Astonishingly irrational ideas are spreading. Covid denial persists in the face of overwhelming evidence. Anti-vaxxers compromise public health. Conspiracy thinking hijacks minds and incites mob violence. Toxic partisanship is cleaving nations, and climate denial has pushed our planet to the brink. Meanwhile, American Nazis march openly in the streets, and Flat Earth theory is back. What the heck is going on? Why is all this happening, and why now? More important, what can we do about it?
In Mental Immunity, Andy Norman shows that these phenomena share a root cause. We live in a time when the so-called “right to your opinion” is thought to trump our responsibilities. The resulting ethos effectively compromises mental immune systems, allowing “mind parasites” to overrun them. Conspiracy theories, evidence-defying ideologies, garden-variety bad ideas: these are all species of mind parasite, and each of them employs clever strategies to circumvent mental immune systems. In fact, some of them compromise cultural immune systems – the things societies do to prevent bad ideas from spreading. Norman shows why all of this is more than mere analogy: minds and cultures really do have immune systems, and they really can break down. Fortunately, they can also be built up: strengthened against ideological corruption. He calls for a rigorous science of mental immune health – what he calls “cognitive immunology” – and explains how it could revolutionize our capacity for critical thinking.
Hailed as “a feast for thought,” Mental Immunity melds cutting-edge work in science and philosophy into an “astonishingly enlightening and productive” solution to the signature problem of our age. A practical guide to spotting and removing bad ideas, a stirring call to transcend our petty tribalisms, and a serious bid to bring humanity to its senses.
Don’t believe everything you hear, read and watch. To puncture received ideas about culture, start thinking like Jacques Derrida
by Peter SalmonJacques Derrida in Paris, 1993. Photo by François Goudier/Gamma-Rapho
Peter Salmonis an Australian writer living in the UK. His latest book is An Event Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida (2020), and his writing has appeared in the New Humanist, the Sydney Review of Books and The Guardian, among others.
Edited by Nigel Warburton
19 MAY 2021 (psyche.co)
Need to know
There have been few thinkers in the history of philosophy who have divided opinion as completely as Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). For some, he is one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, whose brilliant analyses of the text of philosophy and literature overturned many of the fundamental assumptions of each. To others, he is a charlatan: his honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1992 was opposed in a letter to TheTimes that accused him of not meeting accepted standards of clarity and rigour. His work, the signatories argued, consisted in no small part of elaborate jokes and puns, making French philosophy ‘an object of ridicule’.
Handsome, charismatic, pipe-smoking, Derrida looked like everything a French philosopher should. Pop songs were written about him, films were made in which he played himself, while his aphorisms appeared on T-shirts and coffee mugs: ‘There is nothing outside the text’; ‘To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend’; and ‘I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.’
He was born in Algeria on 15 July 1930, and his real name was, in fact, Jackie – named after Jackie Coogan, star of the film The Kid (1921), by his Charlie Chaplin-loving parents. Jewish, French, Algerian, Derrida’s identity was complicated, and he strove to apply this complexity to all he touched. Part of thinking like Derrida involves taking those things we take most for granted – such as our identity, such as our language – and looking for unexplored assumptions, contradictions and absences. Thinking like Derrida is a form of close reading, not just of texts, such as those of philosophy and literature, but of everything – art, religion, politics, even ourselves.
In 1967, Derrida introduced a new method to philosophy, which he called deconstruction. Put simply – and it rarely is, especially by Derrida – this is the idea that if something is constructed, it can be de-constructed. That applies to objects in the world, such as chairs, cars and houses, but it also applies to the concepts we use, such as truth, justice and God. These ‘things’, which we tend to assume are natural, are in fact culturally constructed. There might or might not be an actual God – deconstruction has no opinion on this – but the only ‘God’ we can encounter is a culturally constructed one. As that other controversial philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, put it, if you want to know the meaning of the word God, look at how it is used.
Importantly, deconstruction is not destruction. The concept or object is still there at the end. In fact, for Derrida, what was fascinating was not just the multiple factors that went into constructing a concept, but the actual final act of construction itself; the faith or belief we have that any concept is coherent and enduring. One of the tricks of thinking is to convince us that a word, or a concept, or a text, has a single, fixed meaning. And that this meaning is true, pure, unconstructed – natural, rather than cultural. Derrida called this the ‘metaphysics of presence’: the belief that coherence is a measure of truth.
