Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak

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Subjects with transplanted or implanted organ,⁸⁵ or implanted intelligent devices⁸⁶ may also be temporarily disadvantaged in their approach to themselves; however, the problem is not restricted to the narrative self. Radical allograft experiences are documented case-by-case and will be examined in this volume together with experiences with artificial devices. Unlike these cases, the posthumanist experiments seem to be colonized by fictional and utopian narratives offered from scholars’ meta-perspectives and literature. Authentic first-person reports on a posthuman self/identity are scarce. There is no certainty as to whether posthuman creatures showed interest in self-identity or were rather satisfied with their post-egological and post-personal existence. However, as long as we are dealing with the originally human element in post- or ‘neohuman’ creatures, interest in self-identity will prevail, at least at “the next ego balance”⁸⁷ level. That balance would not necessarily be achieved through the approach of the narrative self, but through the “care of the self” originating from “our capacity to tenderly and lovingly care for the body,”⁸⁸ both in silence⁸⁹ or in the middle of narratives and discourses.

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      Van den Berg examined the relationship between continuity, discontinuity, and the concept of a self whose coherence and balance were supported by narrative ability, as I tried to show above with Ricoeur and Dennett’s narrative theories. If a radical jump from human to posthuman identity implied a decline of the narratively structured self, there would be a radical discontinuity within the latter. However, according to van den Berg, discontinuity paradoxically promises more structure than continuity and homogeneity:

Discontinuity means: Intransitivity, a jump, a gap, disconnectedness, something accidental and open-ended. This sounds quiet puzzlingly. We are so used to the connectedness and the transition that we are no more able to imagine how can something arise outside connection. It is like an idea left in the air (…) The idea of structure without continuity does not come to our mind. However, one may only talk about the structure when no continuity (…) Continuity makes everything homogenous and nothing is more structureless than the homogeneous (…) Or I expressed it in a wrong way: Conversely, homogeneity implies continuity.⁹⁰

But, still, such implications presuppose basic dialogical relations between myself and someone else in the commitment, trust, and mediation of language.⁹¹ Otherwise, single episodes can “be connected without necessarily being coherent,”⁹² but they must be voiced.

3.3 Between Narrative, Silence and Dysnarrativa

Modern-day research findings across cultures raise objections to a structured or even narrated self. One rather “should embrace the significance of the silence (…). Needless to say, as there are various kinds of silence, we must examine its extent and meaning with careful attention (…) Silence that conveys the presence of the ‘Nothingness’ may well be telling more than any spoken words,” whereas “quick verbalization may easily destroy the life of the image.”⁹³ Instead,

the hidden secrets of silence and non-verbal interaction [are to be explored]. There is a great deal being expressed non-verbally through body movement, facial expression, eye contact, breathing etc. (…) Amplification of the image is usually being unfolded in ←34 | 35→silence, which, of course, is not only true of Japanese psychotherapy but is also the case cross-culturally with practitioners where image is central.⁹⁴

In the Japanese tradition, continuity and continuous self-narratives are not considered as a relevant contribution to the self, as the latter need not to be conceptualized as a unity or diachrony of conscious contents. Kitarō Nishida, who can be regarded as a Far Eastern hermeneutic thinker, held a more daring view called “mu no ba sho.” According to this philosopher, the contradictions and dissonances lived or performed by an individual neither presuppose nor imply “an ultimate discretedness”⁹⁵ of herself (they do not ruin its coherent representation as one of a synchronic – not diachronic – multitude). “The unity of consciousness, namely the self, is not possible in a merely straight-lined process. All the phenomena of my consciousness are many,” Nishida asserts, “and, at the same time – as mine – also one. This is a unity of opposites in the shown sense;”⁹⁶ it is likely that it is possible to articulate and story this unity in language, logic, semantics, and narrative forms very different to ours, but probably as open-ended forms. Also, narration, as a tool for giving shape, structure, and content to the human “I,” has a completely different meaning in each of these cultural circles. An example of functioning at the interface between these two cultural ‘tectonic plates,’ which never formed a monolithic continent, if only because they attach very different importance to the role of narrative in defining the self and its vicissitudes, is Megumi Yama, an American psychotherapist with Japanese roots. She examines two completely different models of the self. Each of these models is encased in a strong normativity that has endured for hundreds of years. The Japanese model, an example of “Eastern selfhood,” is non-egological, decentered, “speechless,” and “blank,” while the American model, which is an example of “Western selfhood,” is individualistic, centered (egological), permanently storied and restoried. “It is even doubtful” if the Japanese psyche really has a “center” or a “conscious self.”⁹⁷ The true Japanese “self” is nothingness and can be explained using traditional myths, like the one about heavenly ancestors. A person who is asked about their “self,” even in a diagnostic or therapeutic context, expresses herself sparingly and cautiously; it is not her who is the main agent, ←35 | 36→actor, or inventor of what is happening to her. She is also not influenced by others who dominate over her “I,” because in her native culture, such an “I” simply does not exist. In conversation with others, such a person does not attribute specific features, intentions, or labels to her listeners, because this would be a sign of her domination over them. Instead, she tries to guess and infer the qualities of others from a broader context and relationship.⁹⁸

The Japanese therapist acts in a similar way. Instead of asking what am I?, she prefers to ask what emptiness is and whether a given person experiences it properly, meaning that she releases herself from the limits of her psychosomatic condition to open herself to the whole and draw energy that is essential for her own life activity,⁹⁹ as Yama emphasizes. Nonetheless,

what at first glance appears to be ‘Nothingness’ is not literally nothingness but may well contain everything that might gradually unfold into the future. But it cannot be understood by ordinary rational thinking and therefore cannot be expressed with words at first. Put another way, I could say that in the ‘Nothingness’ there are buds of all the possibilities which do not have any words; these possibilities are not yet even images that could be apprehended in a dream.¹⁰⁰

Seemingly the “nothingness” СКАЧАТЬ