In his book of this name, Satre - a most interesting-looking dude - differentiates between actions like "driving the car" and "writing" (why he puts these in speech marks is unclear) and 'purely psychical actions, like doubting, reasoning, meditating, making a hypothesis...'
There is, he claims, active consciousness, and then there is reflection, which is directed onto the consciousness. Obviously, being Satre, he tries to complicate this idea as much as possible and tie his readers' minds up like a cat's cradle on inexperienced but enthusiastic little fingers. (A taster: 'To these moments correspond concrete, active consciousnesses, and the reflection which is directed on the consciousnesses apprehends the total action in an intuition which exhibits it as the transcendent unity of the active consciousnesses.' This is easily conveyed compared to some of the ideas, but for a real challenge you should try 'Being and Nothingness': there are sentences in there that would win first prize in a 'Most Incomprehensible Collection of Words Ever to Form a Sentence' competition. Perhaps that's why his eyes went a little skewhiff.)
'Simply to be and to be aware of itself are one and the same thing for consciousness; nothing can act on consciousness because it is cause of itself,' he says. But the Ego is an object, and thus is passive, which means it is capable of 'being affected. The me, as such, remains unknown to us...The only method for knowing it is observation, approximation, anticipation, experience.'
The me remains unknown to us, and, if I might debunk his theory somewhat, only seems to become more and more so despite the observations, the approximations, the anticipations and the experiences.
Moving to another country is a wonderful way to transcend one's Ego. 'Transcend' sounds elevated and stately; 'stamp on with big boots' might be more precise. Ballasts of former self are removed. You walk around in the same body but something has been scraped out; pitted, cored, taken to a lab to be examined. No one really knows you, and apart from the closest person, no one really cares - not really. Going to London next week feels like being a rock-star and leaping off the stage in a heady dive: a crowdful of arms are there to catch me, hold me aloft over their heads, know me, love me, talk to me, keep me up and hope I won't go back onto the stage because they want me to stay there suspended and laughing like a loony in their arms.
I foolishly thought the blasting of the Ego was something we went through in youth: we can walk out of the life presented as the only real option; we can change our beliefs, have life-affecting, soul-enlightening experiences of near-death serenity and feel the force of life in its fullest but we get older and still parts of us get stripped away. Like a snake, a once integral membrane of who we are, a sheath of wafer-thin skin, is left on the dusty ground as we slither off, slightly raw.
This is probably a good thing. The Ego can become something we hide behind because we don't know what else there would be of us if we stepped out from behind it. A friend of mine is going to a women's groupy thing and one of the women there said to her, 'Why are you hiding behind cool?' This struck me somewhat. Being cool, being clever or beautiful or nutty or reserved or angst-ridden - these are edifices we construct when we're young: we dress in a certain way, we become walking embodiments of something we consider to be 'me', experiences shape us into a form. But clothes that look good on a nineteen year old don't translate well onto a sixty year old, so some essential aspect has to remain fluid, open and pliable.
'The problem with women,' my darling said to me this week, 'is that they change. Men don't change.' He said it as if that was a splendid thing. Maybe it is. It helps, I suppose.
Anyway.
On the Jerusalem roads this week we watched a policeman driving whilst talking on his mobile phone; a police van drive as close as he could behind me, flashing (the usual signal when someone wants you to move out of their effing way), which meant forcing me to drive faster than the speed limit in order to pass the car parallel to me and let him pass; a car that had crashed into the back of a bus in Gilo as buses just pull out after bus stops and don't care if there's a car in the lane already; I nearly got run off the road by a religious guy because he wasn't going to let me filter in front of him when I got in the wrong lane - he'd rather have crashed into me than let me get one over by getting in front of him. Arse. Traffic lights become gridlocked as drivers don't think about flow or other drivers on the road and I had this great idea that everyone here should be taught chess at school in order to THINK IN ADVANCE and plan one step ahead and learn that elusive and sublime thing everyone lacks called PATIENCE. Ahhh. Driving here is a war of truculence and you need full armour on, to hold your sword aloft, to have the heat of battle ringing in your ears before you pull out of your parking space. Hell. It's hell.
But it's quite fun if you're in a black mood and are a dab hand at rally driving. As I am. But most of the time it just gets you down. Man's inhumanity to man is the most baffling of all the illogicalities on this earth - just look at what's happening in Mumbai. Time to put my combat gear on - going to get the kids now.
Happy Thanksgiving.
3 comments:
Sartre had a life-long companion, his alter-ego one could say, or his contra-sexual sounding board, Simone de Beauvoir.
A woman Philosopher! Like Emma de Shevah.
Sartre's allegiance was to what we might call atheistic existentialism.
