The introduction/Self-consciousness, from Ellmann, Richard and Charles Feidelson, Jr, eds. The Modern Tradition, Backgrounds of Modern Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. 1965.
Self-Realization
The Field of Consciousness
The Divided Self
Freedom
Self-Consciousness - Introduction
Modern exploration of the unconscious mind and of the heritage of myth has been part of a larger concern with the distinctive qualities and value of subjective life. But if the Unconscious is primarily a personal subjective world for Freud, it is primarily super-personal for Jung; and if the forms of myth are closely related to the private visions of symbolist poets, they are also public, communal, and historical.^ Subjective life at its most intense is personal and private, wholly individual, and the value of subjective reality in this sense is a modern article of faith. The individual person has turned round upon himself, seeking to know all that he is and to unify all that he knows himself to be. The totality of the self has become the object of an inner quest. This cultivation of self-consciousness--uneasy, ardent introspection--often amounts to an almost religious enterprise.
A first principle of self-consciousness is that nothing, however inglorious or unpleasant, should be ignored. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions is the prototype of many later examples of the elevation of candor into a prime virtue. Rousseau premised his book upon his capacity to be wholly honest with himself and the reader. "Every human heart, no matter how pure," he insists, "conceals some odious vice." But he displays his vices primarily as evidence of his personal uniqueness and his ability to overcome any desire for concealment. Though he passes judgment on his misdeeds and calls attention to his virtues, he professes to be more interested in the truth about his own nature than in moral self-evaluation. What he would reveal is the astonishing, idiosyncratic phenomenon of himself, and what he would claim as his superiority over other men is his self-knowledge and his openness.
Rousseau conceives his past life as a sequence of feelings, all of which live on within him and are readily remembered. But he has little notion of inner growth. He appears to regard his self as an entity with fixed and pre-ordained traits that are manifested in a series of biographical events. Other writers emphasize rather that the self is an unending process. André Gide, and such varied authors as Lawrence, Rilke, and Kandinsky, picture a long struggle for self-definition. They regard true selfhood as something to be achieved [p. 685] and re-achieved because they are constantly betrayed into falsehood by inner and outer deceptions.^ Gide discovers that a factitious self has been proffered him, like some inherited office, by his well-meaning parents and teachers. To repudiate social sanctions, formal and informal, is his first arduous step toward self-affirmation. The second is to free himself from his own self rationalizations, to liberate the extreme possibilities, however inconsistent, that reside within him. Gide seeks his distinctive self by self-multiplication. He cultivates an inner heterogeneity in the face of all single-minded virtues or patterns that claim authority in him. Similarly, Lawrence sees a deprivation of natural energy and impulse as the great peril of our time. The self, changing and full of incongruous parts, is besieged by the parson, the philosopher, and the scientist, all of whom conspire against life by their neat formulations of it. Against their procrustean molds Lawrence offers the living ambiguity of a successful fictional character as an exemplar of vital freedom in human beings--for a novel is successful, according to him, precisely insofar as it eludes any single, reductive formula.
Rilke is more intent upon the self's confrontation of ultimate realities like God and Death. He asks whether these vast abstractions, alien and terrifying to us, are not actually states of ourselves that we have externalized in order to simplify our existence. If so, then by reassuming them as part of ourselves we can at once nullify the terror of the unknown and come into our birthright. For Rilke, art is the incorporation of such seemingly distant and external realities into the act of self-knowledge. For Kandinsky, a valid work of art presupposes the inner wholeness and substantiality of its maker. The artist's personal integrity and spiritual wealth are won by a constant vigilance against the demoralizing climate of the time. Art is the expression of this inner truth in defiance of external canons of correctness or of objective representation.
The idea of a field of consciousness is assumed by Henry James when he argues for a fictional technique that would place the center of a novel in the mind of an observant character.^ This intense perceiver is not only self-aware, so that the story becomes the adventure of his feelings and thoughts, but also an instrument whereby the "values" of the objective situation surrounding him may be recorded. To some extent, the distinction between external and internal disappears: all that matters is the world as possessed and defined by the central figure. William James undertakes a psychological description of the unfolding field of individual consciousness. In opposition to the static self and atomic sensations of traditional psychology, he pictures experience [p. 686] as a continuous and perpetually altering "stream." The resting places in the stream, the ideas and objects to which we cling as reference points, are no more important than the "feelings of tendency," the "transitive" relations, that suffuse them.
