Conceptions of the ‘I’, the ‘ego’, the ‘person’, the ‘subject’, the ‘individual’ or the ‘self’ have become increasingly important in Western philosophy since Descartes and his cogito. By asserting « I think », and even more so « I doubt », Descartes placed the singular existence of the « I » and the pre-eminence of the « ego » at the centre of his philosophy. Before him, no doubt, other philosophers had an idea of the ‘self’, but they did not have the idea of basing this idea on the assurance of a doubt about it.
Take Montaigne, for example. Pascal described, with a kind of light-hearted irony, the nature of the doubt that assailed the author of the Essays, a doubt so doubtful that it made him doubt even his own doubt: « Montaigne places all things in such universal and general doubt that this doubt carries itself away, that is to say, if he doubts, and doubting even this last proposition, his uncertainty rolls over itself in a perpetual circle without rest; opposing equally those who assure that everything is uncertain and those who assure that everything is not, because he does not want to assure anything. The essence of his opinion, which he has not been able to express by any positive term, is to be found in this self-doubting and self-ignoring ignorance, which he calls his master form. For if he says he doubts, he betrays himself, by at least assuring that he doubts; which being formally against his intention, he could only explain by interrogation; so that, not wanting to say ‘I don’t know’ he says ‘What do I know?’ of which he makes his motto. »i
After Descartes, the so-called ‘modern’ philosophical systems that followed, and especially the German idealist philosophies, amplified interest in the figures of ‘I’, ‘ego’ and ‘self’. These personal pronouns, in their deceptive simplicity, embodied various attempts, literally semantic and grammatical, to denote what human beings ‘are’, or rather appear to be, and thus more conveniently designate, at least in appearance, ‘what makes each of us what we are’ii .
But there is nothing less timeless than ‘modernity’. Modern philosophies, as the latest arrivals in the history of thought, are predictably doomed to have to pass the baton in their turn at some point in the future. In their passing glitter, their assertive arrogance, their piecemeal questioning, their contrived theses, they can never make us forget that the conceptions on which they are based are not in themselves universal or absolutely necessary. Other thinkers, of whom we have no idea, will perhaps, in the centuries to come, come up with other points of view. There is no doubt that, on a subject as obscure, profound and abysmal as that of the subject or consciousness, alternative views will flourish and bear new fruit.
If we look briefly at the past, neither the Hebrews nor the ancient Greeks, to take these two examples, attached to the personal pronouns in use in the grammars of their languages, Semitic and Indo-European respectively, an ontological weight comparable to that which they took on in modern philosophies of the ‘subject’, such as those of Descartes, Kant, Fichte or Hegel. But in the absence of ontological weight, their pronouns possessed other qualities, more evanescent, intangible or implicit, perhaps, but nonetheless highly significant, allusive and challenging.
As far as the ancient Hebrews are concerned, several grammatical treatises would not exhaust the subject of ‘subject’. To give an idea of the resources of Hebrew grammatical forms, I will limit myself here to the example of the three personal pronouns juxtaposed one after the other, אֲנִי אֲנִי הוּא , ani, ani, hu’, (« me, me, him »), when God (YHVH) used them to name himself in Deuteronomy, 32,39. This Trinitarian and strange combination of two ‘me’ and one ‘him’ seems designed to reveal a kind of latent, abysmal power in these pronouns intended to define the essence of God.
As for the ancient Greeks, the role of the ‘self’ is nothing less than simple or elusive in Hesiod, Homer, the pre-Socratic philosophers and Plato. But it is not ‘modern’. Frédérique Ildefonse, in her book Le multiple dans l’âme. Sur l’intériorité comme problème, makes a point of expressing her reluctance in principle to use the very word ‘self’ in the context of Greek mythology or philosophy. She considers that the philosophical use of the word ‘I’ is inadvisable, because it is tantamount to « reproducing grammatical categories in the order of the concept, in this case transforming a personal pronoun into a concept »iv . In her view, the ‘I’ has the character of a ‘false end’. It fixes or freezes reflection prematurely. « Rather, the concept of the self artificially blocks the analysis, when it could be developed further ».v
She refers to Lacan, who does not believe in the ‘I’ either. Lacan refers to it in a curiously Anglo-Latin phrase, ‘autonomous ego’, and believes that belief in its existence is ‘a rather common folly’…
« What inner necessity does it serve to say that somewhere there must be an autonomous ego? This conviction goes beyond the individual naivety of the subject who believes in himself, who believes that he is himself – a fairly common folly, and not a complete folly, because it is part of the order of beliefs. Obviously we all tend to believe that we are us. But we’re not as sure as that, if you look closely enough. In many very specific circumstances, we doubt it, without undergoing any depersonalisation ».vi
