'Into The Nothingness of Scorn and Noise'

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,

My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost.

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest - that I loved the best -
Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below - above the vaulted sky. 

(John Clare (1793 – 1864)).

John Clare reaffirms his sense of identity, rather ironically, one might say, as he wrote his great poem in an asylum, at a time of a mental breakdown in which he had lost much of the sense of who or what he is (on occasion he believed himself to be Lord Byron). The sense of alienation is palpable, like that experienced by Poprishchin, the protagonist of Nikolai Gogol's, (1809 – 1852), 'Diary of a Madman': 'They don’t listen to me, they don’t hear me, they don’t see me'.

'What I am none cares or knows'. But what am I? What are the necessary prerequisites for a person being the person that they are? We can identify a person through their physical characteristics, but how much, if anything, has bodily identity to do with our personal identity? 'And God, (∞ - ∞), said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you', (Exodus 3:14). But what does the word 'I' even mean?

David Hume, (1711 – 1776), a radical empiricist, believed all our ideas derived from experience; 'it must be some one impression', said Hume, 'that gives rise to every real idea'. So for Hume there is no real idea of the self, for the impression necessary to give rise to the idea of a self would have to 'continue invariably the same, thro' the whole course of our lives', but no impression is like that, as he explains:

'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  at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of , and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions remov’d by death, and cou’d I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I shou’d be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity. If any one upon serious and unprejudic’d reflexion, thinks he has a different notion of , I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu’d, which he calls ; tho’ I am certain there is no such principle in me... But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement'.

The self is only a bundle of perceptions, for Hume. This is where a commitment to empiricism can lead us, for though Hume acknowledges that the 'self or person is … that to which our several impressions and ideas are suppos'd to have a reference', he replies to the question 'is there a self?' as though it were a question about something that can be observed. 'I never can catch  myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception'.

But then, what about the 'I' that is observing the perception? What is that, if not a self?

'I am not a rationalist, I am an empiricist', said Stephen Fry, (1957 - ), 'there's a very important difference when thinking about thought. Empirical thought is about seeing whether something is true, experimenting with it, finding out, testing it. And sometimes rationalism can be superstition. Like Pascal had a rational theory of light, and it took Newton to poke a hole in some cardboard, and that's the empirical way... clear thinking, a phrase I value highly from Bertrand Russell, and the empirical side of it is this, countries that have kings and queens, (which are rationally stupid, weird ideas), are empirically freer, more socially just, than countries that don't. Look at the world now, look at social justice, happiness, freedom, and equality in the world, and you are thinking Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Benelux countries, and Britain, which does have very high levels of social justice, and Holland. These countries have kings and queens, and they have constitutional monarchies. That's what I mean by being empirical. I am not saying that you must therefore have a king or queen in order to be free. All I am saying is having one doesn't stop you from being freer, opener, these are very open societies. Denmark, and Sweden, and Norway in particular, incredible open societies'.

So much obvious confirmation bias, (are not France, or Germany, open societies?), but in addition, 'facts have to be discovered by observation, not by reasoning', said Bertrand Russell, (1872 – 1970), and yet are not observations theory-laden, as Fry demonstrates, given the discernible presuppositions in what he is claiming on the basis of his observations? And even if we can agree on the facts, (without going into the question of what constitutes a 'fact', ('the world is the totality of facts, not of things', said Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1889 – 1951), it is certainly a fact, despite the oft made assertion to the contrary, that facts are not the kind of things that could ever, as it were, speak for themselves. We have to speak for them, if I may so put it.

So, from his observations of countries that have kings and queens, H. G. Wells, (1866 – 1946), came to very different conclusions from those of Fry: 'I have always regarded and written of monarchy as a profoundly corrupting influence upon our national life, imposing an intricate snobbishness on our dominant classes, upon our religions, educational, military, naval and combatant services generally, burking the promotion of capable men and reserving power in the community entirely for the privileged supporters of our Hanoverian monarchy'.

