Throughout a life there are many points in which one reflects and looks upon their self with serious inquiry, where one might construct a story, conclude something about oneself, learn something, discover something, become informed, or embark on any number of self revealing missions as trivial as taking a personality test or as grandiose as quitting ones job, selling everything one owns and literally embarking on a journey. Throughout my life in particular these moments have occurred and as a result, my self and the ideas or stories of this self have fueled much of my behavior and action.
There was of course a time when I thought I was myself but who that was was not yet discovered, out there waiting to be revealed, or later on created. And subsequently there was a time when I thought the self was an illusion, that what “I” was, was nothingness, or everythingness, depending on how one looks at it. I was empty space, nothingness, and yet my emptiness made me everything. This was a time when I was a metaphysical definition. Another time when I was confronted with the mundane and ordinary middle class nature of my self, and this was another kind of nothingness, an irrelevancy, I sought out the extreme to rescue me from the mundane. A time when I was convinced of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, when what I was after was vindication of my intelligence, when I was alienated from mediocrity and the ordinary, when I thought that I could rescue myself from this nothingness, that if I could only become better, superior, more noble, by collecting wisdom, academic references, intellect, that it could prop me up from my nothingness. There was a time when my self was inherent in me, that I possessed my own characteristics the way one possesses the objects in their home. There was a time when my self was simply what I did, when I became a runner by running, a writer by writing. All of this time it was all happening at once, as my self was suspended in a devious but sensory pool of confusion, for the self had eluded me in all my attempts, those attempts to discover it, those attempts to create it, and most importantly those attempts to ignore it, to make it nothing, to look outward from the inward turn. But when I looked out I saw only myself, that is what I saw were reflections of my thoughts, my ideas, my biases, in the trees, in my company, in my family, I saw only myself, and I knew it then I was no illusion, I was a transcendent phenomenon, brought into being by my own reflection and imagination, and this was perhaps the most psychiatric diagnosis of my self. But to know it as I then knew it and so many times before is the first and last deception. For what are my words now but the neurotic accrual of arrows pointing down the narrow hallway, the rumbling of the train engine and the shaking of the seat as it lies fixed to its tracks? These self obsessions are dotted with conceits, so perhaps then my flirtations with my self aren’t so serious, so strenuous, and yet my next question then is to what extent are they necessary?
The apparent loss of the self and the commerce around its rediscovery both belong to the same forces. It is our pleasure, our leisure, and our entertainment which first kills us, and it is the business of public education, of psychology, of personality, to revive us, and both belong to the free market. Ahh, and it is my business to glibly remark on this industrial complex of the self and the tensions of being and becoming, to revel in the righteousness of opinion. To what extent then is it necessary? The final answer is never as satisfying as the ones that come before it or after it. The final answer to questions posed along the quest of life examination is always, “there are no problems.” And yet the quest can’t end there, there’s always another finale lurking beyond the next book, the next experience, and perhaps it’s the finales I have grown addicted to. But what happens when every finale has already been written? And the wisdom has been uncovered? When the unanswerable questions have indeed been answered, and the political forces have been organized, and the conversation which was supposed to change the world loses its momentum, must we simply take pleasure in the rumbling on the tracks? It is best perhaps to listen to the world rather than to explain it, and maybe the same is true for the “self” whatever it is. In our explanations there is deception, yet in our listening there’s no action. It’s a tension that defines us.
There are two concepts which much of the spiraling conversation of the self in history can be boiled down to, being and becoming. Becoming, is the way of divided knowledge, and being is the way of undivided knowledge. Becoming is the effort expended, becoming is the source of progress and its agenda. Being is non discursive, being is effortless, a sort of leisure, being is unconcerned with what to become because what to become is to already be. Yet to become something other than what one is, rather to progress and move towards being something else, is the achievement of civilization and the intellect. To grasp and grope at the world like we do is driven by a becoming force, to be better, to be stronger, smarter, more civil, more compassionate, more kind, more noble. Yet the very force which built us is that which threatens our well-being, this becoming is endless and insatiable, being is where we discover peace, becoming is where we declare war. Rather than lament further on the two fundamental forces, the divine being and worldly becoming, I just want to call attention to the tension they present in the conceiving of the self, and posit that where “we” really are is on the straddling of that divide.
What is my self? Becoming, or being, the truest answer is never the most satisfying. I simply do not know. But maybe it is very simple. I am what I decide to be, but who could ever decide once and for all? Okay, I am what I was made to be, but what if I don’t want to be what I am, I can become something else? Okay, I am neither, in fact, “I” don’t exist from the truest point of view. But when my name is called I exist. Ahh. The tracks are really shaking now, and the pleasure is gone.
Look out there and see how the self when turned inward disappears, and hunks of metal drive themselves down the street, and person less ambitions buzz on the electric wires, and gum bakes on the pavement in front of two automatic doors that slide open and a hobo walks out of this little suburban dollar store. And on the dusk of nothingness suddenly a woman walking her Goldendoodle draws the attention of a few passersby and the whole orchestra is awoken with the sound of jovial voices greeting a furry animal which starts a chain of events which ends in a boy and girl falling in love. And two young men walking and balancing on a concrete ledge discussing their plans for building their fortune look up at the hobo as he pushes his shopping cart with fishing rods poking out resting on his shoulder and he looks the young men in the eyes and says, “To be or not to be, what’s the answer?” And the two men stare at the hobo for a few seconds before walking along without answering him and he yells at their backs, “Two B’s”.
Subsequent reading: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/16/hannah-arendt-the-life-of-the-mind/
gregorykelsh 