Derrida’s influence is particularly striking in literature and the arts, where the ‘constructed-ness’ of a text is both obvious and easily forgotten. We’re trained to suspend disbelief when encountering a book or a film or a television programme. Derrida has no problem with this being one way to approach a text, but we mustn’t make the mistake of thinking that what we’re encountering happened naturally. Rather, perhaps after we’ve enjoyed that cultural text, it’s time to light our own pipe, sharpen our pen syringe, and deconstruct the thing, to see what’s really going on.NEED TO KNOWTHINK IT THROUGHKEY POINTSWHY IT MATTERSLINKS & BOOKS
Think it through
First, get comfortable – you’re planning to overthrow every preconceived idea
Start by closing the door. Derrida did all his work in a study at the top of his house full of thousands of books. (In one interview, he was asked if he had read them all. ‘No,’ he said, smiling, ‘only three or four. But I read those four really, really well.’) You might or might not have changed from your nightwear to daywear – Derrida often worked from the moment he woke, ascending to his office first thing, in his pyjamas (after a coffee, of course). You will also need a pipe, which you might choose to light. If not, you can still chew on it ruminatively.
Next, you need something to deconstruct
This can be anything. Fundamental to deconstruction is the idea that any text can be deconstructed. A poem. A railway timetable. A shopping list. Edmund Husserl’s Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy – First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (1913). Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003). The Bible. The newspaper. This essay.
Or, if you’re feeling less ‘wordy’, you could watch something online. Or listen to the radio. A podcast. Put a glass to the wall and listen to the people next door talking. For Derrida, sitting there in his pyjamas, all of these ‘things’ are texts. All of them can be pulled apart in various ways. Each of them can be deconstructed.
Get deconstructing
How? Well, first, it can be useful to know how the text is regarded, the prevailing wisdom. For instance, society has ‘decided’ that Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Finding Nemo (2003) and Sleepless in Seattle (1993) are heart-warming films for the whole family. That The Waste Land (1922) is a difficult poem about the ‘human condition’. That the TV series DowntonAbbey (2010-15) is the story of an England that used to be (and things were better then).
In Old Skool philosophical terms, this consensus is called the doxa (from where we get ‘orthodoxy’), and is contrasted with episteme, knowledge. Since Greek times (at least) the two have been in tension. To think deconstructively is to not only call into question accepted truths, but to ask in whose interests it is that they be accepted. These accepted truths might be benign – the result of lazy thinking or genuine consensus – but they can also be malignant.
So the first thing to do, as you light your pipe (or don’t light your pipe), is to think about why these texts are regarded this way, why this is the doxa. How ‘true’ is this assessment? Take the ‘human condition’ that The Waste Land seeks to explore. Whose human condition? Are the poem’s insights applicable across cultures? Genders? If not, why not? If they’re only partially applicable, then why partially, and what are the limits? And what do these limits tell us? The doxa is, for Derrida, only one interpretation, and its dominance is not necessarily because it’s somehow ‘truer’.
Take Downton Abbey. Please!
In fact, for Derrida, there’s no absolutely true assessment of a text, and the idea that one assessment is dominant can tell us more about the conditions around the text than the text itself. A text such as Downton Abbey is marketed as an exploration of a particular section of English history, and purports to tell it like it was. But any such exploration must carry within it any number of decisions about what to include or exclude. So the argument ‘this is how it was’ is false. It can be deconstructed.
For instance, the show has been praised for portraying not only the aristocracy, but the servant class. We follow their emotional journeys and melodramas as we follow those of their employers, and we are nudged to smile ruefully at how similar people are deep down, regardless of class. Both the aristocrats and the servants are mutually ‘humanised’ by this.
In fact, the relationship between the two classes was hugely exploitative. As the historian Margaret MacMillan has pointed out, servants in this era weren’t necessarily well clothed or fed, and in general were up at five in the morning and worked deep into the night. But this would be an inconvenient truth for a show that’s essentially ‘feel-good’. By reinforcing the humanness of the landed class and the, well, chattel class, the class system itself is seen as a product of chance, rather than a rigidly imposed structure of servility.
