Mirror, Mirror

The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love

Simon Blackburn

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781400849956
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

From the author of Think, an enlightening and entertaining exploration of narcissism and self-esteem Everyone deplores narcissism, especially in others. The vain are by turns annoying or absurd, offending us whether they are blissfully oblivious or proudly aware of their behavior. But are narcissism and vanity really as bad as they seem? Can we avoid them even if we try? In Mirror, Mirror, Simon Blackburn, the author of such best-selling philosophy books as Think, Being Good, and Lust, says that narcissism, vanity, pride, and self-esteem are more complex than they first appear and have innumerable good and bad forms. Drawing on philosophy, psychology, literature, history, and popular culture, Blackburn offers an enlightening and entertaining exploration of self-love, from the myth of Narcissus and the Christian story of the Fall to today's self-esteem industry.A sparkling mixture of learning, humor, and style, Mirror, Mirror examines what great thinkers have said about self-love—from Aristotle, Cicero, and Erasmus to Rousseau, Adam Smith, Kant, and Iris Murdoch. It considers today's "me"-related obsessions, such as the "selfie, " plastic surgery, and cosmetic enhancements, and reflects on connected phenomena such as the fatal commodification of social life and the tragic overconfidence of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Ultimately, Mirror, Mirror shows why self-regard is a necessary and healthy part of life. But it also suggests that we have lost the ability to distinguish—let alone strike a balance—between good and bad forms of self-concern.

1

The Self

Iris Murdoch and Uncle William

Selves are everywhere. I myself and you yourself are but two of them. And they are the focus of much of our attention. We talk of self-abasement, self-awareness, self-belief, self-control, self-denial, self-disgust, self-esteem, and so on through the alphabet, past self-hatred and self-love to self-respect, self-searching, self-trust, and self-violence. My Oxford English Dictionary lists eighty-seven such hyphenations before the end of the letter c, but after that I lost count. Perhaps there should be more, since with a few exceptions we can have just about any attitude toward ourselves that we have toward other people, or even to things in the world. The exceptions only include such trivial things as my finding you in my way, which is possible, as opposed to finding myself in my way, which is arguably not, except metaphorically when perhaps it is all too possible.

Some moral philosophers give much of this very bad press. In passages such as the following, Iris Murdoch rails against the “self-assertive movements of deluded selfish will,” contrasting it with the way that love and truth put us on the right track:

The love which brings the right answer is an exercise of justice and realism and really looking. The difficulty is to keep the attention fixed upon the real situation and to prevent it from returning surreptitiously to the self with consolations of self-pity, resentment, fantasy and despair.¹

Humility is a rare virtue and an unfashionable one and one which is often hard to discern. Only rarely does one meet somebody in whom it positively shines, in whom one apprehends with amazement the absence of the anxious avaricious tentacles of the self.²

There is nothing mysterious about the forms of bad art, since they are the recognizable and familiar rat-runs of selfish daydream. Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision. We are presented with a truthful vision of the human condition in a form in which it can be steadily contemplated.³

In this view, with attention to the self come delusions, inability to see situations as they are, avarice, fantasy, self-pity, resentment, and despair. Perhaps they do, although perhaps they come in other ways as well, as we shall see in chapter 4. But we can certainly be suspicious of people who cannot be “taken out of themselves,” for instance, through devoting attention to others, or even through being carried away by other things, such as great art, music, or spectacles of nature. People who cannot throw themselves into things because of the worm of self-consciousness, typically prominent during adolescence, labor under a serious handicap.

Iris Murdoch’s target, however, is far from clear. On the one hand we have the self-conscious adolescent, say, unhealthily preoccupied with the way in which he or she appears to other people. It is not difficult to find that state deplorable, and the cure, alongside simply growing up, may well be to pay more attention to other things. However, the self-conscious adolescent need not be particularly selfish, and selfish people need not be particularly self-conscious: indeed, sublimely selfish people are typically unaware of their elephantine footprints. A fixed disposition to safeguard or improve one’s own position, even at the expense of others, does not have to be conscious. It can manifest itself in a lifelong habit of absentmindedly taking lots of anything that ought to be shared more equitably, or backing away when there are unpleasant things to be done, or finding oneself certain that the rest of the family will also enjoy whatever you want to do. Sesame Street’s Miss Piggy can say “Selfish? Moi?” with sincere surprise. The businessmen we meet later may think of themselves as merely doing their job, simply servants of their calling.

