The Complex Nature of the Individual
INTRODUCTION
I journal extensively; I write not merely about the mundane and everyday (in fact, I usually leave that out altogether—to my chagrin later on) but instead I focus on the thoughts and ideas I have, which often have a long developmental history of their own and are not simply spur-of-the-moment musings. Usually my writings are heavily influenced by concepts I’ve picked up in the surrounding weeks (from classes, books, conversations with friends, and so forth). I like to integrate disparate concepts into my writing, to try to see what novel and meaningful connections I can make. Although this is a fun and sometimes whimsical activity, it is also a genuine endeavor with a specific purpose: to know myself.
Many people will tell you to “be yourself”. The great Socrates instead commanded “Know thyself”! But what does it mean to know yourself? And what does it mean to be yourself? We will soon look to Sartre for some of his thoughts on the matter (and form).
WHAT ARE PEOPLE LIKE, AND WHAT DO THEY STRIVE TOWARDS?
People are multi-faceted, complex creatures characterized by contradictions and inconsistencies. As an observer of humanity, and as a person, I am uniquely qualified in making this claim. But furthermore, speak to any dialectician and you will likely hear about how progress develops out of opposites, opposition, conflict, negation, and so forth. So, what does this mean for an individual? One observation I’ve made is that many people strive for inner harmony, in spite of their complex human condition (i.e., internal conflict). But many people attempt to obtain this harmony by both a) avoiding unconscious conflict (as Freud might term it) and b) forming a negative attitude towards it. Unfortunately, inner discord doesn’t merely go away because the individual tries to avoid it.
Following the “inner harmony” goal which we might posit, some individuals further wish for a consistent self, and value identity similarly to how logical consistency is valued, while viewing struggle and conflict as negative (internal dissonance may be perceived as a threat to identity, because facing conflict results in change). Similar to the Platonic forms, many people themselves are psychologically motivated to strive for the eternal and immutable (what we might call the criteria of the “real”, wherein the real is intelligible [i.e., accessible via reason and the intellect], unchanging, and so forth). Why? To be eternal and unchanging is simply the opposite of being temporal, limited, mutable, etc. Doesn’t it seem better to be immutable, godlike, rather than to accept oneself as human, all too human? This psychological motivation may manifest in a number of ways: striving to become famous, mastering an intellectual subject such as philosophy, having children and thus “living on” after death, or simply abstaining from life and not taking stances on worldly things or having opinions (to abstain from inserting oneself into temporal matters may appear to the individual as a means by which to remain “transcendent” and above mere worldly matters; it is also a way to reject identity).
Of course, this is not exactly true of all people. Some others may reject the ‘criteria of intelligibility’ themselves, on the grounds that they are simply incompatible with this world—these people are, generally speaking, existentialists, who emphasize existence (being) over essence (form or intelligibility) and aim to embrace life as it is (wherein ‘as it is’ is typically defined as ‘without external objective meaning’, and is instead transient, mutable, and so forth). Perhaps the existentialists, following Nietzsche, and the dialectically-oriented, might view conflict and struggle as a positive, as a means to progress, because they are not constrained by a “futile passion”—the term Sartre gives to humanity’s striving for godlikeness. But without transcendence, with only this world, where does such progress lead?
Existential, individualistic nihilism is another curious case, of which one might be suspicious, and of which there are many types. What motivates an individual to reject meaning? (Say in this case, a nihilist is someone who rejects both subjective and objective meaning, concluding that both are impossible, and life is categorically meaningless). Is this freeing? Or is this a means of “throwing” off the Sartrean state of being “condemned to be free”? While existentialists aspire to life-affirming activity, nihilists are typically “accused” of negating being, negating life—and nihilism itself could be termed a sort of ‘life-negating activity’ (to borrow some of Nietzsche’s ideas).
DOSTOEVSKY’S ‘UNDERGROUND MAN’, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND IDENTITY
One great example is Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, from Notes from Underground, who is a sort of nihilist, a nihilist in despair, riddled with conflict and contradiction, and appraising these things as altogether negative, indeed feeling as though he “never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect’ (p. 5). He says, “And now I am living my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something” (p. 5). Here, the Underground Man contrasts himself with the Man of Action, who is a person of defined character (though therefore limited, if one takes identity as limiting) and who is, of course, active—these are people who do things and become things. While the Man of Action as such is simply not self-reflective, The Underground Man looks on consciousness as a disease, saying, “I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness” (p. 7). If you’ve read it, does this call to mind Peter Wessel Zapffe’s “The Last Messiah” (as a comparison), or Nietzsche’s concept of the Ubermensch (as a contrast)?