Also, is it any coincidence that this series, with its sympathetic portrayal of the aristocracy, has appeared at this moment in time? Again, whose interests might it suit? There’s a real culture war happening in the UK now, around such things as race, privilege, gender and Britishness. Is the production and popularity of a programme in which these issues aren’t moot part of that culture war? Is its very ‘escapism’ a reinforcement of threatened norms?
Look for contradictions
Next, look for places within the text that contradict each other, and where the spirit of the text is actually different, or even opposed to, what’s actually going on. Hollywood movies are great for this. For instance, we’ve become increasingly familiar with the idea of the ‘white saviour’ narrative. Films that purport to examine racial stereotypes, for instance, but then use those very same stereotypes to tell their story; they require a white protagonist to go on a ‘journey’ of understanding, with the oppressed characters becoming objectified in the exact same way as what the film purports to be critiquing. Whiteness is normality, to which otherness is explained. We’re trained not to notice this, but Derrida’s thinking attempts to train us to make it our focus – to look for tensions within a text, to see where the heavy lifting is being done.
Thinking like Derrida, then, means looking for these contradictions and exploring what they mean. Derrida himself did it with Karl Marx, in his bookSpecters of Marx (1993). Marxist thought privileges a materialist conception of being. It argues that everything, including our individual consciousnesses, can be explained by material things (labour, working conditions, class and so on). But Derrida, in his deconstruction, explores the persistence of the immaterial in Marx’s writing: of ghosts, phantoms and spectres. This is there in the first sentence of The Communist Manifesto (1848) – ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism’ – but also in Marx’s use of imagery from William Shakespeare and his discussions of money, that invisible force moving like a ghost through society.
You’re reading against the grain
Derrida saw this kind of reading as reading against the grain. Take a text, find what it seems to advocate, and look in the opposite direction. G W F Hegel wrote about spirit, untainted by the mess of life – so Derrida explored his relationship to family. Husserl wrote about subjectivity by describing the surrounding world, so Derrida looked for moments where Husserl invoked God. This doesn’t eliminate the text or the thinking, but it problematises them, it finds the limits. In a sense, we’re to treat every text with suspicion, although Derrida himself called this an act of ‘hospitality’. To read a text this closely is to treat it with seriousness, to really look at what’s going on.
This reading against the grain can also be more subtle than just looking for the opposite. As all readings are interpretations, one is able to explore radically different ways into a text. What, we think as we light our second pipe, happens if we look at The Waste Land through queer theory? What role does race play in the Marvel movies? What are the economics of the Bible?
This has all made Derrida an influential thinker in areas such as feminism, postcolonial studies and queer theory. He calls on all of us to examine our most fundamental ideas, even those – especially those – that seem least open to question. Like Sigmund Freud and his idea of the repressed (and its return), for Derrida, our certainties are the sweet spot, the fissures in our beliefs and those of our culture. Our cultural biases are often least stable at precisely the points where we feel them to be most natural.
But this is anarchy…
Some critics have accused Derridean thinking of allowing for any interpretation or, worse still, of saying any interpretation is equally valid. The first is perhaps true, the second is not. Derrida was always clear that there were more effective and less effective ways of reading a text. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with analysing the novels of Leo Tolstoy through, say, modern dance. But the result is more likely to be ineffective or trivial. Some critics of Derrida and his followers have argued that this is precisely the sort of free-for-all that deconstruction leads to. But, ultimately, any philosophical idea pushed to its extreme allows for nonsense. Derrida would be – was – as appalled by the misuse and misunderstanding of his work as any of his critics. Far from being an anarchic process, Derrida called for a very close reading of the text at hand and, as with anything, the closer you look at something, the more fissures you see.
