What can go wrong in the mirror?

Baden

Notes:

1)The end part is not about narcissists, but a different kind of neurosis.
2) Much of what follows is probably hard to understand, and if you don't like continental philosophy, it's probably safe to give it a miss.
3) There are probably some mistakes in there.

****

We encounter the other as subject through the filter of the physical, but also the filter of our own subjectivity, which is in turn interpolated reflexively through an awareness of the other’s perspective. That is to say, we encounter through a physical filter the other with the awareness the other so encounters us and this awareness is inescapable. The physical filter is a form of social symbolism. The learned meaning of physicality matters in terms of our incorporation of the other as object and it always matters relatively. What are they to us in terms of what we are to them? (Are we better looking, better dressed, better groomed, physically stronger, healthier, younger etc?).

This dynamic is mirrored on several levels, the socially-symbolic physical—matter—matters, but also the socially-symbolic virtual, our abstract ordering of relation, e.g. teacher/student, and the socially-symbolic situational, the context of our encounter, e.g. a classroom. Of course, to say “socially-symbolic” is to say contextually linguistic. The physical, virtual, and situational are saturated in language. Meaning for the human is social and linguistic and also analogical. We build from the physical filter, the virtual and situational filters as we internalise social norms. That is, the physical filter is the fundamental basis which society uses to leverage itself into the human being and make of it a socio-linguistic being, which in turn reaches upwards to others and downwards even into that physical filter itself in a form of unifying symbolic territorialization.

So, we can imagine “feral” humans understanding and responding to differences in physicality of the other (e.g. being more afraid of those bigger than them), but we cannot imagine them understanding and responding to the fact that they are faced with a bank manager or a nurse or understanding what it means to be in a supermarket. And even our responses to physicality are not strictly analogous to the theorized feral. What it means to be a certain way physically is, as previously indicated, also conditioned socio-linguistically, both in terms of the whole body and particularly the face. For example, a feral human would not understand our expressions in the way we do as they are inextricably layered with social meaning.

This is all to say that the subject’s internal mirror of itself, its non-positional self-awareness (unreflective background awareness) is formed both from a general self-understanding in terms of the above avenues to the other—these filtering layers—and a structured flexibility that allows for socially conditioned contingencies to be absorbed—for a range of social situations to make sense. This is the context of consciousness as intentionality and which colours and textures intentional acts. The subject is a structure and a mirror to itself and the other (the other is integrated into our necessary non-positional awareness, making, as Sartre points out, solipsism incoherent) while it is also a reaching out, a transcendence.

The question then is: what happens when this internal mirror makes of its object the self in a physical mirror?

The confrontation:

First of all, as the other is necessarily integrated into our non-positional awareness, we are simultaneously confronted with ourselves as object of the other—which confirms the other—and object of the self—which confirms the self. That is, in Sartrean terms, as an in-itself and a for-itself that forms the social relation. But this is a confrontation precisely because while being simultaneous it is not a unity and our immanent knowledge of this disunity creates a desire for that (impossible) unity, that is, the unity of the in-itself and the for-itself—again, following Sartre, “God”. The mirror instantiates a desire for God by presenting this lack. So proceeds our integration into an abstract social being that substitutes for God but can never be reached in actual social relations which are always at a distance from this “God”.

What can go wrong?

Clearly, something has already gone wrong. In the mirror, we are naked, the other’s gaze is returned to us in judgement. We have been ejected from paradise and condemned to know ourselves through the filter of the other. We must dress ourselves in social clothes to be acceptable. We must look as such and act as such. The very form of our body in the mirror presents not so much as a physical limitation (functionally, humans are very similar) but a social limitation. This is how I appear to the other now and I cannot but appear so, for, look, this is what I am! And it is limited! I cannot satisfy the other’s desire. I cannot fully become its desire and as the other is installed in my very self-awareness as a fundamental context for my intentional acts—the internal mirror of non-positional awareness where both of us must necessarily lurk—I can never be, insofar as I am socially integrated consciousness (i.e. a sane member of society), what I want to be. So, something has certainly gone wrong in that I am forced to accept a limitation, an unfillable lacuna in the self which is a necessary condition of the only self I know how to be.

But what further?

I want to examine here how one could deny to oneself this very condition of being a self. That is to explore a neurosis where one imagines one could make of oneself the object of desire for the idealized other which one desires (and in a sense desires to be but projects as other). This amounts to an attempt to eject the other from the self into a pure object of consciousness so one can make the pure self (without other) meet the demands of this object.

This is the project of Narcissus. But it is strangely paradoxical. For Sartre, the for-itself is what it is not. Narcissus stretches this paradox so that the for-itself is both a return to solipsism where the other is “ejected” from the internal mirror, but at the same time reified as Narcissus is imprisoned in the desire of the projection of the ultimate other that this externalization allows. That is to say, Narcissus tries to make of himself not just God, but the dream of God. It is not to be God but God's desire—it is not to unite the for-itself with the in-itself but to deny the need for such unity through positing the possibility of an ultimate validation of the for-itself, which is, of course a fantasy and a destructive one—Lacan's warning not to become caught in the dream of the other writ large. Narcissus can only make of himself here a monster, a subject pre-reflectively at war with itself, whose intentionality is diseased and whose thoughts and reflections carry the stain of a fundamental self-deception.

In this dynamic, what must ultimately give, what must break to sustain it, is reality as social mirror itself. The image of the self as social self, as the object of the other's gaze and site of desire cannot stabilize. There can no longer be a "centre" to the polarities of inner other and outer other because the binary has been denied and so the mirrored projection no longer belongs to a stable self and cannot therefore mirror a stable self. The self, having lost touch with the reality of its inner mirror, is now at the mercy of outer mirrors that can never present it with constancy. The question of self has been broken. The outer mirror becomes the torturous void where the subject can never find the inner mirror, which has, in fact, become its impossible desire, and the more it looks outside to find it. the more it denies the reality of self as self-for-other, and must be haunted by it. And so outer mirrors haunt it by presenting it with a self impossible to desire, the ghost of its denial.