The Latin word ego comes from the Greek ἐγώ whose Indo-European root is *aghamvii , which gave rise to several other derivatives in various Indo-European languages, including the Gothic ik, the German ich and, most originally, the Sanskrit अहम्, aham. The latter form is also, it should be noted, the origin of the pronouns moi in French and me in English. Notwithstanding the existence of the word ἐγώ, ‘me’, it remains a matter of debate how the ancient Greeks conceptualised the nature of what it covered. For example, the Athenian states in Plato’s Laws, according to the translation by Auguste Diès: ‘The soul is entirely superior to the body, and, in this very life, what constitutes our self is nothing other than the soul: the body is, for each of us, only the concomitant image; thus we are quite right to say that the lifeless body is only the image of the dead, and that the real self of each of us, what we call the immortal soul, goes to give account before other gods, as our ancestral law declares. »viii In this translation, we see that the word ‘me’ appears twice, although the Greek word ἐγώ is in fact completely absent from the Greek original… On this ground, F. Ildefonse criticises the classical translations of Platoix , which render the expression ‘τὸ παρεχόμενον ἡμῶν ἕκαστον τοῦτ’εἶναι’ (to parekhomenon hèmôn hékaston toût’eïnai) by: « the real self of each of us », or by: « what constitutes our self ». She recommends sticking to a more literal version, and suggests translating ‘τὸ παρεχόμενον ἡμῶν ἕκαστον τοῦτ’εἶναι μηδὲν ἀλλ’ᾒ τὴν ψυχήν’ by « what makes each of us what we are, it is nothing other than our soul ». In doing so, she is moreover in full agreement with Léon Robin’s translation, published in 1950 in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, and which is almost identical: « ce qui fait de chacun de nous ce qu’il est, n’est rien d’autre que son âme ».x F. Ildefonse also quotes Michel Narcyxi who also questions the translation of ἡμῶν ἕκαστον (hèmôn hékaston) as « self ». In fact, there is nothing in the original Greek text to suggest that for Plato ‘the true self is the soul’. Without using the word ἐγώ, ‘I, self’, Plato invites us to explore other avenues, such as that of the ‘immortal principle of the soul’ (arkhen psukhès athanaton) or that of the inner ‘demon’ (daimon) supposed to inhabit the soul.
By way of comparison with these resolutely non-modern Platonic ideas, Michel Narcy refers to the definition of the self as given by Adolphe Franck’s Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques: « The self is the name by which modern philosophers are accustomed to designate the soul insofar as it is aware of itself and conceives of its own operations, or that it is both the subject and the object of its thought ».xii This definition establishes a link between the concept of self and that of consciousness, a link notoriously absent in Plato. Adolphe Franck’s article reinforces the idea of an identity equation between the self, the soul and consciousness. In Kantian philosophy, this identity takes on a more abstract meaning, that of the pure self or self-reflective consciousness. For Fichte, the abstract self will even identify with the idea of the absolute, insofar as it thinks itself. For Schelling and Hegel, it embodies the particular form or manifestation of the absolute insofar as this form reveals it to itself. « When Descartes defined himself as something that thinks, res cogitans, or enunciated the famous proposition: I think, therefore I am, he was really putting the self in the place of the soul; and this substitution or, to put it more accurately, this equation, he did not content himself with establishing it in the substance of things, he also made it pass into language. Because, ‘on the one hand’, he says (Sixth Meditation, § 8), ‘I have a clear and distinct idea of myself in so far as I am only a thing that thinks and is not extended, and because, on the other hand, I have a distinct idea of the body in so far as it is only an extended thing and does not think, it is certain that this self, that is to say my soul, through which I am what I am, is entirely and truly distinct from my body, and that it can be or exist without it. »xiii However, we do not see that this expression ever took on the rigorous and absolute meaning that was later attached to it, either by him or by any of his disciples. He does intentionally say ‘I’ instead of ‘my soul’, but he does not use theword ‘I’ to designate the soul or the spirit in general. It is only in the German school of thought that we come across this expression for the first time, and it is also there that it reaches a degree of abstraction that the psychological or experimental method, brought in by Descartes, cannot authorise. The self, in Kant’s system, is not the soul or the human person, but consciousness only, thought insofar as it reflects itself, i.e. its own acts, and the phenomena on which it is exercised. Hence, for the founder of critical philosophy, two kinds of self: the pure self (das reine ich) and the empirical self. The first, as we have just said, is the consciousness that thought has of itself and of the functions that are entirely its own; the second is the consciousness applied to the phenomena of sensibility and experience. Fichte makes the ego the absolute being itself, thought substituted for the creative power and drawing everything from its own bosom, mind and matter, soul and body, humanity and nature, after it has made itself, or posited its own existence. Finally, in the doctrine of Schelling and Hegel, the self isneither the human soul, nor human consciousness, nor thought taken in its absolute unity and placed in the place of God; it is only one of the forms or manifestations of the absolute, that which reveals it to itself, when, after having spread out as it were in nature, it returns to itself or collects itself in humanity. » xiv
If we were to undertake a general history of the word « I » and of the conceptions attached to it, we could undoubtedly determine that the « I » has never been considered to be perfectly identical with what is called the soul or consciousness. The self can certainly represent the soul, but only when it has reached a state of development where it is truly aware of itself and its various ways of being. But the « I » doesnot embody the very essence of the soul, nor the whole range of its manifestations. It does not show it to us in all its possible states and in all the putative forms of its existence. There are certainly states in which the soul does not yet know itself. Thus the soul in infancy, and before that during the uterine life that precedes birth. There are also states in which it ceases to know itself, as in the time of dreams, deep sleep, and the various states of unconsciousness that can affect life, without the soul necessarily being aware of being a self. If we wish to affirm that the notion of self is formally linked to that of consciousness, what then becomes of the identity of the human person in cases where this consciousness is not complete, or is more or less obscured? Is not the soul then distinct from the self, when it is immersed in the obscure sensations of a relative or absolute unconsciousness, or when it is dominated by instinctive faculties, in which consciousness plays no assured role?