Don’t listen to what the author says
Finally – and, by now, it might be time to get dressed and have a spot of lunch – thinking like Derrida means trusting one’s own analysis of a text – even, or perhaps especially, if it contradicts the authors’ idea of what they’re doing. For Derrida, the author’s interpretation of her or his text is no more valid than the reader’s. Again, Freud is a useful reference point here. Patients in analysis reveals their truth not simply in the words they use, but in the words they don’t, in the stutters and repetitions, in the times they try to laugh things off, and when they contradict themselves. The ‘self’ being whole and coherent is an act of will. For Derrida, the ‘text’ being whole is the same.NEED TO KNOWTHINK IT THROUGHKEY POINTSWHY IT MATTERSLINKS & BOOKS
Key points
Anything that has been constructed can be deconstructed. This is true for objects, but is also true for concepts, such as God, justice and truth.
Deconstruction is not destruction, the thing deconstructed still exists.
A text can be anything, a book, a movie, a recording.
All opinions about a text are interpretations, even those that seem most obvious.
Any interpretation of a text is valid, but some are more valid than others, depending on what they yield.
Read against the grain – bring unexpected concepts to your analysis, and see what this does to the text.
The author’s interpretation of a text is no more valid than your own. In fact, what the author says about a text might reveal some of the problems in it, as in psychoanalysis.
NEED TO KNOWTHINK IT THROUGHKEY POINTSWHY IT MATTERSLINKS & BOOKS
Why it matters
One of the barriers to engaging with deconstruction is Derrida’s own fearsome prose style. Having argued that all words and concepts are suspicious insofar as they declare a stable meaning, his writing enacts this position by avoiding simple declarative sentences and ‘definitions’. As he put it, ‘once quotation marks demand to appear, they don’t know when to stop.’ The founding text of deconstruction, Of Grammatology (1967), is a wonderfully bonkers book, ranging across all of language and language systems, all of history, all of literature. Its main argument, that speech has been privileged over writing, draws attention to the fact that the words and concepts we use, including those in our own heads that we mistake for our thinking – or even our soul – are inherited from the culture around us.
So, some of the best ways to learn about deconstruction are to engage with works that have been influenced by Derrida, or that anticipate his work: works that draw attention to their own status as having been constructed. In literature, this includes books such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), a key work for Derrida, that foregrounds its ‘novelness’ by switching between genres – from sections written like newspaper reports to those written exclusively in dialogue. More recently, books such as Landscape With Landscape (1985) by Gerald Murnane constantly draw the readers’ attention to the fact that they’re reading a novel, and that they can’t just get lost in the story. When an author such as Murnane writes about ‘a man walking down the street’, the last thing he wants you to do is visualise a man walking down the street.
In film, the work of the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami is fascinating in the way it shows its own working. The opening words spoken in Through the Olive Trees (1994), a film about making a film, are ‘I am the actor who plays the director,’ while Close-Up (1990), recently voted one of the best 50 films of all time by the British Film Institute, tells the real-life story of a man who pretended to be the real-life film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf – and stars the actual man who did so, and Makhmalbaf, both playing themselves, with Kiarostami himself intervening at one point to ask the impersonator questions. You can find all of Kiarostami’s films online.
In music, Derrida’s work spawned a whole genre called ‘hauntology’, a pun on the word ontology. Ontology is the philosophical investigation of what there is. Hauntology is the philosophical investigation of what there isn’t. Lost futures, distant pasts, gaps and fissures in our reality that can’t be closed over. Hauntological music tends to foreground the technology that produces it. The sound of needles on records, tape hiss and noises-off remind the listener that there’s an ‘outside of the frame’. Exemplary here is William Basinski’s series of albums The Disintegration Loops (2002-03). Basinski, while attempting to transfer his old tapes to digital, found that, by looping a small piece of music and letting it run, you could actually hear the tape deteriorating, producing an unworldly – haunting – effect. That he finished this project on the day in 2001 when he watched, from the rooftop of his Brooklyn apartment, as the Twin Towers collapsed adds a layer of mourning to the listening experience.