What is the way out?

The way out must begin with a refusal to search, but it cannot be a purely negative act. Narcissus must rebuild the other into its internal mirror through creative acts that confirm the symbolic social embeddedness of the self and so performatively deny its neurotic / solipsistic denial. It is a return to humility through working not to be the dream of God and to do so by creating new dreams for God that may substitute for the sacrifice of the self. Narcissus must become the dreamer, not the dreamed, and must make his dreams real. He must be, in Sartrean terms, a useless passion, but nonetheless a passion and a socially mediated one, that yet creates its own unique, and, ultimately, desirable story of self.

L'éléphant

What is the way out?

The way out must begin with a refusal to search, but it cannot be a purely negative act. Narcissus must rebuild the other into its internal mirror through creative acts that confirm the symbolic social embeddedness of the self and so performatively deny its neurotic / solipsistic denial. It is a return to humility through working not to be the dream of God by creating new dreams for God that may substitute for the sacrifice of the self. Narcissus must become the dreamer, not the dreamed, and must make his dreams real. He must be, in Sartrean terms, a useless passion, but nonetheless a passion and a socially mediated one, that yet creates its own unique, and, ultimately, desirable story of self. — Baden

Not a fan of the topic of Narcissus. To me what he had was a disease of the mind, not the lack humility, if this is the diagnosis. Symbolically, when it's already a disease, a procedure is necessary to be performed, not an analysis to be laid out. He was left to die alone. No sage could save him.

As I have said before, the self is a 'modern' coming of age, for in the primitive times, it was always 'the other' that primitive humans had looked at, not themselves. It was a process to have finally arrived at the self, the recognition of the self -- a very long time. It was also not experienced by a handful of people, rather the whole village. It was not self-love that brought us to the self-awareness, not narcissistic, rather it was the beginning of wisdom.

Jack Cummins

↪Baden

An interesting outpost, as so much can go wrong in the mirror. The reflection in the mirror physically and psychologically is the foundation of personal and social identity. The sense of self is gained in front of the mirror in connection with the gaze of the other in social interaction.

The mirror itself is of significance. I remember when I lived with a mirror nearby my bed it was horrible to see myself as soon as I woke up each day. Of course, the mirror is a reverse image so it is not as one appears exactly to others as most people are not completely symmetrical.

Selfies have also become the new mirrors even though they can be played around with. We live in a world of images and one can love or loath oneself. Identity problems arise in conjunction with such images, including eating disorders, body dysmorphic disorder and gender identity problems.

The psychological aspects of self and the perception of self by others is the foundation of relationships and so many developmental and psychiatric issues. Autism is interesting as it is like a soliptist bubble in some ways.

I have read some of Sartre's writing on self, body and otherness, which I found helpful. Also, the social sciences shed light on the issues, including Erving Goffman's sociological work, 'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life'. Also, object-relations theory, especially the work of Melanie Klein, looks at developmental aspects of self identity, with the role of mother as the initial mirror.

One book which I came across which I see as very significant is Martin Buber's 'I and Thou'. It compares the relationship between self and a personal 'God' and the human other. This is of importance in imagination and fantasy. As belief in God is facing there may be more attention to the opinions of others for a sense of self and self esteem.

But, as for the solution to the problem of self loathing or excessive self-love I am not sure that there is a complete solution. In practical terms, ito throw away the mirrors entirely might result in a complete disheveled appearance. Also, opinions of others may be overvalued but do need to be taken into account for coping in social life.

I am an existentialist outsider in many respects but don't wish to be a complete isolate. As people spend more time on the internet and phones there is a danger of going into a fantasy life in which the other becomes more remote. It may be a way of getting lost in a life of fantasy and preoccupation with an idealised imaginary image of oneself. To find the balance in navigating self and aloneness may be the way to wisdom. Through feedback from others we gain some awareness of our own blindspots, which may be uncomfortable but essential for deepening self-awareness.

Baden

↪L'éléphant

↪Jack Cummins

Interesting points which I will come back to. For now, I should clarify that I am using Narcissus as a stand in for a neurosis whereby someone gets locked into or caught in the physical mirror because their relation to the other (the social mirror) is diseased. The most obvious corollaries are body image disorders, rather than narcissim per se.

Baden

↪L'éléphant

↪Jack Cummins

It might also help to shed light on this if I clarify Sartre’s concept of consciousness that I’m making use of here, especially non-positional awareness. So, from a phenomenological angle, we can say consciousness is always consciousness of something, and from this we get intentionality. I look at the lamp in front of me and that is the object of my consciousness. But, of course, that is not the whole story, for I am not only aware of the lamp. It doesn’t fill my awareness. I do not become the object. For even to have an object, we must have a subject and implicit to non-positional awareness is that separation—what is going on is an observation that requires an observer, i.e. me. So, this is a moment to moment background knowledge and is pre-reflective. It is not me saying to myself after looking at the lamp, “I looked at the lamp”, it is included in, immanent in, the experience of looking at the lamp.

I read a good piece of secondary literature that helps visualize this. We can imagine non-positional awareness as a sphere on the inside of which is a mirror. Suppose there is a hole in the mirror to the outside, to the phenomenon. Well, consciousness simultaneously “reaches out” to that outside while mirroring itself on the inside and this happens in the moment. It’s what gives moments their immediate “feel” and what gives us the ability to immediately act in the world like a participant. It’s immanent to every act of consciousness rather than being in any way separate. It’s that immediate pre-reflective sense of being a subject observing an object that allows for later reflection. That later reflection is harder to visualize because it involves a kind of loop, where consciousness reaches out and returns to the self---through the filter of the previous immanent knowledge of it being a subject vs objects---in order to examine a moment or series of moments or the result of a moment, e.g. a feeling that is a part of itself, and in this act the subject is made object by consciousness.