William Jame's metaphor of the "stream of consciousness," which converts the self from an entity into a movement or activity, is obviously analogous to Bergson's "bottomless, bankless river."^ Bergson uses this figure to propound his metaphysical concept of duration, in terms of which the self is essentially temporal, always opening out into the future but incorporating its entire past. Bergson holds that we create ourselves continually; consciousness cannot go through the same state twice; we move toward a future that cannot be predicted. Nevertheless, the self endures out of the past into the present; there is a continuity of personality like a thread on a ball or like the distinctive palette of a particular artist. Paradoxically past, present, and future--changing yet continuous--multiple yet one--the self can never be wholly grasped by intellectual concepts. But it can be "intuited." Intuition of the enduring self is the great subject of Proust, who knew Bergson's work well. The Proustian memory, activated by a concrete sensation, rediscovers a concrete past that the abstract intellect has simplified and partially lost. By recapturing past time, Proust re-enters the fluid world of endurance and thereby repossesses himself.^
The very term "self-consciousness," however, implies an inner division between the self that is conscious and the self of which it is conscious. Friedrich Schlegel even contends that all thought is an internal dialogue. Like Gide long after, he views consciousness as ironic in the sense that it cannot properly exist without a play of voices within itself.^ Hegel interprets the intrinsic duality of self-consciousness as a conflict between a "changing" or individual aspect of the self and a "changeless" or universal aspect. These parts pursue and undermine each other and produce a "negative" state of self-alienation; yet they are really parts of one undivided soul, and their war comes to an end when consciousness attains the recognition of its own unity in the synthesis of Spirit.^ Karl Marx applies the same general conception to human experience under modern economic conditions. According to Marx, the individual modern man is estranged from himself because, having no personal interest in the objective product of his labor, he has no personal relation to his own act of production. This self-estrangement of the individual is [p. 687] actually estrangement from universal man, the human species, in which he no longer participates as a productive being. Marx envisages a new society in which work and worker, the worker and himself, himself and humanity, will be reunited, and the alienated consciousness will be healed, at one with itself.^
Kierkegaard contends that the state of self-division, "ironic" or "negative," is part of the very definition of personal existence. We cannot escape from it, he thinks, by an easy Hegelian or Marxist synthesis, for a paradoxical tension of individual and universal must remain if the universal is to be apprehended at all. Truth is given only to the "subjective" thinker, who becomes more and more isolated as he "inwardly" assimilates the universal truth, and becomes more and more capable of genuine knowledge as he affirms his finite and changeable human nature. Universal truth being knowable only by existing individuals, valid communication cannot be the "direct" statement of an objective universal. The mode of rendering is all-important for Kierkegaard; it must be "indirect," artistic, even deceptive, if it is to convey a subjective truth and not a worthless objective substitute. Like Schlegel, Kierkegaard discovers his model in Socratic irony. The audience must be deceived out of its "positive" illusions into "negative" truth by the theatrical devices of an indirect author. As an example from his own experience, Kierkegaard relates how he posed as an idler in order to mislead the world as to his real thoughts and make it more unsuspectingly amenable to the "aesthetic" rendering of ethical and religious insights in his works.^
The masks of Nietzsche and Yeats are other forms of indirection. Nietzsche wears a mask because personal truth is either too delicate to be displayed without protection or too complex and terrible to be apprehended directly. The mask is as natural to the great man as the face to a lesser one. Yeats deliberately makes a mask in order to quarrel with himself, to subject himself to his other self, and thereby to attain real personality. Art becomes a self-discipline, a redemption of his everyday nature by possibilities dimly felt or envisaged.^
Back of the Yeatsian aesthetic lies the morality of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, both of whom would transcend the human condition by ascetic self-discipline of the individual will. But Schopenhauer looks toward the traditional virtue of selfless love, participation in the universal suffering, and toward a deliberate self-mortification.^ Nietzschean asceticism decisively rejects the "Slave-Morality" of sympathetic communion, finding in it only a shameful retreat from natural life and a propagation of mediocrity and weakness. To see life as tragedy, to accept suffering without self-abasement, to assert oneself with pride, is the vocation of the free individual. The self-mastery [p. 688] of the Nietzschean superman does not eradicate the will to live but expresses the will to power, of which the highest form is power over himself.^
This power is precisely what Dostoevsky's Underground Man denies that he possesses. His self-consciousness is an incurable disease; his knowledge serves only to make him aware of his own unaswerable questions, his virtue to disgust him with his loathesome vices, his candor to reveal his trickiness, his persistence to demonstrate his utter volatility. He offers a disquieting counterstatement to Rousseau's program of self-revelation. And yet he really is knowing, candid, and persistent--even virtuous in his peculiar way. If he cannot achieve the freedom of love or of self-denial or of self-mastery, at least he can proclaim that he is far more alive than his audience. In all his individual ambiguity and torment, he exists, as they do not in their complacent social identities. Even though he can express his freedom only by perversity, he clings to it with some joy and pride; for in that minimal form he still touches upon the value of selfhood that others have asserted more confidently and perhaps with less right to make the claim.^ [p. 689]
[The introduction/Self-consciousness, from Ellmann, Richard and Charles Feidelson, Jr, eds. The Modern Tradition, Backgrounds of Modern Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. 1965.]
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