In Chapter 6 (The Poetics of Personal Renewal) of his book on Dewey and Pirsig,
David Granger offers a view of "self" I think is critical to any read of the
MOQ. Much of what I have been saying is said better here, although this is not
saying David agrees with me, only that I find much to agree with in him. I'm
going to post the first section from Chapter 6, hoping as always it encourages
readers to go out and get the entire book (typos are mine). This is a bit
lengthy, I hope you find it as valuable as I have.
>From CHAPTER 6 "THE POETICS OF PERSONAL RENEWAL" (pp 206-210)
The subject of personal renewal brings us once again to the Emersonian idea of
"work." While the orientation of this work becomes variously more reflexive
when viewed from the perspective of selfhood, the basic self-world materials
remain identical to those contributing to cultural renewal. Put most simply,
this work now takes the form of a pragmatic-poetic approach to subjectivity as
an ongoing work-in-progress. Using his popular figure of circles, Emerson
perceives it this way: "The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from
a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outWards to new and larger
circles, and that without end."'
You will recall that Emerson's circles are often configured as linguistic
formations, and that the contents of these formations are necessarily
contingent upon the meanings made available to us in our efforts to make sense
of the world. They are, as a result, finally inseparable from the environment
in which the self lives and works-personal renewal and cultural renewal are
interdependent events. This means that the Emersonian self should not be
thought of as a fixed Cartesian entity (subject), situated and constituted
independent of its actions and ends, standing over and against the world
(object). "Everything is medial," we are again reminded. And "Permanence is a
word of degrees" ("Circles" 297).
Still, chapter 5 showed us that observing such pragmatic principles is not as
simple as these easy aphorisms might lead us to believe. The reifying
tendencies of subject-object metaphysics are very deeply entrenched in our
everyday forms of life, influencing in a fundamental way how we talk and think
about ourselves and the world. Most importantly, this metaphysics can make the
self or subject appear essentially fixed and autonomous. In critiquing this
common phenomenon, Pirsig again summons his computer metaphor to underscore our
(skeptical) tendency to be seduced by substantives into supposing some
antecedently existing thing that corresponds to them:
Our language is so organized around pronouns such as "I" and they arc so
convenient to use it is impossible to get rid of them. . . . The language we've
inherited confuses [us].... This Cartesian little "Me," this autonomous little
homunculus who sits behind our eyeballs looking out through them in order to
pass judgment on the affairs of the world, is just completely ridiculous. This
self-appointed little editor of reality is just an impossible fiction that
collapses the moment one examines it. This Cartesian "Me" is a software
reality, not a hardware reality. (Lila 154, 201)
Even Emerson and Pirsig's "original unit," it seems, is an emergent entity, a
software reality. Nonetheless, they still hold that it Can successfully rewrite
itself and flourish through selected private practices of self-fashioning and
carefully measured participation in social life.
In opposition to the reified subject of Cartesian convention, Emersonian
pragmatists maintain that the self is best seen as an activity or constellation
of behaviors, a means of organizing and making sense of experience rather than
a mental substance that acts. It is an ongoing event that emerges and, one
hopes, expands or grows through interaction with the natural and sociocultural
world (it may also fragment or become encased in a shell of addled routine).
Consequently, self-realization is no more a given than any of life's other
goods. WIth this general theme as our point of departure, we explore in this
chapter the possibilities and problems of personal renewal, of reconstructing
(or rewriting) this emergent self. After demonstrating that the poetics of
personal renewal comprise multiple narrative dimensions, I offer a Deweyan
corrective to Emerson and Pirsig's distinctly inner-directed path to remaking
the self. All of this serves by degrees to round out our investigation of focal
question number 3: How might art as experience contribute to an everyday
poetics of living?
THE EMERGENT POETIC SELF
Dewey's take on the emergent self is a natural extension of his theory of
habits, those readily acquired "working capacities" that lend structUre and
direction to experience' It is a theory based upon his recognition that we are
thoroughly embodied, biological beings. Yet Dewey also dearly understands that
we are very much the products of culture and various forms of social
interaction. In braiding these different sources of the self together, we might
then say that Deweyan habits are expressions of culture rooted in the lived
body and mediated by social interaction. This means, contra Emerson, that the
acquired meanings manifested by our working capacities are not situated solely,
or even primarily, in language. Rather, they suffuse our embodied, spatial,
temporal, culturally formed, and value-laden behaviors and understandings. What
exactly this means for the processes of personal renewal will become evident
shortly.