And here, as Sartre points out we have no conceptually privileged access to the nature of our pre-reflective apparatus in terms of its pure being than we do to others' consciousness as immediate being. It can only be experienced reflectively as an object for us as others are. For the conceptual, I, the subject as self-understanding, solipsism makes no sense because we are in principle no better off in relation to our own pre-reflective existence than we are to that of others. That is, we can never find ourselves as substance, we are given to ourselves only through our actions, which allow for reflection.

What follows then is an attempt to explore a form of brokenness in or in our relation to this non-positional awareness, and, by extension, the other.

Baden

The reflection in the mirror physically and psychologically is the foundation of personal and social identity. The sense of self is gained in front of the mirror in connection with the gaze of the other in social interaction. — Jack Cummins

Exactly.

The mirror itself is of significance. I remember when I lived with a mirror nearby my bed it was horrible to see myself as soon as I woke up each day. Of course, the mirror is a reverse image so it is not as one appears exactly to others as most people are not completely symmetrical. — Jack Cummins

This is the type of "haunting" of the mirror that can become a damaging pattern.

Self lies have also become the new mirrors even though they can be played around with. We live in a world of images and one can love or loath oneself. Identity problems arise in conjunction with such images, including eating disorders, body dysmorphic disorder and gender identity problems.

Someone with body dysmorphic disorder is a perfect example of the Narcissus I'm pointing to. And the hyper-focus on image excacerbates the problem. The image is never stable, every angle, mirror or camera will present us with someone something different. Without something else solid to fall back on, it's easy to become destabilised by it. But that something to fall back on can never be something entirely physical. It must transcend the physical image. It must be an abstract structure of self that can stabilize it, conceptualize it, and "recover" it from the mirror.

The psychological aspects of self and the perception of self by others is the foundation of relationships and so many developmental and psychiatric issues. Autism is interesting as it is like a soliptist bubble in some ways.

I have read some of Sartre's writing on self, body and otherness, which I found helpful. Also, the social sciences shed light on the issues, including Erving Goffman's sociological work, 'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life'. Also, object-relations theory, especially the work of Melanie Klein, looks at developmental aspects of self identity, with the role of mother as the initial mirror. — Jack Cummins

I'm in the middle of a Goffman book now ("Behaviour in public places"). Klein's work sounds interesting to. But yes, sociology is highly relevant here. My approach kind of flits between philosophy and the social sciences.

One book which I came across which I see as very significant is Martin Buber's 'I and Thou'. It compares the relationship between self and a personal 'God' and the human other. This is of importance in imagination and fantasy. As belief in God is facing there may be more attention to the opinions of others for a sense of self and self esteem. — Jack Cummins

I haven't explored Buber closely, but I should. He often comes up tangentially in my research.

But, as for the solution to the problem of self loathing or excessive self-love I am not sure that there is a complete solution. In practical terms, ito throw away the mirrors entirely might result in a complete disheveled appearance. Also, opinions of others may be overvalued but do need to be taken into account for coping in social life.

Agree, it's a healthy relationship with the mirror, and by extension with other, that's important. Fleeing the other or the image of the other is no healthier ultimately than overvaluing it. It's more the flip side of the same fear.

I am an existentialist outsider in many respects but don't wish to be a complete isolate. As people spend more time on the internet and phones there is a danger of going into a fantasy life in which the other becomes more remote. It may be a way of getting lost in a life of fantasy and preoccupation with an idealised imaginary image of oneself. To find the balance in navigating self and aloneness may be the way to wisdom. Through feedback from others we gain some awareness of our own blindspots, which may be uncomfortable but essential for deepening self-awareness. — Jack Cummins

Yes, I've deliberately isolated myself at times, and I am generally a loner, but it all must be with the goal of finding productive and fulfilling relationships with the other, because, again, the self is in some sense the other to the self. There is a radical awareness of and relationship to the other that we cannot do without.

Baden

Not a fan of the topic of Narcissus. To me what he had was a disease of the mind, not the lack humility, if this is the diagnosis. Symbolically, when it's already a disease, a procedure is necessary to be performed, not an analysis to be laid out. He was left to die alone. No sage could save him. — L'éléphant

I hope my previous comments have helped clarify where I'm coming from on this. A disease of the mind is just what I have in mind.

As I have said before, the self is a 'modern' coming of age, for in the primitive times, it was always 'the other' that primitive humans had looked at, not themselves. It was a process to have finally arrived at the self, the recognition of the self -- a very long time. It was also not experienced by a handful of people, rather the whole village. It was not self-love that brought us to the self-awareness, not narcissistic, rather it was the beginning of wisdom. — L'éléphant

I hadn't considered the historical perspective actually, so thank you for this.

Joshs

↪Baden

It might also help to shed light on this if I clarify Sartre’s concept of consciousness that I’m making use of here, especially non-positional awareness. So, from a phenomenological angle, we can say consciousness is always consciousness of something, and from this we get intentionality. I look at the lamp in front of me and that is the object of my consciousness. But, of course, that is not the whole story, for I am not only aware of the lamp. It doesn’t fill my awareness. I do not become the object. For even to have an object, we must have a subject and implicit to non-positional awareness is that separation—what is going on is an observation that requires an observer, i.e. me. So, this is a moment to moment background knowledge and is pre-reflective. It is not me saying to myself after looking at the lamp, “I looked at the lamp”, it is included in, immanent in, the experience of looking at the lamp — Baden

I wonder how your argument would change if we substituted Husserlian for Sartrean phenomenonology. In this case there is no subject or object outside of the intentional acts by which the subject engages with the world. The subject only exists in its acts, and in these acts it doesn’t simply observe objects, it constitutes or enacts them. The subjective pole of the subject-object relation supplies an anticipative thrust (protension) drawn from its past (retentional) history. My awareness of the lamp is not just a passive gaze but an active constituting act. The ‘physicality’ of the lamp is not something intrinsic to it as a material element of the natural world. It is a product of objectivizing idealizations we perform. Similarly the otherness of the other is an otherness which is constituted within my own subjectivty on the basis of consonance’s which allow me to recognize the other as a person. Thus, no matter. how alienated my experience of myself or another, this alienation emerges from within an overarching comportment of familiarity and recognizability.

