Inwardness: An Outsider's Guide (No Limits) 0231192290, 9780231192293

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Preamble
Explorations in Inwardness
Libraries Lined with Memories
Rashōmon’s Effect
Self-Illuminating Beings
The Face as Interface
Hidden Layers Within
Troubles with Doubles
Dreams of Dreams
More “I”s Than “I Myself”
To Say “I” Is to Lie
Postscript
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Inwardness Jonardon Ganeri

AN OUTSIDER’S GUIDE

Inwardness

NO LIMITS

NO LIMITS Edited by Costica Bradatan The most important questions in life haunt us with a sense of boundlessness: there is no one right way to think about them or an exclusive place to look for answers. Philosophers and prophets, poets and scholars, scientists and artists—all are right in their quest for clarity and meaning. We care about these issues not simply in themselves but for ourselves—for us. To make sense of them is to understand who we are better. No Limits brings together creative thinkers who delight in the pleasure of intellectual hunting, wherever the hunt may take them and whatever critical boundaries they have to trample as they go. And in so doing they prove that such searching is not just rewarding but also transformative. There are no limits to knowledge and self-knowledge—just as there are none to self-fashioning. Aimlessness, Tom Lutz Intervolution: Smart Bodies Smart Things, Mark C. Taylor Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense, Richard Kearney

Inwardness Jonardon Ganeri

AN OUTSIDER’S GUIDE

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ganeri, Jonardon, author. Title: Inwardness : an outsider’s guide / Jonardon Ganeri. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2021] | Series: No limits | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020053886 (print) | LCCN 2020053887 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231192286 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231192293 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231549752 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Self (Philosophy) | Philosophy of mind. Classification: LCC BD438.5 .G358 2021 (print) | LCC BD438.5 (ebook) | DDC 126—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053886 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053887

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Lisa Hamm

For Masha

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Contents

Preamble

ix

Explorations in Inwardness 1 Libraries Lined with Memories 9 Rashōmon’s Effect 17 Self-Illuminating Beings 27 The Face as Interface 35 Hidden Layers Within 43 Troubles with Doubles 51 Dreams of Dreams 61 More “I”s Than “I Myself” 71 To Say “I” Is to Lie 85 Postscript 93 Notes

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Select Bibliography Index

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Preamble

I

n Aśvaghoṣa’s Sanskrit play, Handsome Nanda, a Buddhist monk advises the eponymous hero that the careful examiners who know interiority are doctors for minds filled with passion and dark ignorance.1

Those rare individuals who have made a careful study of the contours of the inner world, this monk points out, are the ones best placed to offer therapeutic advice to others in distress. The Sanskrit word rendered here as “interiority” is adhyātma, an overseeing subjectivity. More commonly a different word is used: antarātman, the hidden “inner self” concealed in the depths of our being. In his magnificent historical survey of inwardness in Hinduism, Buddhism, and

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Christianity, The Truth Within, Gavin Flood notes that this term has its equivalent in the Latin interior homo. Still other expressions, such as “remaining within” (antaḥsthita), and “facing inwards” (antarmukha), are in frequent use among thinkers from the Hindu schools, with the Buddhists preferring instead to talk of “the truth of the inner state of enlightenment” (pratyātmādhigama-dharmaḥ).2 In ten short chapters, this book will lead you in a “careful examination” of that most virtual of all realities: one’s own inner life. The book kicks off by introducing you to the very idea of inwardness or interiority. This is not a matter of teaching anyone a new concept, such as the concept of a komainu, but, as the tenth century philosopher Avicenna put it, a question of “alerting” you to— drawing your attention to— something you already know about but tend to overlook, caught up as you are in the distractions of the everyday. It is appropriate, therefore, to begin with Avicenna’s remarkable thought experiment, in which each of us is invited to imagine ourselves created all at once and flying through space, but with no sensory awareness of our body or external environment. Can it be, nevertheless, as Avicenna claims it is, that you are still aware of something, that you are even then present to yourself? A powerful metaphor in one of the most ancient of the Upaniṣads

PREAMBLE

makes the same point: “Take, for example, a hidden treasure of gold. People who do not know the terrain, even when they pass right over it time and again, would not discover it. In exactly the same way, all these creatures, even though they go there every day, do not discover this [inner] world, for they are led astray by the false.”3 My aim is to understand—and then to cast doubt upon—some of the metaphors that philosophers have drawn on, over the years, in their attempts to make sense of the phenomenon of inwardness. I begin with Aurelius Augustine’s picture of interiority as an inner space whose walls are filled with memories. It is sometimes said that Augustine invented the inner self, and, while I think that goes too far, what he did invent was a certain way of thinking about inwardness, that it is a journey into an inner sanctum. The dominant images here are of travel and of spaces that can be filled with mental objects. In further exploring the issue, I employ a technique which I have found works very well: to juxtapose material presented in one medium with the same material presented in another as a way to triangulate medium and message. I contrast Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashōmon with the short story on which it is based, the Japanese short-story writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s “In a Grove.” The point is to introduce

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readers to the effect named after the film, that a perspective partly constitutes a world. So, to “turn within” is not to withdraw from the world, but to engage in an act of world creation. Here the contrast is between the sparse, noncommittal first-person minimalism of the original story, which upends and subverts the reader’s desire to work out the whodunit, and Kurosawa’s attempt to use the camera lens as the eye of God. Others, especially the Buddhists of India, depict the inward turn as the shining of a light, or a lamp that illuminates the things around it even as it illuminates itself. This isn’t a spatial metaphor but rather a metaphor of access and unveiling: inwardness is an act of revealing something hidden. The last metaphor I will explore puts pressure on the idea that the inner is a private place, and it does so by suggesting that if the aim is to see oneself then the way to do it, indeed the only way, is to look in a mirror. This move makes the subjective essentially intersubjective, because, as Socrates puts it in reply to Alcibiades, “You have observed, then, that the face of the person who looks in the eye of another person, appears visible to himself in the eye-sight of the person opposite to him as in a mirror? And we therefore call this the pupil, because it exhibits the image of that person who looks in it.”4 The face of another is

PREAMBLE

the mirror of oneself, and the face is, most literally, an interface between self and other. I turn to another work of fiction, Kobo Abe’s brilliant philosophical novel The Face of Another, to ponder the extent to which inwardness is constituted by such interchanges at the interface. By this point in the book, you will have been “alerted” to an inwardness implicit in the human condition, and you will have a feel for the pros and cons of several of the leading metaphors that thinkers have drawn on to domesticate the idea. Whichever metaphor one chooses, the inner world has a certain structure, and I move on to look at that structure and what can be said of it. Two leading motifs guide these chapters. First, that the inner world is layered, like a Matryoshka doll or an onion. Now the challenge is to find some correlate to the notion of “peeling away” the outer layers to reveal what is hidden within—a kernel, the kernel of truth within. No text has spoken more powerfully to this aspect of self-discovery than the marvelous poetry of the earliest Upaniṣads, predating the Buddha by several centuries. Yet perhaps the truth about the structure of the within is that it is more like a hall of mirrors, and a better way to picture it would be through such phenomena as the mise en abyme, or the trope of the dream-inside-adream. There are powerful echoes of that line of

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thought in the famous parable of the butterfly in the Daoist Zhuangzi, a text I read in juxtaposition with Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Circular Ruins”; Borges’s short stories often supply deep explorations of the philosophy of inwardness in fiction. The second motif is that to gain a handle on the idea that the phenomenology of the first-person position has a certain distinctive structure is to think that there are different parts in dialogue, coconstituting the self. I will show that this, indeed, is what is at stake in some of the most powerful deployments of the trope of the double in literature, referring to the Tamil writer Mauni and, again, to Borges, and drawing on insights into subjectivity offered by existentialist thinkers Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. Novelists are only human in their desire to hide their inner selves. It was Italo Calvino who put the matter most strongly, saying that “the author, since he has no intention of telling about himself, decided to call the character ‘I’ as if to conceal him, not having to name him or describe him more than this stark pronoun.”5 In the final chapters of this book I look at how, through his use of pseudonyms, the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard sought to disguise himself; and at how, through his contrasting invention of the heteronym, the Portuguese poet Fernando

PREAMBLE

Pessoa sought to simulate, and thence dissimulate, himself. As I move to the end of the book, I disrupt the narrative that has so far played out with the troubling idea that perhaps Avicenna was wrong after all, that perhaps it is just an illusion that there is something within worth paying attention to. Perhaps it is rather as the brilliant French philosopher Simone Weil has said, that the “feeling for reality” which she calls joy is a matter of putting oneself in the world, and it is a fundamental error to think that the direction of attention can or should be turned on its head. Her alarming aside, that “to say ‘I’ is to lie,” hints at the thought, also implicit in Calvino, that to speak of oneself is simply a way to hide. So this brief book is about the interiority of human life, about the various metaphors that have been employed to explore it and explain it, about the phenomenological structure of the subject position, and about the value or otherwise of turning one’s gaze inward. I invoke ideas from many of the world’s intellectual cultures, analyzing, sometimes critically, their appeal to metaphors of light, of mirrors, of masks and shadows, and of interior spaces. I draw on expressions of contemporary subjectivity in novelists and filmmakers. At the end, I turn to those troubling dissenters who have said, with an edge, that inwardness is merely an illusion— or, worse, a deceit.

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Explorations in Inwardness

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hat do I mean when I speak of inwardness and interiority, of an inner turn and a hidden inner self? Let me introduce the idea with the help of an experiment. It is not the sort of experiment that requires me to boil up liquids in test tubes or fire particles into each other in hadron colliders, to mash, bash, or smash stuff. It’s instead an experiment in thought, the collision of concepts in an act of imagination. The province of Bactria, just north of the Hindu Kush, and its capital city Balkh, had for centuries been the greatest seat of Greek-infused Central Asian Buddhism, and it was a multicultural meeting place for Zoroastrian, Sogdian, and other major civilizations. Further west along the Silk Road lay Samarkand and Bukhara. It was from Balkh to Bukhara that the father of Avicenna traveled, and it

EXPLORATIONS IN INWARDNESS

was near Bukhara that Avicenna (or, more correctly, ibn Sīnā) was born in 980 CE. In his book On the Soul, Avicenna invites the reader to perform for themselves an unusual mental experiment: So we say: one of us must imagine himself so that he is created all at once and perfect but his sight is veiled from seeing anything external, that he is created floating in the air or in a void so that the resistance of the air does not hit him— a hit he would have to sense— and that his limbs are sepa2

rated from each other so that they do not meet or touch each other. He must then consider whether he affirms the existence of his self (dhāt). He will not hesitate in affirming that his self exists, but he will not thereby affirm any of his limbs, any of his intestines, the heart or the brain, or any external thing. Rather, he will affirm his self without affirming for it length, breadth or depth.1

This man is able to grasp that he exists without grasping that he has a body, and so, it seems, is capable of a sort of self-awareness that is not grounded in sensation. Avicenna is elsewhere clear that his view is that “self-awareness is innate to the self, it is the self’s very existence; so nothing external is needed by

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1.1 The Flying Man, illustration by Nic Bommarito

means of which to apprehend the self—rather, the self is that which apprehends itself.”2 We are being invited to imagine that we find ourselves in a state of total sensory deprivation; in fact, that we have been in this state from the very beginning and have never experienced perceptual or kinesthetic sensations ever at all. And then we are  asked whether, in this imagined state, we can imagine ourselves nevertheless to be self-aware.

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Avicenna says that he can, and since there is nothing to prevent you from performing the same imaginal act yourself, he says that you too can imagine yourself to be self-aware without having, or ever having had, any experience that draws its content from an awareness of one’s body or from contact with the external world mediated by the embodied powers of sensation. You are normally absorbed by the world, Avicenna is saying. Your mind is occupied with the happenings you see around you, the carriages going past, the delicious fragrance emerging from a restaurant’s open door, the heat or the cold, the wind on your face. And yet there is something else that you might notice if only it weren’t for the world’s distractions, a presence of yourself to yourself that is independent of worldly engagement. This is one concrete meaning of inwardness, a presence of self to self unmediated by the body’s contact with an external world. Avicenna says that it is always there, and there even when you are immersed in the sensory saturation tank that is the world. He says that all he is doing with his thought experiment is to “alert” you to something about yourself that is always present but which you normally overlook, preoccupied as you are by all the stimulating events in your surroundings: “We must indicate in this place a manner of establishing

EXPLORATIONS IN INWARDNESS

the existence of the self we have by way of alerting (tanbih) and reminding (tadhīr), giving an indication (ishāra) that has a strong impact on someone who has the power of noticing (mulāḥaza) the truth himself, without needing to educate him, constantly prod him, and divert him from what causes sophistical errors.”3 As Avicenna’s choice of terminology reveals, it’s all  about attention—where it is placed, and how it can be distracted. I don’t know where Avicenna got the idea for his “flying man,” but there is much truth in the suggestion that his conception of inwardness owes its existence to Porphyry (232–304 CE),4 a student of Plotinus (204–260 CE), the presumptive founder of the school of Greek philosophy known as Neoplatonism. One thing we know about Plotinus is that he was obsessed with India and fascinated by Indian philosophy, and he seems to have been on speaking terms with the urtexts of a great deal of Indian philosophy, the Upaniṣads.5 We can, indeed, find in one of the earliest Upaniṣads, the pre-Buddhist Chāndogya Upaniṣad, a method comparable to that of Avicenna for introducing the idea of a hidden, inner self: “Take, for example, a hidden treasure of gold. People who do not know the terrain, even when they pass right over it time and again, would not discover it. In exactly the same way, all these creatures, even though

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they go there every day, do not discover this world of brahman, for they are led astray by the false.”6 One is led astray, this text says, by false desires, desires that serve to mask the true ones. The text introduces the idea that something is hidden, concealed, undisclosed, something precious but overlooked. Another Upaniṣad explains that the false and concealing desires are “outward desires,” and what they mask is the desire to look within: The Self-existent One pierced the apertures

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outward, therefore, one looks out, and not into oneself. A certain wise man in search of immortality, turned his sight inward and saw the self within. Fools pursue outward desires, and enter the trap of death spread wide. But the wise know what constitutes the immortal, and in unstable things here do not seek the stable. Appearance and taste, smell and sounds, touches and sexual acts— That by which one experiences these, by the same one understands— What then is here left behind?7

EXPLORATIONS IN INWARDNESS

This Upaniṣadic text trades on a metaphor of inwardness. While the sense modalities are likened to outward-facing windows, through which one looks out, what one should do is to “turn one’s sight inward” and look “into oneself” (antarātman). So there is already here the idea of an inward turn, a redirection of attention away from objects and events in the world “outside,” and instead toward what is “within.” And there is, in this Upaniṣad, the barest hint of an argument, a proof by demonstration rather than by thought experiment, for the existence of this hidden, inner world. The implicit argument is that there must be something (a faculty or else a mode of awareness) by which even outward-facing perceptions are experienced, and by just this same thing one is also aware of oneself. The premise in this argument is that I can have a sensation without noticing that I am having it: an ache gradually developing in my foot, for instance, which I don’t notice because I’m preoccupied with something else—the conversation I am having with my companion as we walk along a steep mountain path. The premise is formulated with great clarity in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad: “We say: ‘I didn’t see; my attention (manas) was elsewhere. I didn’t hear; my attention was elsewhere.’ For it is through the attention that one sees and hears. Desire,

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decision, doubt, faith and lack of faith, steadfastness and lack of steadfastness, shame, reflection, and fear—all these are simply the attention. Therefore, even when someone touches us on the back, we perceive it through the attention.”8 I notice my sensations only when I attend to them. So there must be a channeling, filtering, selective capacity of the mind, which we call the attention, and, the argument continues, this same power of attention is something I can redirect inward so as to attend, instead, to what is within. Inwardness, claims Avicenna, is the presence of yourself to yourself. For him it is something that could possibly exist independent of any sensory awareness of the world around you. But the main point of his thought experiment is to convince you that this form of self-presence is there even when you are immersed in the world; you just don’t notice it. The earliest Upaniṣads are similarly uninterested in the bare metaphysical possibility of self-awareness in a state of total sensory deprivation. For them the point is rather that it is always possible to redirect one’s attention, to turn it inward instead of outward, and that this possibility flows from the very nature of attention itself. So, for both, inwardness is not a matter of denying the outer, but of changing one’s bearing with respect to it.

