Thinking about relationship again in the shower. For some reason this morning it would not get hot and I had to fiddle with the controls a bit before it finally worked properly. What a difference between a cold and a hot shower! Only a minute difference in degrees but what a difference in comfort and a feeling of well being. A few microscopic organisms have just given me a week of suffering and discomfort with a very bad sore throat and a cold. They were responsible for sapping my energy and zest for reading and research. I felt that I wanted only to withdraw from others and cosset myself in my misery. Yesterday I awoke feeling better and feeling, literally, a different person from the one I had been the week before.
We are what we are only in the context of our physical, biological, social, psychological, philosophical and perceptual relationships. If I want to understand ‘me’ I must be aware, not only of each of them, but also that I transcend them. This transcendence is the most mysterious thing of all. The biological ‘me’ can be understood but don’t forget to take into account the influence on it of the psychological ‘me’. The psychological and the gregarious ‘me’s’ are so intertwined that they cannot really be separated. Then there is the egoistic ‘me’, that private person that no one, not even I, I sometimes think, know fully. And then, there is the ‘I’ who transcends all of these. As often as not the ‘I’ is not on stage. His role has been usurped by one of the ‘me’s’. But who is this ‘I’? Is he more fundamental than the ‘me’s’, or is he simply the agent of the currently dominant ‘me’? Are the ‘me’s’ ephemeral psychosocial constructs educed at different times by different environments? Or is the ‘I’ the centre of conscious awareness capable of transcending the empirical ‘me’s’ and the physical sensorium? Just as the ‘me’ as agent is evoked by a specific psychosocial environment and particular physical needs, so too, perhaps is the ‘I’ evoked by an awareness of transcendence.
“I shall never forget what I have never revealed to anyone, the phenomenon which accompanied the birth of my consciousness of self and of which I can specify both the place and the time. One morning, as a very young child, I was standing in our front door and was looking over the wood pile on the left, when suddenly the inner vision ‘I am me’ shot down before me like a flash of lightening from the sky, and ever since it has remained with me luminously: at that moment my ego had seen itself for the first time and for ever.“
(Jean Paul Richter, quoted in Glover J., I: The Philosophy and Psychology of Personal Identity, (1989) Penguin, London p59)
This is a (rare?) example of what Karl Jaspers called a ‘limiting situation’. In the awareness of limits one is aware of the transcendent as the negatively comprehended complement of limits. In other words one is not aware of a limit as limit if one has not somehow seen beyond it. We are not normally aware of the limits of consciousness just as we are not normally aware of the limits of our vision (this is why the figure of eight sideways, to depict vision through binoculars, on the screen jars our sensibilities. This is not how we normally see, through binoculars or otherwise.) Yet we know that both are limited. It is from this that our difficulty in grasping consciousness arises – and hence the difficulty in defining it, describing it. We cannot, from within our subjective perspective, perceive our awareness objectively, no more than the eye can see itself seeing. By reflection the eye can see itself and the consciousness can grasp itself; but just as the eye (through the mirror) sees no more than the outer surface of the organ of sight, so too, analogously, reflective awareness is no more than the surface of the stream of consciousness and sees neither the banks, nor the depths beneath, much less the origin.