Baden

I wonder how your argument would change if we substituted Husserlian for Sartrean phenomenonology — Joshs

The short answer is it doesn't work, particularly if you mean later Husserl.

The more rambling answer is I've never given Husserl the attention he probably deserves. However, to my knowledge, Sartre's structure of intentionality is derivative of early Husserl. But we need Sartre's formulation "consciousness is what it is not" to set up the idea of the other being integrated into non-positional awareness. I see this as developmental (Vygotsky, Lacan) in a way that Sartre didn't really address as far as I know.

But the analogy of the sphere with a mirror on the inside and a hole to the outside (from secondary literature) got me thinking about mirror-based pathologies etc. Sartre doesn't give us these kinds of metaphors directly. He gives us situations like the man looking through the keyhole who suddenly finds himself observed, but I find this less evocative and want a bit more even at the risk of stretching the theory further than he may have intended. I think what I've said is pretty much consistent with him though.

Anyway, Husserl's "consonance" attempt to avoid solipsism is just more Descartes right? I don't find it convincing and Husserl got dumped by many of his follower's, including Sartre, by turning idealist in the end. Solipsism is something idealism can't really make go away. It's not just the thrust of subjectivity we need, it's a kind of meta-phenomenal grounding supplied by the integrated context of the other.

So, back to the short answer. Husserl's no good for me. And that's OK because I think he went off track in the end, didn't really explain why, and is ultimately superceded by Sartre and others who came after.

Who do you find more convincing, particularly in relation to solipsism, and why do you think Husserl went off his original track the way he did?

Baden

(Incidentally, if you look at this through a systems theory lens, the corollary of non-positional awareness is something like the structural coupling of the systems of consciousness and society through language. The other sneaks in again prereflectively.)

Joshs

Who do you find more convincing, particularly in relation to solipsism, and why do you think Husserl went off his original track the way he did? — Baden

Some believe he ‘went off track’, and that’s usually because they prefer a realist notion of essences, and a world-directed empiricism. One of my favorite interpreters of Husserl is Derrida, and in his major works on Husserl he always emphasizes the profound continuity over the course of Husserl’s career. It seems when people make the claim you’re making they usually have in mind his turn toward transcendental subjectivity, as though that werent already hinted at in his earlier writings, and as if it represented a retreat from an original world-centered empiricism into a solipsistic Cartesianism via Kantian Idealism. Misreadings of Husserl along these lines abound, and Sartre is one of the most egregious examples of it, according to Derrida:

It is true that in my work Sartre was very important, in the beginning. When I was a student, he was already there, and it's by reading Sartre that, in a certain way, I began to get into the field of philosophy and literature. For this reason, it would be absurd for me to try to absolutely distance myself from Sartre. That being said, quite quickly I thought it clear that Sartre was a representative of a philosophy like Husserlian phenomenology, adapted to France, a philosophy that was already beginning to make some noise but that at the same time, and even with respect to what he was introducing or translating from phenomenology, from Heidegger even, that there were some enlargements, distortions, simplifications, which from that point of view seemed to me to amortize what was essentially interesting about the work of Husserl and Heidegger. And so since then I have never ceased, in a certain way, to see better into all of that. [Lights up a cigar.]

FT: But do you mean that from the point of view of the legitimacy of Husserl's and Heidegger's thought, for instance, or of a critique of the reading offered by Sartre of Husserl or Heidegger?

JD: Yes, I mean that both in what he was keeping and in what he was critiquing, in my opinion, he was not a rigorous enough reader. And from that point of view, it turns out that the work done by him in France was very ambiguous. I am not saying that it was simply negative, but he and others with him kept from us for a long time the real importance and the sharpness of Husserl's and Heidegger's work while importing them and pretending to critique them, as both translator, if you like, of Husserl and Heidegger and critic of Husserl and Heidegger. This is not to say that it was simply a question of finding our way back into Husserlian and Heideggerian orthodoxy against Sartre. Not at all. But I think that even in order to understand, to critique Husserl and Heidegger, it was necessary to understand them better than Sartre did in those days. The point is not here to issue some condemnation; since that's how it happened, it couldn't have happened otherwise, in those conditions and in a certain number of historical conditions.

But it is a fact that Sartre's thought obscured in quite a powerful way what was happening elsewhere in German philosophy, even in the philosophy that he himself pretended to be introducing in France. To say nothing of Marx and to say nothing of Freud and to say nothing of Nietzsche, whom he, in a way, never really read. I mean that he misunderstood Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche (to put them together as is usually done) even more than he misunderstood Husserl and Heidegger, whom he nevertheless quoted. And so, from that point of view, we have to deal with a huge sedimentation of thought, a huge philosophical sediment that covered the French scene for quite a few years after the war and that, I think, has marked everyone from that generation. I would say that there was a lot of dissimulation, and subsequently it has been necessary to undo this sedimentation in order to find again what was dissimulated by it, in a way.

Sartre no doubt, well, guided me, as he did so many others at the time. Reading him, I discovered Blanchot, Bataille, Ponge-whom I now think one could have read otherwise. But finally, Same was himself the "unsurpassable horizon". Things changed when, thanks to him but especially against him, I read Husserl, , Heidegger, Blanchot, and others. One would have to devote several dozen books to this question: What must a society such as ours be if a man, who, in his own way, rejected or misunderstood so many theoretical and literary events of his timelet's say, to go quickly, psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism, Joyce, Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot-who accumulated and disseminated incredible misreadings of Heidegger, sometimes of Husserl, could come to dominate the cultural scene to the point of becoming a great popular figure?

