First Fall

Boundaries of the Existential Self, Part 1

I was ten years old when I learned of René Descartes’ deduction of his own existence from a point of total skepticism. If I start by thinking that nothing exists, then there must be thinking, and so there must be someone doing the thinking. It is not possible that there is nothing at all; at the very least there is me. I think, therefore I am.

This is an old song in philosophy, but of course to me as a child it was entirely new. My mind was absolutely blown. I thought that deduction must be pretty much the most incredible thing anyone had ever done. I remember swinging happily on the bars after school, just thinking about it. Philosophy was my new favourite thing. I was going to be just like my Mum—she was a philosophy student at the time—and I was going to learn all about philosophy and maybe one day I’d get to think philosophical thoughts of my own. That would be amazing.

I was already an odd kid. I spent a lot of my playtimes at school staring off into space. The other kids used to wave their hands in front of my face to see if I’d blink. They’d ask what I was doing, and I would say “Thinking,” and they would say “You’re weird.” I thought that was fair enough, except for the part where they sometimes seemed to think there was something wrong with that.

By ten years old, though, those other kids weren’t bullying me as much as they used to. My mother had taught me “assertiveness” a few years earlier, and by then it was more like ferocity. I was not a likely target. I was, in fact, the self-designated protector of all bullied kids, not just me. Whether the kids in question even wanted my help wasn’t especially important; I considered intervening to be a matter of principle. No bullying, because bullying is immoral, and unless you can come up with a good reason to do that (which you can’t, because I am currently yelling at you very loudly and by now you just want me to go away), you had better stop.

I loved Descartes, or thought I did, but I didn’t follow him all the way. I was aware that Descartes had further deduced, from his idea of something more perfect than himself, that there must be some Perfect Being who put it that idea there (since an imperfect being could not conceive of perfection without help). This Perfect Being, namely God, must then exist (or else it would not be perfect). Similarly, being perfect, it must be the ultimate power. And since a good ultimate power would not deceive us, we are therefore excused from doubting our other perceptions.

Like my parents, I was an atheist, and I found these further deductions much less impressive than the first one. At first, I simply declared myself unconvinced by the step from the idea of perfection to its existence. Later, I found myself thinking that it is also not obvious that we can conceive of perfection with any real accuracy. These days, I would add that pretty much any theodicy you like will give you a reason to complicate our confidence in claims like, “It seems like a good God would not allow this.”

This left me with a sort of tiered epistemology, in which, for each of us, our own existence is Tier 1, and objects that we perceive directly are Tier 2, and other people’s subjective experience is Tier 3. I wasn’t a solipsist; truth was important to me and that included the (likely) truths in Tier 2 and Tier 3. Still, I held that those things were able to be doubted, on a theoretical level, in a way that my own existence was not.

The year I turned eleven, I discovered that some other things were able to be doubted, too. Did you know that you can’t win all of your arguments just by yelling at people? You probably did know that, although sometimes on the internet we seem to forget it. Also, it does matter how the person you are trying to defend actually feels about your defence of them. The boy who the other boys picked on didn’t want my help. As far as I could tell, he actually kind of wanted to keep being picked on, because that was his role in the group, and it was better to be in the group than out of it.

As for the girls, their social structure was even more arcane. I didn’t understand any of it. People were complicated. Morality was complicated. I didn’t know what to do.

By the time I was twelve, I was starting to feel like I could barely relate to the other kids at all. I was nominally friends with a few of them, but as the year went on I retreated further and further inside myself. I discovered The Lord of the Rings and read it six times in succession. I held long imaginary conversations with Denethor in which I convinced him not to kill himself. When the other kids started interrupting my thoughts too much I deserted them entirely. I went all the way to the far corner of the playground, where the tall old gum trees grew.

I was desperately lonely. I gave the tallest tree a name in Quenya and pretended she was my friend.

A ghost gum tree. Photo by Brian W. Schaller. Found on Wikimedia Commons and used under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Perhaps it was inevitable that I would finally apply skepticism to the very notion of good.

I think that moment was always coming. I prized doubt, not because it was good in itself but because I considered it a necessary component of truth-seeking, and I cared deeply about truth. I didn’t think it wrong to operate on uncertain grounds, of course; uncertainty is a fact of life. But it would be wrong to pretend to yourself that a thing is more certain than it actually is.

I had, with more pain that you might expect, slowly assimilated my experience with the boy who didn’t want me to stop him from being picked on. It was an object lesson in the necessity of moral querying. A thing might seem to be an unshakeable principle, and yet not be. I had thought that to be moral meant holding to your principles; what now?

Was I even a good person at all? I had liked yelling at people. It had felt heroic. There was always that rush of moral satisfaction, the thrill of a conflict. But I was starting to realise that people needed friends more than they needed defenders, and I was useless at being friends with people. Out here on my own, I wasn’t hurting anyone, but I wasn’t helping them, either. Maybe I was more of a … medium person? A very sad medium person.

In some ways I want to laugh, looking at the lead-up to my twelve-year-old existential crisis. In other ways I want to cry. I was childish and precocious, but these are actually the kinds of questions that are still hard for grown adults. And that’s even before we get to the big one.