Dewey's conception of the self suggests that we are more creatUres of habit
than of will or reason. Will or reason, he tells us, could constitute the self
only in a world where we are not continually engaged in purposive interaction
with our natural and sociocultural environments. What we commonly think of as
will largely becomes, for Dewey, the habitual predisposition to respond in
certain ways to different life sitUations. Reason, correspondingly, is a set of
intellectual tools that assists us in developing intelligently functioning
habits.
Dewey likewise dismisses the idea of a preexisting core self or ego that is
always (already) there, an independent and autonomous thinker and unifier of
experience. The self for him exists only in its "workings" or active
dispositions. When viewed from an anthropological perspective, the Deweyan self
is composed of little more than relatively enduring and integrated habitual
patterns of behavior. These habits condition our dispositions, desires, and
ends, our responsiveness to the environment, and our abilities to care,
perceive, and think. Indeed, we could not learn to act meaningfully in the
world were we not essentially habit-forming creatures.
Be that as it may, Dewey's metaphysics points up the fact that the self cannot
survive and flourish if defined only by its own past. We are integral parts of
an ever-changing world with ever-new possibilities for meaningful experience.
Hence it would be unwise, Dewey says, to treat "the old, the habitual self. . .
as if it were the self; as if new conditions and new demands were [inevitably]
something foreign and hostile." For this relatively static, attained self of
past experience is effectually liberated from itself only when working in
conjunction with a transitional, dynamic self (LW 7: 306). Dewey does not mean
to tell us to regard these tWo "selves" as distinct entities. On the contrary,
he wishes to accentuate the degree to which the temporal dimension of
subjectivity-namely, the continuity of past, present, and future-conditions
personal renewal. Thus Dewey writes, "The growing, enlarging, liberated self. .
. goes forth to meet new demands and occasions, and readapts and remakes itself
in the process. It welcomes untried situations. The necessity for choice
betWeen the interests of the old and of the forming, moving, self is recurrent.
It is found at every stage of civilization and every period of life" (LW 7:
307).
Dewey envisions this growing self as one that successfully integrates or
harmonizes the static and dynamic in experience. That is to say, it is capable
of relinquishing aspects of its previous make-up so as to expand its palette of
meaning-enhancing ways of interacting with the environment, its attitUdes and
habits and their effective horizons of meaning. This complex process requires
conditions that acknowledge the interdependence of intelligent choice and
action. In short, it requires the tools and agencies of a positive freedom. A>
Dewey explains, "There is an intrinsic connection betWeen choice as freedom and
power of action as freedom. A choice which intelligently manifests
individuality enlarges the range of action, and this enlargement in turn
confers upon our desires greater insight and foresight, and makes choice more
intelligent. There is a circle, but an enlarging circle."
Dewey believes strongly that to maintain the vitality of the human eros- native
impulse to live a life of ever-expanding meaning and value-an end-in-view
achieved must always become the means of a new, further end-in-view. When
attained, he says, an end may fairly be called a "perfection," a fulfillment of
antecedent conditions. Yet it should never be viewed as a finality.- This is
because self-making is only an initial step along the path to eventUal
self-remaking; and this entails continual movement both within and beyond the
habitual self, or what Wordsworth calls the ongoing process of marriage and
remarriage with the world. Either way, growth of the self always brings with it
a renewed relationship with both people and things. Dewey also recognizes,
however, chat because of the increased uncertainty they engender, we often
eschew conditions that demand new attitudes and new responsibilities, thus
rigidifying the self. As a matter of course, he writes, "we are at home and fed
comfortable in lines of action chat run in the tracks of habits already
established and mastered" (LW 7: 307).
"People wish to be settled," is how Emerson puts it in "Circles." But, he adds,
"the way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment" ("Circles" 305, 306).
Emersonian pragmatists know firsthand just how formidable the work and wonder
of personal renewal can be; in other words, they understand the conservatizing
force of the habitual self. To venture beyond that home which is your attained
self and, following Stanley Cavell, "side with" or "neighbor" your "next" self
is to invite discomfort and self-criticism, to unsettle the world as you now
see and acknowledge it.' Thoreau, in Walden, refers to this transitory
condition as being "beside ourselves in a sane sense," and contrasts it with
the skeptical indolence of"[t]he mass of men [who] lead lives of quiet
desperation." Siding with, rather than against, a further self involves risking
(if only temporarily) the integrity of selfhood and accepting the vulnerability
attendant upon being "beside yourself." It calls for a mindful receptivity to
that pragmatic-poetic space of "something, perhaps," an imaginative exploration
of those potential ways of chinking and being chat lie beyond your present
array of behaviors. Furthermore, and paradoxically, the experience of loss is
not only a possibility here-it is actually a prerequisite for growth and
renewal.