Sartre was a philosophical lightweight compared to Husserl, which is why Heidegger called his work ‘dreck’ ,and why Merleau-Ponty considered his work a continuation of Husserl’s project and distanced himself from Sartre’s thinking. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception is explicitly a development of Husserl’s later work, emphasizing embodiment, perception, and the lifeworld.

Regarding your question about solipsism, I thinks Sartre’s notion of subjective freedom is more solipsistic and voluntaritistic than Husserl’s. What is needed is an account of subject-world interaction which doesn’t oppose subjective will to external circumstances and then proceed to privilege one side of the binary over the other. There is neither outside nor inside prior to interaction. We always understand ourselves though participation in normative discursive communities, but these are partially shared circumstances, subtended by perspectival positionings do not allow for their being swallowed up and dissolved into a flat social totality. We mirror ourselves in others as reciprocal interaffecting, but it is an interaffecting that doesn’t remove the utter particularity of individual vantage.

Jack Cummins

↪Baden

There is so much to be questioned in theory and human experience. With diagnostic criteria of body dysmorohic disorder, erroneous perception comes into play. In particular, a person may be preoccupied with a feature of 'ugliness' which is not observed by others. But, so much involves cultural or intersubjective standards.

Some of this comes down to cultural aesthetics about the body. However, it also involves ideas of perfection in the wider sphere, including moral aspects. Here, I am suggesting that ideas of 'goodness' and 'badnees' come into play in self perception and ideas of what is seen as 'wrong' in the mirror.

The two may overlap, especially in conjunction with sexuality, which has so much of a significant role in both aesthetic and moral dimensions of identity and the arena of perception by an 'other'' or others. It involves self acceptance and repentance of one's personal worth, on a whole global or blurred picture of personal identity and self worth. It involves relationships and how one experiences in moments of alonenesx in the mirror of reflective self-awareness.

Moliere

Sartre was a philosophical lightweight compared to Husserl, which is why Heidegger called his work ‘dreck’ , — Joshs

Isn't that a bit of an exaggeration, though?

I'm not sure Sartre is a lightweight compared to Husserl, at least (and thereby Heidegger, whom I respect less).

Concerned differently? Mistaken about what his priors were saying? Sure.

Lightweight? Naw.

Joshs

I'm not sure Sartre is a lightweight compared to Husserl, at least (and thereby Heidegger, whom I respect less).

Concerned differently? Mistaken about what his priors were saying? Sure.

Lightweight? Naw. — Moliere

↪Moliere

It took me years to understand Husserl. His writing is extraordinarily dense with ideas. When I pick up Sartre’s Being and Nothingness after reading Husserl (or Heidegger’s Being and Time), it’s like going from Mozart to Salieri.

Moliere

↪Joshs

Heh, fair.

Obviously, that's not my experience, but also, I don't claim a good understanding of Husserl while recognizing him as the giant that he is. Not enough years of patient reading on my part.

My comparison between B&T and B&N so far is that they're just doing different things, and his interpretations are very much his own interpretations -- but that doesn't mean it's not doing something interesting all on its own.

I'm sympathetic to the notion that Sartre didn't really understand Heidegger, but at the same time that's more because he was also a creative philosopher with a vision which may have attempted to integrate what was into what is, but was also kind of doing his own thing that is, if we take Descartes as a starting point, a very French way of doing things.

Joshs

↪Moliere

This is how I would put it. In the late 19th century Nietzsche came along and from a critique of such predecessors as Hegel and Schopenhauer produced a radical new vision for philosophy . 20 years later Husserl did something comparable, and Heidegger and Derrida pushed this thinking even further. Sartre read Husserl, Heidegger and Nietzsche but missed the point of their work. Instead, his existentialism remained confined to the period prior to Nietzsche , the Hegelian milieu of such figures as Kierkegaard and James. So yes, his writing offers its own unique vantage, but it’s a vantage which belongs to a metaphysical framework and era that Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger strove to overcome.

Moliere

↪Joshs

That helps me a lot in understanding what we've talked about before.

Especially the designation of which names go on which side of "the break" -- Sartre with Hegel/Kierkegaard/James, vs. thems who "understood" Nietzsche (I had to use the scare quotes given the topic) -- that helps me in trying to orient our conversations at least, and so I appreciate it.

Baden

@Joshs @Moliere

Interesting back and forth. I know Sartre is polarizing and has been accused of completely misunderstanding Heidegger. The Husserl angle I'm not as familiar with as I've always approached Husserl through the lens of his successors. Work to do on Husserl then. Thanks.

Baden

Of course, we don't need Sartre specifically for this theory, we need only the socially installed other at the level of prereflection, a theoretical destination that can be reached through many other thinkers; Vygotsky, who I mentioned above, comes to mind. And we can access the dynamic easily with everyday examples.

I might say to myself in the context of this conversation, "I think I'll mention thinker X... but wait, Joshs will probably rip him apart too", and what I've done there in a very simple sense is reflect on another, specifically the potential action of another, something we do all the time. But behind that is the fact that prereflectively my intentional acts are interwoven with the socially symbolic; Joshs was always already there in the original thought, but not as Joshs, rather as one part of the overall social weave---perhaps "critic-who-knows" or whatever---a weave that sets a "tone" or "colour" to the original thought such that a) thought can be recognized as multidimensional---capable of having such "tones" and "colours", and b) that capability is what sets thought apart from itself such that it can be recognized inherently as my thought of this or that. So, "critic-who-knows" and all the other functional sub-elements of the social system (and "critic-who-knows" is strictly a functional element with which both human and non-human actors can resonate---e.g. AI can be "critic-who-knows", or a book we are about to read can or etc.) are always-already-there in the developed person, the socialized self.

