquid Life (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005).

I merely state rather than argue for these points. These arguments are of my own (more or less overtly theological) formulation, and are not to be taken as representing any particular postmodern thinker, much lest postmodernism as a whole. I find most of these arguments compelling at least in some degree.

More theologically: Even the soul has a history.

More theologically: Self and world are perichoretically related.

More theologically: Self and other are perichoretically related.

Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 6.

Ricoeur, Oneself As Another, pp. 11-16. Ricoeur characterizes Nietzsche’s argument as an intensification of Cartesian doubt: While Descartes doubts the evidence of his own senses, Nietzsche doubts the possibility of non-distorting language, and thus casts the cogito itself into doubt.

Self After Postmodernity, pp. 32-33.

See Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones, eds., Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1997).

Confessions, 7.10.16. I am using the translation of Henry Chadwick (Oxford: OUP, 1991), p. 123.

John Webster, "The Human Person," in Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), p. 228. Webster is responding to the a/theology of Mark C. Taylor.

I have suggested elsewhere that the problem is found already in Calvin, who defines the image of God as something that must be "within" the human being, rather than something that a human being might possess in relation.