Mice as "Selves"

In a comment to the previous blog John explained the pains and pleasures of life as imaginations occurring to an ego, which is also only an imagination. He suggests that these imaginations can be made to disappear “by constant enquiry into” the nature of the ego. Pursued to its roots in reality, the ego itself will cease to exist; only the Self will survive.

Some may recognize the Eastern flavor of these ideas. I see them as an expression of the psychology proposed by Spinoza (who perhaps got them secondhand from Eastern sources). The words we hear our “little voice” speaking, the pictures we see with our mind’s eyes, even the feelings of pain and pleasure we experience – all of consciousness exists as fragmentary and confused representations of something we understand perhaps not at all.

The scientific discipline suggests that as we understand more and more of how the world works we draw closer and closer to what reality really is. We see the fact that automobiles will not run without fuel, and by inceasing our knowledge of machines and fuels we feel we have learned more about how the world works. But actually, we have only learned more about how automobiles and fuels interact to produce motion. If we make similar enquiries into the way our minds work, if we try to explain how the brain converts the “fuel” of the senses into conscious and unconscious thought, we eventually see that we are trying to lift our understanding by its bootstraps. We’re using our minds to understand how minds work.

Obviously, this approach to understanding is bound to wind up in a cul de sac. We finally conclude, as John did, that we cannot prove – by the methods of science that we used to understand automobiles and fuels – that our conscious ideas relate in a mirror-like way to real objects. But we can at least say something. We can assert that our senses and the neurological processes they stimulate relate in some way to our conscious imaginations. We may also acknowledge that, even if all the content of consciousness is imaginary, it is nevertheless real.

But just as we see a difference between automobiles and fuels, we may also see that our consciousness of some things differs from our consciousness of others. We may, for instance, be conscious of hunger in a painful sort of way, and we may also be conscious of pain as an idea quite different from an actual pain. We may transcend the direct experience of pain and pleasure and begin to think about those two fundamental emotions as things in themselves. Thus, when John spoke of the “Self,” he was speaking of a transcendent sense of whatever he actually is. He may not have known of what he was speaking (Mr. Wittgenstein) but he did know that he could not have noticed a difference between the imagination of pain and the consideration of pain unless there were in reality a way to speak with authority of things we do not completely understand. John knows whereof he speaks when he says that the ego is an imagination. I’m sure he would acknowledge that the word “imagination” is also an imagination, but that it’s reality comes into being because of the contrast we notice between the “imaginary” reality of the ego and the transcendent reality of the Self.

Spinoza referred to this way of seeing as knowing sub specie aeternitatis, from the viewpoint of eternity. He assumed that all effects have causes and all effects are caused, and proceeded from there to a deduction of Reality (or God) within which ego and Self can be understood as separate sorts of things. Once we make that distinction, and realize that we, and not things “out there,” were responsible for seeing that difference, then the world and our Selves stand in relation to each other in a completely different way.

In God – in reality – good and evil do not exist. Those qualities emerge out of the human condition. Just as an automobile is only a hunk of junk without fuel, so are human beings only blood and bone without their active minds. Pain and pleasure, the ego, and perhaps even the Self may be imaginations, but they are our imaginations. They are ours to manage, ours to manipulate and control, ours to transcend. We may choose – as many have – to regard ourselves as victims of reality (or other people), but the better road opens to us when we see ourselves as creative creatures making, out of what seems real, our own reality. Pain and pleasure may not go away, but we will know them for what they are . . . just friendly little reminders of what is good for us and what is not. And that, of course, is the ultimate of human goodness.