Elements of metaphysics

by A. E. Taylor

On the other side, it seems difficult to say whether there is anything which ordinarily forms part of the “self” which may not, under special conditions, become a part of what we recognise as the “not-self.” Thus our bodily feelings and sensations, our thoughts and desires, and in particular our virtuous and vicious habits, are usually reckoned as definitely belonging to our self. Yet in so far as we can think of any desire or habit as an element which is discordant with the rest of our self, and ought not to be there,—and the whole business of moral progress depends on our being able to take up this attitude,—we, so far, relegate that element to the not-self. To will the habit or desire to be otherwise is already, in principle, to expel it from the teleological unity which makes up our inner life. So again with our thoughts: in so far as we can suspend our assent to a judgment, and balance reasons for or against accepting it into the general system of our beliefs, the judgment clearly belongs to the external not-self.

Yet it is at least conceivable that there may be intellectual as well as moral habits so deeply engrained in our constitution that we cannot thus set them over-against the self for judgment and sentence. We must not deny that there are cases in which we could not will or think differently, or even mentally entertain the possibility of thinking or willing differently, without the destruction of our life’s continuity of purpose. Again, our bodily sensations seem to belong in a very special way to our self. Yet in so far as we can acquire the power of voluntarily observing them, or again of withdrawing attention from them, they are in principle reduced to the position of elements in the not-self.

Even pleasure and pain do not seem to belong inalienably to the self’s side of the contrast. E.g., to adapt a Platonic illustration, if I feel pleasure in contemplating the vulgar or obscene, and at the same time feel disgusted with myself for being so pleased, the pleasure seems in the act of condemnation to be recognised as no part of my “true” self, but an alien element obtruded on the self against its nature. Pain, by reason of that urgency and insistency which give it its biological importance, is much harder to banish from the self; but experience, I think, will convince any one who cares to make the experiment, that bodily pains, when not too intense (e.g., a moderately severe toothache), can, by directing attention to their sensational quality, be sometimes made to appear as definitely foreign to the experiencing self. And the history of asceticism, ancient and modern, as well as the practice of “mind-curers,” suggests that this process of extrusion can be carried further than we commonly suspect.

Organic or “common” sensations of general bodily condition probably form the element in experience which most obstinately resists all attempts to sever it from the whole self and treat it as a foreign object, though in some cases we certainly seem able to extrude the organic sensation from the felt self by analysis of its quality and “localisation.” Still, it must be admitted that if there are any elements in experience which are absolutely incapable of transference to the not-self, they are probably in the main masses of unanalysed and unanalysable organic sensation.[^[188]]

All these considerations make two points very clear. (a) The self in which we are interested in Ethics and History is not anything with definitely fixed boundaries. The line dividing it from its complement, the not-self, is one which we cannot draw according to any precise logical rule; and again, what is at one time on one side of the boundary is at another on the other. If there is any part of our experience at all which must be regarded as always and essentially belonging to the self’s side of the dividing line, it will in all probability be merely masses of bodily feeling which are manifestly not the whole of what Ethics and History contemplate when they appraise the worth of a self.[^[189]]

Further, a conclusion follows as to the nature of the opposition of self to not-self. The not-self, as the readiness with which most of the contents of experience can pass from one side of the antithesis to the other shows, is in a sense included in at the very time that it is excluded from the self. The various factors of which the not-self can, at different times, be composed, our fellows, the physical world, thoughts, habits, feelings, all agree in possessing one common characteristic; when referred to the self, they are all elements of discord within the whole of present experience, and it is on account of this discordancy that we treat them as foreign to our real nature, and therefore as belonging to the not-self. We may thus say with accuracy that what is ascribed to the not-self is so ascribed because previously found to be discrepant, and therefore excluded from the self; in other words, the not-self is not an external limit which we somehow find in experience side by side with the self, but is constructed out of experience-data by the extrusion of those data which, if admitted into the self, would destroy its harmony. Thus we finite beings are confronted by a not-self ultimately because in our very finitude, as we have seen in earlier chapters, we contain in ourselves a principle of strife and disharmony. The not-self is no merely external environment, but an inevitable consequence of the imperfection of internal structure which belongs to all finitude.