Iris Murdoch’s recipe for avoiding either selfishness or self-consciousness is that we should pay serious attention to other things, which she casually identifies with achieving a kind of objective, God’s-eye view of the world and our place in it, and here too there is surely room for doubt. So, commenting on the last of the three passages, the critic John Carey mocks the alleged objectivity of great art:

Are the paintings of El Greco or Rubens or Turner objective? Or the poetry of Milton or Pope or Blake? Or the fiction of Swift or Dickens or Kafka? … Murdoch’s proclamation seems the exact reverse of the truth. If we had to choose between objectivity and her term “selfish daydream” as the principle behind art then it would have to be “selfish daydream,” though we might want to rephrase it as “individual imaginative vision.”⁴

An artist who erases his or her own personality is not going to be an artist at all. Carey is surely right to query the ideal of the innocent or impersonal eye, unencumbered with cultural or personal slants on things. All recent philosophy of perception has stressed the way in which expectations, emotions, moods, or a sense of opportunities and obstacles infuse our perception of the world. Indeed, supposing that we are free of personal elements, just seeing things as God intended them to be seen, or in the only way that it could be right to see them, might itself reasonably be classed as a complacent exercise of the “big fat ego” about which Iris Murdoch seemed so worried.⁵

We may be even more doubtful about the association between selfishness and lack of an objective vision. In 1968 at an auction at Aldwick Court in Somerset, a ring of art dealers conspired not to bid against one another to buy a hitherto unrecognized Madonna and Child by the great Sienese artist Duccio di Buoninsegna. They therefore paid only £2,700 (around $4,000) for it, and scurrying away they promptly sold the painting to the National Gallery for £140,000 (more than $200,000). Their vision seems to have been excellent: they saw the painting exactly for what it was, when other people did not. But their keen perception was also entirely at the service of their greed, and indeed criminally so, although by the time the ring came to light, the date for a possible prosecution had passed. Many a connoisseur will look more acutely at things when he anticipates possessing them. Selfishness motivates, and can sharpen one’s attention to crucial detail.

So we have excessive attention to the self, or self-consciousness, and excessive demands on behalf of the self, or selfishness, as things to avoid. But we should also remember that a sense of self is a precious thing. Envisage someone losing it, not knowing who she is. We might think of Iris Murdoch’s humble saint who “never thinks of herself,” but we might think instead of the terrifying state of those who have lost any sense of their own self, and cannot seize on any self to think of. This might be through advanced Alzheimer’s disease or some similar incapacity. Take away someone’s memory and you leave them bewildered, lost, living only in the present, surprised, frightened, or even angry at the constantly unfamiliar scenes they remain able to perceive but not to remember or place in sequence. Our identities are the lifelines used to guide our journey: even knowing where we are implies enough of knowing who we are to keep our bearings. Otherwise, experience becomes what Kant called “a mere kaleidoscope of sensations, less even than a dream.”⁶ King Lear’s tragedy is largely one of the terrifying loss of this lifeline, the disintegration of the self. Under the impact of terrible traumas, such as those of disaster and battle, survivors have to struggle to put the fragments back together, to rebuild themselves. Lear is reduced to animal cries, and the victims of severe psychological trauma often cannot speak:

Like most of the 4th I was numb, in a state of virtual dissociation. There is a condition … which we call the two-thousand-year-stare. This was the anaesthetized look, the wide, hollow eyes of a man who no longer cares. I wasn’t to that state yet, but the numbness was total. I felt almost as if I hadn’t actually been in battle.⁷

To recover himself would be to recover his voice, his ability to attend to the world around him, to rejoin the activities and conversations of others.

Philosophers have found it puzzling that the central character in all this drama is surprisingly absent from the stage. David Hume put it like this:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity.⁸

It sounds as though Hume had hoped to find a constantly present “thing,” only to find that there is no such constant presence as we go our everyday ways. There is only the ongoing life of the one animal, and the thoughts and desires and intentions that make up that life do not include the self as an element in the scene, in the way that the Albert Hall or Statue of Liberty might be. These have an independent existence: they are there whether or not we notice them or think about them, and there is something new and identifiable in our experience when they literally come into view. But selves seem to be creatures of consciousness. Without self-awareness in its various forms, there is no self left. Yet what is it of which we are aware? Not just the body, because one may be aware of one’s body without being aware of it as one’s own, as when we see a momentarily unrecognized fat person in a mirror. What then is the “I” behind my eyeballs, the subject inhabiting my brain and body, the being who survives life’s changes, that wakes up afresh every morning, and that hurtles or falters forward to its inevitable end?