Libraries Lined with Memories

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o not go out, return to yourself; truth dwells in the inner man (in interiore homine),” declares Aurelius Augustine (354–430 CE), an African Berber from Numidia; his words are approvingly quoted by the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl at the end of his Cartesian Meditations.1 Charles Taylor opines that “it was Augustine who introduced the inwardness of radical reflexivity and bequeathed it to the Western tradition of thought,”2 and that’s a sentiment echoed by scholars who happily speak of “Augustine’s invention of the inner self.”3 We have already seen in the last chapter that such claims on behalf of Augustine are an exaggeration, and it is far  more likely to have been Plotinus who was responsible for the introduction into the  “Western” tradition of thought an idea whose appearance in

LIBRARIES LINED WITH MEMORIES

world philosophy can be traced back at least to the pre-Buddhist Upaniṣads.4 What Augustine does invent is an original depiction of the nature of inwardness, which he likens to an inner hall whose walls are lined with memories: I come to the fields and the grand palaces of my memory where there are treasure stores of countless impressions brought there from every imaginable kind of thing that my senses perceived. Stowed away there is everything we reflect upon 10

either by accentuating or depreciating it or in any way whatever modifying the actual things which our sense apprehended; and anything else that has been preserved and deposited and that forgetfulness has not yet consumed and buried. When I am there, I call for whatever I want to be produced: some things are immediately forthcoming; others take longer to look for, and are, as it were, unearthed from more inaccessible places; and yet others cascade out in a rush, and while one particular item is searched and hunted for, they thrust themselves forward en masse as if saying “Can we be the ones?” With the hand of my heart I drive them away from the forefront of my recollection, until what I am after emerges from obscurity and

LIBRARIES LINED WITH MEMORIES

comes out of hiding into plain sight. Other things are produced in the correct order as required, easily and without any fuss; and the earlier things make way for those that come later, and by making way they return into storage, ready to come forth again whenever I want them. . . . Everything there is preserved separately and in categories, and each has been placed there by means of its own proper access: for example, light and all the colours, and the shapes of bodies, go through the eyes; all kinds of sounds through the ears; all smells through the access of the nostrils; all tastes through the access of the mouth; and, from the sense of touch of the body as a whole, what is hard, and what soft, what is hot or cold, gentle or harsh, heavy or light, inside or outside the body. The vast recesses of memory, and the concealed and indescribable hiding places of one sort or another, receive all this material to be recalled as required and reconsidered: and every bit of it enters the memory by its own access route, and is replaced there. . . . These are my internal thought processes in the vast hall of my memory. . . . This is also the place where I encounter myself, and recall myself: what I experienced, and when, and where, and—when I did have an experience—how it had an impact on me.5

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If we think of inwardness in terms of a metaphor of containment— of halls, receptacles, treasuries, and stores—then the redirection of the attention that is the “inward turn” is akin to stepping inside a room and seeing what is there. You go into your inner room and what you find there, says Augustine, are your memories. So the “container–contained” model of interiority coexists with a perceptual model of introspection: I look around and find here a memory of this event, there a memory of that one. The structure of the inner self is, for Augustine, exactly like that of a library: there are books on the open shelves, waiting to be pulled down, and there are books in the stacks, which one needs to call for and have fetched. A not-inappropriate metaphor for a Church father. Augustine also speaks of himself as a traveler in an inner world: People go off to marvel at the height of mountains and the great waves of the sea and the broad courses of rivers, and the flow of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars: but they neglect themselves. They are not amazed that when I spoke of all these things I was not looking at them with physical sight; or that I would not be speaking of them at all but for the fact that I was seeing within, in my memory, the mountains and waves and rivers and stars that

LIBRARIES LINED WITH MEMORIES

I have seen in person, and the ocean to which I give credence— and all of them with just as wide a distance between them as if I were seeing them externally. Even so, when I looked at them with my eyes, I did now absorb them into myself by the act of looking at them, and it is not they themselves that abide with me, but impressions of them; and I know which impression was made upon me by which physical sense.6

Augustine has likened interiority to a hall of recollection, complete with its own mechanisms of acquisition, retrieval, and cataloguing. And yet there is something deeply amiss in this depiction of the inward turn as literally perceiving the contents of a library of memories. One obvious, but perhaps superficial, problem with the container model is that if the library of memories is the self, how can one go inside it—who is the “I” that walks around inside itself? Even if one finds a way to resolve this Augustinian paradox, there are more fundamental difficulties. Suppose we grant that introspection can be understood as a special sort of inwardly turned attention; still, this cannot be just a matter of seeing what is within, for that is to ignore the transformational and the selective aspects of introspection, the fact that introspection is a type of attention under which

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impressions, and the memories of them, are themselves transformed. One contemporary philosopher of mind, Christopher Hill, says, dramatically, that there has been a sort of “imperialist struggle” on behalf of the Augustinian view: “There has been little recognition of the fact that a sensation may be transformed by the act of coming to attend to it, and even less of the fact that a sensation may be brought into existence by attention. Instead of facing these facts and attempting to explain them, philosophers have often waged an imperialist struggle on behalf of inner vision and the inner eye hypothesis.”7 He continues, “I see no reason to prefer imperialism to the view that the phenomenal field is often profoundly changed by the process of coming to attend to a sensation. . . . Thus, consider a case in which someone decides to focus on a sensation that has heretofore been at the margin of consciousness. If the sensation is an itch, attending to it may make it more importunate; if it is a pain, attending to it may make it more severe; if it is an auditory sensation, attending to it may increase its phenomenal volume; if it is a visual sensation, attending to it may increase its vividness; and so on.”8 The point Hill makes here about sensations applies with equal force to memories: attending to one of the memories that line the walls

LIBRARIES LINED WITH MEMORIES

in Augustine’s inner treasury may well transform that memory into something else. The difficulty can be made more vivid still. I am thinking about a short story by the Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges, titled “The Library of Babel.”9 It is a story about a library composed of hexagonal rooms in which there is a different book for every possible combination of the letters of the alphabet: “The detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogues, a proof of the falsity of the true catalogue, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus.” The problem this poses for Augustine is this: Within this great library of memories, both true and false, how is one to select which book to read? If the book one picks off the shelf, or calls down from the stacks, is as likely to be a false report as a true one, and if one lives inside this privatized space with no way to verify the

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contents of the books against the facts, how can the conception of an “inward turn” as a matter of simply seeing what is there, of going on an inner travel, not reduce itself to an absurdity of just the sort Borges describes? The picture of inwardness as rummaging around in the library of one’s memories is ultimately not sustainable. It does not do justice to the true nature of the inward turn, nor to the specifically mental nature of a mental life. And if “truth dwells in the inner man,” then so does falsity, and then the quest to discover oneself among one’s memories, to travel in “the place where I encounter myself,” becomes at best quixotic, at worst absurd.

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t was, indeed, our friend Plotinus who advised, “How then should one see the good life and the beauty it has? Go into yourself and look.”1 To go into yourself is to redirect your attention inwardly, so that it is your inner world that is at the heart of your concern. How, though, is one meant to do this? Perhaps I am feeling disappointed, or elated, perhaps impatient, perhaps content. These states of mind are not like external things: I can’t see them the way I can see a table or an orange. Going into yourself and looking cannot be simply like opening the door to a different room, walking inside, and looking around to see what is there. What happens, rather, is that being in a particular state of mind transforms the way the world itself shows up. To someone who is feeling disappointed, the world

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itself seems flatter, less full of possibility and surprise. For someone in a state of elation, on the other hand, the world appears more open, brighter, things around seem to shine. So what you have to do if you want to “go into oneself and look” is, paradoxically, to pay attention to the world outside, but with a particular eye on how it is showing up for you. Off the world’s particular appearance, you read your own state of mind. And this idea, that inwardness is all about one’s inner orientation toward the outer world, is the one I will now explore. For it implies that there are as many inner worlds as there are ways internally to orient oneself to what is outside. Written in 1921, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s short story “In a Grove” is a subtle and ingenious illustration in fiction of this phenomenon.2 With seven protagonists addressing themselves in turn before a police commissioner, the story consists of four testimonies and three confessions. Each protagonist speaks about their own self, and speaks, therefore, in the first person, and what they take turns to describe is an event, which might have been an attack, a rape or a seduction, a murder or a suicide; the only thing we can be relatively sure of is that the samurai Takehiko is dead and that he died in a bamboo grove. We have first the testimony of the woodcutter, who gives off an air of an impartial

RASHŌMON’S EFFECT

3.1 Characters in “In a Grove,” illustration by

Nic Bommarito

witness concerned about his integrity: “Did I see a sword or anything? No, Sir, not a thing.” Then the testimony of the Buddhist priest, preoccupied with compassion for the human condition: “Ah, what is the life of a human being— a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.” Then the arresting officer, who sees things through the self-justificatory lens of his professional pride: “Everybody said Tajōmaru must have done it . . . I don’t mean to meddle, Sir, but I do think you ought to question him.” Next up is the said Tajōmaru, a bandit with a bandit’s sense of honor and an absence of any sign of remorse: “My sword pierced his breast on the twenty-third thrust.

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Not till the twenty-third: I want you to keep that in mind. I still admire him for that. He’s the only man who ever lasted even twenty thrusts with me.” Then comes the confession of the dead samurai’s wife, Masago, who declares that she vengefully killed her husband for having humiliated her: “In that moment, his eyes conveyed his whole heart to me. What I saw shining there was neither anger nor sorrow. It was the cold flash of contempt— contempt for me.” The story would be incomplete without the samurai’s own version of events, and through a medium his spirit recounts how he committed a suicide in a fit of jealousy: “When my wife raised her face in response to him, she seemed almost spellbound. And what do you think this beautiful wife of mine said to the bandit, in my presence—in the presence of her husband bound hand and foot?” Akutagawa, though, is playing a trick on the readers of his story. He wills us into situating ourselves as sleuths, he invites us to assume the role of a detective, trying to solve the daunting mystery of an apparent crime. And yet the mystery cannot be solved: the first-person testimonies and confessions contradict one another, and there is no rational reconstruction of the event that makes any sense. There is a piece of rope, but who untied it? There is a dagger, now missing, but was Takehiko stabbed before or

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after being untied? It is only when we have exhausted ourselves trying, and failing, to find a single coherent reading of the seven narratives, that we begin, reluctantly at first, to see that we have been looking in the wrong place for a solution to the riddle. We begin, at last, to pay attention to something else, that is, to what each telling reveals about the teller. What we begin to understand is that there are as many perceptions of the event as there are inner worlds perceiving it, that we cannot read what really happened off any one of the reports in a manner consistent with any of the others; and that what we should have been attending to all along is how, in faithfully or unfaithfully describing the way the event appears, each testimony makes manifest the inner world of the testifier. Akutagawa’s story belongs in the category of protreptic. The first century Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus says of protreptic that “it is the ability to show people, both individuals and groups, the inconsistency they are caught up in, and that they are focused on everything except what they want.”3 Protreptic “turns” the mind of the reader, redirects their attention from where it is to where it should have been. As a protreptic device, the insoluble inconsistency in the various accounts reported in Akutagawa’s story forces the reader to shift their interest away

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from the whodunnit, from this enigmatic external event, and onto the inner lives of the protagonists. It is through the transforming influence of their values, preoccupations, emotions, and beliefs that each sees the world around them; their perception of external events is cognitively and affectively penetrated by the contents of their inner worlds. When, in 1950, the celebrated filmmaker Akira Kurosawa turned Akutagawa’s brilliant story into an equally brilliant film, he made several small adjustments, alterations which, however, transformed its point completely. Presented now for an audience of cinema-going viewers and not to a community of literary readers, Kurosawa understood the cinematographic need to add a frame within which to locate the bare sequence of first-person narrations. His clever move was to embed those narrations within a frame provided by another of Akutagawa’s stories, “Rashōmon.”4 In this story, set within the city gate, a woman is stealing clothes from corpses she has found there. Seeing her do this, a samurai murders her and steals her clothes, his justification being that he is simply doing to her as she does to others. Kurosawa’s film has the woodcutter and the priest, huddled against the rain beneath the Rashōmon gate, recounting the events of “In a Grove” for the benefit of a commoner who

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3.2 Poster for Rashōmon

has joined them—the commoner evidently introduced by Kurosawa to fulfill in film the role that we, as readers, perform in the context of the short story. And Kurosawa frames the narrative in another

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way—he introduces the very thing whose absence gave the story its protreptic potential— a denouement. The final scene of the film brings the viewing audience back to the present, and we are shown again the trio huddled beneath the city gate. The woodcutter has changed his story, and we are given to understand that it was he who stole the missing dagger. When the woodcutter volunteers to adopt an abandoned baby (whose clothes the commoner has stolen), Kurosawa gives the viewing audience the dramatic resolution they demand by implying that he is someone who, after all, can be trusted, while the priest has his faith in humanity restored. Yet the denouement, while so necessary in film, runs contrary to Akutagawa’s literary intention. In the short story the first-person narratives coexist synchronically and present, like a shattered mirror, multiple partial and incompatible glimpses of a single scene. The reader is meant to hold the competing narratives simultaneously in their mind, thereby permitting the irresoluble tension between them to come to the fore. A film, on the other hand, is essentially diachronic, owing its very existence to a rolling succession of frames, and the viewer of a film is a diachronic subject, following in real time the events portrayed in the film. Ironically, then, what

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now goes by the name “Rashōmon effect,”5 an irreconcilable clash in perspectives on the apparent world, is an effect achieved much better in the short story “In a Grove,” and scarcely replicated in the film from which it derives its name. The lesson of our study of “In a Grove” is that the contours of the inner world are made manifest in the structure of the apparent outer world, and an irredeemable conflict in the multiplicity of apparent outer worlds forces us to redirect our attention. As Donald Richie puts matters very well, “In more ways than one, Rashōmon is like a vast distorting mirror, or, better, a collection of prisms that reflect and refract reality . . . The world is an illusion, you yourself make reality, but this reality undoes you if you submit to being limited by what you have made.”6 Kurosawa instead makes the question one of sincerity, of truth and lies in the moral sense: Woodcutter: It’s a lie. They’re all lies. Tajōmaru’s confession, the woman’s story. They’re lies. Priest: That may be true. But it is because men are so weak. That’s why they can’t tell the truth. Not even to each other. Commoner: Not another sermon. I don’t mind a lie—not if it’s an interesting one.7

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While granting that they might be, we don’t have to suppose that any of the protagonists is lying about what they have seen. It is simply the case that the apparent realities they inhabit are inflected by their inner fears and hopes, their passions and their dreams. Possibly not the objective truth, but still interesting.

