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Self-portrait by the author
When a cow takes a look at herself in a mirror (or in
the water surface of the ditch when she drinks), she doesn’t recognize herself,
while a man does. There are hardly any animals that recognize themselves when
looking in a mirror. I think that this is also an indication that man has
personhood, while a cow hasn’t or has a reduced kind of personhood at most: One
cannot be a person if one hasn’t a conception of oneself. Being able to
recognize oneself as oneself in a mirror is an expression of this conception,
which is usually called self-awareness. Following Velleman in the article I
quoted in my last blog one can say that this self conception is not just the
feeling of being there in the world. It’s not merely subjective, but “it is the
conception of himself as a creature with this very conception of itself. This
self-conception is objective in the sense that it represents its subject as its subject in the world …” (Velleman,
325) So, one’s self-awareness is objective in the sense that one can take an
objective stance towards oneself just as one does towards a bird in the garden and
wonders whether it is a marsh tit or a willow tit. Likewise one can
think and talk about oneself.
Literary and philosophical expressions of this
phenomenon are self-descriptions like autobiographies, autobiographic novels, apologies
and the like. Many essays written by Montaigne have also an autobiographical
content or aspect. His subjective treatises became so popular that they were
the beginning of a completely new genre. However, not everybody valued the
personal content of such writings. Blaise Pascal, for instance, wrote about
Montaigne’s work: “His foolish project of describing himself! And this not
casually and against his maxims, since everyone makes mistakes, but by his
maxims themselves, and by first and chief design. For to say silly things by
chance and weakness is a common misfortune; but to say them intentionally is
intolerable …” (II, 62) Nevertheless Pascal has been much influenced by
Montaigne, although his project was not self-descriptive.
But is it really so foolish to describe yourself?
Maybe Pascal thought that it isn’t as long as you keep it for yourself, but
showing yourself intentionally to the world isn’t done, according to him. Maybe
it wasn’t in his time, but Montaigne’s Essays
were widely read and withstood the ages, and that not only as a way of peeping
in the soul of another person. They help to understand the age he lived in and
human life in general; not only the author’s life. That’s also a function of
autobiographies. They are interesting as self-descriptions of this life or that
life (and they satisfy our voyeurism as well), but they reflect also the age
the author lived in and they are lessons of life.
In these days of individualism self-descriptions in
any shape have become very important. In an age in which one can rely less on
relations, the way you present yourself has become very important. This concerns
not only the way you look, your appearance, and the way you know to manipulate
your looks in the right way. It concerns also the way you tell others who you
are. A self-description is often a way to present the better side of yourself
and then it is more a kind of self-justification, or self-promotion. And just
as photos added to job applications are photoshopped today in order to suggest
a “better” appearance, so often self-descriptions as presented to the world are
nothing else than kinds of self-advertisements, in which the raw edges of the
subject’s life are polished away. But who tells us that also Montaigne hasn’t
avoided talking about the potholes in his road of life he was ashamed of? So I
finish with a quotation from Pascal, torn loose from the context: “It is not in
Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in him.” (II, 64) In other
words: Look at yourself, take an objective stance and judge. Who can? “
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