If Hume is right, the self has disappeared, in which case perhaps we cannot think about ourselves at all. Some versions of both Buddhist and Hindu religions hold this. They both have “anatta” or “no self” traditions that deny the reality of the self, and see this discovery as liberation from chains of self-concern and self-love that otherwise fetter us and weigh us down. It would be nice for moralists if the fact that the self is elusive did have this moral implication, freeing us without effort from Iris Murdoch’s tentacles of selfishness. But unfortunately, it does not do so: there is no royal road from anatta to agape, or diffuse, general love of others. The illusion or fiction of a self, if that is what it is, leaves us capable of excesses of self-love or self-interest, just as it leaves us capable of deficiencies of self-knowledge or self-confidence. And in spite of his difficulties over finding a “self” of which he was aware, Hume almost immediately followed his discussion with an analysis of pride, an emotion that is only identifiable in terms of a pleasurable belief in something admirable about oneself. He was too well grounded to think that self-centeredness would wither because of metaphysical puzzles, although other, more hopeful philosophers have argued that whether or not it does, it certainly ought to do so.⁹

The problem is that even if, from the point of view of the universe, your toothache is exactly as bad as my toothache, it is inevitable that the latter matters to me and motivates me in quite a different way from the former. However much compassion I can summon up for you, the one is quite different from the other. I might recognize that from the point of view of the universe, it is just as good if my twin brother goes to Venice as if I do, and if I love him like a brother, I might be just as happy if he does. But it is still different if he goes and not I, and in the ordinary desires and motivations of life, that difference matters. No metaphysics is likely to erase the distinction between “mine” and “thine,” although moralists can certainly urge us to soft-pedal it whenever we can.

Yet how can this be so if the self is elusive to the vanishing point? Perhaps the clue to the conundrum lies in those endless hyphenations: the noun “self,” with its elusive object, is perhaps an unnecessary if tempting abstraction from all-too-real processes such as self-assertion, selfishness, self-doubt, and the others. Just as we do not need to look around the world for “sakes” in order to make sense of doing something for the sake of someone, so we may not need to look for selves to make sense of the processes that we use the word to describe.¹⁰ We do not need to believe in souls in order to find some people soulful.

Cognitive scientists and philosophers reflecting on their work like to think of the mind as evolving from the interactions between a large number of unintelligent components, just as the working of a computer can derive from a large number of individually dumb transformations of strings of zeroes and ones. The mind is like a club or nation, an aggregate that emerges from the relationships between the elements that make it up. Our minds, or we ourselves, emerge from this swarm of dumb happenings. But there need be no central control room, no inner manager to whom messages are delivered and from whom instructions emerge. There is just the activity of the whole, but nothing constant or unchanging. There is an organized orchestra but no conductor; a government, but nobody sitting on a throne receiving messages and issuing orders. There are processes, but no inner agent guiding and directing them. When the processes happen properly, then we as agents do things and decide things, but we are the upshot of the processes, not the sovereign who controls them. We are the lumbering and all-too-physical animals, not the ghostly controllers upstairs in their attics. An animal needs no such thing; its own control of its own actions lies in the multiple interactions of its neural circuits and chemical messengers.¹¹

The elusive self that Hume could not find is sometimes called the self as “metaphysical subject,” the “I” who thinks and acts and perceives and rejoices or suffers, and who is thought of as set over and against all the rest of the world. Asked what it is, the Buddha is said to have replied by remaining silent, suggesting that it somehow defies description or analysis. Thinking of the self as a kind of thing is making the subject into an object. It is making it a thing in the world, and I agree with those philosophers who suggest that this is an illusion. It is in this vein that Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote:

There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas.

If I wrote a book called The World as I Found It, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book.¹²

The self, in this story, is like the eye that cannot be a given in its own visual field. Its elusive nature can usefully be compared with the elusive nature of the place from which you see things, or the time at which events are happening. Thus, suppose you find yourself in an instant transported to the middle of a desert or ocean. You can see in all directions—but unless you have other clues, what you see does not tell you where you are. Or suppose that like Rip Van Winkle you regain consciousness after a long sleep or coma. You see what is happening around you—but that does not tell you what time it is. Time and place function as points of reference from which things are experienced, but are themselves no part of the experience. Perhaps selves are like that.

Wittgenstein drew an interesting conclusion from this:

Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality coordinated with it.¹³

It is rather wonderful to think that solipsism, the monstrous limit of egoism, the idea that I am the only entity in the cosmos, with everything else being only part of a virtual reality spun out of my own consciousness, coincides with “pure realism,” or confidence in the everyday, commonsense, independent world that existed before me and will exist after me. Solipsism seems to be the ultimate limit of skepticism, but rather as extreme communism comes to seem uncannily like extreme fascism, according to Wittgenstein, solipsism evaporates into simple realism. It does so just because the “metaphysical subject” or self of solipsism cannot be given as a “thing” in the world. So the “I” of solipsism diffuses, and all one is left with is the world as one experiences it.

Curiously, however, Wittgenstein himself retained a hankering for reading his equation the other way around, reducing realism to solipsism. One of the more pr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Self: Iris Murdoch and Uncle William
• Chapter 2: Liriope’s Son
• Chapter 3: Worth It?
• Chapter 4: Hubris and the Fragile Self
• Chapter 5: Self-Esteem, Amour Propre, Pride
• Chapter 6: Respect
• Chapter 7: Temptation
• Chapter 8: Integrity, Sincerity, Authenticity
• Chapter 9: Envoi
• Notes
• Index