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Self-Illuminating Beings

I

nwardness cannot be a matter of roaming around inside the hallways of one’s mind. Fortunately, there are other ways to give substance to the distinction between “inner” and “outer,” ones that do not appeal to dubious metaphors of containment. We need a principle that will enable us to say of some things that they are inner and others that they are outer. Some philosophers claim to have found it in an appeal to a different metaphor, a metaphor of illumination. The world within illuminates itself, they have said, but things outside need something else to illuminate them. Though not confined to Buddhist thinkers, nor even endorsed by all Buddhists, it is Buddhist explorations of this new idea which I will describe, as it emerges in dialogue with their Hindu rivals, the philosophers of the Nyāya school.

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The Sanskrit term for “illumination” is prakāśa, and the view about inwardness is that the inner world is self-illuminating (svaprakāśaka), while ordinary denizens of the outer world remain in darkness unless and until they are lit. The exceptions are things like lamps and stars, which emit light, and for Buddhists the lamp rather than the library best exemplifies the character of inwardness. We are, almost literally, in the dark about things we don’t cognize, and to cognize them is to dispel the darkness of ignorance. A famous Buddhist treatise, from somewhere between the first century BCE and the second century CE, describes a conversation between a Greek king, Menander I, who ruled over Bactria, the Central Asian province I mentioned before, and a Buddhist monk, Nāgasena: Menander: What, Nāgasena, is the characteristic mark of wisdom? Nāgasena: Illuminating, O king. When wisdom springs up in the mind it dispels the darkness of ignorance, causes the radiance of vision to arise, makes the light of knowledge shine forth and makes the noble truths plain. Thus does the mediator perceive with the clearest wisdom, the impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and soullessness of all formations.

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Menander: Give me an illustration. Nāgasena: It is like a lamp, O king, which in a dark room would illuminate it and make the objects there plainly visible.1

The trope of the lamp stands in for two ideas. First, as here, a lamp is needed to bring light to other things, to reveal them, to remove the darkness that enshrouds them. Take this fragment of another conversation, now between the materialist philosopher Pāyasi and the Buddhist monk Kāśyapa. Kāśyapa says, Suppose there is a hall in a building . . . Someone with a light or lamp enters the hall of that building. He then completely shuts the door openings everywhere, so that they are tight, impervious, without gaps or apertures. Right in the middle of this hall, let him light a lamp. Now this lamp would illuminate, light, brighten and irradiate this hall inside but not outside. Further, if this person were to cover this lamp with a bushel, then it would illuminate the bushel inside, but neither outside it nor outside the hall.2

Kāśyapa is here introducing a distinction between inner and outer, and he is saying that a lamp shining

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within a closed space will illuminate all that is within but nothing that is without. So he is explicitly providing us with a criterion for inwardness and making it have to do with illumination. More often, though, and this is the second idea, the point is put slightly differently. It is that lamps are self-illuminating; that is, that they require no other source of light to illuminate them, while “outer” things do. As the Nyāya author Vātsyāyana expresses the idea, “A lamp can be seen even without another lamp; that being the case, to take up a lamp in order  to see another lamp is pointless.”3 Again, much later, another Nyāya philosopher, Śrīdhara, will say that it is “just as light falling on pots and the like, which are not of the nature of light, because of lamps and the like, which are of the nature of light. But the light in a lamp does not come from another lamp, rather it is there innately.”4 Buddhist philosophers, and here I am thinking especially of Dignāga, Dharmakīrti, and other members of the so- called “Buddhist Epistemological School,” argue with great subtlety and ingenuity that  it is the hallmark of inwardness to be selfilluminating.5 They explicitly take the example of the lamp as their key metaphor. Dharmakīrti says, “As an illuminating light is considered to be the illuminator of itself, because of its nature, just so is

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awareness aware of itself.”6 And here is how Nyāya philosopher Jayanta, on behalf of Dharmakīrti, formulates the idea: “Awareness does not depend on another illumination, because like a lamp its nature is to shine forth by itself.”7 So “cognition is (a kind of) light, like a lamp.”8 Not everyone, though, has found this metaphor convincing. Just as I criticized Augustine’s metaphor for inwardness, as a library whose books are memories, so I must question the value of the metaphor of inwardness as self-illumination. Ironically, the most telling criticism has come from another Buddhist, the first century CE founder of the Buddhist “Middle Way School,” Nāgārjuna. With typical bravura, Nāgārjuna, radically, challenges the basic premise behind the metaphor, the claim that lamps, fires, and other sources of light do illuminate themselves! He is responding to a view seemingly expressed in Nyāyasūtra 2.1.19, which, using the reflexive metaphor to explain the idea that sources of knowledge can be self-certifying, claims that “the sources of knowledge are established like the light of a lamp.”9 Nāgārjuna counters: 33. [My opponent says:] “Fire illuminates itself as well as other things. Likewise, sources of knowledge establish themselves as well as other things.”

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SELF- ILLUMINATING BEINGS

34. This is a defective proposition. Fire does not illuminate itself, for its non-perception is not seen to be comparable to that of a pot in the darkness. [To explain:] A pot, not illuminated by fire, is first not perceived in darkness. Then, being illuminated by fire, it is perceived. If, in the same manner, fire, not being illuminated, first existed in darkness and then were illuminated, it would be possible to say: it illuminates itself. This, however, is not the case. 35. If, as you say, fire illuminates itself as it illuminates other things, then it will also burn itself. . . . 32

This, however, is not the case. In these circumstances, your statement that fire illuminates itself as it illuminates other things, is not valid. 36. If, as you say, fire illuminates both other things and itself, then darkness (too) will cover both other things and itself. . . . This, however, is not seen. In these circumstances, your statement that fire illuminates both other things and itself is not valid. 37. There is no darkness in fire nor in something else in which fire stands. How can it (then) illuminate? For illumination is the destruction of darkness. [To explain:] Here, in fire, there is no darkness. Nor is there any darkness where fire is. Now, illumination is obstruction caused to darkness. But since there is no darkness in fire nor where fire is, what is that darkness which is obstructed by fire, and by virtue

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of whose obstruction it illuminates both other things and itself?10

How does this argument work out in the case at hand, that of the purportedly self-illuminating inner world? Nāgārjuna has argued that illumination is the elimination of darkness, and so, if there is no darkness, there can be no illumination either. Applying the metaphor, the point would be that making something into the object of one’s conscious awareness is the elimination of its state of being uncognized, but if items in one’s inner world are already cognized, then there is nothing to be eliminated. In other words, it is quite meaningless to characterize inwardness in terms of self-illumination or selfdisclosure, because these terms only acquire significance in a context where there is the possibility of not being illuminated, of not being disclosed. The metaphor of illumination fails to capture what is distinctive about inwardness. I think that Nāgārjuna’s argument here is a very strong one. If something is concealed then it can also be revealed; or, to put it the other way round, revelation requires concealment. But to say of something that is never concealed, that is always on view, that it is “self-revealing,” seems to be a distortion and corruption of the language of concealment and

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revelation. If we agree with Avicenna that inwardness is the presence of yourself to yourself, then the metaphor of illumination is inadequate to do justice to the spirit of the idea. We can’t describe something as “self-cleaning” if it never gets dirty, and we can’t describe interiority as “self-illuminating” if it is never concealed. In trying to describe inwardness there is a perennial temptation to reach for metaphors drawn from natural phenomena, but there is a real risk that what lends inwardness its unique and distinctive status is thereby only obscured. The temptation is to bring inwardness into the orbit of natural scientific intelligibility with similes about elastic balls, force fields, centers of gravity, mirrors, or, as in Kāśyapa’s case, light dispersal. But to surrender to the temptation is also to surrender any hope of explaining inwardness in terms that are uniquely appropriate to it.

The Face as Interface

I

n some of his later writings about subjectivity, the twentieth- century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre insists that subjectivity is always a social phenomenon. There is only an “inner” if there is also an “outer,” and this outer lies in society. Sartre was led to this view by a desire to find a place for inwardness within a Marxist social and political philosophy. In his talk to the Gramsci Institute in Rome in 1961, Sartre writes, “When I speak of subjectivity, it is as a certain type of internal action, an interior system, rather than the simple, immediate relationship of the subject to itself.”1 If the exteriority of a human being consists both in what is en deçà, that is to say one’s organic body, and also what is au- delà, that which an organism needs in order to maintain itself, the interiority of a human being, he explains,

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involves a sort of mediation: “It is the same being, the same being in exteriority, which mediates with itself, and it is this that is interiority . . . Consequently, it is at the level of this mediation, which is not itself mediated, that we encounter pure subjectivity.”2 As for the more exact nature of the exterior with which the subject exists in a condition of mediation, Sartre is clear that it is society: “Subjectivity is to live your own being, and to live what you are in a society—because we know no other state of man, he is precisely a social being, a social being who, at the same time, lives the whole of society from his own point of view. . . . This social subjectivity is the very definition of subjectivity. . . . It means that everything that makes an individual, all her projections, her acts, and also everything to which she is subject, only reflects . . . the society itself.”3 The first-person narratives of “In a Grove,” in which each character is acutely aware of their situation, status, and role in society, amply bear out the truth of this observation. Sartre did not say this, because his more immediate concern was with the reconciliation of existentialism and Marxism, but it seems to me that the fundamental place of mediation between one human being and another is the face. As Socrates puts it to Alcibiades, “You have observed, then, that the face of the person who looks in the eye of another person

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appears visible to himself in the eye-sight of the person opposite to him, as in a mirror? And we therefore call this the pupil, because it exhibits the image of that person who looks in it.”4 How do I know myself, asks Socrates. How do I respect the Delphic commandment? I see myself, that is to say my face, as a reflection in the pupil of your eye, which serves as a mirror of myself. In a later twist, the metaphor is made to bring in more faces still: “Those who seek to follow the Delphic instruction— so Hesychios was to say—find themselves, as it were, gazing into a mirror, and sighting the dark faces of the demons peering over their shoulders.”5 The selfie stick, on the other hand, is the Augustinian “inner man” ’s attempt to fight back, a reprivatization of what is essentially a social phenomenon. I would like to explore the idea that the face is the interface between yourself and others, and, insofar as it is the condition for mediation, it is what makes possible your interiority, your inwardness. This is, indeed, the very theme of Kobo Abe’s disturbing and brilliant 1964 novel, The Face of Another.6 The protagonist, who writes in the first person, having had his face destroyed in an industrial accident, seeks out innovative plastic surgery with which to create a synthetic mask, molded on the face of another person. Despite the discomfort in wearing it, the protagonist

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finds that he is able to go about in society again, and also, as he becomes ever more confident, that he begins to assume a new identity, that the new face gives him freedoms his old self never enjoyed. What had begun as a disguise becomes his “true self.” The novel is an extraordinary philosophical exploration of the role of the face as interface, of the nature of the mask and the disguise, and so, to pick up the thread from the previous chapter, of concealment and disclosure. It is a probing inquiry into the very claim Sartre makes about interiority, that one’s inner world is a systematic construct fashioned in a process of mediation between oneself and others. Shame, secrecy, freedom, self-transformation, silence, disguise, loneliness, and the distance between people are the themes of this novel. On first acquiring the new face our protagonist regards it simply as a mask. “A mask,” he reflects, “is apparently the expression of an extremely metaphysical aspiration to give oneself a kind of transcendental disguise,” but “no matter how many faces I have, there is no changing the fact that I am me.”7 His doctor, the cosmetic surgeon, is unconvinced: “Man’s soul is in his skin,” he says, “the face, in the final analysis, is the expression . . . something like an equation by which we show our relationship with others. It’s a roadway between oneself and others.”8 As

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5.1 A Noh mask

the new face begins to take hold and his sense of self weakens, he starts to fear that he is turning into a freak: “I wondered if I weren’t becoming a kind of monster. Carlyle said that the robe makes the priest and the uniform the soldier; perhaps the face makes the monster. A monster’s face brings loneliness, and the loneliness informs his heart.”9 He has not yet identified with the face but continues to believe in an “inner man” distinct from it: “The face is made by someone else; one doesn’t make it oneself . . . the expression is chosen by someone else; it is not oneself that chooses it.”10 It is still a disguise, “a kind of art of concealment.”11

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Our protagonist begins, though, to realize that masks obey a strange law of their own, a law, as he puts it, of double negation; he is now “dazzled by the double aspect of the mask—was it the negation of my real face or actually a new face? In mathematics there are ‘imaginary numbers,’ strange numbers which, when squared become minus. They have points of similarity with masks, for putting one mask over another would be the same as not putting on any at all.”12 The decisive moment of transformation occurs when he steals up the courage to look at himself directly in a mirror: I slowly raised my face and looked in the mirror. Of course, my companion raised his face too and looked back. When I ate my soup, he ate his. Our breathing, exactly coordinated, was most natural. Suddenly my companion arose and came to look at me with an expression of suspicion. At that instance I was enveloped by a strange feeling of harmony, sharp yet rapturous, shocking yet smooth. Perhaps cracks were opening in this husk of mine. For some time we gazed at each other, but my companion laughed first. Drawn in, I too chuckled, and then with no resistance I slipped into his face. At once we fused, and I became him.”13

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He now goes along with “the mask’s demand for autonomy,”14 a “delicate transformation”15 has taken place, and a new freedom which, though naturally expressing itself in sexual longings, takes the particular form in our protagonist of a desire to seduce his  own wife. She, however, is undeceived, and leaves him a letter in which she reveals she knew it was him all the time, and that she went along assuming that he knew that she knew. She explains that love is always a matter of putting on masks just so that they can be taken off again, “for if there is no mask to start with, there is no pleasure in removing it, is there?”16 His failure to understand this condemned him in her eyes: “You don’t need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger for you is simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don’t ever again want to return to such a desert of mirrors.”17 The wife’s final verdict returns us to where we started, Socrates’s claim of finding himself in the reflection of the pupil of another. Is the face a mask which conceals one’s true inner self? Or is it, rather, that who we really are comprises the networks of social mediations that exist because faces embody and constitute expressions? Might it not be that, if we believe that mirror images only exist in the mirrors,

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then the one that you see in the pupil of my eye, that one that is you, is actually constituted by a web of reflections and nothing more?18 Your self-image, we might say, is the image you form in your mind’s eye of the image you see in mine. Isn’t this Søren Kierkegaard’s point when he describes inwardness as a “double reflection”: “The reflection of inwardness is the subjective thinker’s double reflection. In thinking, he thinks the universal, but as existing in this thinking, as assimilating this in his inwardness, he becomes more and more subjectively isolated.”19 Novelists, more so I think than philosophers, have been the ones most vigorously to press this question, with their arsenal of tropes of pseudonyms, heteronyms, doubles, and other kinds of literary disguise and assumed identity. I will soon look at the implications of such literary devices for the philosophy of inwardness; but let me first continue in my exploration of the structure of inwardness, at what Sartre rightly describes as a “system” of interiority.

