Tag Archives: egoic mind

The Faith of Egoic Individuality

According to certain philologists and psychologists, from E. R. Dodds to Julian Jaynes, a private internal sense of self was a social construction made possible by linguistic innovations, such as metaphorical framings of space and containment. The theory asserts that the human psyche can be explained according to the bundle theory of mind, whereas the ego theory of mind is merely descriptive of a cultural artifact, albeit powerful and compelling.

Supposedly, prior to the invention of egoic individualism, both an inner voice and deceit as we know it wasn’t possible. That is shown in the changes that emerged with the wily Odysseus, the kind of character that was not previously depicted. Deceit requires a number of things. For one, there has to be a private internal space separate from a public external space. And secondly, that space must be used as a stage to imagine and model, to script, narratize, and enact scenarios in order to plan out how another could be manipulated. This requires high levels of cognitive empathy, theory of mind, and mind reading.

What allowed this psychosocial advancement may have been the rise of literacy and literary culture. Having begun as mainly a tool of accounting used by a literary elite, it took many millennia for writing to develop into more common use and so to have widespread effect on mentalities and identities. It’s important to note that the Odyssey was a later Homeric epic, closer to the time when they were being written down. It’s quite likely the story of Odysseus had changed over time, with his character increasingly taking on individualistic characteristics.

But even long after that, it was a slow process with many periods of reversion such as when literary culture declined in the West after the fall of Rome. It was only with the Protestant Reformation that literacy not only made a serious comeback but expanded like never before. Even Catholics embraced broad literacy to compete with Protestant and other dissenter cultures. In England, the Anglican Church, not properly Protestant but a Catholic splinter religion, came into conflict with the Catholic Church in the post-Reformation period. Literacy was more common then, but it’s affect was still restrained, not to boom until the early modern revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods.

In England, the tumultuous 17th century brought on Enlightenment Thought, Elizabethan Renaissance, Country Party ideology, English Civil War, and the Real or Radical Whigs. The burgeoning egoic individualism was challenging the social order but was far from firmly established. The underlying structure of a propertied self as egoic precursor was in place, if it was still largely defined externally, not to more fully take hold until the 19th century. The idea and experience of a hermetically-sealed inner space of inviolable individuality remained unimaginable to most, as it posed radical possibilities that could destabilize what remained of the Ancien Regime.

Yet there was a conflict over which public authority and voice authorization could make claims over the self. And so the arguments proffered involved rhetorical struggles over ideological interpellation, that is to say whose hail of authority should one respond and submit to. This division of claims, over time, unintentionally subverted the very claim of any external authority. The strengthening of individuality was largely a side effect of weakening centralized and hierarchical authority, if those seeking the command of authority over others would find ever new means to enforce and make compelling their voice authorization (e.g., the authoritarianism of of nation-states and mass media propaganda).

In this manner, the battle over the human psyche continues. Selfhood remains a morality play, a public narrative. The real power lies not in the character of the individual that is portrayed but in the authorizing voice that narratizes that character as part of an officially approved script. The locus of control is in the voice that hails, not in the self that is hailed, if there is always power in refusing a hail. And in present society, that ideological persuasion mostly comes by way of mass media and social media. No longer is it primarily church clerics fighting over our souls using apologetics but, instead, corporate perception managers with advertising, whitewashing, astroturf, think tanks, social media influencers, talking points, gatekeeping, and the propaganda model of news.

It’s a different kind of faith. We in the West are now all individuals following and conforming to the same script. Until another religious reformation, or rather revolution of the mind, comes along, the ideological realism of egoic individualism will remain the ruling voice in our minds, a voice that we mistake for our own. But older cultures remain with their vestiges of a bundled mind, reminding us of something else entirely. And no doubt new renaissances and enlightenments will come along, maybe restructuring society and psyche in their wake.

It’s not clear that powers behind egoic individualism will finally, much less permanently, seize the one ring that rules them all or if modern Western hegemony will be a mere historical spark in the pan, subsiding back again down to the resting level of human nature. With the authority of the word being challenged by the media of image and sound, it’s far from clear that the past centuries’ trajectory will continue. Those like Marshall McLuhan thought a new tribal-like age would follow.

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Equivocation and the Legal Conflict Over Religious Identity In Early Modern England
by Janet E. Halley

The chief pugilists in the polemical controversy over equivocation were Thomas Morton, who served the English Church and Crown first as Dean of Gloucester and then as Bishop of Durham, and Robert Parsons, an English Jesuit who worked largely from the continent as a mastermind and controversialist for the English mission. Their polemics represent an implacable disagreement about what language is, about what constitutes an audience, and about what kind of self is created in the activity of discourse. It deceptively suggests that their models of discourse are mutually exclusive.

