I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
In Episode 253 of Steven West’s Philosophize This! podcast, Alan Watts on the Self and the Illusion of Separation, West introduces Alan Watts’ philosophy through the question Watts asked in an 1965 lecture: What do you mean when you say the word “I”? According to West, Watts proposed that we are mistaken when we take the self-observing narrator inside our head as the sum total of our selves.
This makes me think of Nietzsche’s idea that consciousness is falsifying and incomplete; that it developed for social coordination; that it does not represent the entirety of a person’s experience, but is only what has been conceptualized.
In Western society, we face a double bind (identified by anthropologist Gregory Bateson) passed along by our parents and the culture we live in, in which we are both told what to do (be nice to your grandmother, get married and have kids, be responsible financially and so forth) and also told to be ourselves, free and unique. This, according to Watts, is what leads to the critical voice inside our heads.
The irony, says West (channeling Watts), is that this voice inside our heads which is “mostly made up of other people’s ideas about who we ought to [be]” is “the thing that many people experience as their most independent authentic self.”
West says, “[Watts is] trying to get us to see when it comes to the kind of beings we are, just how small a piece of that is this controlling and willing ourselves to do things every day really is.” That’s basically what Nietzsche proposed too.
If we are not what we think, then what are we? Watts, according to West, says we are processes not objects or things in the world, like a whirlpool which has identity even as the water that makes it up is constantly flowing in and out of it.