Hidden Layers Within

I

am exploring the structure of the inner world, which the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, to whose ideas I will return, so brilliantly describes as “the geometry of the abyss.”1 I have found wanting the metaphor that likens inwardness to a library whose shelves are filled with memories, and inadequate too the metaphor that would have us believe that inwardness is a shining lamp, illuminating all  that is within. Being human isn’t about going about with an interiorized Bodleian library inside your head; nor is it about having your own inner light bulb. Whatever structure inwardness—the presence of yourself to yourself—has, it is, as we have just seen, in some way constituted by the nature of the mediation between the inner and the outer, between

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interiority and exteriority, between subjectivity and the objective world. In Abe’s novel, The Face of Another, the protagonist’s wife complains that he has not one mask but many: “Even though I might tear the mask off of your hypocrisy, you had a thousand layers of masks, and one after another a new one would appear.”2 Might it be that the structure we are investigating is one of layers beneath layers, of a nested, Matryoshka doll-like self? For our protagonist’s wife, the masks are like turtles, going all the way down. Others have felt, to the contrary, that if you manage to peel away the layers, you shall eventually reach something properly entitled to be described as your “true self.” There is a celebrated passage in the Taittirīya Upaniṣad which speaks of a nested self comprising five “sheaves” (kośa): Different from and lying within this man formed from the essence of food is the self consisting of lifebreath,

which

suffuses that man com-

pletely. . . . Different from and lying within this self consisting of breath is the self consisting of mind, which suffuses this other self completely. . . . Different from and lying within this self consisting of mind is the self consisting of perception, which suffuses this other self completely. . . . Different

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from and lying within this self consisting of perception is the self consisting of bliss, which suffuses this other self completely.3

The five sheaves are all sheaves of the same self; they jointly constitute the self. For the Taitirīya passage only adds more layers to a schema already present in the much earlier Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, which says, “These are what constitute this self—it consists of speech, it consists of mind, it consists of breath.”4 It is rather tempting to interpret “sheaf” here as something like a mask, bottoming out in a self consisting of bliss:

6.1 Japanese Matryoshka doll, by Trish Grantham

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“Food” is a mask of “Breath,” “Breath” of “Mind,” “Mind” of “Perception,” and “Perception” of “Bliss.” If you can find a way to peel away the outermost layer of self, Food, that is to say, the body and its appetites, you remove the mask that conceals the you that is Breath, or, perhaps, speech. Discard that disguise and you reveal the you that is Mind, standing here, I think, for the attentive self, the self that consists in filtering and selecting information from the outside world. Peel that away and you get to Perception, or rather Cognition (jñāna), the self that consists in consciousness of what is around. And if you finally manage to get behind the mask which is thinking, you reach your inner kernel, a state of Bliss (ānanda), which is elsewhere described as the pure phenomenology of awareness as such, the primordial “what it is like” to be conscious at all. Some philosophers say that this activity of peeling away is a therapeutic one, and that means it is a social one, because the spiritual practice it requires has to be performed under the guidance of a teacher. The therapeutic dimension is described in a story about Indra and Virocana. Prajāpati has spoken about a self “by discovering which one obtains all the worlds, and all one’s desires are fulfilled.”5 The god Indra and the demon Virocana both want to find out about this self and they therefore elect to live as

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celibates in Prajāpati’s dwelling place. Prajāpati ignores them for thirty-two years, but then reluctantly asks them what they want. On learning why they are there, he then says, “Look at yourselves in a pan of water. And let me know if there is anything you do not perceive about yourselves.” So they looked into a pan of water. Prajāpati asked them: “What do you see?” And they replied: “Sir, we see here our entire body (ātman), a perfect likeness down to the very hairs of the body, down to the very nails.” Prajāpati told them then: “Adorn yourself beautifully, dress well, and spruce yourself up, and then look into a pan of water.” So they adorned themselves beautifully, dressed well, and spruced themselves up, and then looked into a pan of water. Prajāpati asked them: “What do you see?” And they replied: “Sir, as the two of us here are beautifully adorned, well dressed, and all spruced up, in exactly the same way are these, sir, beautifully adorned, well dressed, and all spruced up.” “That is the self; that is the immortal; that is the one free from fear; that is brahman,” Prajāpati told them. And the two of them left with contented hearts. Seeing the two depart, Prajāpati observed: “There they go, without learning about the self, without discovering the self!”6

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Here we have an echo of a theme we explored in the last chapter, that seeing your reflection is the way to know yourself, though now it is not one’s reflection in the eyes of others that is at stake. While Virocana is content enough with the idea that he is essentially nothing more or less than an embodied being, and goes away happy, Indra quickly realizes that this reflected self cannot be the self for which he seeks, because if the body can be made beautiful, then it can also become lame and crippled.7 Prajāpati makes him wait another thirty-two years before seeing if he will be happy with a revised answer: “The one who goes happily about in a dream—that is the self; that is the immortal; that is the one free from fear; that is brahman.”8 Indra is again initially persuaded, but on thinking it through realizes this cannot be the “true self” either. It certainly is the case that one is present to oneself in one’s dreams, and so there is a distinction between the dreaming subject and the subject-within-the dream, and I’ll have much more to say about this idea in a later chapter. But the subject-within-a-dream isn’t necessarily blissful or even very happy; not, at least, if it’s one of those dreams, which we all have, when one dreams that one is missing a train or being chased by robbers. So Indra waits another thirty-two years for Prajāpati this time to say, “When one is fast asleep, totally

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collected and serene, and sees no dreams— that is the self; that is the immortal, that is the one free from fear; that is brahman.”9 Indra goes away, again returning when he realizes his error: that this is no self at all, no interior life, no presence of self to self; it is just being comatose, a state no better than a stone. The therapeutic, and therefore social, dimension to this story is evident in the relationship between Indra and Prajāpati. Prajāpati is a very reluctant teacher and imposes enormous hardships on his erstwhile students. What is remarkable is the literary device used here, in which progressively more sophisticated accounts of the self are presented as the grudging concessions of a recalcitrant god. Indra is made to entertain a sequence of theories about the self, each one being an improvement on its predecessor. What the literary form of the story is communicating is that some such procession is necessary in the quest for the self. We can say that one idea is a “preparatory condition” for another if understanding that the first is false is required of someone to be in a position even to speculate about the truth or falsity of the second. Indra could not even begin to appreciate the virtues of the less obvious doctrine that the true self is the self one encounters in a dream had he not already understood that the more obvious idea about the true self being the body’s reflected image

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is wrong. Prajāpati’s skill as a teacher is based on his understanding that Indra must discover this for himself, that it is not something that can be taught in the classroom. There was no point in Prajāpati simply lecturing Indra; he had to force him to commence his own personal self-investigation, much as the story “In a Grove” forces upon its readers a reorientation of attention. In this interaction between Indra and Prajāpati, we see how a layered understanding of the structure of inwardness emerges in a dialogue between self and other. If the outer layers of your self really are masks, then it is only under the promptings of another that you can appreciate them as such and peel them away, something which was the very point made by our protagonist’s wife in The Face of Another.

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he great Danish existentialist thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813– 1855), who burned much too brightly and lived much too intensely to withstand Prajāpati’s extended instruction, bases his profound exposition of the notion of despair in The Sickness Unto Death on an astonishing and startling analysis of the structure of inwardness. He argues that subjectivity is an activity, not a static thing, and that, more specifically, insofar as it is the activity of relating oneself to one’s self, what it consists of is a synthesizing of factors that are in some sense the opposites of each other, despair being nothing but the failure to achieve synthesis: “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself. A human being is a

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synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. . . . Despair is the misrelationship in a relation that relates itself to itself.”1 Inwardness, Kierkegaard is saying, is a process, the process of bringing two aspects of oneself into relation with one another. And the misery he calls “despair”—“disquiet” is, perhaps, a better term—is the unhappy state one falls into when those different aspects, which are, in themselves, both aspects of oneself, are misrelated. Kierkegaard, we might say, has taken the older idea of inwardness as the presence of yourself to yourself and transformed it into the activity of relating one aspect of oneself to its contrary, which is also an aspect of oneself. It seems to me that there is a trope running throughout much modernist literature which has to do exactly with this idea of the self as a process of self-relating, and that is the trope of the double. As Charles Stang points out, “The double is not a divine, vertical, visitor, but more often a threat on the horizontal plane— someone who poses a danger to the protagonist, perhaps with the threat that the image might replace the archetype. . . . If modernity seems exercised by the threat of a menacing doppelgänger, a horizontal double, then late antiquity seems equally exercised

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by the promise of a divine counterpart, a vertical double.”2 Stang accurately diagnoses what is the characteristic dynamic of the literary double: that although one’s double is oneself, or a feature or aspect of oneself, it is also a threat to oneself. The process of fashioning a self, of creating interiority, is, we might say, embodied in the manner in which one seeks to achieve, or else despairingly fails to find, a reconciliation with one’s double who is oneself. The Tamil writer Mauni plays beautifully with the trope of the double in his short stories.3 He asks, “Are all of us merely shadows? Of what, then, are we the moving shadows?”4 The dreamlike quality of what one calls one’s personality is the main theme in the disconcertingly ethereal story, “Error.” A man is sitting in his room, awaiting the arrival of someone he just happened to meet the previous day. He decides, however, to go for a walk instead, and then finds it difficult to return: “He wondered if he should return to his room. He thought his friend might already be sitting in his chair, in his very room, ready to upbraid him for his error, for making him wait although he had arrived at precisely the agreed time. He would not know what to say then. He gave up the thought of returning.”5 Already you have the fear of being usurped by this other who wants to sit  on your chair in your room. The protagonist

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wanders into a train station, a place where people can “leave behind their characters and details of their past natures,” a place “where transformations happen, sometimes in error.”6 By chance he finds himself on a train, without a ticket. He gets off at a desolate station in the middle of the night. Mauni ends the story by returning us back at the beginning: a milkwoman arrives and knocks on the door of his room, but to no avail: “He was lost in his dream world, itself the shadow of someone else’s dream.”7 What are we to make of this strangely amorphous and surreal story, in which there is barely any narrative or even any characterization? The journey that is a person’s life, this story seems to say, can hardly be thought of as a progress or development in any way; rather, it is the illusion of a departure from a self left behind; that’s also the theme, incidentally, of Aki Kaurismäki’s disturbing film, Pidä Huivista kiini, Tatjana (Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana). The decisions you make seem more like accidental happenings to you than actual choices. One half of the double seems to be engaged in practical reasoning and decision making, going for a walk, getting on a train. But these “doings” are not really of his doing, and he has left behind another aspect of himself, the one who, observing, silently upbraids him for this

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neglect. The boundary between one’s self and oneself hovers, in this story, on the brink of dissolution without ever quite disappearing. In reality, it is only such imaginary separations which give one any sense of identity at all. One struggles to pull together the whole ragbag of fragments and lend it some form of dignity, and that effort to “bring together the foreshadowings of the future as well as the traces of memories long gone”8 is all there is to this insubstantial, shadow-like sense of self. In the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, the complex system that is a human being is likened to a chariot drawn by horses, controlled by a charioteer who is, however, not the same as the rider, a passenger in the chariot: “Know the self as a rider in a chariot / and the body, as simply the chariot. / Know the intellect as the charioteer, / and the mind, as simply the reins.”9 It is as if Mauni is saying that the two aspects of oneself that need to be relating, in the activity of relating that is inwardness, are the controller and the witness selves. Mauni goes even further in his last story, “Wasteland.” A man is suddenly joined by a nameless companion whom he cannot shake off, no matter how much he roams about: “What possible pleasure could there be in walking about the town like this? Yet they walked on and on like each other’s shadows, changing places from time to time. When he looked at

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the man as if he were his shadow, suddenly another notion struck him. If thought alone could effect such a conclusion, how easily he might have given the other the slip and escaped! The very thought added a spring to his steps. He heard the other call out, ‘What’s the joke?’ and calmed down a little. It had begun to dawn on him that the only way he could release himself from the shadow that was dogging him was actually by becoming the other man.”10 His double pretends to be fatigued, but it is just a trick: “He could see that the other was exhausted to the point of dropping off. Suddenly he seemed to vanish and then reappear at his side, only to fall to the ground beside him. In a second he realized he had been tricked. The other had swallowed his shadow. Sheer terror! His mind was swamped by sheer terror! As he saw a crazed smile on the man’s face, his fear grew worse—if that were possible. With a great wearying of spirit he awoke to the realization that holding on to the body is nothing but an endless addiction.”11 To lose your shadow is clearly a fatal mishap, but what if your shadow is stolen from you by your own double? To say that is to imply that the trick is one which you have played upon yourself. And have we not already been told that the way to shake off the unwelcome companion is to become the other

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man? In this story, and the previous one, Mauni’s use of the third person pronoun “he” is very slippery, and one is never sure whether it is the protagonist or his double who is being referred to. In becoming one’s own shadow, and in then swallowing up that shadow who is also oneself, one is, though, engaging in a process of self-synthesis, constructing a system that delineates, however ethereally, one’s very self. In these stories, the double serves the function of a dummy variable, standing in for whatever it is that the relation is seeking to relate itself to, and the dominant mood is one of anxiety, that one will never manage to pull off the relating, and will instead be forever trapped in a seesaw, alternating between two states without end. For modernist writers like Mauni, the anxiety induced by the dawning fear that no “relating of itself to itself” is ultimately achievable supersedes and overwhelms any optimism that a Kierkegaardian synthesis may be possible. I have already discussed one of Jorge Luis Borges’s stories, “The Library of Babel,” and I will soon analyze another, “The Circular Ruins.” For a philosophical exploration of the concept of the double, however, it is his brief story “August  25, 1983” that I wish to turn to now. This story is redolent with all the horror of encountering one’s double—the fear that they

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have no desire other than to take one’s place. Our protagonist, writing in the first person, enters a familiar hotel, only to find that someone has already signed himself in under the name “Jorge Luis Borges” and is already installed in our protagonist’s room: “I tried the door; it opened at my touch. The overhead light still burned. In the pitiless light, I came face to face with myself. There, in the narrow iron bed— older, withered, and very pale—lay I.”12 The doubling in this story is a diachronic doubling, an encounter between two temporal phases of oneself. The two Kierkegaardian aspects which stand in need of synthesis are not the infinite and the finite, nor the necessary and the possible, but rather here the younger and the older, the former and the yet-to-become. “ ‘How odd,’ it was saying, ‘we are two and yet we are one. But then nothing is odd in dreams . . . [for] still I dream these dreams of my double . . . that tiresome subject I got from Stevenson and mirrors.’ ”13 Our protagonist is not so keen on being reduced to a simulacrum in his double’s dream: “ ‘I am the dreamer,’ I replied, with a touch of defiance.” The elder Borges now foretells what the younger one has to look forward to, which he does by remembering his own past. The synthesis, such as it is, consists in the equivalence of past and future— of memory and anticipation as analogous acts of mental time travel.

