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Notes
For a rigorous analysis, that draws heavily on the work of von Uexküll, of whether or how human experience involves a radical difference from the experience of other animals, see Heidegger (1995).
On the idea that language cannot be a merely “private” matter, but is a matter of answering to shared norms, see Wittgenstein (1958), especially §§256–271; compare Derrida’s (1982) discussion of the necessary “iterability” of language. For a rich phenomenological analysis of language acquisition, see Simms (2010). On the bodily dimensions of developing the ability to write, see Beith (2017). See also Cobb (1977), especially pp. 38, 41.
On the need for active participation in language learning, see the discussion by Gallager and Hutto (2008) of the need to be involved when engaging with narratives.
Sartre (1984), p. 499. See also: “[T]his organic complex which is immediately present to desire is desirable only in so far as it reveals not only life but also an appropriate consciousness” (p. 502).
On the need for plasticity of perceptual response, see Cobb (1977), passim. Note especially p. 70: “But I believe this process can take place only when experience of the world and man is informed by compassionate intelligence. If adaptive modification of behavior is too narrowly confined within self-interest, and does not spread out into a wider and more generous world view, the process of understanding, the expansion into metaphoric evolution which expresses this enlargement of empathy and transcendence of the self, fails to occur. The disturbance of ecological balance in the natural world follows upon individual behavior that is unduly limited to self-interest when mind dwindles or becomes rigidly fixed for lack of mental nourishment and spiritual exercise.”
Compare Kant’s distinction between the “mathematical” categories, which pertain to the constitution of an object of intuition, and the “dynamical” categories, which pertain to the relations in which the object of intuition “exists.” See Kant (2007), particularly A160/B199.
On the threshold at which a system changes from plastic to rigid, see Walker et al. (2004); Walker and Meyers (2004); and Masten and Obradović (2006). On the general idea that our relationship to the world is an “ecological” one, see Cobb (1977); see p. 66 in particular on the ongoing character of the establishment of equilibrium between self and world.
In Nicomachean Ethics, I.10, Aristotle emphasizes the resiliency that comes with developing virtuous habits, and the essential importance of this for human happiness.
Sōphrosunē has no unambiguous definition in the Greek tradition, though it broadly means something like “control of oneself” or “balance”; for a rich discussion of its meaning, see Plato, Charmides, passim, and also Republic IV.430e-432a; for Aristotle’s somewhat narrower usage, see Nicomachean Ethics, III.10–12.
In other words, the ability to recognize others is concomitantly the ability to distinguish ourselves from them, or, again, our ability to recognize ourselves is concomitantly the ability to distinguish others from ourselves. As Waldenfels (2004) remarks, “Intercorporeity implies that the own and the alien are entangled, that everybody is inserted into an interlacing, into a Geflecht or entrelacs as Norbert Elias, Merleau-Ponty and sometimes even Husserl put it. There are no readymade individuals, rather there is only a process of individualisation which presupposes a certain anonymity and typicality of our bodily self. What we feel, perceive, do or say is interwoven with what others feel, perceive, do or say.” (p. 246) On the stages of development in intersubjective experience, see Gallager and Hutto (2008).
This is the central point of Hegel’s (1977) study of “The Dependence and Independence of Self-Consciousness,” particularly paragraphs 178–196.
For the common contrast with god and beast, see, for example, Aristotle, Politics, I.2, 1253a27ff.
On sōphrosunē as “self-consciousness,” see Rosen (1972–3).
See Stolorow (2013), p. 386: “A second consequence of developmental trauma is a severe constriction and narrowing of the horizons of emotional experiencing, so as to exclude whatever feels unacceptable, intolerable, or too dangerous in particular intersubjective contexts. When a child’s emotional experiences are consistently not responded to or are actively rejected, the child perceives that aspects of his or her affective life are intolerable to the caregiver. These regions of the child’s emotional world must then be sacrificed in order to safeguard the needed tie.” On the importance of primary caregivers, see Cobb (1977), p. 30.
Because we are beings of “second nature,” we necessarily exist as a relation to ourselves—we have no purely “immediate” state, but are always and essentially self-interpretive. For this reason, we are always in a state of self-variance, that is, there is always a non-self-identical relationship between our way of existing and our sense of our way of existing. For that reason, our very existence always offers us grounds for critically assessing our self-interpretations. This is a crucially important with regard to the “I” and the “I can.” One’s lived sense of whether and how one is an “I” who “can” has, as I have argued here, a crucial impact—encouraging or crippling—on one’s abilities to engage with the world and cultivate the virtues of agency. On the other hand, we are functioning, organic bodies in relation to a world, and our bodies reflect abilities—given and developed—that do not flow from our self-consciousness. For that reason, we can in fact be “able” in ways in which we understand ourselves to be unable/disabled (and vice versa). Consequently, our behaviour offers a permanent counter-voice to our explicit self-interpretation. This can be developmentally and therapeutically crucial. Hegel’s discussion, (Hegel 1977, paragraphs 194–196), of the transformative potential in the work done by the slave is a classic statement of this point. For contemporary studies of disability that reflect this insight, see Mairs (1996) pp. 17, 133, and Barnes (1985). On the social and political dimensions of living with the identity, “disabled,” see Siebers (2013). For a discussion of this theme in relationship to racism, see Burwood (2008). For the power of this theme in relationship to art, see Cachia (2012).
On this theme, see Cobb (1977) p. 29.
Winnicott (1964), p. 69 and Chapter 10. Kirsten Jacobson (2004) shows that the “fear of public spaces” is not so much about those public spaces as it is about the inability to have a sense of being at home in the world, and thus it is not by addressing the manifest “problem” of dealing with the outdoors that progress will be made but by addressing the weakness of the foundation from upon which the engagement with the outdoors is based. On “testing” the self against the world, see Cobb (1977), p. 37: “Testing of the self against the bounded and the unbounded begins within the spatiotemporal relations of mother and child and continues into play and the iconography of play art”; see also pp. 82 f. on the idea that the play-world allows children to test themselves against reality and the vice of “staying a child” for too long.
See Cobb (1977), p. 83: “Ultimately, mature purpose, either emotional or cultural, requires recognition of the limits of the self and a capacity, within recognition, for suffering. This, in turn, implies the capacity to perceive creatively despite suffering and awareness of the discontinuity between self and the world.”
Salvador Minuchin’s “Family Therapy” revolves around this idea that putatively individual problems are in fact reflections of family-systems (Minuchin et al. 1978). The ground-breaking thinker in systems-theoretic understanding of character is Gregory Bateson; see, for example, “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory of Alcoholism” (Bateson 1972). For a study of identity as a intersubjective network in the context of disability, see Fritsch (2010).
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Russon, J. Personality as equilibrium: fragility and plasticity in (inter-)personal identity. Phenom Cogn Sci 16, 623–635 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9520-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9520-4