Ten

Philosophy as Autobiography

THE ORIGINS of philosophy are obscure, and the obscurity is such that it cannot be dispelled by further historical information. Any account whatsoever of the origins of philosophy is strictly dependent upon the philosophy of him who gives the account, and eventually it will be that philosophy whose origin is given. We thus enter into a circle where the relevant facts are determined by our principles, in fact those very principles which are to be accounted for or justified by the facts. Heidegger dubs it a hermeneutical circle; Hegel also sees it as the circle of a system. But if circles are causes of despair in deductive logic, circular reasoning being the same as no reasoning at all, for philosophy the situation is not the same. At least perhaps we can agree that not all circles are equally valuable: they can differ in range and in coherence. As for range, perhaps the smallest circle imaginable is that of Parmenides, for whom the truth is confined to the perception that being is one. Plato’s dialogue Parmenides even questioned whether this much could be said with perfect coherence. In any event, the diameter of Parmenides’ circle is very small indeed, every statement of change, difference, time, and multiplicity being excluded from the circle of the truth. The coherence within the circle is almost perfect; the unity of being is on the verge of perfect identity between “being” and “unity”; when they exactly coincide into exact unity of meaning, then the circle becomes a point, and we achieve perfect coherence within a zero range, a somewhat shortwinded termination of the project.

I know of no circle larger than Hegel’s nor at the same time one more contested for its coherence. My present purpose is not to defend Hegel but to look once again at the obscure origins of philosophy, betraying thereby my own philosophical predilections, and in the end to offer reasons to justify the occupation of a particular standpoint, the autobiographical. In the end this project too will be circular and not demonstrative. That is, the reasons will be autobiographical choices for considering philosophy itself as a gigantic autobiographical confession in depth. Being is autobiographical

To return to our theme: the origins of Western philosophy in Greece have been told many times. In the beginning there seemed to be a single human type: it is questionable whether he was what we would call a Philosopher, Scientist, Priest, or Poet. Or, if one can force these roles together, perhaps he was a Sage. But it is indeed for us a conglomeration of functions, which we now think we have happily and clearly distinguished. Religion is an affair of ritual and “faith”; the arts offer us “aesthetic pleasures”; philosophy is yet another department of the university where people “analyze” what others have said in order to make it clear. Truth is the possession of scientists who, even if they don’t have it, nevertheless can define the methods by which it might be reached in an unforeseeable future. And so, if what is now called philosophy had its origins in Greek religion, it was a religion itself unlike anything of that name today; the arts too took their origin in religion, and yet, since the religion in question was already what we call “artistic” ritual or drama, what has been said? Or did religion take its rise from philosophy and the dramas of art? To be an origin is already to be obscure, since it can only be understood through precisely what those origins are taken to be the origin of. And then there is always the optical illusion of understanding things as origins; is it not doubtful indeed whether these prehistorical origins took themselves to be origins of something else altogether, finally ourselves, creatures they may very well have found hopelessly confused and fractured in spirit if they could have anticipated us? Perhaps we are exactly those fragments against which they held themselves together, to which they were most deeply opposed?

If we now trace a mythical or dialectical origin of philosophy, it will be retrospective story and will not necessarily correspond to temporal sequences. It will be an interpretation, in effect. And in that light the origins of what later degenerated into philosophy is the insight that one equaled one. Parmenides’ “being is one” would serve equally well, but I can derive all I need from the simpler example, and we have authority from Plato himself; his Academy forbade anyone ignorant of mathematics from entering. Mathematics today is too complicated for anyone to understand as a whole; but we need only one is one. Most of us today are far too blasé to find anything of interest in that simple insight, but by the same token perhaps we have lost the extraordinary origins of that “rational thought” which philosophy aspires to be.

