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Originally published in 1990.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691607658 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1038 |
| Pages: | 146 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.90(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.40(d) |
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The Discipline of Subjectivity
An Essay on Montaigne
By Ermanno Bencivenga
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1990 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07364-4
CHAPTER 1
I SEARCH
I do not find myself in the place where I look; and I find myself more by chance encounter than by searching my judgment.
(I 10, pp. 26–27)
* * *
The Objective
Do I exist? Of course I do. An unknown, almighty power could well annihilate the whole world around me (and perhaps already did), but there is something it cannot do: it cannot annihilate me so long as I am a terrified spectator of its incinerating action, or so long as I wonder whether such an action has taken place or not. My puzzlement, or my terror, is conclusive evidence that I, at least, have not been incinerated yet.
Do I know something about myself? Of course I do. I may be wrong about this being a crazy spring day, with the sun fighting to come out but being repeatedly chased and suffocated by black, thundering clouds. I may be wrong about there being a screen in front of me, and about green impalpable letters being plotted on it by the pressure of my fingers on the keys. And I may be wrong about these being fingers, or their being mine. I can imagine situations in which none of these beliefs are true. But no situation can be imagined in which it is false that I see black thundering clouds, or green impalpable letters, or that I feel pressure as if I had fingers and they were hitting keys. This knowledge cannot be denied; in fact, it cannot even be perfected. Not only is it the rock bottom of what I know, it is also top quality as far as what I can know.
Do I have, to some extent, control over myself? Of course I do. A threatening, hostile environment often makes it impossible for me to pursue my plans, or even forces me into outcomes I will hate and regret; but this unfortunate consequence of my finitude and limitations does not cancel the fact that I, too, am a party in the transaction, an acting party, a party with a will of its own. If worst comes to worst, and the environment becomes too hostile and threatening, I can always retreat into myself, refuse to impose my power over fortune and external things, and rest content with maintaining my independence of judgment. Nobody but I can take that away from me; even the sweeping passions that occasionally win me over would not have their way if I did not let them, that is, if I did not — perhaps half-mindedly, perhaps discontentedly — decide to let them. The world is not my own, but I most certainly am.
Or am I?
Early in the Meditations, Descartes reaches a view of the self much like the one sketched above. The self is absolutely certain of its own existence, absolutely certain of its nature, which is that of a thinking thing (and remains untouched by the reality or unreality of what is being thought), and can acquire maximum control over itself by minimizing the intervention of external agencies, that is, by withdrawing to a small, quiet corner of the earth and refusing to take part in anything but the search after (its own) truth. The self is absolute transparency: what is opaque in its perception of itself is due to the Other, and though there may have to be an Other given that this self is not infinite, leaving that Other — at least temporarily — on the side will allow the self to recover its primordial, immediate, and unquestionably veridical relation with itself. On the basis of this recovery, it will be possible to return to the Other, and to account for it in an effective, indeed conclusive, way. Thus in Descartes's view, (the thought of) subjectivity is the only safe way to begin a rational reconstruction of the world — a position that, extreme as it is, is also quite popular, to the point of being commonsensical, among scholars and laymen alike.
There is also another, more elaborate, extreme in this matter, typified by Kant. It intimates that only spatio-temporal objects can be assumed to exist, and hence that the presence revealed by self-consciousness must be provided with hands and feet before we can attempt to predicate being of it. In fact, it even suggests that Descartes's may be the wrong order of business: you don't first assert the existence of something and then ask what it is. The existence of something becomes an issue only after it has been decided what that something is: "The category [of existence] as such does not apply to an indeterminately given object but only to one of which we have a concept and about which we seek to know whether it does or does not exist outside the concept" (Critique of Pure Reason, B423 footnote). And, finally, this position acknowledges that the will and its free agency must be postulated, but denies that such postulation accounts for much; rather, what is reached through it is the limit of explanation, something that cannot be avoided but cannot be understood, either. To say that an event occurs because I want it to occur — that is, to locate in my free choice the origin of the event — is tantamount to saying that I don't know why the event occurred. A reference to freedom may be an effective question stopper, but not one that brings with it real enlightenment.
Of these two extremes, I feel closer to the latter, and elsewhere I have tried to make some sense of it, though with more sympathy for making waves and bringing out the underlying tensions than its official champions are likely to reveal. But it is time to go beyond programmatic and general statements about what is and what is not possible, what is and what is not knowledge, what is and what is not an object, and turn our attention to some of the details of the matter. Our relation to the self may be essentially different from our relation to anything else; it may be noncognitive, and may even be a delusion. Accepting these negative statements, however, is not an end but a beginning: the beginning of an investigation of what exactly the structure of the relation — or of the delusion — is.