I knew a fair bit more about philosophy by now. I knew there were alternate moral theories. I knew about Hume’s is/ought distinction and I could already see how it might be antithetical to my prior conception of morality as purely rational. In theory, if I wanted moral guidance, I should be looking to my moral foundations. And if I was looking to my moral foundations, then perhaps step one was to doubt everything.

I didn’t want to do that.

I was scared. Of course I was! I’d already lost a moral principle, at great personal cost. It was worth losing, because it was clearly false, but I hadn’t enjoyed the experience at all. I didn’t want to risk losing even more. But a good person would ask questions. A good person would care about true and false, even if it hurt. A philosopher certainly would.

Maybe I’d learn something. Descartes couldn’t have beat back total skepticism without first considering it, after all. Sometimes you have to consider a thing properly before you can know what would even follow from it. Also, Kierkegaard¹ reckoned that you needed to feel Angst in order to develop as a person. Sartre … actually, I wasn’t too sure about Sartre but apparently Angst was important there too? I wasn’t entirely sure how you were supposed to distinguish Angst from ordinary fear, and it bothered me that there was this apparently-important philosophical concept that referred to something I couldn’t identify, but maybe this would count?

So I made myself look. Suppose there’s no such thing as good. Even the idea of believing it filled me with absolute horror. I didn’t want to treat every action as if it were no better or worse than any other! I wanted to help people! I wanted to look for the truth! I wanted—but if there was no such thing as morality, I could do whatever I wanted. I grasped at the notion like my last best hope.

If I wanted to help people, then I could. If I wanted to act on my moral intuitions, I could; if I preferred to use a broader theory, I could; if I wanted to believe in God—did I want to believe in God? Probably not, but I found myself suddenly understanding why a belief system of some kind would be a thing that a person might want. Questioning everything was awful. Did I even want to do philosophy, if that was what was required?

What if, I found myself thinking, what if we could have a nice big elaborate theory? And then we could keep asking questions, inside our nice big elaborate theory, and they’d have answers, and ideally the answers would include an answer about why we don’t ask that question, and then we could keep on, you know, doing philosophy, for fun, and we just wouldn’t stare at the abyss.

No. A philosophy adopted on those terms would be founded at its heart on fear and hypocrisy and despair. And if there was some true good to be found, out there, then I would be walling myself off from it by way of a deliberately crafted illusion. That couldn’t be right.

The honest way to respond to the situation, I decided, was to abjure the promise of safety in an elaborate theory palace. Explore up there, sure, and learn from what you find, but don’t live there. Don’t take it for granted that there can’t be a true morality, but don’t pretend you’ve found it. When you must make assumptions, make them smaller rather than larger. Stick with a hammock over the abyss. And don’t look down again until you’re ready.

I think it was about six years before I was ready. I’ve come a long way since then.

It’s interesting, looking back. I don’t think it would have been reasonable to expect much more of myself at the time, but I do have commentaries. Descartes got me into that existential crisis in the first place, but Descartes was also how I got out. I took the entire complex of things I thought of as morality, and I stashed them in the safest place I knew. I stashed them in myself.

There’s actually an interesting critique of Descartes, first voiced by Pierre Gassendi, that notes that the self is a pretty complicated concept. Perhaps all you can really say, in the face of total skepticism, is that thinking exists. To say “I am” is to assume a great deal.

I had done something to my sense of self that is, in hindsight, worth drawing out. After this, every time I did something that I “didn’t want to,” I knew that there was another sense in which I was doing it because I wanted to. This change in viewpoint did not make me any less likely to act morally; if anything, I was more severe on myself because I feared losing whatever it was about me that continued to seek something that I still thought of as good. However, it did make me more resistant to the idea of wholly denying myself, philosophically speaking. I would look at Christians, or at Buddhists, and think, you want me to get rid of my self? My entire morality is in there! No, I will not be doing that.

Since I could not be questioning my foundations all the time—or even most of the time—I did need some kind of ethical model, even if it wasn’t my final answer, just to be working with. I liked virtue ethics, but I couldn’t see how to use it without also having some concept of the good to improve myself towards, so I figured utilitarianism would do for a rough answer there. After all, I was in favour of considering everyone equally, and I thought pleasure was better than pain … or did I?

I had been putting myself through a lot of pain. I was a different person at the end of it. And I wanted to be that person, including all of the pain, every last bit. It was agony, but I wouldn’t erase any of it, given the choice.

The sun felt bright. My tree looked more beautiful than ever. I found out that even when I was lonely, if I smiled at a stranger, they’d smile back. Maybe those things wouldn’t cancel out my pain, if you put numbers on them, but they felt valuable. They were like the sweet centre of a sour lolly².

I always did like those lollies.

I was twelve years old, and I didn’t think the universe owed me anything. Not happiness, not a moral system, not even necessarily any kind of generally accessible truth. But I knew, now, that even if I might never find them, there were some things I would rather seek than not.

1. I wasn’t reading these philosophers directly, to be clear. At this point, my main resource was Sophie’s World, by Jostein Gaarder.

2. Children’s words are, in my experience, particularly likely to vary between localities. “Lolly” is what I would have called it, but Americans would say “candy” and British people would call it a “sweet.”