The idea of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man as a contrast to the Man of Action is related to one’s individual stance towards identity (recall the principle of identity: A=A; and A=B iff. A and B have all and only the same qualities). The Man of Action, on the one hand, commits to an identity: a defined nature and role. However, identity is, on one view, defined by negation: if you are A, then you are not C. If you are this, you are not that, because according to the identity of indiscernibles, no two separate objects can have all of their properties in common. So, to take an identity is automatically to limit oneself. Or, to view identity as limiting or absolutely binding might then lead an individual to dismiss, ignore, try to reconcile, or explain away a myriad of inner contradictions.
Whether one approaches identity as a positive or a negative is dependent on…many things, beyond the scope of this essay. But it is safe to say Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is faced with a set of alternatives: to be a hero or an insect, to be good or wicked, to be or…not to be, as Shakespeare said long ago. And he chooses none. His choice is not to choose, not to take an identity, and yet there is an obvious strain here, because the Underground Man, while not taking an identity, still lives as though the criteria of identity are binding for an individual—hence he views his complex nature as frustrating.
The Underground Man goes so far as to say, “…as a matter of fact I was never able to become wicked. I was conscious every moment of so very many elements in myself most opposite to that. I felt them simply swarming in me all my life, asking to be let out of me, but I would not let them, I would not, I purposefully would not let them out. They tormented me to the point of shame…” (p. 5).
These preceding examples of how different individuals respond to identity, conflict, and the like, are loosely defined and utterly incomplete. But the general point is that there are many ways to view the state of being multi-faceted, and if we proceed under the assumption that people are in fact muti-faceted and complex, this general claim may offer us a method to get to know oneself a bit better—regardless of the particular stance an individual takes in regard to ‘ontological phenomenology’ as Sartre terms it, or more simply, the nature of our being. That is, whether you are an existentialist, a nihilist, or a Man of Action (or whether you think those examples are illuminating or sensical) both the internal conflicts you have and the way you approach them can teach you about yourself.
JOURNALING, IDENTITY, AND SARTRE
Back to journaling, to journal is a surprisingly risky endeavor, because it can commit a person to a rigid self-conception: so aware of the way you think and the inclinations you have, you might come to identify with them incredibly strongly, not wanting to change or progress. But a journal itself is much like an author’s autobiography of a specific character—like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. It is an autobiography, yet one can look at it in two ways: one, in-and-of-itself, and two, with the knowledge that it was written by someone else, with an agenda beyond the words on the page themselves. While some of us may write about ourselves and our lives, this is a mere “slice of life” with its own story behind it, an additional layer of meaning. We are, in a sense, the authors of ourselves as our own literary characters. Does this mean it is impossible to represent ourselves authentically? Not necessarily. But I think it means is there are always underlying motivations, always contextual information separate from the text itself, a sort of “meta” element in all pieces of writing (this one included, of course!).
There is, in a sentence, a separation between the self as “being” and the self as “awareness”. This calls to mind Sartre’s distinction of the in-itself and the for-itself, discussed extensively in his major work Being and Nothingness. In brief oversimplification, according to Sartre, in people, two distinct types of being are both present, and the result is a contradiction impossible to reconcile. Sartre describes them as follows: being-in-itself is quite ‘simple’; it is the whole of being, the existence itself of an object. It is non-reflective, unconscious, and immediate. Being-in-itself is more like matter than form, if you want to think about this in Aristotelian terms (which aren’t entirely accurate for our discussion but may help to form a conceptual map). Being-for-itself is essentially reflective consciousness—for instance, yes I am Ashley; but I’m also conscious and aware of being Ashley (and further, I am conscious of not being my mother, my father, the person I may or may not be dating, and so on; but my consciousness of my self is not the same thing as my ‘self’. The two aren’t perfectly coincident. Sartre describes being-in-itself (and by extension, consciousness) as a form of negation, a form of non-being, because by reflecting on myself I also see all that I am not, all that I lack, and all that is wholly external to me. (In fact, in the title of this book, Being and Nothingness¸ ‘being’ refers to being-in-itself, and ‘nothingness’ refers to being-for-itself.)
On a less abstract level, the contradiction some people with a Sartrean predilection face is this: one cannot simultaneously be oneself and be aware of oneself (i.e., be self-reflective and self-conscious). For instance, when I am myself, I can’t “see” myself, yet when I reflect on who I am, where do I go? The impossible reconciliation between these two types of being (according to Sartre) would be God. So, humans accordingly strive (whether they phrase it like this or not) to become like God: the in-itself-for-itself—this is another way of looking at the Platonic criteria we went over earlier.