Parsons insisted that internal speech was not only possible but legally permissible. Morton insisted that speech always occurred in the public arena governed by law, and for that reason, it must be plainly referential. […] Parsons’ notion of internal speech appears to open up a space for private discourse that Morton would firmly close. Parsons asserts that the Aristotelian term “enunciative” describes not statements which may be heard by an audience but rather statements which affirm or deny. […] The Jesuit theory of equivocation constructs the self as a discursive world sufficient unto itself, encompassing both sign and signified within the mind and flatly excluding any necessity for social intercourse.

Jesuit proponents of equivocation defended the realm of discursive privacy which they created by invoking a Catholic’s personal right and capacity to determine the jurisdictional validity of any question put to him or her. The manuscript Treatise of Equivocation observes that the “order of law” requires that one must “answer directly” only when the inquisitor exhibits every condition of legitimate authority. […] Only when these conditions are not met is the respondent free to equivocate. Particularly if the form of equivocation he chooses is mental reservation, his course of action seems to suggest that he assumes a mantle of inviolable privacy and withdraws briefly from the social interaction. Thus Parsons instructs that, when these conditions are not met, “then [the Catholic] may answere, as though he were alone, and no manby[.]” […]

This answer defines speaker and audience diacritically. The inquisitor ceases to be a judge when he assumes a legally deficient relationship vis i vis the speaker, though he remains a present, public audience throughout the interaction. The justification of equivocation therefore turns on the shifting, socially contingent identity of the speaker. The priest, who might in another social setting “be” Peter, is not Peter when claiming that name would render him “Peter-who-owes-a-duty-of-responding-tothis-judge.” Even when he frames a large chunk of his answer as a silent self-address, the priest defines himself in terms of the legal relationship he bears to his interlocutor. […]

When Parsons opined that language was purely conventional, he was arguing not that Catholics could make the act of going to church mean whatever they liked, but that historical conditions had made the act of going to church “mean” the actor’s Protestantism and thus, for a Catholic, his apostacy. What is not apparent from Parsons’ exposition of this dialectic is his own role, as polemicist, in hardening it, in attempting to fix the boundaries of Catholic identity and to impose those boundaries on English Catholics. Parsons’ argument represents precisely what lay Catholics most resented about the Jesuits-their effort to dictate terms of martyrdom to devout believers who wished to find a middle way.

In this propaganda effort, as again later in the dispute over the Oath of Allegiance, Parsons and his fellow Jesuits exhibit a highly acute awareness of meaning as an everchanging product of cultural interactions, and thus seem to justify Morton’s attacks on them as subverters of the natural and stable reference of signs in the political sphere. But at the same time the Jesuits display a willingness to constrain Catholics to the single meaning which their semiology inflexibly assigns to the act in question. And they establish a kinship with Morton and Coke not only in this method, but also in their enforcement of a meaning created by the state. […]

Unlike Parsons, whose theory of the equivocating self expressly recognizes privacy to be a public construct, Morton’s attack on the concept of internal speech is predicated on the illusion that personal privacy is inviolable. […] This assertion delineates the two familiar spheres of private and of public life: the former is the equivalent of a man’s “self,” while the latter places him in relation to others. Within the private sphere-that is, within the boundaries of the self-Morton includes a man’s wife, his possessions, and his own meanings. Whatever goes on there, Morton claims, escapes legal control. In the public sphere occur legally cognizible actions: adultery (with another man’s wife), theft (of another man’s goods), and speech (to another man as audience). […]

As against this encapsulated self, Morton posits speech as an activity always undertaken within a public realm explicitly governed by law and by the sovereign’s power to interdict. All representation, whether by spoken or written signs, is thrown into an arena that lies within the legitimate power of the sovereign and her agents. It was as one such agent that Morton beckoned: “Loquere… vt te videam: Speake… my friend that I may see thee.”3 The distribution of action in this sentence is highly instructive. The speaker’s role is simply to speak; it remains for the listener to determine, on the basis of what he hears, who has spoken. Particularly in a political struggle that turns on personal identity, the listener’s ability to transform language heard into a person seen tips a discursive balance of power strongly in favor of the interpreter.

In the audience relation which Morton seeks to establish, an epistemological increment, from aural to ocular proof, accrues to an interpreter who aims not to comprehend some external referent of the speaker’s works, but rather to know the speaker’s personal identity. For all its appealing familiarity (“Speake, friend.. .”), Morton’s voice commands open and public speech, requires its own pivotal role as audience, and insists that the purpose of this social discourse is the listener’s power to fix promptly and accurately the speaker’s identity in all its unitary neatness. In opposition to the discursive privacy apparently advanced by the Jesuits, Morton constructs a thoroughly political world of speech.