Of course, while these are all works that overtly deconstruct themselves, for Derrida, as we acknowledged at the outset, all works do this. No work can be pure – and present – in itself. Deconstruction is always happening in any work of art, and by looking very closely we can see not only how it’s happening, but also how the creator has pretended that it isn’t. As Derrida once said: ‘To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.’NEED TO KNOWTHINK IT THROUGHKEY POINTSWHY IT MATTERSLINKS & BOOKS
Links & books
Perhaps the most accessible introduction to Derrida and deconstruction online is the documentaryDerrida (2002), which is available on YouTube. It’s a fascinating exploration of Derrida’s work, and includes a section on his return to his childhood home of Algeria, the place where his questions of identity – as a Jewish, French, Algerian boy – began to be formed. There are also many bite-size clips from the film, including this one of him being funny in his library about the number of books he’s read.
There are also a number of introductions to deconstruction on YouTube – one of the best is this, from the history channel Then & Now. And if you haven’t encountered the work of the US philosopher Rick Roderick, I would highly recommend it: his are old-style philosophy lectures – even down to a lecturer who wears braces! – but deal with some of the most up-to-the-minute philosophers, including Derrida, Michel Foucault and Martin Heidegger. Here he is on Derrida.
For something more, well, mad, there is the filmGhost Dance (1983), which features – sort of – two Derrideans tracking down their hero. Derrida himself makes an appearance, playing himself – can one say badly? The film would actually come to have a profound effect on Derrida. In one scene, he is asked by the actress Pascale Ogier: ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Ogier died the following year, aged 25, and Derrida later recalled how when watching the film after her death he found himself profoundly shaken – cinema, he said, is the science of ghosts, and here he was, watching his past self being asked by a ghost if he believed in them…
For a good introduction to deconstruction, Jonathan Culler’s bookOn Deconstruction (1982) is perhaps the gold standard, while Christopher Norris’s Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (1982) takes a wider look at the effects of Derrida’s work outside of philosophy – its impact on literary studies, for instance. If you want a highly entertaining attack on Derrida and his followers, then Colin Campbell’s article ‘The Tyranny Of The Yale Critics’ (1986) in TheNew York Times is tremendous fun, or you can explore the arguments between Derrida and the philosopher John Searle – neither pulling any punches.
Finally, to read Derrida himself, some of his later work is his least rebarbative, and it often introduces his thinking in ways that he eschewed earlier on. Of special interest is Circumfession (1993), his long ‘footnote’ to a book by Geoffrey Bennington, based on Augustine’s Confessions. The footnote runs for the entire length of Bennington’s book. Or there is Specters of Marx (1993), his meditation on the ‘end of Communism’ via Hamlet, and the book that introduced the term ‘hauntology’. Finally, there’s his experimental book Glas (1974), which is presented in a two-column format: the left is on the philosophy of Hegel, the right on the writing of Jean Genet.
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Aries playwright Samuel Beckett wrote the play “Waiting for Godot.” At one point in the tale, the character named Estragon suggests it might be possible, even desirable, to “dance first and think afterwards.” In response, the character named Pozzo says, “By all means, nothing simpler. It’s the natural order.” With that in mind, and in accordance with astrological omens, I am going to encourage you to dance first and think afterwards as much as possible in the coming weeks. In my opinion, your ability to analyze and reason will thrive to the degree that you encourage your body to engage in enjoyable free-form play. Your power to make good decisions will grow as you take really good care of your physical organism and give it an abundance of pleasure and release.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): As you enter a phase when gradual, incremental progress is the best progress possible, I offer you the concluding lines of Taurus poet Adrienne Rich’s poem “From a Survivor”: “not as a leap, but a succession of brief, amazing movements, each one making possible the next.” I especially want to call your attention to the fact that the small steps can be “brief, amazing movements.” Don’t underestimate the power of minor, subtle, regular breakthroughs.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Here’s a public service announcement for you Geminis from the planet and god Mercury: You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were three years ago, or six months ago, or last week — or even five minutes ago, for that matter. Mercury furthermore wants you to know that you have been authorized to begin a period of improvisation and experimentation, hopefully guided by a single overriding directive: what feels most fun and interesting to you. In the coming weeks it will be more important to create yourself anew than to know precisely who you are.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): As a Zen Buddhist priest for 47 years, Kōshō Uchiyama was knowledgeable about the power that illusions can wield over our imaginations. “If we’re not careful,” he said, “we are apt to grant ultimate value to something we’ve just made up in our heads.” I won’t tell you the examples from my own life that prove his point, because they’re too embarrassing. And I’m happy to report that I don’t think you’re anywhere near granting ultimate value to something you’ve just made up in your head. But I do advise you to be on the lookout for milder versions of that phenomenon.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Leo-born professor Sibelan Forrester is an expert on charms, spells and incantations in Russian folklore. She wrote, “An empty place where no one can see or hear what one says is the proper locus for working magic.” Spells often start with these words, she added: “I rise up, saying a blessing. I go out, crossing myself, and I go to an open field.” Whether or not you have Russian heritage, Leo, I see the immediate future as being a good time for you to perform magic in an open field with no one else around. What might be the intention of your magic? How about something like this: “I ask my guides and ancestors to help me offer my most inspired largesse so as to serve the health and inspiration and liberation of the people whose lives I touch.”