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The same events feature twice within a single, temporally extended life, once as looked forward to and again as recalled. Within every human life events appear under two aspects, as future and as past. Insofar as it is never possible to feel fully reconciled with one’s past or future self, that expectation is always a foreboding of regret; the passage of time is always filled with a sense of despair. If the interface between self and other is, in general, constitutive of interiority, then the interface between oneself and one’s double is where the self is formed. “Don’t you realize that the first thing to find out is whether there is only one man dreaming, or two men dreaming each other?” the double says, now shifting the duality to the one between dreaming subject and subject-within-a- dream. And when our protagonist leaves, he finds there is no staircase and no hotel: “Outside awaited other dreams.” The way that dreams dispense doubles will be what we look at next.

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Dreams of Dreams

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any of the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges can be read as profound explorations of the philosophy of inwardness in fiction. In his scintillating story “The Circular Ruins,” someone, a sorcerer whom Borges describes only as “the foreigner,” sets out to dream into existence another human being, because, after all, “the task of moulding the incoherent and dizzying stuff that dreams are made of is the most difficult work a man can undertake.”1 Returning every night to the same ruins, in order to dream the same dream, he gradually molds a youth, described by Borges as a “phantasm” and a “simulacrum.” The dreamed-of youth is “not a man but the projection of another man’s dream.”2 The dreamer’s work complete, the youth he created goes away, in search of some circular ruins of his own, now free to

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do as he chooses independent of the direction of the dreamer. The sorcerer ’s amphitheater is engulfed in flames, and the sorcerer thinks at first of fleeing, but decides instead to commit himself to the fire: “He walked into the tatters of flame, but they did not bite his flesh— they caressed him, bathed him without heat and without combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he realized that he, too, was but appearance, that another man was dreaming him.”3 It is within the dream of “another man” that the dreamer exists, as that other’s simulacrum, just as the youth exists as his. Borges writes, “the foreigner dreamed that he was in the centre of a circular amphitheatre.”4 To say this is to situate the sorcerer as a character within a dream, one who, within this dream, is engaged in various activities. So the sorcerer is both the dreaming subject, that is the one who is dreaming, and also the subject-within-the-dream, the one to whom the events within the dream are presented. The events in the dream are things that happen to the sorcerer, and it is from his perspective that the dream unfolds. That is to say, the sorcerer occupies a so-called field perspective in the dream. He is at the center of the dream, in its subject position. Indeed, the circular amphitheater can be read as a metaphor for the field

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of dream-awareness, at whose center the sorcerer is located. What exactly, though, is the nature of the relationship between the dreaming subject and the subject-within-the-dream? Evan Thompson is one of the few philosophers to have discussed this intriguing question. His answer is that the distinction between the subject-within-the-dream and the dreaming subject is analogous to the distinction between an avatar in a virtual world and its user: “We need to distinguish between the dreaming self and the dream ego—between the self-as-dreamer and the selfwithin-the-dream,” he rightly says, continuing, [i]n a nonlucid dream, we identify with our dream ego and think, ‘I’m flying.’ In a lucid dream, we think, ‘I’m dreaming,’ and we recognize that the dreaming self isn’t the same as the dream ego, or how we appear within the dream. The dream ego is like an avatar in a virtual world; the dreaming self is its user. . . . In a nonlucid dream, we lose the awareness that we’re imagining things and identify with the dream ego as the I. We’re like gamers who identify so completely with their avatars they forget they’re gaming. In a lucid dream, we regain awareness of our imagining consciousness.

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Nonlucid dreams frame experience from the imagined perspective of the dream ego; lucid dreams reframe experience from the perspective of the imagining and dreaming self. Lucidity can enable the dreaming self to act consciously and deliberately in the dream state through the persona of the dream ego, who becomes like an avatar in a role-playing game. . . .5

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Thompson’s proposal is that the relationship between the dreaming subject and the subjectwithin-the-dream is such that there are actually two distinct subjects, but their distinctness is overlooked in an act of mistaken identification. In company with Indra, Thompson in effect rejects Prajāpati's second proposal, that the true self is “the one who goes happily about in a dream,” on the grounds that it is a mistake to identify oneself with one’s dream ego. And yet the sorcerer dreams that he is in a circular amphitheater, and it does not seem that any error due to misidentification is involved. Borges does not say that in the sorcerer’s dream a certain simulacrum of the sorcerer stands at the center of the amphitheater, a simulacrum which is mistaken by the sorcerer to be himself. Nor does he say, in the story we looked at in the previous chapter, “August  25, 1983,” that the younger Borges encounters an older man in the hotel

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room, someone whom he mistakes to be himself. The whole point is rather that one’s double is oneself, albeit presented under a disturbingly hostile and threatening aspect. And while Thompson chose at random to illustrate his idea with the example of dreaming—“I’m flying”—his choice prompts us to wonder whether we can recast Avicenna's thought experiment as a dream scenario, one in which Avicenna dreams of being a man flying through space in a state of sensory deprivation. The point then would be that even a subject-within-the-dream is the bearer of inwardness. In an echo of our earlier discussion of layered selves, what Borges explores is the idea that the relation between the dreaming subject and the subjectwithin-the-dream is repeatable. The sorcerer who dreams a “youth” into being discovers, in the dramatic final moments of the story, that he stands as the “youth” to another dreamer; and, likewise, “the youth” goes off in search of his own circular ruins where he might dream into being another youth himself. What the sorcerer discovers at the very end of the story is that the Cartesian Dream Hypothesis is true: all this is a dream, a dream inside which there is a dream in which the “youth” is dreamt into being. Borges’s own illustration, in the manuscript copy of  the text of the story (now held in La

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Fundación Internacional Jorge Luis Borges, Buenos Aires), contains just a hint of the iterability of the relationship of dreams within dreams, with its echoing image of a second circular ruin fading into the background. There is a remarkable passage in the third-centuryBCE Daoist classic, the Zhuangzi, where the theme of the dream within a dream, and its implications for the identity of the doubled subject, is tested in an astonishing way:

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Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, fluttering about joyfully just as a butterfly would. He followed his whims exactly as he liked and knew nothing about Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he awoke, and there he was, the startled Zhuang Zhou in the flesh. He did not know if Zhou had been dreaming he was a butterfly, or if a butterfly was now dreaming it was Zhou. Surely, Zhou and a butterfly count as two distinct identities! Such is what we call the transformation of one thing into another.6

The story begins with a dream, Zhou’s dream that he is a butterfly, a dream, that is to say, in which a butterfly is the one to whom the field of dream experience is presented. Zhou “emerges” from the dream,

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and is now, in some sense, present “in the flesh.” Two different explanations of the nature of this emergence from the dream are then brought forward. There is the everyday view that Zhou wakes up, having fallen asleep, and remembers that in his dream he was a butterfly. But another, more complicated, possibility is also entertained: that within the dream the butterfly falls asleep and has another dream, a dream in which it is Zhou. There is a dream inside a dream, and the subject within the second dream, the dream of the butterfly, is affirmed to be none other than the first dream’s dreaming subject, Zhou, who fell asleep and dreamt he was a butterfly. Even if we read the second alternative as simply that it was a butterfly all along, there is still in this reading a dream within a dream, because now we would say that the butterfly dreams it is Zhou who dreams he is a butterfly. Either way, then, the story introduces a scenario involving dreams within dreams. What, though, is the relationship between the first dream’s dreaming subject and the subjectwithin-the-dream of the second, embedded, dream? The narrator of the story uses the name “Zhou” for both, seeming to imply that it is one and the same person. But that is apparently what is queried in the final sentences in the passage: “Surely, Zhou and a butterfly count as two distinct identities! Such is

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what we call the transformation of one thing into another.”7 If Zhou counts as distinct from the butterfly in the framing dream, then surely the butterfly counts as distinct from Zhou in the framed dream. A hint of a similar puzzle is present in Julio Cortázar’s story “The Night Face Up.” This is a story in which a man in a hospital ward falls asleep and dreams he is a Moteca, and that he is on the run from the Aztecs. He repeatedly wakes up and falls asleep again, having the same dream. Only right at the end of the story does the realization dawn on him that he really is a Moteca, repeatedly dreaming of being a man in a hospital bed.8 The process of double transformation, of Zhou into a butterfly followed by the transformation of the butterfly into Zhou, has created a puzzle about identity: is the Zhou who is embedded in a dream nested in another dream the same as Zhou the dreamer? I believe that this puzzle is identical to the one raised by the literary trope of the double. “How odd; we are two and yet we are one,” says Borges’s double in  “August  25, 1983.” The second “Zhou,” the one whom the butterfly dreams of being, is and isn’t Zhou, the dreamer of the embedding dream, just as your double is and isn’t yourself. What underpins both, then, is the puzzling and apparently paradoxical concept of “another I,” of an I who both is

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and isn’t me. We’ll be able to make sense of that enigmatic notion only in the next chapter, with the help of Fernando Pessoa. The point of these explorations involving dreams within dreams is to put a certain sort of pressure on your notion of what is real, especially when what is in question is the reality of your inner self. If you are, in some sense, no more real, and no less, than the “you” whom you dream of being while dreaming you are someone else, it only goes to show that “you,” though real, do not belong within the same order of reality as a pebble or a chair. You are constituted by something whose essence is inwardness, something which is just as much there in dreams inside of dreams as it is in waking experience. That, at any rate, is the philosophical lesson drawn from such cases by a ninth century epic poem in Sanskrit, the  Mokṣopāya or Yogavāsiṣṭha.9 The point is not to undermine reality, to prove the idealist thesis that nothing, not even your self, is real. No: the point is to say something about what kind of reality subjective beings have, specifically that inwardness is their real essence.

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More “I”s Than “I Myself”

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he Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888– 1935) made the philosophical exploration of interiority his life’s work. He raises the introspective study of the structure of inwardness into a science in its own right: “The scientist of tomorrow will pay special attention to his own inner life, subjecting it to analysis with a precision instrument created out of himself.”1 Or, again: “What really astounds me is that [ordinary scientists] don’t realize there are things hidden in the cracks of knowledge—things of the soul and consciousness—that can also be classified.”2 Like Augustine, and rather appropriately for someone living in Lisbon, Pessoa compares himself to a voyager, yet his travels are not across the seas, and are instead within his inner world: “To dream is to find ourselves. You’re going to be the Columbus of your

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soul. You’re going to set out to discover your own landscapes”;3 “eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are.”4 Pessoa disagrees with Augustine, however, and crucially so, in what he takes to be the appropriate metaphor for the structure of the inner. Whereas Augustine thought of it as a library whose walls are lined with memories, Pessoa thinks of it as a landscape: “The geography of our consciousness of reality is an endless complexity of irregular coasts, low and high mountains, and myriad lakes.”5 Again, “the true landscapes are those that we ourselves create since, being their gods, we see them as they truly are, which is however we created them.”6 These internal landscapes are made in the imagination out of what Pessoa refers to as “sensations,” using the term as a sort of catchall for all that is within phenomenal experience. The most important discovery Pessoa made in the  course of his introspective experiments is the existence of what he called heteronyms. Heteronymy is, as the term itself suggests, an othering of oneself—an awareness of oneself, but as other. Pessoa deliberately contrasts his new discovery with the literary device of the pseudonym: “Pseudonymous works are by the author in his own person, except in the name he signs; heteronymic works are by the author outside his own person. They proceed from a

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full-fledged individual created by him.”7 A pseudonym is a mask, a disguise intended, even if only ironically, to hide the true identity of the author. A heteronym is something else entirely: it is the author writing “outside his own person,” and in doing so, transforming himself into an other I. We have already encountered a version of the distinction, for the protagonist in The Face of Another in effect evolves from viewing his mask as a pseudonym to treating it heteronymically. To write under a heteronym is not to hide oneself behind a mask but to experience life as that very person. Each heteronym, says Pessoa, is “lived by the author within himself.”8 A heteronym is “someone in me who has taken my place.”9 For an excellent illustration of the unusual idea of heteronymy at work, consider Yasumasa Morimura’s study, Las Meninas renacen de noche V: Drawn by a distant light, awaken to the darkness, 2013. This is, evidently, a reworking of a famous painting by Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas. In Morimura’s version, however, all the depicted figures are depictions of Morimura, Morimura as the artist, Morimura as the Infanta Margaret Theresa, Morimura as King Phillip IV of Spain, and so on. Morimura, we can now say, has made each and every one of the figures into a heteronym of himself. Assuming one heteronym,

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9.1 © Yasumasa Morimura, Las Meninas renacen de noche V:

Drawn by a distant light, awaken to the darkness, 2013. Chromogenic print 58 1/4 x 65 3/4 inches (148 x 167 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York.

Pessoa is a pantheistic naturalist poet Caeiro; assuming another heteronym, he is a neoclassical poet, Reis; assuming a third, he is the hedonistic Campos. When he assumes the semiheteronym “Bernardo Soares,” he is a solitary philosopher of selfconsciousness, and he is an alienated rationalist

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when he assumes the orthonym “Fernando Pessoa.” Each such heteronym is not Pessoa and yet is Pessoa: it is Pessoa-as-Caeiro, Pessoa-as-Reis, and Pessoa-asCampos who write(s) heteronymic poetry. While the contrast between heteronyms and pseudonyms is clear enough, we should note that the most famous pseudonymous writer, Søren Kierkegaard, describes his pseudonyms—which he also calls polyonyms—in a manner which makes them seem closer to heteronyms than conventional pseudonyms. He emphasizes that he is simply their producer, or a prompter (souffleur) for them, but not their author: “What is written is indeed therefore mine, but only so far as I have put the life-view of the creating, poetically actualized individuality into his mouth in audible lines, for my relation is even more remote than that of a poet, who creates characters and yet in the preface is himself the author. For I am impersonally, or personally, in the second person, a souffleur who has poetically produced the authors.”10 The Kierkegaard scholar Stephen Crites makes Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms sound a lot like Pessoa’s heteronyms when he characterizes them as follows: “[The pseudonym] not only represents a definite point of view but reflects his point of view in the style and tone of his language. That is the supreme achievement of Kierkegaard’s poetic gift.