Emerson embraces the idea chat writing is the primary means of negotiating the
work of personal renewal. It is the language by which the self becomes
articulate or otherwise enacts itself chat is his animating interest. Like
Dewey, then, Emerson does not automatically presuppose the inferential "I" of
Descartes's cogito, as if the self is always (already) there. Instead, he
eagerly performs it with words.- Recognizing chat language is subject to
contingency and selective in nature, Emerson constantly searches for openings
through which novel ways of "reading" the self-world relationship might pass.
The image here is yet again very Wittgensteinian: "We now and then detect in
nature slight dislocations, which apprise us chat this surface on which we now
stand is not fixed, but sliding" ("Circles" 302). Emerson seeks to mine the
traces of deferred meanings and the vague overtones and resonances that seep
through these dislocations in the surfaces of words. He then puts them to work
in the process of rewriting the self by experimenting with fresh tropes and
metaphors. In forging his own creations as a write- his own self, as it
were-Emerson is better able to reconstruct them (and it) before they become too
static, before his habitual self becomes too convenient, too "homey." Our
everyday linguistic resources and habits would seem to settle the possibilities
of the self. But with the dilated eye of the poet, Emerson uses the
transitional energies of his linguistic skepticism to "unsettle all things"
(304).
Richard Poirier observes that this constant unsettling of things can make
Emerson "amazingly hard to read, hard to get close to, all the more because he
finds it manifestly difficult to get close to himself, to read or understand
himself. If you want to get to know him, you must stay as close as possible to
the movements of his language, moment by moment, for at every moment there is
movement with no place to rest; you must share, to a degree few other writers
since Shakespeare have asked us to do, in his contentions with his own and
therefore with our own meanings, as these pass into and then out of any
particular verbal configuration."
As we participate in this exploration of our linguistic inheritance, we are
repeatedly confronted with passages that apparently negate or "unsay" those
that came previously. It is hard to know just what beliefs to ascribe to
Emerson from one critical-creative moment to the next. This is because the
impetUs of personal renewal takes precedence over any elements of an
immediately prior self that might be sacrificed in the process. He writes as if
nothing he ever finds in his words is worth holding onto, cherishing, and
putting safely aside. The necessary inference is that for Emerson, "the act of
self-erasure, of disowning the words by which just a few seconds ago you may
have identified yourself, becomes in fact, and paradoxically, an indication of
selfhood" (PandP 11). Thus, as Pirsig exclaims, "The pencil is mightier than
the pen" (Lila 222).
Of course we must also consider the self-world relationship from the other
direction. Because the self emerges out of physical and sociocultUral
interaction, any changes that it undergoes bring with them changes in our
everyday environments. As new things become pivotal to our evolving sense of
selfhood, others begin to drop away, sometimes inducing great pain and anguish,
sometimes almost invisibly. Friends, loves, and associations, beliefS and
values, projects and commitments are all potentially jeopardized by the
transitional self. We can only hope that expansive growth in and through new,
more fruitful relationships and pursuits accompanies such losses. Emerson
speaks quite candidly about personal renewal in just these terms: "The
continual effort to raise himself above himself, to work a pitch above his last
height, betrays itself in a man's relations. . .. A man's growth is seen in the
successive choirs of his mends. For every mend whom he loses for truth, he
gains a better" ("Circles" 299).
Or perhaps not. Emerson's rhetoric of personal renewal often seems to evade the
question of the ultimate irreplaceability of lost friendships and loves.
Realizing you are no longer comfortable spending time with an old and dear mend
can be a profoundly disturbing experience, even if ending the relationship is
finally for the better. What is more, each of us inherits and is partially
constitUted by a number of sociocultUral scripts authored by those who came
before us. As roles to be acted out in everyday life, these at times
conflicting scripts-for example, of daughter, sister, mother, lover, wife,
woman, teacher-can be exceedingly difficult and painful to rewrite, especially
for those persons (like "Phaedrus") who have been relegated to the margins. No
situation can ever be thoroughly freed from the force of such expectations or
norms. As even Dewey fails to acknowledge sufficiently, they inevitably
constrain the possibilities of personal renewal in very significant and
consequential ways. That said, I think Emerson does provide us with a vision of
personal renewal that recognizes the innate complexity of the relationship
betWeen self-realization and democratic life.
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