His philosophy can be seen as a merciless analysis of the human situation when 'God is dead'. An expression that came from Nietzsche.
The keyword in Satre's philosophy,as in Kierkegaard's, is existence. He said that existence takes priority over essence.
By essence we mean that which something consists of-the nature or being, of something. But according to Sartre, man has no such innate 'nature'. Man must therefore create himself. He must create his own nature or 'essence', because its not fixed in advance. The tool of that self-creating process would be the ego.Like the Confucianists, who believed life needed to be ordered and regulated,you cannot just hang out in a state of ego-less Zen passivism; you had to take chaos by the scruff and give it meaning, categorize it, name it, bend it to meet the expectations of the Ego.
Believing is Seeing not vice-versa.
The Ego as Guide, plotting the course with scientific certainty.
Neither was Sartre a Nihilist, he believed that things matter.Life must have meaning. It is an imperative. To exist is to create your own life. We have no basic nature to fall back on. Simone denied the existence of a basic 'female nature' or 'male nature'.
It has generally been claimed that man has a 'transcending' nature, or achieving nature.He will therefore seek meaning and direction outside the home. Woman has been said to have the opposite life philosophy. She is 'immanent', which means she wishes to be where she is, nurturing the family and caring for her environment. De Beauvoir believed that men and women must liberate themselves from such ingrown prejudices and ideals.
Simone was not about to fall into that 'Women as second sex' category. The one propagated by monotheistic patriarchal religions.
'God is Male, therefore men are Gods'. Ego-inflation supreme!
The Gnostic Christians have a different creation myth which honors the Feminine. As in Zen philosophy, there is the undifferentiated Oneness, which might look like the well-known circular yin/yang symbol. The Gnostics call this the pleroma.
When the pleroma divides, in the first act of creation, the first priciple or Concept happens to be a feminine symbol, Sofia. After all since when was man born of man?! The pleroma radiates out from its undifferentiated oneness through the prism of Sofia across the universe and certain Redeemers/Messiahs manifest (in our world at least) and they have names like Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed.Certain Buddhist Beliefs say that a woman cannot attain enlightenment until she has at least 5 incarnations as a man. This where I start to mistrust how the story changed every time it was told and the male Ego developed and it told the story according to its ever increasing fear and awe of the immanent power of the Feminine.The Secrets of Mother Nature, the Sophic dna.
So here we are in the theatre of the Absurd, Planet of the Apeman,
the Adam, so pure in his Oneness until Eve happened by with her seductive serpent ways.
So if you asked whether the Ego was male or female, my bet is that most people would associate with maleness. Does that mean you Gals have to come up with another concept, one that speaks to the female developmental orienting process?
I always imagined G-d, the Universal Energy, the Divine Source or whadeveryouwannacallit, to be neither intrinsically male nor female but a perfect symbiotic amalgam of the two. Look at nature: creation and destruction in perfect harmony and disharmony; the womb of the nurturing, life-giving fertile wench and the conquering, protective, disciplinarian warrior(horrible generalisations that I don't believe in, but you get the drift). The Ego, surely, is also an 'embodiment' of this fusion - in all of us we have aspects of both creative and destructive energies, of nurture and attack, creativity and reason. I'm with Simone in denying the existence of a basic male or female nature (and that reminds me: we had her book - The Second Sex - sitting around at home for ages and now I want to find it and read it.)
I like your line: 'Man must create himself.' Nothing is fixed - Rambam (the very influential Rabbi who lived in the twelfth century)said so himself: G-d gave us the choice to murder or not and we decide. But we develop from being an Id-ridden child: we are either taught or evolve naturally into Ego conscious adults, then face the real struggle with what Freud calls the Super-Ego, and if you ignore all the father-dominant Oedipal stuff he barks on about, The Super-ego is a handy idea. It comprises that organized part of the personality structure, mainly but not entirely unconscious, that includes the individual's ego ideals, spiritual goals, and the psychic agency (commonly called 'conscience') that criticizes and prohibits his or her drives, fantasies, feelings, and actions.
Prohibition. Interesting word. It assumes, then, that our conscience prohibits our drives - from truly experiencing ourselves - yet knowing ourselves, Satre says, means getting to know our drives, fantasies, feelings and actions. It's a mind-bending Catch-22. Which means we can look at ourselves from any angle and we're still fucked. Not to be nihilistic or anything...
prohibition is rather forbidding and always strikes me as a word used to denote a limitation from outside ones self. We do suffer though, from inhibitions.I think that is why art is so popular, pornography, war movies,Hannibal Lector characters and so on; they enable us to acknowledge our 'shadows' without exercising our own grisly desires.
In other words, as a writer, for instance, you can turn your poop into gold, alchemically speaking.
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