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Constantine Constantius chooses his words between thoughtful sips of good wine, his young poet declaims in fits of lyric desperation; Judge William’s tone is earnest, firm, good-natured but humorless, yet beneath the prosaic surface one senses a quiet and constant ardor; Vigilius Haufniensis writes the sort of prose one would expect to meet in an academic journal; Johannes de Silentio intones as if from the bottom of a deep well.”11 But he distances the two concepts when he goes on, “Anyone who has lived with these authors for a while would recognize the voice of any of them after three sentences, in exactly the way that he would recognize Falstaff or Goethe’s Mephistopheles. But he would not mistake them for the voices of real human beings. They are altogether theatrical creations. They are sheer personae, masks without actors underneath, voices.” This is the crucial point, for Kierkegaard too denies that he is himself any of his pseudonyms, and says that he has “no opinion about them except as third party,” remarks which show that a Kierkegaardian pseudonym is also not quite “another I,” not quite a heteronym of Kierkegaard. Another Kierkegaard scholar, Edward Mooney, likewise casts doubt on the idea that Kierkegaard literally “becomes a new author each time he starts a new book (under a new pseudonym, or non-pseudonym)—the new author only

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problematically related to predecessors and successors.”12 Becoming a new author is exactly the point, on the other hand, of assuming a heteronym. Pessoa’s three most famous heteronyms are the world- class poets he names Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. Pessoa says, “I placed all my power of dramatic depersonalization in Caeiro; I placed all my mental discipline, clothed in its own special music, in Ricardo Reis; and in Álvaro de Campos I placed all the emotion that I deny myself and don’t put into life.”13 To assume a heteronym is not merely to don a disguise or wear a mask, but to transform oneself into another I: “First we must create another I, charged with suffering—in and for us— everything we suffer.”14 When Pessoa writes that heteronymy is a subjective state in which “every felt pain is automatically analysed to the core, ruthlessly foisted on an extraneous I,”15 he exactly formulates the essence of the concept in an idea of experience that is at once irreducibly first-personal, and yet also alien. A heteronym is another I, an I who is not me, an othered I: But since I am me, I merely take a little pleasure in the little that it is to imagine myself as that someone else. Yes, soon he-I, under a tree or bower, will

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eat twice what I can eat, drink twice what I dare drink, and laugh twice what I can conceive of laughing. Soon he, now I. Yes, for a moment I was someone else: in someone else I saw and lived this human and humble joy of existing as an animal in shirtsleeves.16

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If living through a heteronym is certainly a way of enriching one’s experiential life, Pessoa, paradoxically, also describes it in terms of a loss of self: “Today I have no personality: I’ve divided all my humaneness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. Today I’m the meeting-place of a small humanity that belongs only to me . . . I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I’m less real than the  others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all.”17 Again, “I created a nonexistent coterie, placing it all in a framework of reality. I ascertained the influences at work and the friendships between them, I listened in myself to their discussions and divergent points of view, and in all of this it seems that I, who created them all, was the one who was least there.”18 One point Pessoa is making here is that, even as he assumes the multiple heteronyms, Pessoa is separately conscious of himself in the capacity of a meeting place for them, which he also describes as a

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harbor and a theater stage. While being a heteronym corresponds to a well- defined style of experiencing, this separate self- consciousness is one that is empty of any specific personality or content: it is a depersonalized self-awareness. Pessoa seems to think that one’s awareness of oneself as meeting place for the heteronyms is less robust than one’s awareness of oneself as another I— that it does not support a strong sense of presence. One’s selfawareness as meeting place or harbor is, though, associated with a particular feature, a capacity to observe the heteronyms, both from the outside, and also, more importantly, from the inside, a  simultaneously introspective and empathetic capacity to analyze and scrutinize the subjective character of the heteronym that is being lived through. We have seen in earlier chapters of this book that inwardness, or, rather, the inward turn, can be thought of in terms of a redirection of attention away from one’s external surroundings, and onto one’s inner life. The term Pessoa uses for this “inward turn” is “analysis,” which for him means attentive scrutiny of the landscape of sensations that constitute a heteronymic subjectivity. Subjectivity, he discovered, has a particular structure, a center– periphery structure according to which every

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sensation is presented to a subject. Indeed, to be a subject is to be the one who occupies the subject position, the one at the center of a centered landscape of sensation. Pessoa describes the structure of inwardness very well when he writes: “And amid all this confusion I, what’s truly I, am the centre that exists only in the geometry of the abyss: I’m the nothing around which everything spins, existing only so that it can spin, being a centre only because every circle has one. I, what’s truly I, am a well without walls but with the wall’s viscosity, the centre of everything with nothing around it.”19 Whoever is found occupying that center position is the one I refer to as myself. Pessoa’s remarkable discovery was that there is no constancy in the fact of who is there at the center. I  can imagine a landscape of sensation in which Alberto Caeiro, who is then I myself, is the one at the center; or, again, I might imagine a landscape in which it is Ricardo Reis, who is then I myself, who is the one at the center. So there are as many “I”s as there are possible occupants of the subject position; every heteronym is another I myself. To appreciate how this discovery relates to the ideas we have been discussing up to now in this book, we have only to observe that there is, in fact, an analogous phenomenon in the case of dreaming. In his splendid book Dream, Death, and the Self, J. Valberg

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asks us to consider the following case: “Suppose I have a dream in which there are two individuals (human beings), X and JV. Yet in the dream I am not JV but X (X is me). This seems possible, but what does it mean? Not that, in the dream, JV was X. In the dream, JV and X are distinct individuals. JV is in the dream, but in the dream JV is not me. In the dream I am a human being other than the human being that I am. . . . Given that JV and X are distinct individuals in the dream, there still exists the possibility that in the dream I am X.”20 Imagine you have a dream in which you and a friend are present, sitting, say, at a table in a cafe. What is very strange about this particular dream, however, is that in the dream you are your friend, and what you dream is sitting at a table with yourself, who you see sitting in front of you. The puzzle is to know what makes it the case that in the dream you are your friend: on what grounds should we answer the question, “Which one is me?” As Valberg puts it, “Consider the set of human beings in the cafe. One of them—this one—is the one I call ‘me.’ On what basis do I select him? What makes him me?”21 And Valberg makes the following, very good, suggestion, albeit a suggestion already anticipated by Pessoa: “We may understand the possibility as follows. In the dream it is X, not JV, who occupied the subject position—the

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position occupied by JV in reality. That is, it is X, not JV, who is at the centre of the dream. In reality, JV is the one at the centre: JV is me. In the dream X occupies the position at the centre: in the dream X is me.”22 Now we have already encountered an example with a very similar formal structure. When Borges, in the story “August 25, 1983,” goes up to the room in the hotel and meets his double, he, Borges, is the one at the center of the landscape of sensation; and yet the one he finds there, lying on the bed, is also Borges. Borges’s double, in this story, stands in exactly the same relation to its protagonist, writing in the first person, as “JV” does in Valberg’s dream to the one who is at the center of that dream. Likewise, in Pessoa’s writings we often come across a character called “Fernando Pessoa,” or “Fernando Pessoa himself.” Yet we should not make the mistake of thinking that we have at last tracked down the real Fernando Pessoa, the one who is behind the multiple heteronyms. For, Pessoa says, this “Fernando Pessoa” is simply an orthonym, and an orthonym is a heteronym who happens to share a name. “Fernando Pessoa’s writings,” says Pessoa speaking of himself, “belong to two categories of works, which we may call orthonymic and heteronymic. The heteronymic works of Fernando Pessoa have been produced

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by (so far) three people’s names—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. . . . If these three individuals are more or less real than Fernando Pessoa himself is a metaphysical problem that the latter—not privy to the secret of the Gods and therefore ignorant of what reality is—will never be able to solve.”23 “JV” is an orthonym too, as is “Borges,” and orthonyms are shadow selves, doubles of oneself within one’s dreams. For a real-world example of Pessoan orthonymy, consider the case of breakfast TV presenter Lorraine Kelly. In a court of law Kelly argued that the “Lorraine Kelly” who appeared on the TV was a “persona of herself,” and not Kelly, and that her agent fees were, therefore, tax deductible. The judge agreed: “We did not accept that Ms Kelly simply appeared as herself; we were satisfied that Ms Kelly presents a persona of herself. We should make clear we do not doubt that Ms Kelly is an entertaining lady, but the point is that for the time Ms Kelly is contracted to perform live on air she is public ‘Lorraine Kelly’; she may not like the guest she interviews, she may not like the food she eats, she may not like the film she viewed but that is where the performance lies.”24 For another real world example, consider those comedians who perform in their own name, such as Mae Martin, Amna Saleem, and Liam Williams.

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Martin says that as the onstage “Mae Martin,” “I try to be as close to myself as I possibly can be [although] maybe more energised,” while Williams says of his onstage orthonym that “it’s like a mask, a version of yourself that you have an affinity with, but also it’s distant enough that it can do things you’d never do.”25 Giorgio Manganelli explores just this phenomenon in his novel La Notte, and he speaks there not of orthonymy but of “homopseudonymy,” the unusual situation in which one uses one’s very own name as a pseudonym, as a mask.26 And, to fulfill the promise I made at the end of the last chapter, we can now see that Zhou, the one whom the butterfly dreams of being, is an orthonym—a heteronym with the same name—of Zhou who dreams of being a butterfly: the one is “another I” of the other.

To Say “I” Is to Lie

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T

he destruction of the ‘I’ is the one and only free act that lies open to us.”1 These are the words of the brilliant French philosopher Simone Weil (1909– 1943). Weil’s ethics is one of “selfemptying,” a stripping away (dépouillement) of the “I.” “To say ‘I’ is to lie,” she famously announces.2 In another place, she says, “To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the centre of the world in imagination, to discern that all points in the world are equally centres and that the true centre is outside the world, this is to consent to the rule of mechanical necessity in matter and of free choice at the centre of each soul.”3 “I must suppress the ‘I,’ ”4 she affirms, somewhat paradoxically. Weil’s radical claim is that you should completely abandon the “inward turn,” the redirection of the

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attention away from the world and into yourself, the very turn that we have seen, time and again in this book, that has been supposed to provide the notion of inwardness substance and meaning. Not that she is against an ethics of attention; to the contrary, she  claims that it is your fundamental ethical responsibility to attend in the right way. The right way to attend, she says, is to attend to the world itself, without allowing one’s inner desires or preoccupations to influence what one attends to or how one attends: 86

We liberate energy in ourselves, but it constantly reattaches itself. How are we to liberate it entirely? We have to desire that it should be done in us—to desire it truly— simply to desire it, not to try to accomplish it. For every attempt in that direction is vain and has to be dearly paid for. In such a work all that I call “I” has to be passive. Attention alone— that attention which is so full that the “I” disappears—is required of me. I have to deprive all that I call “I” of the light of my attention and turn it on to that which cannot be conceived.5

Modern reformulations of Weil’s central idea are helpful in making clear what she has in mind. As Weil scholar David Cockburn puts it, to attend to the

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things themselves is to see them “in a way which involves a canceling of those concerns which involve a reference to the object’s relation to myself.”6 Another scholar of Weil’s philosophy, Mark Shiffman, has said that for Weil, attention is “the ‘negative effort’ of clearing oneself out of the path of receiving the true perception of reality.”7 Still another, Ann Pirruccello, sums up the idea as being that, for Weil, “attention is the activity of waiting, of expecting in a way that embodies self-diminishment. Only when one has suspended a way of seeing that has the values of the personal self or ego as its interpretative principle can one approach reality instead of illusion.”8 Weil describes this canceling of the self as a process of “decreation,” meaning the destruction of self that makes room for the possibility of consenting to what is real: to decreate oneself, Weil says in her “decreative prayer,” is to live “without the possibility of bringing about any act of my will.” As Robert Chenavier has put it, “attention gives back to the real what the existence of the self has stolen from it.”9 Weil’s claim that you should seek “to give up being the centre of the world in imagination” sounds like a  complete repudiation of Pessoa’s philosophy of  inwardness. Pessoa’s analysis of the center– periphery structure in what he calls “landscapes of sensation” leads him to discover the phenomenon of

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heteronymic subjectivity, and with it, the idea that it is possible for each of us indefinitely to multiply ourselves. For Pessoa this is something precious because, as Álvaro de Campos puts it in the famous poem Time’s Passage, it is possible now “To feel everything in every way, / To live everything from all sides, / To be the same thing in all ways possible at the same time, / To realize in oneself all humanity at all moments in one scattered, extravagant, complete, and aloof moment.”10 Weil, to the contrary, argues that one should abandon forms of self- consciousness that are grounded in one’s thinking of oneself as the one at the center of a landscape of sensation. This moral prescription demands of one that one reorders one’s mind in such a way as to eliminate any center– periphery structure in one’s field of experience. Her idea is that there is a mental activity which gives unity and wholeness even to an uncentred mind, namely the activity of attending to the real: “The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as it is, in all its truth. Only he who is capable of attention can do this.”11 Again, “attention alone—that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears—is required of me. I have to deprive all that I call ‘I’ of the light of my

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attention and turn it on to that which cannot be conceived.”12 One could not imagine a blunter negation of Augustine’s advice: “Do not go out, return to yourself; truth dwells in the inner man.”13 Weil says that it is precisely the keeping of oneself in contact with reality by attending to the world—but without projecting oneself into it, as the characters in Akutagawa’s “In a Grove” were so woefully wont to do—that holds the mind together. The structure of inwardness Weil would see you cultivate would thus be a sort of conformal and aperspectival map of reality, standing in correspondence with the world without any privileged perspectival point. It would have as much order as the world has, no more and no less. What would it be like to experience the world in this way? I think that immersive installations like the infinity rooms of the brilliant conceptual artist Yayoi Kusama are a good attempt at capturing the phenomenology. In these rooms, the mirrored surfaces of the walls create the impression of endless repetition, an infinite three- dimensional matrix in which the viewer no longer occupies a privileged viewing position. The immersive installations grew out of Kusama’s earlier infinite net painting, which Kusama thought of as “paintings that ignored

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10.1 Yayoi Kusama, Dots Obsession, Rice University Art

Gallery

composition and had no centres. The monotony produced by their repetitive patterns bewildered the viewer, while their hypnotic serenity drew the spirit into a vertigo of nothingness.” Kusama tells a funny anecdote about a visit paid to her studio: “One day an artist who had found success in Paris and become renowned around the world called at my studio. This ebullient Frenchman . . . said ‘Why don’t you read Kant and Hegel? There’s so much greatness out there! How can you repeat these meaningless exercises, day and night, for years?’ But I was under the spell of the polka dot nets.”14 I think

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that this artist understood, even if only subliminally, the threat Kusama’s art presented to the European Enlightenment’s picture of inwardness, and its celebration of the individual will. There is no room for that in Kusama’s conception of inwardness; indeed, she explains the whole point of her work in a way that would have sat well with Weil: “By obliterating one’s individual self one returns to the infinite universe.”15 It isn’t the case, then, that Simone Weil wants to revoke the notion of inwardness altogether. Yes, she finds the idea that there is something of value in the “inward turn” abhorrent, but her real objection is to a way of thinking about oneself that puts one at the center of an arena of agency. Were Weil to have offered an analysis of the geometry of inwardness to which we ought to aspire, she would, I believe, have agreed with Kusama that it is an uncentered and infinite network of nodes and vertices without any overarching ego.