We might call this invention a theory of jurisdiction, and note that it allows the exercise of state power to coerce speech, to create the lexicons according to which it will be interpreted, and to privilege or punish speakers on the basis of their utterances as interpreted by the state. Morton’s argument would leave to the private discretion of English citizens, however, the cultivation of their own thoughts. Like the statutes themselves, his formulation draws a boundary to the state’s jurisdictional reach at the perimeter of the private self.

It is precisely here, however, that the analogy Morton offers-between the private worlds of marriage, personal possession of property, and private thought-returns and ominously suggests its closure. For it suggests not merely that the contours of personal devotional privacy are drawn by the state as it withholds its powers from that domain, but more strikingly that the state creates the legal content of a privacy that is only ostensibly autonomous of it. The self that Morton constructs, after all, is no intrapsychic isolate. It comprises all persons (e.g., wives) and things (e.g., personal property) with which the law itself endows individuals, whether through the legal status of marriage or the legal recognition of property rights. For all its apparent simplicity and coherence, it is an exceedingly complex set of intrapersonal and material relationships, all of which take the shape they do through the action of legal enforcement.

The Hobbesean Fallacy of Primordial Individualism

“We might label this the Hobbesean fallacy: the idea that human beings were primordially individualistic and that they entered into society at a later stage in their development only as a result of a rational calculation that social cooperation was the best way for them to achieve their individual ends. This premise of primordial individualism underpins the understanding of rights contained in the American Declaration of Independence and thus of the democratic political community that springs from it. This premise also underlies contemporary neoclassical economics, which builds its models on the assumption that human beings are rational beings who want to maximize their individual utility or incomes. But it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history. That individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts. Aristotle was more correct than these early modern liberal theorists when he said that human beings were political by nature. So while an individualistic understanding of human motivation may help to explain the activities of commodity traders and libertarian activists in present-day America, it is not the most helpful way to understand the early evolution of human politics. Everything”

― Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

Looking back on history, from the ancient world on, humans have been fundamentally communal and collectivist. In histories of the ancient world, what stands out is how nearly everything people did was as group activities. And this social way of being remained strong through the Middle Ages (Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets). Individualism was invented and rather recently, and hyper-individualism more recent still. It is a historically-contingent social construction and civilizational development, be it an ultimate achievement or blind alley, not something we are born with as part of an ancient biological inheritance handed down to us from evolution. Systematically and repeatedly, it must be actively reinforced and defended, far beyond merely the initial enculturation and indoctrination of each new generation of children. It’s a collective ongoing project.

When some refuse to submit to and conform to individualist norms, they must be constrained, suppressed, isolated, punished, or otherwise neutralized. There are many examples of this. In the United States, when a communitarian group like the Hutterites become too successful, their jealous individualistic neighbors sought state power to hobble their farming competitors (e.g., outlawing large communal ownership of farmland). Individualism doesn’t win because of free markets, quite the opposite since individualism requires heavily constrained and controlled markets. This had been going on for centuries. Starting in early modernity, there was a concerted push by the elite (e.g., William Godwin) to destroy organic group identities, specifically to eliminate shared freedom (a word cognate with ‘friendship’) in order to make way for modern capitalism and private ownership, including the emerging concept of self-ownership.

Of course, this is part of a larger shift, mostly happening without conscious intent. Though individualism proper has shallow roots, proto-individualism has been emerging for several millennia, apparently a seed planted in the decline and collapse of Bronze Age civilization and then first taking hold in the Axial Age. All of the major elements that would later form individualism were taking shape, if not yet fully assembled as individualism itself. Many theorize that the transformation had to do with innovations and developments of media technologies, specifically written text, but there were also the changes in the foods humans ate and the substances they imbibed, with a particularly interesting observation about the widespread switch from mildly psychedelic groot ales to caffeinated beverages.

The idea that humans aren’t originally, fundamentally, and primarily individualist is obviously an ancient understanding. One can see that by reading ancient texts for oneself or by looking to the philological research on such ancient texts. But that understanding didn’t entirely disappear in the modern West. Though relational dividualism was on the decline, 19th century philosophers like David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the bundled mind. Shortly after that period, in the United States, others began writing about this topic, including Henry Adams who was the great grandson of multiple American founders and presidents. Those like Carl Jung were also expressing a similar understanding of the psyche. Following in those footsteps were many other philologists and psychologists, along with some political philosophers: E.R. Dodds, Bruno Snell, Julian Jaynes, Eric Havelock, Joseph Henrich, Larry Siedentop, Francis Fukuyama, etc. The human reality of the bundled mind doesn’t go away and so the idea of it is continually rediscovered.