So much for empiricism.

''Tis so much to be a king, that he only is so by being so', said Michel de Montaigne, (1533 – 1552).

But I digress. I merely make the point that a one-sided and dogmatic empiricism will not in itself yield an answer to the question, 'what am I?' Given that our mental lives have their own peculiar kinds of reality, a more appropriate methodology is needed. Perhaps phenomenology, the study of consciousness as it appears to itself, (hence, the study of 'phenomena', appearances). On the positive side, phenomenology is non-dogmatic; that is, if we cannot eliminate our presuppositions entirely, we can at least get them under some sort of control. But there is a problem. Jean-Paul Sartre, (1905 – 1980), an existential phenomenologist, described his great work 'Being and Nothingness' as 'an essay in phenomenological ontology'; and that suggests what must be a rather awkward combination of metaphysics, (what exists), and epistemology, (what we can know about what exists). The problem stems from subjectivity. Sartre operates within a peculiar understanding of S?ren Kierkegaard's, (1813 – 1855), notion of subjective truth, which Kierkegaard defined as 'an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation process of the most passionate inwardness'.

Subjective truth is a good thing, for Kierkegaard, not so for Sartre. For, as we reflect on ourselves, the reflection is necessarily distorted, and a distorted reflective belief, that is just self-deception, (or even if it is not self-deception, our beliefs about ourselves will always be wrong, or at least distorted); and that means that Sartre's methodology, being reflective, can only produce results that are necessarily distorted.

An example may suffice to make the difficulty clear; (I take it from literature, again, a habit of mine, but Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's, (1770 – 1831), philosophical writings are full of literary references, so, if it is fine by him, then it is fine by me too).

In 'The Murder of Gonzago', that play within another play, 'Hamlet', the Player Queen vows an undying fidelity to her lord, the Player King, after his death: 
'A second time I kill my husband dead 
When second husband kisses me in bed'.
As the Player King, though somewhat cynical about what he has heard, falls asleep, Hamlet, in the audience with his mother, asks: 

HAMLET

Madam, how like you this play?

GERTRUDE

The lady protests too much, methinks.

('Hamlet', Act 3, Scene 2).

By which she means the Player Queen is overdoing it, with her protestations of love and everlasting fidelity to the Player King.

And there's the rub. For a mere belief, for Sartre, is not about something we know, it is 'the adherence of being to its object when the object is not given or is given indistinctly', (like faith, hence, 'bad faith', or self-deception); and adhering to an object is committing to it, as the Player Queen commits herself to her fidelity. Her protestations are necessary to convince herself, as well as the Player King, of her fidelity. She may truly believe in her fidelity, but this kind of belief is not knowledge. She needs to talk herself into believing it, as we talk ourselves into believing whatever we believe about ourselves, in the performance of whatever role we happen to be playing.

The Player Queen is not so much protesting too much as protesting just enough to convince herself of what she is protesting about. For Kierkegaard a belief that is an achievement, a product of our own activity, sustained by our own efforts, that is something of value; for Sartre it leads to the inevitability of self-deception. ' I am what I am not and I am not what I am', Sartre famously said. We cannot even be sincere, that is, we cannot see ourselves objectively for what we really are; for there is nothing that we really are; there is no real me. The (objective) self seems to have disappeared again, as it did with Hume.

'This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me', said Albert Camus, (1913 - 1960). 'Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself'.  

And given that 'we must abandon the primacy of knowledge', according to Sartre, what of the answer to the question 'what am I?' Even were my situation to be like that of Clare, that is, 'none cares or knows', I can never answer that question either.... for I cannot  be anything. 

And so, we journey 'into the nothingness of scorn and noise'; and at the end of it all?

 ........Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

('Macbeth', Act 5, Scene 5).

However, players on the world's stage we may be, but there is an upside, of a kind, to this particular analysis of the human condition:

'We are what we pretend to be', said Kurt Vonnegut, (1922 – 2007), 'so we must be careful about what we pretend to be'.