There are some horrible puzzles involved even in this simple equation: how can one equal itself, thereby becoming in a way two, when we had only one to begin with? A two, moreover, which are then seen to be not two but one? And what is one-half? We divide one into two, but how can a pure one be divided at all, when by definition it is not two of anything but only one? Everything becomes easy when we think not of a pure one but of one thing, and anyone can see that things can be divided into parts; but we began with pure numbers, not quantities of things in space or time, and with that fatal step pure numbers raise frightful problems. Impure numbers, numbers of things are easier, but then they are impure. In any event our problem now is not to explore precisely these problems which exercised the best minds of Greece but to reflect upon another matter: the origin of rational philosophy from thinking about numbers, in a sense in which all philosophy is rational, even when it is also empirical. Empirical philosophies are also rational in our present sense, since they still offer us a rational theory of experience and its contingencies and not an empirical theory of experience. What, then, is so striking about one equals one that some such insight is the origin of philosophy itself, where even the mind holding it as a model of truth or being is already a decomposition of the original unity, endeavoring to grasp reality itself in its deepest depths by means of the rational concept? Let us explore for a bit the excitement generated by the idea that one is one, and its by-products, the concept or definition: Socrates was held by Aristotle to be the inventor of the definition, and with that, rational philosophy. In Plato’s version Socrates cautions us again and again only to follow the argument. Nay, he says frequently, you are disagreeing not with Socrates but with the argument, Logos. By following the argument, one’s mind will be enabled to think what is, that is, Being. By losing track of the argument, the mind wanders, and it can hit the mark only by chance opinion; the arts of rhetoric then take over, emotional persuasion overwhelms clear insight, and one soon finds oneself in the hands of the sophists, who could make the better look like the worse, vice seem to be a virtue, with the consequence that both mind and heart became victims of the existent chance forces in all their ambiguity. Socrates, on the other hand, armed with little more than the tautology that it is always better to do good, was able to withstand the political forces of his fellow Athenians, remain true to his principles, and resist corruption unto death. A very noble story indeed, which has haunted philosophers ever since, supplying a justification for their pride in their pursuit and a confidence in its absolute value. Philosophy, then, is concerned with very serious matters: truth and error, virtue and vice, acceptable conditions of life and death; and it must work insofar as it remains faithful to its origins solely by reason, argument and tautology. It may seem that we are now far from one equals one; but are we when we recall that for the final reaches of Plato’s philosophy the Good itself was seen to be The One?

More specifically, the pursuit of definitions, of clear concepts, of arguments that are deductive and therefore analytic are all so many forms of realizing the project of rational philosophy to know and know in the form of a variety of necessarily unified identities, each itself another version of the primordial unity, the one is one, with which the whole thing began. The power of the idea of unity is therefore enormous, and when Being itself is envisaged as the One, as with Parmenides and Plato, philosophy takes under its supervision the whole of reality insofar as it may be understood in this way, but that is the only way so far as rational philosophy is concerned.

Now that there is no inherent justification for this movement of thought is evident to me. Transcendentally considered, it is an option, which is neither more nor less justified than any other option. Once made, it defines a series of correlative terms—Being, Reason, Truth—and within it, alternatives must necessarily appear as mere Becoming, mere history, mere fact, mere opinion, or mere confusion, to sum it up. Now the confusion can be allayed, but only insofar as it is reducible back to essence, concept, definition, and eventually The One. Now this represents a very noble tradition indeed, and it is certainly not my purpose to scoff at it. But it is, I believe, of philosophical importance to define its limits, to look at it as one of an indefinite number of spiritual alternatives open to the mind, finally a choice. And if that choice is not made in the light of its alternatives, then indeed it is blind, and in an existential sense of the term no choice at all. Hence the purpose of what follows is to outline a fundamental alternative, philosophy as autobiographical, not for the purpose of compelling assent, but simply for the purpose of clarifying alternatives; with alternatives clarified, one’s own transcendental freedom is given room to make an existential choice; but that choice itself will be of an autobiographical and not rational character since reason itself is at stake. Hence the interpretation of philosophy as autobiographical is itself yet another autobiographical choice. Thus, what is denied is that there is any compelling reason for any fundamental choice, thereby preserving one’s freedom to the very end. The choice in question is how thought and reality are to be related.

