Hic Ego Sum

"The Conversion of St. Augustine" by Fra Angelico

Mark Lilla cites a wonderful quote from Augustine’s Confessions “Mihi quaestio factus sum,” or “I have become a problem to myself” at the beginning of his recent review of Augustine: Conversions to Confessions by Robin Lane Fox (NYT, 11/20/15). The quote could be looked at as solipsistic, as an act of what those who were more interested in social than individual change used to term “belly button gazing.” But what is extraordinary is not only its modernity, but the pithy way in which it defines consciousness. We might think that true change like trickle down economics only occurs at the top, but essentially the awareness of one’s own thought process, which the quote underlines, is an ineluctable attribute of thinking and something which all of mankind is strapped with, whether we are millenarians or not. What defines humanity is precisely the fact that we have all become problems to ourselves and indeed treat ourselves as if we were perceiving separate people rather than simply unthinkingly pursuing our untamed instincts and desires. You could say that “mihi quaestio factus sum” sounds a little like the Cartesian “Cogito ergo sum,” but the difference lies in the word “problem.” There are many philosophers who believe that certain animals partake of phenomena in a way that approaches what we call thinking to the extent that they intake sensations and even experience memory. Have you ever seen a dog for instance who appears to be having a bad dream?  Augustine’s problem adds the extra element of what we might call “self-reflexive” consciousness, the thinking about thinking that creates at least one degree of separation from creatures who are simply at the mercy of their appetites. And perhaps the truth is that you can’t change the world until you develop the ability to  understand and change yourself. Ovid presents a similar problem from a more ontogenic point of view when he says “Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis,”  “in this place I am a barbarian, because men do not understand me.” But “Hic ego sum,” “Here I am,” is where it all begins.

Ordinary Pain

You are speeding along by yourself on an Interstate when a really great song like Stevie Wonder’s Love’s In Need of Love Today comes on, and you turn the sound up as loud as it will go.

    

What is a nice guy or girl? Cordelia wasn’t nice because she didn’t say what Lear wanted to hear. Goneril is definitely not nice. Oracles are not nice. Soothsayers like Calchas are not nice. The Sphinx is not nice in Oedipus because it only proposes riddles. You have to go through hoops to answer what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?

  

Lionel Trilling dealt with this subject in a series of essays called “Sincerity and Authenticity.” But what do these terms really connote? Are the Cordelias of the world better than the Gonerils, or are they merely seeking another kind of gain, i.e., martyrdom and moral superiority? One way to get ahead in the world might be to ask for things, another might be to propose self-deprivation. Though Augustine repudiated earthly desires, he made it (by the worldly standard of fame). Gandhi had a good run of success, as did philosophical kindred like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, who used passive resistance to achieve their aims. Is the man of peace better than the warrior? Is Mother Theresa saintly in comparison to Clausewitz, who argued that war was merely “the continuation of politics”? We are all imperialists, both on ontogenic and phylogenic levels. We all want to control and dominate, whether it’s a person, a class, or a society of people. Was Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik fundamentally more evil than the politics of conciliation that might be advocated by organizations of doves?

   

So is it all a matter of presentation, The Presentation of the Self in Every Day Life that Erving  Goffman described in his famed sociological tome. Is it all public relations? Is personality a series of conscious and unconscious decisions with a pubic face, but no moral scorecard?

   

Now you are speeding down the same highway and Freyda Payne’s disco classic Band of Gold comes on the oldies station.