In carrying out this investigation, I found it useful to follow the devious and occasionally disconcerting paths traced by an author who was dead long before Descartes and Kant made their statements, and who has been all but conspicuously absent from Anglo-American philosophical reflection: Michel de Montaigne. Several times in his Essays, Montaigne makes the point (to which I will return) that he never erases something he wrote earlier because he does "not always find again the sense of [his] first thought; [he does] not know what [he] meant to say, and often [gets] burned by correcting and putting in a new meaning, because [he has] lost the first one, which was better" (II 12, pp. 425–26). Mankind, or our culture, has no better (collective) memory than Montaigne attributes to himself; it is true of it, too, that because something comes later it is not necessarily better, or wiser. Perhaps we have lost the first meaning, and degenerated as a result. Perhaps we need to recover that earlier meaning. My going back to Montaigne is an attempt at such recovery.
Montaigne's declared purpose is that of studying himself:
The world always looks straight ahead; as for me, I turn my gaze inward, I fix it there and keep it busy. Everyone looks in front of him; as for me, I look inside of me; I have no business but with myself; I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself. Others always go elsewhere ...; as for me, I roll about in myself. (II 17, p. 499)
I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics. (III 13, p. 821)
And he considers it both a duty and a pleasure to give a faithful account of his findings:
I owe a complete portrait of myself to the public. (III 5, p. 677)
I take such great pleasure in being judged and known that it is virtually indifferent to me in which of the two forms I am so. (III 8, p. 70s)
This account — this "confession" (II 17, p. 495) — is the very text of the Essays: "I am myself the matter of my book," Montaigne writes, and "you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject" (To the Reader, p. 2). But we do not consider the subject either frivolous or vain; on the contrary, this thorough examination of a self can provide us with an illuminating example of how to search, and perhaps find, the difference, and the relation, between the I and the Other. This example we must savor and cherish, much more than the vacuous generalities philosophers usually regale us with; after all, we are creatures who tend to "adjust themselves not to reason but to example" (III 6, p. 689), and hence example is for us the best means of instruction.
I would have told my master home truths, and watched over his conduct, if he had been willing. Not in general, by schoolmasterly lessons, which I do not know — and I see no true reform spring from them in those who know them — but by observing his conduct step by step, at every opportunity, judging it with my own eyes, piece by piece, simply and naturally. (III 13, p. 825)
The Truth about the Self
Montaigne claims to have complete control over the matter he treats. "[N]o man," he says, "ever treated a subject he knew and understood better than I do the subject I have undertaken" (III 2, p. 611). The reason is that his subject is himself, and "there is no witness so sure as each man to himself" (II 16, p. 474). "There is no one but yourself who knows whether you are cowardly and cruel, or loyal and devout. Others do not see you, they guess at you by uncertain conjectures. ... Therefore do not cling to their judgment; cling to your own" (III 2, p. 613). Besides, he is "a sworn enemy of any falsification" (I 40, p. 186) and "singularly scrupulous about lying" (III 11, p. 786),7 and has "a mortal fear of being taken to be other than [he is] by those who come to know [his] name" (III 5, p. 643). The obvious conclusion of all these premises is that his book contains the truth about him, what a man who did not meet him could only have gained by "long acquaintance and familiarity ..., and more surely and exactly" (III 9, p. 750), and leaves nothing about him "to be desired or guessed" (ibid., p. 751).
So far, Montaigne's statements sound very Cartesian. He may have devoted more time, energy, and single-minded attention to the exploration of his own self, and consequently may have come to know more details about it, but the general story he tells seems consistent with the basic tenets of subjectivism. To dispel this appearance, we need to explore a little further.
A first element that gives us pause here is the claim, repeated several times in the Essays, that Montaigne is trying "not to establish the truth but to seek it" (I 56, p. 229). In line with this aim, he describes his methodology as proceeding by trial and error, by testing things, essaying them,8 taking them "from some unaccustomed point of view ... [scattering a word here, there another, samples separated from their context, dispersed, without a plan and without a promise" (I 50, p. 219). The result of this activity, which he considers not his "teaching, but [his] study" (II 6, p. 272), is sometimes described in very negative terms:
In fine, all this fricassee that I am scribbling here is nothing but a record of the essays of my life, which, for spiritual health, is exemplary enough if you take its instruction in reverse. (III 13, p. 826)
[T]he more I frequent myself and know myself, the more my deformity astonishes me, and the less I understand myself. (III 11, p. 787)
These passages are quite inconsistent with the picture of an expert who masters the "essence" of his subject (in this case, himself; see II 16, p. 274) and provides a reliable report on it. What they suggest instead is a "rambling" procedure (see III 6, p. 692) which, if it ever gets anywhere, only does so because "who is there who, shooting all day, will not sometime hit the mark?" (III, p. 29; quoted from Cicero). Perhaps the specific subject Montaigne is interested in is responsible for this outcome, since "[i]f others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself" (III 9, p. 766). But still, an inconsistency is there and some assessment of it is needed. Shall we blame it on Montaigne's carefree attitude, or rather take it as a sign that something is amiss in the superficial interpretation we have developed so far? An answer to this question will come by a relatively tortuous route.