What, then, is autobiography, why is it of any philosophical importance, and why does it hate “one is one”? Let me substitute the phrase, “autobiographical consciousness” for autobiography, since nothing here initially is at stake upon the writing of one’s life. What is at stake is philosophy as a mode of consciousness, what it might be conscious of, and how it might inhabit a certain standpoint, the first-person singular.

If rational thought aims at the one, the concept, and implicit in that, the necessary, timeless truth of universal scope aiming at “objectivity,” one need only note here what is omitted or reduced to a derived and secondary place, of course the exact opposite: the subjective in its subjectivity, the manifold, the unnecessary or accidental, the nonuniversal or the singular, the irreplaceable, unique, and historical. Not of course that these are ignored, but they have rational value only insofar as they exemplify grander rational principles or laws. In this vein Whitehead characterized metaphysics as a search for that set of irreducible principles which everything must exemplify. Let us for the sake of the argument agree that some such principles could be found; the next question concerns their cognitive value and what they omit or conceive of solely in terms of an illustrative value. And it is obvious at a glance that what is omitted is life itself as it is to those living it, unless they happen to be metaphysicians of this stamp. Hence, while for rational philosophy it is a decisive refutation to tell a man that his arguments are only of autobiographical interest, that is to say, of no interest whatsoever to philosophy, it would be either ludicrous or insane for a man to tell himself that his own life were of merely autobiographical interest to him; what else might there be?

It is, then, this sense of the ontological preciousness of existence in its unrepeatability and singularity that animates the autobiographical consciousness. To live a life in order to exemplify principles that one cannot help but exemplify and that could just as easily be exemplified by anyone else and in fact must be so exemplified, and not merely anyone else but absolutely everything which is, is tantamount to declaring one’s own life meaningless and insignificant in its greatest depth. And the same goes when one’s aim is somewhat less than the absolutely metaphysical of absolutely unrestricted generality; is there some particular obligation for any existing man to live his life in order to know the specific laws of human nature, supposedly common to all? If there is some such nature, which we all willy-nilly exemplify, then it can well take care of itself and certainly has no need of anyone’s individual support. Further, if the very conception of a universal human nature can only look upon human history as variations upon a known theme, if our metaphysics finally agrees to look at history as the scene where our lives are played out, we have made some progress, but hardly enough. We have at least perceived that history is a unique record of what men have made of themselves, and this required a making in which universal concepts and unities were more or less beside the point. For while concepts like “human history,” “the historical event,” “laws of history,” Heidegger’s “historicity,” etc. may be true enough, they serve only to omit from history that which is historical and to transform it once again into an illustration of supposedly knowable generalities. History itself is then required to feed its data into a general theory of man or even an “objective record,” supposedly the desired issue of a study of history. And obviously all this from ground up is a far cry from history as it is historically lived.

I believe, then, that we must go all the way in this direction, still pursuing an ultimate reality and an ultimate value, which perhaps are the same. We must, in other words, revert to the first-person singular consciousness of life, the autobiographical, in order to arrive at the foundations of an alternative to rational, objective philosophy. And curiously, we can accept help from one of the great rationalists, Descartes, with some essential modifications. The Cartesian cogito ergo sum was given as a central point beyond which one cannot go, an anchor so to speak in a world of external nature, of opinion, of the dubitable, but then it was exploited only for the indubitability of its clear and distinct ideas, for the sake of a rational reconstruction of the world. The rational and, in Descartes’ case, mathematical reconstruction of the world is one project; the nonrational, lived recuperation of life is another, which we are looking at here; but the original standpoint from which these projects project themselves is identical: I, the first-person singular, rooted in itself and nothing beyond, the origin of choices and decisions, as well as cognition. I as I am for myself.

