Dialog/Self
V 1 — Yesterday at a party I got talking with someone about A Place to Study, going on about how it supports self-formation. She squinched her nose and said, "Sounds dated." I asked why and she went on about how the self has been put through the juicer and whatever solidity it once had — patriarchal, imperial, what-have-you — is now a drab, yucky liquid that only health nuts will drink. I excused myself to get another beer, but I'd like to hear what you have to say about casual and serious poo-pooing of self-talk.
R 2 — Well, I think it serves best as cocktail chatter and tenurable fodder, but let's see if we can get something worthwhile out of it, not dressed in any expertise, but a better sense of the self in everyday experience, the agent of my life. What would you have said if you didn't want another beer?
V 3 — I ducked responding, not for fear of the reaction so much, but because it's really hard to have something to say about the self, to know what one really thinks the self is. What she said confounded me. It likened the self to some object, I thought of an orange dropping into my blender to be whacked into a smoothie. I felt the self shouldn't get objectified that way but under the circumstances wasn't up to unraveling why. It's deeper than Jiminy Cricket chattering on my shoulder. But I don't really have a clear and definite conception of the self, so I'm still at a loss for words.
R 4 — Let's see if we can find some words. Our cultures have lots of problematic identities etched into them — economic man, legal person, patriarchal male, and lots and lots of types, psychological, ethnic, class, gender, religious, intellectual. They are abstractions that bundle together a few descriptors of human characteristics as one or another identity.
V 5 — Yeah, and a lot of us worry about our identity — am I a this or a that? And none ever fit perfectly so we start developing more and more sub-identities. But a lot of people equate the self, their self and the selves they impute to other people, with these identities, one or another or some mix of them, and they even start to act in ways they think fit their chosen identity. But whenever I hear talk about identity, it feels a bit reductive to me.
R 6 — Same here. I think all the identities are abstract constructions, too simplistic to fit ordinary experience. Equating the self to an identity reduces us to an abstraction, but when my self speaks in living language I am not an abstraction acting; I am actual, manifesting my self-awareness as a living locus, perceiving and acting in and on circumstantial actualities.
V 7 — What can we say about that living self, if we are not going to equate it to identities or other attributes? It seems to have become almost second nature. To speak about it entails objectifying it, letting go of its inner immediacy.
R 8 — Can we grasp any ideas why we think people, including ourselves, link their sense of themselves to an abstract identity?
V 9 — Well, we have lots of reasons, I suspect. Some of it is a little like being a fan of some celebrity — it lends us some charisma, at least among those who share the identity, and it is a quick way to communicate information about ourselves, and it may even give a person a sense of power, solidarity with those sharing the identity.
R 10 — How does this gain of charisma, imparting information, and acquisition of power take place? How does it happen?
V 11 — Hmm. Interesting question. I'm not sure, but I think it must be that the identity goes through a kind of objectification in our mind and becomes a sort of entity that we link with examples of charisma, characteristics, and active accomplishments. Then, in saying, "I am an X," we couple ourselves to this entity, internally equating ourselves with its putative charisma, characteristics, and power.
R 12 — Why do you say putative charisma, characteristics, and power?
V 13 — Hah! You know, it's a cool word meaning supposed that I recently learned, and like to use. But seriously though, I think I'm using it correctly. Remember our saying that identities are abstractions, and I think that abstractions can help us think about lived experience, but I don't think they embody it. The abstraction doesn't really have charisma, characteristics, or power to impart to anyone who might equate themselves with the abstraction.
R 14 — So here we are thinking about the self as an abstraction that equates itself to other abstractions, gaining a fuller abstract identity thereby. That's the objectified self being dropped into your juicer. Is there a different way to think about the self, the "I" of ordinary speech?
V 15 — Well yes. The objectified self, the bearer of identities, doesn't really do anything — as you just put it, it's "being dropped." The whole scene implies another, different I, the I that is dropping the self/orange into the juicer. We don't know anything about the identities of that different I, but we do know what it is doing, it's dropping the objectified self into the juicer.
R 16 — Perhaps the juicer provides a mode of speaking about the reflective powers of the self-as-agent. We think about the self-as-object using the copula, a verb construction that couples the subject with an object stating an identity linking them — as you put it a moment ago, "I am an X." Most of the time in thinking, speaking, and writing, the copula does not suffice to state what is taking place adequately. We use substantial, active verbs, with respect to which the I, the self, initiates and does the action, the self-as-agent.
V 17 — Hey, thinking about it that way, my turning away, not answering, and getting another beer, may have been the perfect response, assuming the person I was talking with was reflective, asking herself what did my doing that suggest.
R 18 — As a great writer put it, "Where words fail him, deeds speak."[1] And good writing uses active verbs with the subject-as-agent. Substantive verbs tell us what the subject does, not what it is. And we use the copula, the verb to be or, too often. And we also use the passive voice, to equate the implicit subject of the proposition with some other object, state, or condition.
V 19 — Let me see if I get the distinction. The I of the substantive verb is conducting the action, doing something — "I'm driving my car." The I of the copula, equating itself with something, is in a state of being — "I am happy." The former continually changes in the flux of the action; the latter is stable, self-subsisting in the declared identity.
R 20 — Yes, but "I am happy" and the like presents a tricky case. It is part of the problem of the copula and the whole problem of being that comes with it. The I-as-object probably cannot be happy in a stable and enduring sense. It's more accurate to use the I-as-agent and say "I feel happy," concretizing the condition in an existential action. There are many ways that we conventionally speak of the I-as-object, when we could speak with greater clarity and significance by using the I-as-agent.
V 21 — Oh-Kay! I think I see a big one. In talking about self-formation, many people think about forming the attributes that make part of their identity. They think of the self as being this or that — a lawyer, smart, attractive, rich, caring, a leader, a good cook, and on and on. They prep the self for this or that role and worry what they need to do to get recognized for this or that acquirement. It's the formation of the self-as-object.
R 22 — Go on. Among such acquisitions are the trappings of a liberal education, and other badges of educational achievement, summed up in the proverbial "My son, the doctor." Is there another way to look at self-formation.
V 23 — You bet! It's forming the self-as-agent. That's what we mean by self-formation here on A Place to Study. It's not your acquirements, your certificates, not even the knowledge, per se, that you accumulated. It's what you can do and how you do it, particularly it's forming yourself as a person who judges wisely, acts prudently, thinks clearly, speaks intelligently, and lives virtuously.
R 24 — I agree, but if someone comes and asks us how we do that here, what are we going to say? If someone comes to the university admissions office and asks how they can acquire a Bachelor of Arts degree for their self-as-object, they will get a clear and definite answer. But how does the self-as-agent form herself as someone who acts prudently and lives virtuously?
V 25 — Hmm.... I see the problem. I didn't really understand it that well on reading Plato's Protagoras, but it was there. When we try to answer for the self-as-agent, we can do so only by treating the self as an object to be shaped this way or that, the recipient, when all is said and done, of an abstract encomium, you know, an empty sign of praise. Instead we really have to trust our selves-as-agent, embracing the question, seeking life-long to engage ourselves in answering it for ourselves. I guess that's why we call it A Place to Study. Here the self-as-agent studies for itself how it can best form its powers of agency in a world of circumstances.
R 26 — Yeah, you might say that we try to support one's self in one's making a room of one's own.
- ↑ J. G. von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship Thomas Carlyle, trans., Book VII, Chapter IX, Indenture.