And, of course, this inheres bidirectionality. As the social system is installed in me, so am I installed in the social system. But things can go wrong. I am hypothesizing a kind of hystericized reaction to the presence of the other as gaze as manifested in the physical mirror relation, which relation then becomes diseased and destructive. And which reaction amounts to a fundamental denial / rejection of the reality of self as self-for/with/among/judged by etc other. We can come at this through Sartre (and I did so for the reasons I mentioned above) or Vygotsky or systems theory etc. But I'm curious if any of this makes sense to anyone else on its own terms.

Baden

There is neither outside nor inside prior to interaction. We always understand ourselves though participation in normative discursive communities, but these are partially shared circumstances, subtended by perspectival positionings do not allow for their being swallowed up and dissolved into a flat social totality. We mirror ourselves in others as reciprocal interaffecting, but it is an interaffecting that doesn’t remove the utter particularity of individual vantage. — Joshs

I agree with this. I don't think I have said anything that suggests I don't. But if I appear to have, let's thrash it out.

(Ok maybe "utter particularity", I can't say I fully agree with. We can't escape certain commonalities.)

Baden

There is so much to be questioned in theory and human experience. With diagnostic criteria of body dysmorohic disorder, erroneous perception comes into play. In particular, a person may be preoccupied with a feature of 'ugliness' which is not observed by others. But, so much involves cultural or intersubjective standards.

Some of this comes down to cultural aesthetics about the body. However, it also involves ideas of perfection in the wider sphere, including moral aspects. Here, I am suggesting that ideas of 'goodness' and 'badnees' come into play in self perception and ideas of what is seen as 'wrong' in the mirror. — Jack Cummins

Definitely. As hinted above, what can go wrong is at least in large part a hystericized reaction to being judged where one performatively tries to out-judge the judge and becomes stuck in the mirror which is the ostensible tool for so-doing, not realizing that the object in the mirror is always a socially mediated projection, a socio-symbolic weave layered over an irretrievably lost "pure" physicality---and at some level we cannot but know that. It's like being caught in a paradoxical spiral where one intensifies exactly what one is trying to avoid. The fear becomes self-manifesting.

The two may overlap, especially in conjunction with sexuality, which has so much of a significant role in both aesthetic and moral dimensions of identity and the arena of perception by an 'other'' or others. It involves self acceptance and repentance of one's personal worth, on a whole global or blurred picture of personal identity and self worth. It involves relationships and how one experiences in moments of alonenesx in the mirror of reflective self-awareness. — Jack Cummins

The connection with sexuality is really hard to work out. It's such a broad category when extended up from biology through psychology and into different cultural contexts. Happy to hear further ideas on this.

Baden

(To put my "way out" another way as it is vaguely worded above: It is to performatively reverse this situation of being-under-judgement by becoming the analyst and judge of one’s context, that is one’s cultural and social context. This creative reversal can take the form of art, philosophy, or science, the point is that one engages in the types of activities that change and develop the social weave rather than being smothered in it through a hystericized reaction to its prereflective installment. The sufferer is an inverse artist who is painted by a given socio-symbolic "God", cannot escape this portrait, and freezes in the mirror to concretize the situation and make it all the easirer for herself to be so painted. But, to regain control, she must paint the hand that is painting her. And for someone in such a faulty self-relationship, that will likely need to be a constant effort.)

Moliere

↪Baden

Yeah, we don't need Sartre -- but in my ignorance at least I prefer Sartre ;)

Not with all that implies**, but the notion of not knowing yourself through immediate self-reflection is something I'd keep -- i.e. what you talk about when saying we only know ourselves through our acts rather than some attachment to being which we can reflect upon, and that, in turn, requires a certain sociality before "the subject" is able to even reflect upon "the subject", in the manner of Sartre's notion of consciousness being that which it is not.

When I think of the difference between Sartre and Heidegger I think of the questions they're posing -- Derrida is probably right that Sartre wasn't Heidegger, but Sartre is still an amazing thinker on his own (and given Sartre's popularity at the time what else is a Derrida to do but look for problems in the thinker? :D)

But the opening of each spells out how different they are, at least by the old translations I read -- one is questioning the ability to articulate the question about the meaning of being and answering it through a phenomenological analysis of language such that he makes claims about "the greek mind" to elucidate how our heritage has, in some sense, lost the original quality of the questions (itself a historical falsehood, but wonderful philosophy as an entirely unique way of thinking)

Sartre is asking, in layman terms, how the seemingly singular subject conscious of itself is able to lie to itself -- and also articulating a theory of consciousness that differs from Husserl in that it is always what it is not (at least, insofar that I understand the differences at all); which is what brings in things like bad faith and an explanation for how an individual consciousness can lie to themself.

__________

On each account I'm fairly skeptical about the ability to spell out abstract notions of consciousness, even in philosophy, that are universal -- but they also seem to capture something of the thinker and the moment better than other attempts at such philosophy, so it always remains very interesting.

I'm just a natural skeptic, what can I say.

**"All that implies" meaning something along the sense that Sartre's subject can be conceived of in the Cartesian manner -- a point-like entity which rather than thinking is deciding, or "acting", and it is always free. I can see that, but I also see a more sympathetic reading which emphasizes the ekstases (the tri-partite divison of time being not-pointlike, but rather constitutive of any consciousness -- a before/during/after that blends together in consciousness)

Moliere

But I'm curious if any of this makes sense to anyone else on its own terms. — Baden

In a rough way, yes. I'm wanting the eating disorder example to be filled out in a general manner which might apply elsewhere -- but that means the idea is interesting.