Descartes’ preoccupation, of course, was a mathematical physics that was in principle certain and indubitable and from which he expected and got an unforeseeable wealth of practical results. Now we have but to turn the same cogito, I think, elsewhere, back to its own unrepeatable existence to disclose another domain. From this domain I believe NO practical benefits will result, no contributions to psychology, to sociology, to political theory, to the theory of human nature; nothing of this order for whatever it is worth is our present concern. What is our concern, pursuing the autobiographical consciousness, is the recuperation in mind of the very life of the man living it. This too has its clarity, although that clarity is in principle different from what Descartes or Spinoza sought. The rational clarity of clear and distinct ideas, or with Spinoza “adequate ideas,” must be limited to those things of which an adequate idea can be formed. And yet, while this does define one order of clarity, referred to above as conceptual, definitional, and reducible eventually to the “one is one,” it is hardly the only form. Life as we live it hardly has to wait for a clear and distinct idea to be formed of it in order to exhibit its own sense, meaning, or “clarity.” Here, for a moment, the phenomenologists and ordinary language philosophers can join hands; the phenomenologists uncover the implicit sense of both experience and the experienced, which we daily enact and which, explicated with sufficient nuance, lends itself to fair articulation. We come out with accounts a good deal different from those of the rationalists, which nonetheless have their own clarity. Thus, if for Spinoza “love” is “pleasure accompanied by the representation of its cause,” the phenomenologists such as Binswanger and others look at the intention that structures the passion, what the passion in and of itself aims at, its built-in intentionality; and while obviously in this new vein one can hardly expect a new formula so neat and absurd as Spinoza’s, one is at least back in the human scene, where to love is to wish to be with another in a decisive mode. At this point the poets come into their own.

And so two things have happened: the very ego that lives emerges for itself as the unshakable center of its own life, but then the ego turns its attention not to the eternal and timeless, but to its own unique existence here and now in order to see what it is and how it is. The ego becomes reflexive on its own life. And it is important to note that the first-person singular standpoint, where the ego or self, sitting firmly upon itself, passes all in review before itself, is not in the least narcissistic. It may well become so, as one of its transcendental possibilities, but that is its business. If it indeed recovers its own life as its essential theme, there is no reason in the world why it is compelled to think about itself. If it endeavors to recuperate its life, its life will of course not be a meditation upon itself divested of others or of the inter-subjective and objective world in which it lives. An ego so directed upon itself would very soon come to the end of its tether; there is nothing there. And yet that “nothing” makes all the difference in the world. Unless an ego lives a life, there is none lived; and if its life consists in nothing but a meditation upon itself divested of life, there is also no life. And so two things: the ego is indeed transcendental to any portion of its own life; and yet that transcendental self also lives.

The autobiographical consciousness, then, is at one and the same time transcendental and existential; it is in effect the consciousness of the transitory life of the transcendental ego. Phenomenology can take us so far; but then, armed now with existentialism, it seeks to turn life itself into yet another knowable structure. That is, it prefers philosophically to see in human existence those ever recurrent, ever depressing structures or essences which perpetually remain true and are perpetually irrelevant to the actual existent man living his own unique life. At that point existential thought, as in Heidegger and Sartre, betrays its own best insight. I believe Jaspers almost alone has remained faithful to the real situation, with his resolute refusal to present a new doctrine of what it is to live, what Existenz is and how it must understand itself. In any event, if existential thought touches upon the central subject, the ontological importance of life for him living it, it runs the radical risk of ruining everything by turning it too into a philosophical theme, with claimed structures, necessities, a priori essences, and the rest.

And so while existential philosophy comes close, it also comes closest to ruining everything. It retains the old nostalgia for an ever abiding truth, the universal, the “one is one,” now applied to life itself.

And so what remains? Only what from the rational point of view looks like chaos, incommunicability, the absolutely trivial, in effect, the very domain from which it fled in the first place, life. I repeat that this itself is an autobiographical choice, with no transcendental reason against it, nor for it, but only built-in consequences or destinies.

If so much is to be said against life and its autobiographical understanding, what might for a change be said for it? What does life indeed offer? But at this precise point it must be obvious that nothing can be said in general except by way of negations. Dilthey said: “one cannot get behind life.” And so, if we have already characterized the ontological domain of life in terms such as “unique,” “irreplaceable,” “singular,” “accidental,” this characterization, itself a general one, uses terms that are the mere negatives of rationally comprehensible ones. Reason can only understand essence, the “one is one,” and while it can recognize that something lies beyond, it is sheer confusion to suppose that it can absorb or reduce what eternally lies beyond it to what is within its competence. And what lies beyond reason is only accessible to us because we are not ourselves exclusively reason, but existent conscious persons consciously living in a domain that is a scandal to our own reason.