The in-itself-for-itself (the impossible perfect union of being-in-itself and being-for-itself) would be something like this: you are the foundation of your own being; you are looking at the world, and all it contains, but you are seeing not external things or ‘The Other’, you are seeing yourself. There is then no separation between your being yourself, and your awareness of yourself.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
How do Freud’s idea of unconscious conflict, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Hegel’s dialectical idealism, Sartre’s ontological phenomenology, Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, nihilists, existentialists, those who embrace identity, those who reject it as limiting, Zapffe’s ‘Last Messiah’, Aristotle’s form-matter compound, and Plato’s idea of the forms and intelligibles inform us about ourselves? How does all of this respond to Socrates’ call to “know thyself”? How does all this tell us what it means to “be yourself”?
In synthesizing these views [messily and quickly, in-keeping with the purpose of Philosophy in a Can]: one way to know yourself is to examine your own inner conflicts with the aim of understanding and not judgement. (In doing so, Carl Jung in particular emphasizes not the past but the present when considering internal conflict [in distinction from Freud]).
Perhaps conflict is to you a good thing, if you side with some of these thinkers. Perhaps it is a call to change, to take action, or to embrace the existential “burden” of freedom. Whether you believe in transcendent meaning or not, have a defined personal identity or not (these things are all related in complex ways, but they are not necessary for this following point): your attitude toward struggle and conflict tells you much about yourself. How you approach the very nature of being (whether you are more of an immediate, in-the-moment person, or more reflective and detached—or a combination) tells you about yourself and can illuminate which specific struggles you are prone to face.
An Example
One such conflict, to offer an example, may be the following: imagine a person has internalized Plato’s criteria (i.e., the eternal, unchanging, intelligible are the Real and what we ought to aim for) and applies them to himself. Yet at the same time, imagine this person is nihilistic in the sense that this sort of criteria is deemed impossible to fulfill—perhaps this disposition is a product of the zeitgeist. Then, to “choose life” (i.e., make choices, become someone, etc.), in this instance, could be seen as a punishment!, as it would force one to recognize one’s own finitude, in contrast with the infinite, the transcendent. Such a person may face paralysis in the face of many life choices, from career decisions to friendships and so on, because choice is seen not as a positive, but instead is seen in terms of negation. To choose one possibility of many is then not to choose that thing, but rather to negate other things! As such with identity, to be one thing, for instance a doctor, would be viewed in terms of ‘not being a lawyer’, ‘not being a famous writer’ and so on. And to commit to one person, for instance, would then mean to forego every other possible partner, and thus further instantiate oneself as temporal and limited—no longer a pure subject and observer, but now an object of another person’s gaze. So to be oneself, or to be with someone else, would then mean to put oneself out into the world, the temporal, finite world. Such a person may instead prefer to be an observer of reality, much more than a participant. But such a person wouldn’t feel alive. They would weigh heavier on the side of being-for-itself and lack being-in-itself. If you’ve ever seen the 1987 film Wings of Desire, this might sound familiar. And if you haven’t seen the film, but you enjoy contemplative foreign films, I highly recommend it.
Closing Thoughts Continued
To end on Sartrean terms, to simply be yourself is to lose awareness of yourself. And to be aware of oneself means one cannot just be oneself. A tough predicament indeed—Sartre describes it as an irreconcilable contradiction—and yet out of conflict and strife can come the most meaningful experiences and new perspectives, if only one does not do as the Underground Man does: “I resigned at once and settled into my corner”.
A wise man once told me that the only lessons in life are the hard ones, and no one else can learn them for you—conflict must be faced by the person with the conflict, and self-knowledge comes from within, from both reflection and experience. So in the famous words of Mark Renton from Trainspotting, albeit in a total departure from the sardonic nature of his famous diatribe: “Choose Life” and embrace conflict and uncertainty as a call to become a better version of yourself and learn some things along the way.
READING AND FILM RECOMMENDATIONS FROM THIS ESSAY
Notes From Underground (1864), by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Being and Nothingness (1943) by Jean-Paul Sartre
“The Last Messiah” (1933) by Peter Wessel Zapffe
Trainspotting (1996), directed by Danny Boyle and based on the novel by Irvine Welsh
Wings of Desire (1987), directed by Wim Wenders
Plato’s dialogues, generally
Nietzsche’s criticisms of nihilism
Ashley Katherine Gasdow’s online philosophy column
Acknowledgements
Three people are responsible for a few of the aforementioned film, book, and essay recommendations (they know who they are). Here is where I thank them, for the creative and intellectual inspiration: Thank you!
– Ashley Gasdow