Number2018

↪Baden

In the mirror, we are naked, the other’s gaze is returned to us in judgement. We have been ejected from paradise and condemned to know ourselves through the filter of the other. We must dress ourselves in social clothes to be acceptable. We must look as such and act as such. The very form of our body in the mirror presents not so much as a physical limitation (functionally, humans are very similar) but a social limitation. This is how I appear to the other now and I cannot but appear so, for, look, this is what I am! And it is limited! I cannot satisfy the other’s desire. I cannot fully become its desire and as the other is installed in my very self-awareness as a fundamental context for my intentional acts—the internal mirror of non-positional awareness where both of us must necessarily lurk—I can never be, insofar as I am socially integrated consciousness (i.e. a sane member of society), what I want to be. So, something has certainly gone wrong in that I am forced to accept a limitation, an unfillable lacuna in the self which is a necessary condition of the only self I know how to be. — Baden

What is the way out?

The way out must begin with a refusal to search, but it cannot be a purely negative act. — Baden

Sartre, Lacan, and Althusser present various views on the structural embeddedness of social inscription. But they all suggest that the subject’s desire for self-awareness and wholeness remains ultimately unattainable, as the internal mirror of self-reflection becomes a site of external imposition and the internalization of social norms. The gaze of the Other produces a fully formed yet alienated and internally divided subjectivity. There are different attempts to move beyond totalizing conceptions of subject constitution. Thus, Butler emphasizes the importance of attending to the transient moment of the subject’s emergence. “The form that at first appears as external, pressing power is relentlessly marked by a figure of turning, a turning back upon oneself or even a turning on oneself. This figure operates as part of the explanation of how a subject is produced, and so there is no subject, strictly speaking, who makes this turn.” (Butler, ‘The Psychic Life of Power, p. 7) In this gesture, Butler aims to access a space outside the mirror-like structure of self-recognition or the ideological scene of interpellation.

Jack Cummins

↪Baden

I agree that sexuality is such a wide spectrum range from biology, psychology and culture. However, in thinking about narcissism the psychology aspect is extremely important, especially from the standpoint of psychoanalysis. Freud emphasises the principle of self-love as the foundation for all relationships. It is about basic solidity of ego, especially in the early development of childhood.

I know that Freud's ideas are open to a lot ot criticism but his understanding of childhood development point to the way in which childhood traumas affect one's psychology throughout life. This is a basis for understanding why childhood sexual abuse is so detrimental. One criticism of Freud that he dismissed some flashback memories of childhood abuse as being fantasy. There is a strong link between mental health problems and childhood sexual abuse, acknowledged by many psychiatric researchers.

The ideas of Lacan as a later psychoanalytic development are also of significance. At this stage, I haven't managed to read his actual writing as I I found it rather heavy going. But I did read one book, 'Using Lacanian Clinical Technique_ An Introduction', by Philip F Hill.
He offers a couple of relevant quotes from Lacan:
'Man is captivated by the image of his own body.'
'The sexual relation implies capture by the other's image.'
Hill explains the role of images in particular as central to falling in love in general.

It would make sense to argue that it is differ fall in love if one is struggling with one's own self image and that is why issues, such as body dysmorphic disorder, have such an intrusive impact in life.

Baden

↪Moliere

↪Number2018

↪Jack Cummins

Adding to this (hopefully for clarity) and then I'll come back with some specifics relating to your comments:

In the mirror, we see the grammatized self, and of course it’s not perfect but we want a “perfect” fit and there is a block to that that prevents validation.

Validation is a key concept here. Integration with the socio-symbolic installs in us the desire for validation. That is that we should see in our actions a reflection of its demands.

We should note here that its fundamental demand is inherent. It inheres in the fact that our experience of the world is split. The leading edge of experience is immediately formatted in a way that negativises it. The world is no longer presented in its full positivity. The world in-itself is what it is, cannot be what it is not, and is therefore an absolute positivity, but the creation of a system of symbolic structure inserts gaps into it. A scaffold is not a block, a web is not a sheet. For there to be conceptual understanding, there must be the creation of such negativity, of nothingness, and from this, the subject- object distinction.

The object in this dynamic becomes more than what it is and also less. It is more than what it is in that it is not just its physical reality, it is now also its conceptual reality. And it is less than what it is because the imposition of the socio-symbolic on sensory data is always a kind of reductive formatting. We do not feel the object fully as a pure significance of sense, that purity of significance is sculpted conceptually, and, in the shaping, something is lost, just as in the sculpting of a block we lose some of its physical substance to create an abstract substance as represented by the sculpted form, we lose some of the sentient substance of the object through its sculpting by conceptualisation.

For a pre-linguistic child, the object is pure significance. It is unified with the movement of its inner desire such that that desire functions in a purely reactive way according to the possibilities of urge and restraint. The world demands from without and within simultaneously and the child is satisfied or denied in that pure relation. The mother’s breast is an inner potential, an unfolding promise of the self rather than what we understand as an object. It is a unified reservoir of being which the child shares as its own being.

As objects are conceptualised through grammatization, so is the child self-conceptualised as subject, as a separation from its environment and others that must now connect through the socio-symbolic mediator. The “Big Other” is the guardian both of the world and the self. It gives us the world and the self-in-the-world, but the debt we must pay is that what we get can never be the “pure” world as a unified self-world. Our life world is infused with the negativity of grammatization, of mediated functionalities, of a “right” way of seeing things such that the demand, the moral demand inheres at its most basic level in the object as such. That is, the lamp demands to be seen as a “lamp”. The table demands to be seen as a “table”. Our base level conceptually-bound reactivity is our first step into the moral world. Such are we taught how to acquiesce. Such are our sensory instincts domesticated. This is the primeval bow to the socio-symbolic, the initial humiliation and our initiation ritual into its sphere.