That consciousness called here “autobiographical consciousness” is not in the least plunged into darkness, not in the least incommunicable or unintelligible. It stutters only when it tries to respond to questions posed to it by reason, such as “what is life,” and respond, moreover, in rational terms. Left to itself, it is perfectly articulate. To imagine that Bertrand Russell alone possessed clarity and communicability, whereas Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is unintelligible, shows us nothing with its own clarity, and is a closed book to us would be, to put it mildly, an odd position. Or to think that Proust was intelligible only through the use of common nouns and universal predicates, that he made a contribution to the science of human nature, or that he badly needs clarification through some further analyses of logic, epistemology, psychology, or sociology would verge on the ludicrous. Remembrance of Things Past is fictional autobiography and presents itself as the attempt of Μ to recover past time. Not any past time, but M’s past, his own unique singular past, and to raise that effort to consciousness. The consciousness of one man’s past life is, of course, not in the form of deduction, analysis, or for the sake of an exemplification of general principles. It is narrative. As a narrative, it has no universal consequence. We are not all M’s, we did not all live that life, see or do those things, nor could anyone else have done them. If the whole indeed is taken as of universal application, such that we must all say that in the last analysis we are all M’s, that “last analysis” only signals once again our inherent propensity to abstract and generalize. In the last analysis I am Μ only in my capacity as being a human being, living at some time or other; but if that is all that is gotten from Remembrance of Things Past, we have indeed left the novel far behind and really have our attention on something else, a college-outline synopsis, far easier to write than the novel, far easier to commit to memory, and if the truth be told, far more profoundly wrong than right. Nothing whatsoever can be generalized from the novel without leaving the novel to that extent behind. Indeed what need has the novel of such modes of understanding? It is as intelligible as it can be in its own terms, gains nothing but impoverishment from generalization, and certainly offers itself not as an illustration of something already known to us but as a unique narration of singular events.

Let us suppose for the argument that some such thing were actually in fact the life of somebody, Marcel Proust in fact, a life which, while we know perfectly well was not his life, could have been. We should now have not fictional autobiography but real autobiography, the exploration and confession in depth of what one life meant to the man living it. This I should hold to be of absolute ontological value to us, as well as to him, precisely in its irreplaceability, its singularity. For if ontology or metaphysics is genuinely interested in what there is, why on earth should it direct any particular attention to universal Being, its first specification, cosmic nature, or finally even to Mind as such; granting that the acts and works of mind presuppose nature, they do not repeat it, but raise it to something generically distinct. And yet to go only so far is to miss the final, most determinate, most concrete, and ontologically richest domain of all: each precise singular life as lived by the man living it. And, finally not even that as seen by another, but as he himself achieves consciousness of it. This is the sole domain in which we have the possibility of direct access, to know from firsthand acquaintance what we are talking about, in effect, to know ourselves. And if someone should protest that one’s own life is exactly that about which one knows least and is most subject to delusion, I think the reply must be either that we have shifted the sense of knowing away from subjective acquaintance to an objective, psychological, or sociological sense, or that the possibilities of self-delusion are themselves internal to that man’s sense of life, and therefore a revealing part of it. If delusion is an internal thread in a man’s life, then indeed it would falsify that life to try to do away with it. It should be confessed. If it is not internal, then it is a delusion only from the standpoint of some theory, psychoanalytic or other, which is holding that life up to criteria it may well itself have rejected.

And now a final extension of the point of view I have been exploring. Abstractly considered, a life is the life of a transcendental ego; it expresses its choices, its projects, its way of handling what its own life brings before it. That ego itself freely and absolutely determines what shall have importance for it. In fact, it is hardly different from that choice, and only in rare states would it ever deliberate the question; it is its choice, has the possibility of revoking or changing that choice, but nevertheless for any coherent stretch of life lives out its own choice of significance. It retrospectively recovers what its implicit choice was by narratively recovering to itself what it itself became.

