336. Hidden things and selves

Žižek departs from Kant’s philosophy, in his first Critique, of Pure Reason, and modifies it, using views from Hegel and Lacan. While Kant proposed that we cannot know reality (‘the Thing’) as it is ‘in itself’, Žižek follows Hegels view that this ‘Thing’ is ‘empty’ or ‘non-existent’. This transforms an epistemological void (we don’t know it) into an ontological one (it does not exist).

Let me note, in passing, that I disagree. Here, I remain a Kantian: we don’t know, but we cannot but believe that ‘it’ exists, even if in some objectively unknowable way. This is important for my evolutionary argument, stated in this blog, that thought has developed from interaction with the world, and therefore in some way, for some prolonged time, must have had some adequacy concerning the world, or else it would not have survived.

While I am primarily a nominalist, some vestige of realism remains. I can clarify this with the multiple causality of Aristotle that I have used several times in this blog. Concepts and meanings in language are shaped according to the final cause of interest, the formal cause of mental construction, the conditional cause of context, the exemplary cause of mimicry and culture, but also the material cause of reality. From reality we mentally craft perceptions and ideas that suit us, in interaction with others in a culture.     

It is difficult to accept that things in the world, selves, and social order do not really exist, are not some substance, do not have determinate, consistent, stable properties. Žižek claims that for all three, people adopt an illusory notion of a phantasized, thing, called ‘objet-a’ in the terminology of Lacan, and we lustfully cling to it, in ‘jouissance’.

I am tempted to connect this notion of the ‘objet-a’ with my notion of an ‘object bias’, according to which we conceptualize according to a metaphor of objects in time and space.

Kant postulated that we cannot know the self. Žižek agrees with this, and so do I. The self is not accessible to itself. We cannot step outside ourselves to inspect ourselves. The self cannot know itself, in the same way that the eye cannot see itself. We do not have ideas, as things we can look at, handle, and turn around to inspect. We do not have ideas, we are them. The self is not an objective, outside bystander in the world, as implied in Descartes’ notion of the self, but involved, immersed in it, constituted from interaction with it.

This idea has been adopted more widely. According to Heidegger, the self is not a being in the sense of an object but in the sense of a verb, being constituted by acting in the world. Deleuze and Guattari also saw thought as a force field in which we participate. Thought is not in us, we live in thought. ‘The self is not an objectifiable thing that could be the substantial bearer of the origin of meaning’ (Vande Veire, p. 49).

Here also, Žižek goes further, over the top, in my view, as he so often does, and posits that the self is ‘empty’ or non-existent. Here, he follows David Hume’s denial that there is a self with any identifiable identity. The self is just a flux of perceptions and thoughts.

I disagree with that. Not being able to know or observe the self does not mean that there is no self, or that we cannot experience it in any way. Earlier in this blog, I argued that there is some coherence in the body, in the buzz of neuronal and endocrinal activity that regulate body and mind. Without that the body would not survive. While we cannot see how it all ties together, and cannot survey it, we do experience it. We cannot see the eye, but we experience seeing.

Here also, Žižek postulates that we grasp a mythical, non-existent self as an entity, an ‘objet-a’. I agree. We have an urge towards an identity, even if we can only get it as a make-belief. It is difficult not to think of a self in such a manner. Again, we exercise an object bias in seeing the self as an object in time and pace, and we attach some essence to it that constitutes its identity.

Third, the social order of laws, regulations and customs also is grasped, intuited as some object. That is the subject for the next item.