And so are built higher orders of acquiescence. We join concepts and speak the language of the socio-symbolic both to others and to ourselves. It becomes our subjective and objective world. And then we accept the particular situational interpretations of the sociosymbolic. We acquiesce there too. This is a lamp (the primeval bow), I speak of it as a lamp (linguistic acquiescence), and I treat it as others do (situational acquiescence). These orders of sentient castration are overwhelming. What we know as “freedom” is given to us too as a socio-symbolic “object”. We bow first to “freedom” by understanding the concept, and then by speaking of it, and then by treating it as others do. Freedom in this way becomes just another reactivity, even in immediate reflection.

But we must reflect on our reflections. I think of freedom this way and why? And why, further, do I think this way in general? And why, further, do I think at all?. Only reflections of reflections can take us back to our origins. Yet still the route must be mediated. There is no way to cancel the contract that was signed for us with the blood of our unified world-relation, our pure sentience, That blood is set and dried. We can only negotiate the terms.

Here we return to the pathologies of the mirror (body image disorders) and situate them in a refusal to negotiate, a false hope of cancelling the contract, of seeing reflected back at us a grammatized self that is somehow also whole and therefore unificatory, that cancels our responsibility for our own happiness (the negotiation), that resolves the unresolvable split. The logic of the misunderstanding is a flee from action, that is action as socially legible (or potentially legible) action, and as the only way to negotiate a presence of self and receive validation of self. It is a hystericized reaction to inevitable actual imperfections in one’s impressions of the bodily image as situated under the gaze of the “ideal” grammatized (socially legible) body such that onto such imperfections are projected the original loss of the unified self that in its ungrammatized state was not to itself an other, a body in the world, but a world in and of itself.

And so the imperfections in the mirror come to bear the weight of impossible return. And the more they do, the more hystericized the reaction, the more fear of the magnified imperfections, the more the sufferer is bound to deny them by looking in the mirror to not find them (the pathology subsisting in the illogic of devoting all one’s energies in a search to not find that can only end when it fails its goal).

We see here how any negotiation becomes impossible in the hystericized denial of such a negotiation’s necessity. Body image pathologies are a route that takes the sufferer further and further from responsibility as they seek an impossible effacement of an inevitable difference, That is, they ultimately seek (unknowingly) the effacement of subjectivity itself in a search for a pure subjectivity that exists only in a false reflection or memory, a trace that does not represent the experience but only a view of it from outside so to speak, and a view only possible from outside, from the already split subject—for the pure unity is not a subjectivity but sentience in-itself that does not know itself and cannot experience itself as another as the split subject can.

So, in relation to subjectivity, the sufferer “throws the baby out with the bathwater” in a refusal to acknowledge that its humiliation by the socio-symbolic is a part of its being and being able to be in the only way now possible, in being able to feel the trace of lost being, even transiently. And so it self-humiliates its own socio-symbolic subjectivity in a masochistic act of revenge that cannot end in anything but exhaustion, that is, the exhaustion of the will to be in the subject, which is the only position from which it can act to fulfill itself, and the productive redirection of which is its only hope of its salvation.

Baden

(Addendum: Non-resistance, vain resistance, and productive resistance.

Non-resistance does not recognize the problem and embraces humiliation. This is a process of fading liveability and a disappearing call to self. The “trace” of original being becomes uttterly invisible. The non-resisters may be “comfortable” but deny to themselves “higher” potentialities. They are ultimately proletarianized and disindividuated.

Vain resistance recognizes the problem but self-destructively misinterprets it. It denies to itself its internal logic. Vain resisters (such as sufferers of body image disorders) see the possibility of higher potentialities, but in their hystericized desire for them, the seeking of an impossible direct route to them, they deny themselves all comfort for glimpses of a trace that they immediately smother through their overwhelming desire for it.

Productive resistance recognizes the problem’s inherent lack of an ultimate solution, and negotiates a liveable compromise that yet avoids passivity. Productive resisters accept and embrace discomfort as a necessary part of the irreversible contract of subjectivity and as a route to higher potentialities manifested in creative, and therefore individuating, action. That is, they understand both the rewards and limits of individuation, and that its pains and satisfactions cannot be disentwined. )

Baden

↪Moliere

Good. I like Sartre as an "in" to this approach to consciousness and I'm not particularly bothered by the critique in this context (also, my relative lack of knowledge of Husserl means I can't effectively argue the point anyway).

In a rough way, yes. I'm wanting the eating disorder example to be filled out in a general manner which might apply elsewhere -- but that means the idea is interesting. — Moliere

I'm trying to fill out above a context (more to come) that I'll try to loop back into a fuller application to body image disorders (including body dysmorphic disorder and eating disorders).

The ideas of Lacan as a later psychoanalytic development are also of significance. At this stage, I haven't managed to read his actual writing as I I found it rather heavy going. But I did read one book, 'Using Lacanian Clinical Technique_ An Introduction', by Philip F Hill.
He offers a couple of relevant quotes from Lacan:
'Man is captivated by the image of his own body.'
'The sexual relation implies capture by the other's image.'
Hill explains the role of images in particular as central to falling in love in general.

It would make sense to argue that it is differ fall in love if one is struggling with one's own self image and that is why issues, such as body dysmorphic disorder, have such an intrusive impact in life. — Jack Cummins

Those quotes are super interesting and I don't remember coming across them in my study of Lacan. I agree that it's not only difficult but probably impossible to maintain a romantic loving relationship when trapped in a body image disorder. The other becomes the impossible point of validation and love dissolves into fear.

L'éléphant

What follows then is an attempt to explore a form of brokenness in or in our relation to this non-positional awareness, and, by extension, the other. — Baden

I don't agree that we even experience this brokenness just because we cannot go beyond our perception and explore the consciousness not as an object.
I don't think we feel "incomplete" or there is the lacking. Of course, I am not a Sartrean follower. So, maybe something to explore.

Baden

↪L'éléphant

I think that's right in the sense that a fish doesn't actively experience water. It's too fundamental. On the other hand, water is an essential part of its lived experience, and if you take it out of the water, it definitely knows the difference.

What can go wrong in the mirror?

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