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Postscript

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hen this book began, I promised to lead you in a “careful examination” of inwardness. Inwardness, in its most generic formulation, is the presence of yourself to yourself. Back in ancient times, when sages first became aware that human beings have an interior as well as an exterior life, inwardness was seen as a precious treasure. And yet it was also easily overlooked, for the world is full of distractions and it is hard to wrench oneself away. Indeed, for the ancients, the world just is, in essence, a distraction, and what we should be doing is teaching ourselves in the arts of attention, most especially cultivating the ability to redirect the attention inward. Such were the ideas that animated the earliest of the Upaniṣads, and I suggested that their influence can

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be traced through Plotinus and Porphyry to Augustine and Avicenna. If there is a single, fundamental problem with this way of thinking, it is that it relies on too sharp a separation between the inner and the outer. The distinction, made real by Descartes, would have us all become recluses and renunciates, leading ascetic lives of self- contemplation. We don’t have to deny either the facticity of interiority or the value of an “inward turn” to feel that our inner and outer lives must be enmeshed in ways the ancient picture disallows. A first way to bring home this thought is to realize that the very way the external world appears, the way it shows up in our experience, is itself informed and influenced by that which is within: our preoccupations, wants, feelings, attitudes, and so much else besides. There’s nothing neutral about our encounters with the world. The world is a place that “affords” me the opportunities to satisfy my desires, and the pathways to escape my terrors. That is what the world consists in, for me, and there is one such world for each of us, each of us having our own distinct inner lives. This was the lesson I derived from Akutagawa’s brilliant story “In a Grove,” and from the juxtaposition between the protreptic ambitions of this story and the dramatic

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denouement of Kurosawa’s cinematic rendering, Rashōmon. Let’s agree, then, that there is some truth in the idea of inwardness, insofar as it exists only because there is some truth in the idea of outwardness as well. The question I wanted to answer is: What sort of structure does inwardness have? What, in Sartre’s words, is the systematicity of “the system of interiority”? What, to put it in Pessoa’s terms, is “the geometry of the abyss”? Augustine provided me with a first answer, an answer exemplary in its clarity and persuasive power, even if, in my opinion, ultimately unsatisfactory. He said that to turn inward is to find oneself in the library of one’s memories, walls stacked high with recollections waiting to be pulled down, and others, more remote, which can be called from the stacks. As charming as this metaphor is, its grip on the imagination is only as strong as its ability to exclude other, rival, metaphors. That’s indeed the reason why, in this inquiry, I have found that works of fiction are indispensable argumentative aids. For in literature, unlike academic philosophy, no one metaphor can hope for imperial domination over the imagination. To subvert the grip of Augustine’s picture and expose its inherent absurdity, it was sufficient to bring into play another use of the metaphor

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of a library, as found in Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Library of Babel.” This was the first of several appeals I made to Borges, whose fictional fables are works of pure philosophy. In the Indian, and especially in the Buddhist, imaginaire, a very different metaphor has guided inquiry into inwardness. We are, say these philosophers, self-illuminating beings. The essence of the inner is to illuminate, and of the outer to be illuminated. To turn inward is to discover a world of pure light, uncontaminated by dark corners and hidden recesses and other such undercover entities. I sided with Nāgārjuna, though, in finding this picture unconvincing: if something can’t get dirty, it makes no sense to call it “self-cleaning,” and, likewise, the description of one’s presence to oneself as “selfilluminating” is a torturous distortion of language if the inner is never in the dark. We have already begun to enter the world of shadows and mirrors, masks and disguises, and a third metaphor for inwardness leads us only further down that path. This is the metaphor of the interface. Sartre was not the only one to feel that there is something essentially intersubjective about the subjective, and there has been a long tradition, beginning with Socrates, of thinking that you can only know yourself

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by seeing yourself reflected in the eyes of others. Kobo Abe’s novel The Face of Another is a masterly exploration of the thought, with particular emphasis on the vital role that one’s face performs as a medium and membrane between self and other. Is it the case, as the protagonist starts out believing, that a face is simply a mask, a disguise for one’s “true self” within? Or is it rather, as he comes to think as the novel progresses, that the network of expressions, behaviors, and social interactions that a face sustains are actually in some way constitutive of one’s interior life? Masks are Janus-faced: they present an appearance to the outer viewer, and, simultaneously, imply the existence of something underneath. One might think of one’s physical appearance, or even one’s body as a whole, not as one’s real self but as masking the self within. And there is no reason why one should stop there, for what is within may itself be another mask, and within that another. So, following through the logic of the mask leads us ineluctably in the direction of a layered conception of the topology of inwardness, that just like a Matryoshka doll, one can peel away successively less outer layers in the hope, perhaps, of finding one’s “true self” at the core. Such was the Upaniṣadic understanding of

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the  “geometry of the abyss,” and if one reads the Upaniṣadic texts closely one sees that the activity of peeling away, which is a sort of askesis, is itself a social practice. Kierkegaard emphasizes the relationality of inwardness when he says that a self is a relation relating itself to itself. This is not pure reflexivity, however, because the two relata, although both aspects of oneself, are in another sense polar opposites. A self is a synthesis of contrary factors. It is again in literature, rather than in formal philosophy, that I find this insight most seriously examined. For what is one’s double, one’s doppelgänger, other than oneself under another aspect? The rich vein of modernist fiction which invokes the idea of the double can be read, therefore, as an inquiry into the possibility, or otherwise, of the synthesis Kierkegaard claims is necessary in order to escape despair. Despair is certainly the lead emotion in the two examples of this literature I discuss. In Borges’s story, “August  25, 1983,” the encounter is between one’s younger and one’s older self, and the synthesis, whose possibility the story hardly encourages us to believe in, is a temporal one, of anticipation and memory, of a single event that is at once both in one’s past and in one’s future. My other example comes from the Tamil writer Mauni, who manages to reduce the genre to

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its most basic form. Without plot or characterization, a man, “he,” and his double, also “he,” negotiate their mutual terror of being usurped by the other. If the layers of the Upaniṣadic self constitute one sort of nesting, then another is to be found in the idea that dreams are nestable. Here we must distinguish between the dreaming subject, the one who is dreaming, and the subject-within-the-dream, the one to whom, within the dream, a dreamworld is presented. If I dream that I am flying, the first use of the first person refers indexically to the dreaming subject, while the second use designates the subject position within the dream. The subject-within-thedream is a more purely interior being than the dreaming subject, and for that reason has been thought of as being closer to one’s true self. Again, though, the relation is repeatable, and we can imagine that the subject-within-the-dream is dreaming too, a dream in which there is another subject-within-the-dream; and so on. Borges comes to our aid again, exploring the implications of this scenario for the reality of subjects. Thinkers in the classical worlds of China and India found this idea very conducive: a passage in the Daoist classic Zhuangzi develops the argument, as does the Sanskrit epic poem, the Yogavāsiṣtha. The philosophical lesson is, I believe, that inwardness is the essence of subjects.

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If modernist writers in general live in fear for the integrity of the self, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa is different. His literary oeuvre, indeed his life, is one long sustained experiment to discover the outer reaches of inwardness. What he discovers is remarkable: that I am many, not in the sense of being constituted by a confederation of forces, but in the more radical sense that I can be any one of many heteronyms. A heteronym is “another I,” and Pessoa is very careful to distinguish his discovery from the pseudonym, a literary mask donned to disguise one’s true identity. One’s true identity, Pessoa demonstrates, is multiple. He, too, investigates the structure of inwardness, the “geometry of the abyss,” and he concludes that it sustains a phenomenal center, a subject position which can be multiply occupied, and a periphery which he calls “the landscape of sensation.” Even as heteronymy flourished in Lisbon, though, Pessoa’s contemporary, the brilliant French philosopher Simone Weil, was writing in her Marseilles notebooks of a quite different discovery about inwardness. She rejects absolutely the idea which has run through discussions of inwardness since antiquity, that there is something of value to be found in “turning inwards.” It is not merely a peeling away of the outer layers of selfhood that she recommends, but a

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complete stripping away (dépouillement) of the “I.” She agrees, I think, with the philosophical lesson of “In a Grove,” that one’s wants and wishes shape the world one sees, and she finds that abhorrent. For Weil, what matters is to attend receptively to the world itself, to eliminate the distortions of self-interest, and to make the internal geography of one’s mind into a conformal map, without perspective or prejudice. The jury is perhaps still out as to whether, with Pessoa, we should expand inwardness, or whether, in agreement with Weil, we must revoke it. I shall leave it to you, dear reader, to make your own inner mind up.

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Notes

Preamble 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Aśvaghoṣa, Handsome Nanda, trans. Linda Covill, Clay Sanskrit Library (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 151, 8.5c– d: “manaso hi rajastamasvino ෶ bhiṣajo ’dhyātmavidaḥ parīkṣakāḥ ෶෶” Gavin Flood, The Truth Within: A History of Inwardness in Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 200–1. Chāndogya Upaniṣad 8.3.1–2. Patrick Olivelle, trans., The Early Upaniṣads: Annotated Text and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 277. Plato, Alcibiades 132e– 133c. The Complete Works of Plato, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, trans. William Weaver (London: Harcourt, 1981), 15.

EXPLORATIONS IN INWARDNESS

Explorations in Inwardness 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

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6.

7. 8.

Avicenna, On the Soul, Healing (Al-Shifā) 15.17– 16.17, translation in Jari Kaukua, Self-Awareness in Islamic Philosophy: Avicenna and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 35. Ta‘līqāt, 160– 61. Translation in Kaukua, Self-Awareness, 53. On the Soul, Healing (Al-Shifā) 15.14. Translation in Michael Marmura, “Avicenna’s ‘Flying Man’ In Context,” Monist 69 (1986), 385– 86. Richard Sorabji, Self: Ancient and Modern Insights About Individuality, Life, and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006): 226–27. See Frits Staal, Advaita and Neoplatonism (Madras: University of Madras Press, 1961); Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (New York: Allworth, 2002), ch. 22. Chāndogya Upaniṣad 8.3.1–2. Patrick Olivelle, trans., The Early Upaniṣads: Annotated Text and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 277. Katha Upaniṣad 4.1–3. Olivelle, The Early Upaniṣads, 390– 92. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.5.3. Olivelle, The Early Upaniṣads, 53.

Libraries Lined with Memories 1.

2.

Augustine, De vera religione—Die wahre Religion, ed. Josef Lössl (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007), 39: Noli foras ire, in teipsum redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 131.

RASHŌMON’S EFFECT 3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

Phillip Cary, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of the Christian Platonist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Pauliina Remes, “Inwardness and Infinity of Selfhood: From Plotinus to Augustine,” in P. Remes and J. Sihvola, eds., Ancient Philosophies of the Self (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 155– 76. Confessions 10.8.12– 15. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Carolyn J.-B. Hammond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 87– 94. Confessions 10.8.12– 15. Augustine, Confessions, 95. Christopher Hill, Sensations: A Defense of Type Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 123–25. Hill, Sensations, 123–25. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (London: Penguin, 1999), 112– 18.

Rashōmon’s Effect 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, abridged and edited by John Dillon (London: Penguin, 1991), 1.6.9. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, “In a Grove,” in Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories, trans. Jay Rubin (London: Penguin, 2006), 10– 19. Discourses 3.23.34– 5. Epictetus, Discourses and Selected Writings, trans. Robert Dobbin (London: Penguin, 2008). Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, “Rashōmon,” in Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories, trans. Jay Rubin (London: Penguin, 2006), 3– 9. Karl Heider, “The Rashomon Effect: When Ethnographers Disagree,” American Anthropologist 90 (1988): 73– 81.

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RASHŌMON’S EFFECT 6.

7.

Donald Richie, “Rashomon,” in Donald Richie, ed., Focus on Rashomon (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 84– 85. Richie, “Rashomon,” 80.

Self-Illuminating Beings 1.

2.

106 3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Bhikkhu Pesala, ed., The Debate of King Milinda: An Abridgement of the Milinda Pañha (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2000), 11. Paesi- kahāṇayaṃ 772 (74) [187]. Translated in Willem Bollée, The Story of Paesi (Paesi- kahāṇayaṃ): Soul and Body in Ancient India; A Dialogue on Materialism; Text, Translation, Notes and Glossary (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002), 147. Nyāyabhāṣya ad 5.1.10; translation in Alex Watson, “Light as an Analogy for Cognition in Buddhist Idealism (vijñānavāda),” Journal of Indian Philosophy 42 (2014): 401–21: antareṇāpi pradīpāntaraṃ dṛśyate pradīpaḥ, tatra pradīpadarśanārthaṃ pradīpopādānaṃ nirarthakam. Nyāyakandalī 324, 7– 8; translation in Watson, “Light as an Analogy for Cognition,” 401–21: yathā ghaṭādiṣv aprakāśasvabhāveṣu pradīpādeḥ prakāśasvabhāvāt prakāśo bhavati. na tu pradīpe pradīpāntarāt prakāśaḥ, kiṃ tu svata eva. See Jonardon Ganeri, The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness and the First Person Stance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), ch. 9. Pramāṇavārttika 3:329. For further examples in Dharmakīrti, see Pramāṇavārttika 3:329, 3:482ab, 3:327, 3:446, 3:477, 3:478, 3:480, 3:481; Pramāṇaviniścaya 1:38. Kei Kataoka, “A Critical Edition of the Vijñānādvaitavāda Section of Bhaṭṭa Jayanta’s Nyāyamañjarī,” Memoirs of the

THE FACE AS INTERFACE

8.

9.

10.

Institute of Oriental Culture 133 (2003): 115– 55, § 3.2.2; translation in Watson, “Light as an Analogy for Cognition,” 401–21. Kataoka, § 4.4.1; translation in Watson, “Light as an Analogy for Cognition,” 401–21. The grammarian Bhartṛhari also makes the point: “Just as a light is not illuminated by another light, so is the form of a cognition not grasped by another cognition” (yathā jyotiḥ prakāśena nānyenābhiprakāśyate | jñānākāras tathānyena na jñānenopagṛhyate ||) Vākyapadīya 3.1.106; translation in Watson, “Light as an Analogy for Cognition,” 401–21. Matthew Dasti and Stephen Phillips, The Nyāya- sūtra: Selections with Early Commentaries (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2017), 54. In response to Nāgārjuna’s critique, the early Nyāya commentators reinterpret Gautama’s sūtra in a manner consistent with the rejection of the idea of selfillumination. That is, they accept the force of Nāgārjuna’s argument and move their epistemology and philosophy of mind away from a dependence on this idea. E. H. Johnston and A. Kunst, ed., The Dialectical Method of Nāgārjuna: Vigrahavyāvartanī, translated by Kamaleswar Bhattacharya (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986).

The Face as Interface 1. 2. 3. 4.

Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Subjectivity?, trans. David Broder and Trista Selous (London: Verso, 2016), 3. Sartre, What Is Subjectivity?, 9– 10. Sartre, What Is Subjectivity?, 73. Plato, Alcibiades 132e– 133c. The Complete Works of Plato, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).

107

THE FACE AS INTERFACE 5. 6.

108

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

G. E. H. Palmer, P. Sherrard, and K. Ware, eds., Philokalia (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), 186. Kobo Abe, The Face of Another, trans. Dale Saunders (New York: Knopf, 1966). Originally published as Tamin No Kao in 1964. Abe, The Face of Another, 19. Abe, 26–27. Abe, 61. Abe, 70. Abe, 76. Abe, 93– 94. Abe, 104. Abe, 152. Abe, 160. Abe, 223. Abe, 224. For a review of Indian ideas around the theme, see Isabelle Ratié, “An Indian Debate on Optical Reflection and Its Metaphysical Implications—Śaiva Nondualism and the Mirror of Consciousness,” in Joerg Tuske, ed., Indian Epistemology and Metaphysics (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 207– 40. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 62.

Hidden Layers Within 1.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (London: Penguin), 2002, sketch 262.

TROUBLES WITH DOUBLES 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Kobo Abe, The Face of Another, trans. Dale Saunders (New York: Knopf, 1966), 204– 5. Originally published as Tamin No Kao in 1964. Taittirīya Upaniṣad 2.3.2– 5. Patrick Olivelle, trans., The Early Upaniṣads (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 301. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.5.3. The Early Upaniṣads, 55. Chāndogya Upaniṣad 8.7.2. The Early Upaniṣads, 281. CU 8.8.1–4. The Early Upaniṣads, 281. CU 8.9.1. The Early Upaniṣads, 283. CU 8.10.1. The Early Upaniṣads, 283. CU 8.11.1. The Early Upaniṣads, 285.

Troubles with Doubles 1.

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 13– 15. Charles Stang, Our Divine Double (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 12. Mauni, Fictions, trans. Lakshmi Holmström (New Delhi: Katha, 1997). “Mauni”—“the silent one”—is the pen name of S. Mani (1907– 1985), a Tamil writer who lived in Kumbakonam and Chidambaram, southern India. Mauni, “Undying Flame,” in Fictions, 48. Mauni, “Error,” in Fictions, 142. Mauni, “Error,” 143. Mauni, “Error,” 145. Mauni, “Error,” 140. Kaṭha Upaniṣad 3.3. The Early Upaniṣads, 389. Mauni, “Wasteland,” in Fictions, 152.

109

TROUBLES WITH DOUBLES 11. 12. 13.

Mauni, “Wasteland,” 155. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (London: Penguin, 1999), 489. Borges, Collected Fictions, 490.

Dreams of Dreams 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

110 6. 7. 8.

9.

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (London: Penguin, 1999), 98. Borges, Collected Fictions, 100. Borges, Collected Fictions, 100. Borges, Collected Fictions, 97. Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 109– 10. Brook Ziporyn, trans., Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009), 21. Zhuangzi, 21. Julio Cortázar, “La noche boca arriba,” in The End of the Game, and Other Stories, trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Pantheon, 1963). See Christopher Chapple and Arindam Chakrabarti, eds., Engaged Emancipation: Mind, Morals and Make-Believe in the Mokṣopāya (Yogavāsiṣṭha) (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016); Arindam Chakrabarti, “Dream, Death, and Death Within a Dream,” in Günter Blamberger and Sudhir Kakar, eds., Imaginations of Death and the Beyond in India and Europe (Singapore: Springer, 2018), 101–17.

MORE “I”S THAN “I MYSELF”

More “I”s Than “I Myself” 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (London: Penguin, 2002), sketch 76. Pessoa, sketch 378. Pessoa, 400. Pessoa, sketch 123. Pessoa, sketch 338. Pessoa, sketch 138. Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (London: Penguin, 2006), 3 Fernando Pessoa, The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Grove, 2007), 2. Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, sketch 351. Søren Kierkegaard, “A First and Last Declaration,” in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Alastair Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 527–28. Stephen Crites, “Pseudonymous Authorship as Art and Act,” in Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Josiah Thompson (New York: Anchor, 1972), 216. Edward Mooney, “Pseudonyms and ‘Style,’ ” in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. John Lippitt and George Pattison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 193. Pessoa, Selected Prose, 253– 54. Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, 455. Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, 456. Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, sketch 374. Pessoa, Selected Prose, 262. Pessoa, Selected Prose, 257. Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, sketch 262. J. J. Valberg, Dream, Death, and the Self (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 62. For a more detailed

111

MORE “I”S THAN “I MYSELF”

21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

112

26.

study of the argument of this paragraph, see my Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves: Fernando Pessoa & His Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Valberg, Dream, Death, and the Self, 65. Valberg, Dream, Death, and the Self, 65. Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, 3. Hilary Osborne, “Lorraine Kelly Is a Theatrical Artist, Tax Tribunal Judge Rules,” Guardian, March  20, 2019, https:// www.theguardian . com /business /2019 /mar /20 /lorraine-kelly-theatrical-artist-tax-tribunal-judge-rules. Rachael Healy, “Congratulations, You Played Yourself: Comics Who Fictionalise Their Lives,” Guardian, November  20, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019 /nov/20/comics-real-life- characters-larry- david. Giorgio Manganelli, La Notte, ed. Salvatore Nigro (Milan: Adelphi, 1996).

To Say “I” Is to Lie 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge, 2004), 337. Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks, trans. Richard Rees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 132. Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 100. Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, 265. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Craufurd and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 118. See also Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, 278. David Cockburn, “Time and Eternity in Spinoza and Weil,” in David Cockburn, Other Times: Philosophical Perspectives

TO SAY “I” IS TO LIE

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

on Past, Present and Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 327. Mark Shiffman, “Review of Robert Chenavier, Simone Weil: Attention to the Real,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, March  31, 2013, https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/simone-weil -attention-to-the-real/. Ann Pirruccello, “Interpreting Simone Weil: Presence and Absence in Attention,” Philosophy East and West 45 (1995): 61– 62. Robert Chenavier, Simone Weil: Attention to the Real, translated by Bernard Doering (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 67. Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Grove, 1999), 146. Weil, Waiting for God, 65. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 118. Augustine, De vera religione—Die wahre Religion, ed. Josef Lössl (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2007), 39. Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama (London: Tate, 2015). Kusama, Infinity Net.

113

Select Bibliography

Explorations in Inwardness Flood, Gavin. The Truth Within: A History of Inwardness in Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Kaukua, Jari. Self-Awareness in Islamic Philosophy: Avicenna and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Olivelle, Patrick, trans. The Early Upaniṣads: Annotated Text and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Plotinus. The Enneads. Translated by Stephen MacKenna, abridged and edited by John Dillon. London: Penguin, 1991.

Libraries Lined with Memories Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Carolyn  J.-B. Hammond. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel.” In Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley (London: Penguin, 1999). Cary, Phillip. Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of the Christian Platonist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Rashōmon’s Effect Akutagawa, Ryūnosuke. Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories. Translated by Jay Rubin. London: Penguin, 2006. Richie, Donald, ed. Focus on Rashomon. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972.

116

Self-Illuminating Beings Johnston, E. H., and A. Kunst, eds. The Dialectical Method of Nāgārjuna: Vigrahavyāvartanī. Translated by Kamaleswar Bhattacharya. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986. Watson, Alex. “Light as an Analogy for Cognition in Buddhist Idealism (vijñānavāda).” Journal of Indian Philosophy 42 (2014): 401–21.

The Face as Interface Abe, Kobo. The Face of Another. Translated by Dale Saunders. New York: Knopf, 1966. Originally published as Tamin No Kao in 1964. Ratié, Isabelle. “An Indian Debate on Optical Reflections and Its Metaphysical Implications—Śaiva Nondualism and the

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Mirror of Consciousness.” In Joerg Tuske, ed., Indian Epistemology and Metaphysics (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 207–40. Sartre, Jean-Paul. What Is Subjectivity? Translated by David Broder and Trista Selous. London: Verso, 2016.

Hidden Layers Within Olivelle, Patrick, trans. The Early Upaniṣads: Annotated Text and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Troubles with Doubles 117 Borges, Jorge Luis. “August 25, 1983.” In Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley (London: Penguin, 1999), 489–93. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness Unto Death. Translated by Howard Hong and Edna Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. Mauni. Fictions. Translated by Lakshmi Holmström. New Delhi: Katha, 1997.

Dreams Inside Dreams Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Circular Ruins.” In Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley (London: Penguin, 1999), 96–100. Chapple, Christopher, and Arindam Chakrabarti, eds. Engaged Emancipation: Mind, Morals and Make-Believe in the Mokṣopāya (Yogavāsiṣṭha). Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016).

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Thompson, Evan. Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

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118

Kierkegaard, Søren. “A First and Last Declaration.” In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, translated by Alastair Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 527–31. Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet. Edited and translated by Richard Zenith. London: Penguin, 2002. Pessoa, Fernando. Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems. Edited and translated by Richard Zenith. New York: Grove, 1999. Pessoa, Fernando. The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa. Edited and translated by Richard Zenith. New York: Grove, 2007.

To Say “I” Is to Lie Chenavier, Robert. Simone Weil: Attention to the Real. Translated by Bernard Doering. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Kusama, Yayoi. Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama. London: Tate, 2015. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Craufurd and Mario von der Ruhr. London: Routledge, 2002. Weil, Simone. The Notebooks of Simone Weil. Translated by Arthur Wills. London: Routledge, 2004. Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper Collins, 2009.

Index

Abe Kobo, xi, 37, 97. See also The Face of Another adhyātma, “interiority,” vii Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, ix, 18, 89, 94; “In a Grove,” ix, 18–25, 36, 50, 89, 94, 101 antaḥsthita, “remaining within,” viii antarātman, “inner self,” vii, 7 Aśvaghoṣa, Handsom Nanda, vii attention: and self, 46; drawing of, viii, 5; ethics of, 86– 89, 101; inner turn of, xiii, 7– 8, 12– 13, 17, 25, 79, 93; introspection as, 71; orientation of, 21, 50; transformative effect of, 14. See also introspection

Augustine, Aurelius, ix, 9– 16, 31, 71– 72, 95; “truth dwells in the inner man,” 16, 37, 89 Avicenna (= ibn Sīnā), viii, xiii, 1– 5, 8, 34, 65, 94 Bactria, 1, 28 Bhartṛhari, 107n8 Borges, Jorge Luis: “August 25, 1983,” 57, 64, 68, 82, 98; “The Circular Ruins,” xii, 57, 61– 65; “The Library of Babel,” 15, 57– 58, 96 Buddhists, vii–viii, x, 1, 19, 27–31, 96 Calvino, Italo, xii, xiii China, 99

INDEX

120

concealment, vii, xii, 6, 11, 33, 34, 38, 39, 41, 46 Cortázar, Julio, 68

Hill, Christopher, 14 homopseudonyms, 84 Husserl, Edmund, 9

Daoism, xii, 66, 99 Dharmakīrti, 30–31 Dignāga, 30 disguise, xii, 38–39, 42, 73, 77, 96– 97, 100 double, the, xii, 42, 51– 59, 66– 68, 82, 83, 98– 99; as danger to self, 52– 53, 65; divine, 52– 53 dream, 58– 59, 110n9; autoalienated, 80– 83; dreaming as imagining, 71; dreams inside dreams, xi, 54, 61– 69; dreaming subject vs. subject-within-adream, 48, 59, 62– 67, 99

India, x, 5, 96, 99 Indra and Virocana, story of, 46– 51, 64 inner life, one’s, viii, 16, 71, 79 interior homo, “inner man,” viii, ix. See also Augustine intersubjective, the, x, 35–36, 96 introspection, 71– 72, 79; perceptual model of, 13– 14 inwardness: as inward turn of attention, x, xiii, 6– 9, 12– 16, 79, 85– 86, 91, 94– 96, 100; as presence of self to self, 4, 8, 34, 43, 49, 52, 93, 96

Epictetus, 21 face, the, x–xi, 35–41, 97 fiction, xi, xii, 18, 61, 95, 96, 98 Flood, Gavin, viii Goethe, J. W. von, 76 Hegel, G. W. F., 90 Heteronyms, xii, 72– 82, 88, 100

Kant, Immanuel, 90 Kāśyapa, 29–30, 34 Kaurismäki, Aki, Take Care of Your Headscarf, Tatiana, 54 Kelly, Lorraine, 83 Kierkegaard, Søren, xii, 51– 52, 57– 58, 75– 76, 98

INDEX Kurosawa Akira, 22–25, 95. See also Rashōmon Kusama Yayoi, 89– 91 literature: modernist, 52, 57, 98, 100; as philosophy, xii, 95 Manganelli, Giorgio, 84 masks, 38–41, 44–46, 50, 96; desires as, 6; Janus-faced, 97; pseudonyms as, 73, 76– 77, 84, 100 Mauni, xii, 53– 57, 98 Mendander I, aka King Milinda, 28–29 metaphors of inwardness, ix, xi, xiii, 27, 34, 95 mirrors, x, xi, 24–25, 34, 37, 40–41, 58, 89, 96 Morimura Yasumasa, 73– 74 Nāgārjuna, 31–33, 96, 107n9 nesting, 44, 68, 99 Nyāya philosophy, 27, 30 orthonyms, 75, 82– 84 Pāyasi, 29 personae, 76– 79, 83 perspectives, 25, 62, 64, 89 Pessoa, Fernando, xiii, 43, 69, 71– 83, 87– 88, 95, 100

Plato. See Socrates Plotinus, 5, 9, 17, 94 Porphyry, 5, 94 prakāśa, “illumination,” 28 projection, 36, 61 proptreptic, 21, 24, 94 pseudonyms, xii, 42, 72– 76, 84, 100 Rashōmon effect, the, 17–26 Rashōmon, the film, ix, 22–26, 95 Sartre, Jean-Paul, xii, 35–36, 38, 42, 95 self: integrity of, 19, 100; layers of, 44– 50, 99– 100; one’s “true,” 38, 41, 44, 48–49, 64, 97, 99– 100 self- emptying, 85– 87 selfie stick, 37 self-illuminating beings, 27–34, 96 shadows, xiii, 53– 57, 83 sociality, 35–38, 41, 46, 49, 97– 98 Socrates, x, 36–37, 41, 96 Sogdians, 1 Sorabji, Richard, 104n4 Śrīdhara, 30 Stang, Charles, 52– 53

121

INDEX subject-position, the, xii–xiii, 62, 80– 82, 89, 99– 100

Valberg, J. J., 80– 82 Vātsyāyana, 30

Taylor, Charles, 9 The Face of Another (Tanin no kao), xi, 37–42, 44, 50, 73, 97 Thompson, Evan, 63– 65

Weil, Simone, xiii, 85– 91, 100–1

Upaniṣads, the, xiii–ix, 5– 10, 44–45, 55, 93, 97– 99

122

Yogavāsiṣṭha (aka Mokṣopāya), the, 69, 99 Zhuangzi, The, xii, 66– 68, 84, 99 Zoroastrians, 1