The modern preeminence of the ego over the notion of the soul, – downgraded to the status of a Platonic essence, and as such discredited –, is now apparently predominant. But for how much longer? Neuroscience research has not found the slightest trace of soul in synaptic microtubules. Is this the end of the story? It’s doubtful.
It is certain, on the other hand, that the dominance of the ego leads moderns to dismiss any role for the soul in thought, and to postulate that thought is in some way identical to the ego. The ego becomes the ultimate symbol of the human person who has reached the full development of her ‘consciousness’. This eminent role of ‘consciousness’ was also undoubtedly one of the main reasons for the emergence of the ego, the reason why the human person could be considered by the idealist philosophies already mentioned as a simple ‘mode’ of divine thought, becoming aware of itself.
But there are many other avenues open to us if we are prepared to stray from the beaten track. Firstly, consciousness could be considered as pure energy, and not as a state. From this point of view, it would not be a mode of being of the ego or the subject. Its own movement could be conceptualised as essentially incessant, autonomous, and therefore essentially infinite. The essence of consciousness-energy would be that it always surpasses and increases itself, from its own point of view, in its own world, different from the material world, that ontologically static world where, it is said, ‘nothing is lost, nothing is created’.
Secondly, we cannot exclude a priori the idea that the soul does exist, as a substance, as an irreducible monad. The conceptual annihilation of the soul by modernists could itself be conceptually annihilated in the coming centuries, or millennia, as a result of discoveries that are unimaginable today.
If we follow these lines of thought, we may find that the conceptions of the German idealists (Fichte, Hegel, Schelling), who see in the human soul a kind of incarnate figure of the Absolute, are too simple. Their conclusions are too hasty, too premature. Nothing has yet been absolutely finalised in the great metaphysical and pan-cosmic drama that continues to unfold. Everything remains to be done.
The question of the self isproving to be a thorny one – much more so than a bush of burning thorns.
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iPascal. L’entretien avec M. de Saci sur Épictète et Montaigne. Delagrave, Paris, 1875, p.25
iiTo use Plato’s expression, Laws XII, 959 a, in Léon Robin’s translation.
ivFrédérique Ildefonse The multiple in the soul. On interiority as a problem. Vrin. Paris, 2022, p. 32
vFrédérique Ildefonse The multiple in the soul. On interiority as a problem. Vrin. Paris, 2022, p. 32
viJ. Lacan. The Seminar, Book II. The ego in Freud’s theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis. Paris, Seuil, 1978, p.24
viiMichel Bréal and Anatole Bailly. Latin etymological dictionary. Latin words, grouped according to meaning and etymology. Hachette, Paris, 1918, s.v. « ego ».
viiiPlato, Laws XII, 959 a-b, in the translation by Auguste Diès, quoted by F. Ildefonse.
ixLike those of Joseph de Maistre and Auguste Diès.
x« Between the soul and the body there is a radical difference, and in life precisely what makes each of us what we are is nothing other than our soul, whereas the body is a semblance with which each of us is individually accompanied ; and it is rightly said of the body of a dead man that it is a simulacrum of that man, whereas what each of us really is, that imperishable thing to which we give the name of soul, goes off to other Gods to give account to them, as our national traditions state. » Plato, Laws XII, 959 a-b. Translated by Léon Robin, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, 1950, p.1114.
xiM. Narcy, « En quête du moi chez Platon », in Le moi et l’intériorité, p.58.
xiiDictionnaire des sciences philosophiques by a society of professors and scholars under the direction of M. Adolphe Franck, Paris, Hachette, 1875, p.1122
xiiiDescartes. Méditations métaphysiques. GF Flammarion, Paris, 2009, p.190
xivDictionnaire des sciences philosophiques by a society of professors and scholars under the direction of M. Adolphe Franck, Paris, Hachette, 1875, p.1122
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