Now, hidden in Proust were two absolute passions: his infinite preoccupation with the persons in his circle, and his equally infinite preoccupation with art, with salvation, in a word, a salvation deeply Platonic in character. Involuntary memory, linking together by immediate recognition two moments separated in time but linked together in essence and expressible in art, was his salvation from oblivion. Not all passed away forever, but the individual could recapture directly what had been long forgotten and was no longer accessible to willed recollection. And this gave him an intimation of the power of the work of art itself to save something from oblivion. My present point is not so much to explore these theories, but to consider at the end the role of philosophy itself, whether Proust’s or any other, in existence. In Proust’s life a tincture of philosophy is clearly inherent, which forms an essential part of his novel. And yet the novel remains a novel and not a literal philosophical demonstration. Putting philosophical reflections in a novel of the fictional autobiographical sort suggests a view which, while hardly Proust’s, is nevertheless tenable; it brings us to our conclusion: philosophy as autobiography.

And with this formula I would like to offer a summary of what I have been arguing piecemeal above. At bottom, there is nothing but each of our human lives. But those lives have a transcendental pole, the I, whose life it is. The transcendental ego then must choose, that is, animate its existence with a meaning for itself, even if that meaning is the joy of meaninglessness. And, if it so chooses, it may try to tell the tale of its own life to itself and others. It will call that effort philosophy perhaps, if the word “philosophy” looms with any authority and if it deliberately rationalizes itself, subsumes itself under “one is one,” or it may call it religion or art if those terms possess the required resonance. But, indeed, if the ego should be serious, it will try to express to itself the very deepest and closest sense it has of its life. If “metaphysics,” “philosophy,” “art,” or perhaps even “politics” expresses what lies closest to the very choice of living that the self is, then its occupations will be directed accordingly, and its thought will be the thought inherent in those occupations.

In all of this I have been trying to reflect upon that peculiar preoccupation called philosophy, which aims at the highest and alas frequently sinks to the lowest. It is at its nadir when it is not an intuitive clarification of anyone’s deepest interest, but a rationalistic, argumentative obfuscation of what is already evident. Philosophy properly taken is the articulation in thought of one man’s deepest concerns. Those concerns traditionally are named reality, truth, and the good, meaning of course that few persons seriously wish to become unreal, fraudulent, spurious beings themselves. Or, if they do, they wish to do so voluntarily and with a certain relish. Or, no matter how much one may wish to fool others, and for a time even oneself, it would be a rare life indeed that wished most dearly to live itself out in self-delusion. Those would make fascinating autobiographies—but truth has that value, even if only as an ideal. As for the good, it becomes confused with reality, but, as the Greeks thought, for a man to pursue evil knowingly would be as ludicrous as for him to choose to be ill. If these ancient terms have lost all their power, perhaps what they express can be reanimated by a reversal of certain strains of rational thought, always looking for the general, the abstractly thinkable, the demonstrable. A reversal toward the first-personal life of the transcendental ego, reoccupying its own position, and finding within itself the possibility of an indefinite range of choices, which it nevertheless existentially refuses to make. The history of philosophy is the history, then, of the most profound choices men have made. If they talk as if a single, literal truth were at stake, were statable, that some approached it and others receded from it, or that there is a single line of general progress, it may be possible to understand these naive claims with some charity. Autobiographically understood, we see no more progress or development than we see among the various souls of whom these are the deepest confessions. And if this appears dismal from a scientific standpoint, from our own it is something to be celebrated: a final fascination in what certain unrepeatable lives found excellent, true, and real in the one life given to them to live. If there is a long and noble tradition of abstract thinkers, the present chapter would like to argue that that is but one choice; there is another domain, life itself, which is well capable of including within it as one possibility even the most abstract of concerns. It raises the question why anyone should choose “one is one” for a model of comprehension or an essential aim in existence. But it remains a question and not an attack, except tangentially, and therefore considers rational philosophy, taken seriously, as but one option and only one. The alternative would widen the diameter of the circle I spoke of earlier to include chaos, and would put the self at the center.*

* These matters are developed in greater detail in my Autobiographical Consciousness (New York: Quadrangle Press, 1972).