ethics news & views: Summer faculty seminar explores new and ancient approaches to "the moral self"

August 23, 2004

Summer faculty seminar explores new and ancient approaches to "the moral self"

During the latter half of May, fifteen Emory faculty participated in the 2004 Ethics Center’s annual faculty seminar. This year’s topic, “The Moral Self: Ethical, Psychological, Theological, and Cultural Constructions” witnessed three thematic approaches to the self emerge from the participants.

An interesting facet was the occasional resonance among perspectives that one wouldn’t ordinarily anticipate, such as the Buddhist view of self with the contemporary neurological understanding of self; or the “positionality” conception of self that is current in disability studies and feminism with the antiessentialist epistemology of someone like Richard Rorty.

In the end, our participants were respectful of David Hume’s famous observation that there is no impression of the self, such as the impression I have of this computer screen right now or of my visual memory of my grandmother. Yet, we cannot get very far in our moral lives and our moral communities without talking about one. Indeed, the Eastern insistence on the nonself—which I have great respect for—is nevertheless so persistent that it speaks to the natural human tendency to take our “selves” very seriously indeed. In any event and very briefly, here are three thematic treatments of the self that arose in the seminar:

1) A constructionist view of the self whose point of departure understands the self as a bio-socio-lingual construct, especially given the self’s residence in a body and a community. This view is a direct counterpoint to classical philosophy’s repudiation of interest in the body, given the body’s association with appetitive drives, its nonpurity, and its impermanence. Beginning with the ancient Greeks but reaching its apotheosis probably with Descartes, classical philosophy is so disposed towards universality, reason/mind, and moral purity that the body is only recognized as something to be controlled and, better, overcome in the West’s relentless pursuit of the hallowed “universal.”

In various ways, however, a number of faculty called attention to the inevitability of the self as constituted or constructed, since whatever the self is and however much we would like, the self cannot dismiss its bodily connectedness, its locality in space, and its intelligibility as a member in a community of language users. As Richard Rorty has observed, we cannot assume a “God’s Eye” view of the way the world really is because my neurophysiological wiring and my being forced to use the artificiality of some particular language prohibits it. Thus, we might well look to revelation for that perspective because it won’t be available through our sensorium.

Paradoxically, however, that very understanding might offer a notion that binds us all together: That to understand my self or anyone’s self is to understand its specificity. By not so much thinking but imagining, one comes closer to humanizing the other in attempting to appreciate how that other self evolved. But doing so entails my giving up the supposition about the regnancy of my world perspective, as it is, alas, only one among billions.

2) A neuropsychological position that would understand self as a “collection of schemata regarding one’s abilities, traits and attitudes that guides our behaviors, choices and social interactions,” and whose primary residence may well be in the ventromedical prefrontal cortex. This is a very provocative construct as it tends to see the self as not “thingly” but rather as a system of processes—such that there are multiple selves—that explain how it is we can function on any number of levels.

Borrowing from thinkers like Antonio Damasio, we might think of one of our selves as one about which we are never and can never be conscious. This self regulates our metabolism and the innumerable bodily functions that we take for granted until we become seriously ill. Existing in no specific place but throughout the brain-body architecture, this self literally keeps us going, and usually in an incredibly unobtrusive way. The only time it asserts itself is when, for example, we experience a bout of, say, vertigo or hypoglycemia, prompting us to ask, “What is wrong with me?”

Yet, even here, this “ur-self” is not present to us. Rather another self, inextricably tied with my consciousness, springs into action. Self-aware that this hypoglycemic episode is mine and not someone else’s, this self is able to activate measures that restore bodily equilibrium and accommodate its needs and interests. This self can objectify itself, presume to know itself, and communicate its needs to others. Importantly, this self is quintessentially temporal in its being aware of and sustaining its interests and intentions over time. It is able to know what it needs and to hold these representations firm. It is that overall and self-activating schema of one’s abilities, traits and attitudes that guide our behaviors, choices and social actions. Persons with advanced Alzheimer’s have lost this sense of self. We sadly look for glimmers of their “old self” as we watch it disappear as the disease progresses.

A third sense of self is the autobiographical self. This is the self of our narratives and history—the self as the continuous “me” from my birth till my death. Notice how important it is to maintain the legitimacy of this self-construct as without it, we couldn’t out make a will. That is, we’d have no justification for saying that the wishes of the “I” that were made when I executed the will apply to the property owned by the “I” of today because the two selves are very different. Indeed, for any ownership in anything to exist, there has to be a notion of a self-same, continuing “self” that endures throughout time. Otherwise, as I am not physically the same person from moment to moment, my property would have to belong to an infinite number of different selves, which is preposterous.

3) An Eastern perspective on the self that would indict the West’s preoccupation with the self as evidence of a deep cultural narcissism and recommend that the self is something we should get over. This view of self has considerable resonance with the neurological view, as each would prefer to talk of the self as a process rather than as a thing. The Eastern view seems to admit much more ethical import, however, as it tends to suggest that much of human suffering occurs because of a toxic preoccupation with the self. The East’s desire to lose the self by a meditative immersion in the flow of life and time has a curious resonance with the neurological view of the self as a biological process, whose fictive representation emerges when we objectify the self in language. It is interesting in this respect to note how often individuals, especially younger ones, search for their “true” self and how a Buddhist perspective would repudiate the whole idea.

The above are only some of the themes discussed in this seminar. I would be remiss not to mention, however, how such a seminar—which occurred daily over eight sessions—was not unlike an “intellectual spa” wherein a group of academic professionals exchange ideas and have their imaginations and intellectual interests aroused by their colleagues. I would suggest that a seminar such as this one demonstrates the meaning of the “university” in the richest sense.

[ Posted by John Banja at August 23, 2004 11:01 AM |