Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak
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target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_e61e40c7-e946-50a2-b7fe-301332fe98d1">21 “There are three major types of self-examination: first, self-examination with respect to thoughts in correspondence to reality (Cartesian); second, self-examination with respect to the way our thoughts relate to rules (Senecan), third, the examination of self with respect to the relation between the hidden thought and an inner impurity. At this moment begins the Christian hermeneutics of the self with its deciphering of inner thoughts.” Foucault explains several technologies of the self including Syrian, Hellenistic, Roman, Monastic, Cartesian, Puritan etc. technologies of the self. Today we do not have neither meditatio (imaginative training of the self) nor gymnasia (“training in a real situation”), p. 36.
22 See Stephen L. White, The unity of the self, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1991.
23 D. Zahavi, Subjectivity and selfhood, p. 101.
24 See Galen Strawson, “Against narrativity,” in: G. Strawson (Ed.), The self?, Malden, Blackwell 2005, pp. 63–86.
25 D. Zahavi, Subjectivity and selfhood…, p. 104.
26 Derek Parfit, “Personal identity,” in: Jonathan Glover (Ed.), The philosophy of mind, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976, pp. 142–162.
27 “(…) the terms ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ undoubtedly have a correct application to phenomena that we encounter in everyday life. For they undoubtedly have a correct use as applied to such phenomena, and it follows immediately that they have a correct application to–that they really mean or denote–phenomena that we encounter in everyday life (…) Hence reality is certainly both mental and physical in its essential nature,” as Galen Strawson puts it. His argument will support my own, postdualist view on the embodied self and its biotechnological peregrinations, as shown in subsequent chapters, see Galen Strawson, Mental reality, Malden, The MIT Press, 2010, 2nd edition, pp. 44–48.
28 Also Ewa Nowak, “Podmiot jako pacjent chroniczny,” in: Adriana Warmbier (Ed.), Spór o podmiotowość: perspektywa interdyscyplinarna, Kraków, Księgarnia Akademicka 2016, pp. 207–224.
29 Zeno Gozo, “Interiority and exteriority. Searching for the self,” Philobiblon 2015, vol. 20, no. 7, pp. 319–333.
30 Robert Pollack, “The embodied self,” Columbia Journal of Gender and the Law 2013, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 38–39.
31 See Jaime de Val, „Metahumanism Manifesto – Metabody Projects,“ retrieved from https://metabody.eu (on 21 December 2019).
32 Paul Alsberg, Das Menschenrätsel, Dresden, Sybillen Verlag, 1979, p. 113.
“What is unique about the I hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual I is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.”
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The concepts of self and identity are constantly evolving, and their ambiguity manifests itself as both the tendency to preserve and to release the bonds of self-identity, or at least to change it. The complexity of sociocultural environments and the increasing effect of technologies on our day-to-day life facilitate that change or even lead to a process of permanent half-life (crisis) emerging within one’s self-identity. The issue here is not just postmodernity introducing deconstruction and diffuse, instant, and puzzling concepts of the self as a result of this deconstruction. What we are concerned with is the intrinsic and extrinsic processes for which we need more capacious concepts than those available in traditional, pre-modern psychologies and philosophies. Non-egological and post-egological self-identity concepts (e.g., intersubjectively mediated, extended, ecological, shared, episodic vs. diachronic, embodied, etc.) seem to better approach “a new sense of self”33 than, e.g., Kant’s concept of the transcendental “I.” Complexity challenges individuals from both the outside and inside. However, their ‘new’ self-identity need not be that complex for individuals to voice who they are under new circumstances, such as in dealing with the increasing effect of technologies on them. The new concepts should be explorative and offer some developmental potentials. Therefore, static sociological terms such as the agents and actors of a network, or discursive inter-subjects, will be revisited here only occasionally, in specific contexts, for instance, self-therapeutic strategies to empower the agential aspects of the “me,” which is passive. If our selves really evolve – and in 1991 Giddens suggested they do – the following question would arise: are the traditional directions of that evolution, such as development, ←21 | 22→maturation, flourishing, balance, etc., its final destination, or is there a very different phenomenon, for example, a permanent, positive disintegration of self-identity? Whichever of these directions would be expected to be the individual’s last destination, they all show a conventional, normative and normalizing character, as they seem to elevate the individual, thus carrying them from their chaotic condition to that of organization, coherence, structure, strength, and mastery, or maturity or adulthood in terms of the life-span. But not all recent concepts of the self would offer recovery, empowerment, diachrony, teleology, wholeness, or, put briefly, growth. Rather, regression, fragmentation, “deskilling,” or “insanity”34 are descriptive or normative expressions increasingly used to approach present-day self-identities; in particular, those influenced by technological factors. But diagnoses like these are already available. Therefore, searching for a new concept of the self should result in some epistemological and ontological security, and also guidance, in the light of a chronic crisis of the self,35 and chronic disagreement between experts and therapists, as well as the immediately involved. To show their security potentials – as, e.g., vehicles of possible self-development, self-reconstruction, self-recovery, and self-strengthening, etc.–the limitations of these concepts must also be pointed out. Certainly, the narrative self and the embodied self belong to the most fashionable and most discussed contemporary concepts; the former because of its integrative properties, the latter because of its integral ones, and both because of their developmentalism.
1. Developmental Psychology Meets Phenomenological Psychology 36
Developmentalism is one of the most powerful paradigms in contemporary cognitive psychology. Its original proponents were Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. Their four- and six-stage theories of personal cognitive development, encompassing socio-moral growth, inspired a number of scholars who continuously developed the developmental approach. Searching for the trajectories of personal self-development, scholars such as Robert Selman and Robert Kegan (both developmental psychologists), Anthony Giddens (a sociologist) and Ken