(4) The self is essentially a thing of development, and as such has its being in the time-process. This is a point upon which it seems for many reasons necessary to insist. Its truth seems manifest from our previous consideration of the nature of the experiences upon which the concept of the self is based. As we have seen, it is primarily to our experience of internal disharmony and the collision of purpose that we owe our distinction between self and not-self. And such experience seems only possible to beings who can oppose an ideal of what ought to be, however dimly that ideal may be apprehended, to what is. A being who either was already all that it was its nature to become, or was incapable of in some way apprehending the fact that it was not so, would thus not have in its experience any material for the distinction between the self and the foreign and hostile elements in experience. And, as we have already seen in our Third Book, time is the expression in abstract form of the fundamental nature of an experience which has as yet attained only the partial fulfilment of its purpose and aspirations, and is therefore internally subject to that want of perfect harmony in which we have now sought the origin of the distinction between self and not-self. Hence we may, I think, take it as certain, at least for us who accept this account of the origin of the self concept, that selves are necessarily in time and as such are necessarily products of development.

This conclusion seems in accord with positive facts which are too well established to permit of question. It is probable that there is not a single element in what I call my present self which is not demonstrably the product of my past development, physical and mental. Nor does it appear reasonable to contend that though the material of my existing self is a result of development, its form of selfhood is underived. It is not merely that my present self is not as my past self, but we cannot avoid the admission that my mental life is the result of a process of development by which it is continuously connected with that of the embryo and even the spermatozoon. And thus it seems to have its beginnings in experiences which are probably so little removed from simple feeling as to afford no opportunity for the sense of self as contrasted with not-self. Or if we maintain that the contrast cannot be altogether absent from even the crudest forms of experience, we still have to reckon with the fact that, one stage further back in my personal history, I had no existence even as an animalcule. An embryonic self is at least not positively inconceivable, but where was Levi’s selfhood while he was yet in the loins of his father? If we will consider what we mean when we say we have all had parents, it will, I think, be confessed that our self must be admitted to have been actually originated in the course of development, impossible as we find it to imagine the stage of such a process.[^[190]]

(5) Finally, we must deal briefly with one more point of some importance. The self, as we can now see, is never identical with anything that could be found completely existing at any one moment in my mental life. For one thing, it is thought of as having a temporal continuity which goes far beyond anything that can be immediately experienced at any given moment. It stretches out both into the past and the future beyond the narrow limits of the “sensible present.” Again, this temporal continuity is only an abstract expression of the inner sameness and continuity of aims and interests we ascribe to the self. My experiences are, as we have seen, thought of as being the life of one self ultimately because I look on them as the harmonious expression of a consistent attitude of interest in the world. And any elements in experience which will not coalesce in such a harmony are, by one device or another, extruded from the true self and declared to be alien intruders from elsewhere. Now, in real life we never find this complete and absolute harmony of the contents of experience; there are always, if we look for them, elements in our actual experience which are discordant, and conflict with the system of interests which, on the whole, dominates it. Hence self, in the last resort, is seen to be an ideal which actual experience only imperfectly realises,—the ideal of a system of purposes and interests absolutely in harmony with itself. And there must be, at least, grave doubt as to the logical self-consistency of this ideal, doubts which we must shortly face.

For the present the point to which I want to call attention is this. Must we say that any degree of felt continuity of existence is enough to constitute rudimentary selfhood, or ought we to hold that there is no true self where there is not at least as much intellectual development as is implied in the power to remember the past and anticipate the future, as one’s own? In other words, are we to make selfhood as wide in its range as sentient life, or to limit it to life sufficiently rational to involve some distinct and explicit recognition of the contrast between self and not-self? This is perhaps, in the main, a question as to terminology; for my own part, I confess I find the second alternative the more satisfactory. I do not see that such a degree of teleological continuity as is implied in the mere feeling of pain, for instance, deserves to be recognised as genuine selfhood; and there is, I think, in the unrestricted use of the term self, selfhood, as applied to merely feeling consciousness, a danger of ambiguity. When we have once applied the terms in such a case, we are inevitably tempted to over-interpret the facts of such simple mental life in order to bring them into fuller accord with what we know of selfhood in our own life.[^[191]] At the same time, it is clear that we have no right dogmatically to deny the presence of the intellectual processes involved in the recognition of self where our methods of observation fail to detect them.