First of all, we saw that Montaigne is an "enemy of any falsification." It is natural to read this statement as meaning that he is averse to providing the wrong description of anything — including himself. But this reading has an important presupposition: what is to be described must be ontologically prior to (and hence, independent of) the activity of describing it. Unless describing is limited to reproducing, and an original is invoked as the standard for accuracy, one cannot make sense of the claim that the description is correct, or incorrect. Thus, if I say that it is wrong to describe the table out there as blue, I am presupposing that there would be a table out there, and one that is, for example, brown, even if I did not speak, or for that matter even if, instead of speaking, I ceased altogether to exist. What I say is entirely irrelevant to the being and nature of the table, which would continue to be itself, and to be brown, and to be not blue, whatever accurate or inaccurate description of it I or anybody else uttered.
In the case of the self, however, it is suggested over and over in the Essays that the search for it and the attempt at characterizing it (as conducted in the book) are at least in a relation of mutual determination with the object of the search, that is, that the search is also a constitution of the self:
In modeling this figure upon myself, I have had to fashion and compose myself so often to bring myself out, that the model itself has to some extent grown firm and taken shape. ... I have no more made [faict] my book than my book has made me. (II 18, p. 504)
Clearly, this statement is not unquestionable, and later it will be questioned. But proceeding one step at a time, it is useful to emphasize here that the statement is directly opposed to the presupposition above, and to the reading based upon it. If the book made Montaigne at least as much as he made the book, then Montaigne and the book are ontologically interdependent: a different book would have made a different Montaigne, of whom different descriptions would have been true or false. So the statements contained in the book itself — in what sense can they be true or false of Montaigne? And how are we to understand his aversion to falsification in the case of the self, where there is nothing (ontologically) prior to his report for him to report about?
"We are men," Montaigne says elsewhere, "and hold together, only by our word" (I 9, p. 23). There are two ways in which "our word" is crucial for maintaining social cohesion, and both of them figure prominently in the essay in which this statement occurs. One is when we describe something that already is the case, and others are to take "our word" for it; call this the descriptive use of words. The other is when we commit ourselves to doing something, and give "our word" that we will do it; call this the self-prescriptive use of words. In both cases there is ample room for falsification, though of a different nature: when words are used descriptively it results in lying, when they are used self-prescriptively it results in breaking promises. We know by now that in the case of the self, on the basis of what Montaigne says, the first kind of falsification is out of the question; but it is still possible that the second kind will turn out to be applicable, and that it will be the one he is primarily worried about.
In the essay "Of Vanity," we find the following remarks: "[I]n undertakings in which I am alone concerned and wholly free, if I say what I plan to do, it seems to me that I prescribe it for myself, and that to give knowledge of it to another is to impose it upon myself. It seems to me that I promise it when I mention it" (III 9, p. 738). But to write his book would seem to be a typical case of an undertaking in which he is alone concerned and wholly free, so it is not surprising to find him say, later in the same essay:
I feel this unexpected profit from the publication of my behavior, that to some extent it serves me as a rule. Sometimes there comes to me a feeling that I should not betray the story of my life. This public declaration obliges me to keep on my path, and not to give the lie to the picture of my qualities. (Ibid., p. 749)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Discipline of Subjectivity by Ermanno Bencivenga. Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- Preface, pg. ix
- A Note on Texts, pg. xi
- CHAPTER ONE. I SEARCH, pg. 1
- CHAPTER TWO. TRAINING, pg. 18
- CHAPTER THREE. THE TROUBLE WITH HABIT, pg. 34
- CHAPTER FOUR. MIND GAMES, pg. 49
- CHAPTER FIVE. MADNESS AND METHOD, pg. 63
- CHAPTER SIX. BLEAK EXPECTATIONS, pg. 81
- CHAPTER SEVEN. THE BOOK, pg. 98
- CHAPTER EIGHT. KING OF THE HILL, pg. 114
- BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 129
- INDEX, pg. 131