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Spiritual author Stephen Russell wrote, “Don’t mask or deny your vulnerability: It is your greatest asset.” That’s an exaggeration, in my opinion. Vulnerability is a greater asset than your intelligence, compassion, and creativity? Not in my view. But I do recognize the high value of vulnerability, especially for you Virgos during the next three weeks. “Be vulnerable,” Russell continues. “Quake and shake in your boots with it. The new bounty and beauty that are coming to you, in the form of people, situations and things, can only come to you when you are vulnerable — open.”
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): My friend Jenny’s Swedish grandmother used to say to her on a semi-regular basis, “Åh tänk om vi vore korkade, vi skulle vara så lyckliga,” meaning, “If only we were stupid, we would be so happy.” In the coming weeks, I am asking you to disprove that folk wisdom. According to my analysis of the astrological potentials, now is a favorable time for you to explore ways in which your intelligence might enhance and deepen your enjoyment of life. Your motto should be: “The smarter we are, the happier we will be.”
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Sometime soon I invite you to speak a message similar to what poet Kenneth Rexroth once delivered to a special person in his life. He wrote, “Your tongue thrums and moves / Into me, and I become / Hollow and blaze with / Whirling light, like the inside / Of a vast expanding pearl. ”Do you know anyone who might be receptive to hearing such lyrical praise? If not, create a fantasy character in your imagination to whom you can say it. On the other hand, maybe you do know a real person who would appreciate an earthier, less poetical tribute. If so, please convey it; something akin to this: “Your influence on me amplifies my ability to be my best self.” Now is a perfect time to honor and extol and reward those who move you and excite you.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Author Aldous Huxley said, “I can sympathize with people’s pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.” To that I reply, “Other people’s pleasure and happiness bored you? Maybe you were suffering from raging narcissism and an addiction to cynicism.” In any case, Sagittarius, I hope you won’t be like Huxley in the next few weeks. I believe you could glean useful insights and derive personal benefits from knowing about and appreciating the joys of others.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Capricorn businessman Howard Hughes (1905–1976) had great success early in his life. Working as a film director and aviation pioneer, he became a wealthy philanthropist. But as he aged, he became increasingly eccentric and reclusive. For the last 10 years of his life, he lived in expensive hotels, where he placed strict and often absurd demands on the hotel staff. For example, if he called on room service to bring him a meal that included peas, he would measure the peas with a ruler, and send back any he deemed too big. I do hope that you Capricorns will also have an intense focus on mastering the details in the coming weeks — but not as intense or misguided as that nonsensical obsession.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Aquarian author Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was famous and popular. Audiences packed the halls where he did public lectures and readings. His favorite way to prepare for these evening events was to spend the day drinking a pint of Champagne, as well as generous servings of rum, cream and sherry with eggs beaten into the mix. I don’t have a problem with that — whatever works, right? — but I suggest a different approach for your upcoming appointments with greater visibility and prominence. Like what? How about sexy meditations on the gratitude you feel for your expanding possibilities? How about fun fantasies focusing on how you’ll use your increased clout?
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In his upcoming book “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,” John Koenig proposes that we begin using “monachopsis,” a word he coined. He defines it as follows: “the feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach — lumbering, clumsy, easily distracted, huddled in the company of other misfits, unable to recognize the ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you’d be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home.” Even if you have spent too much time lately experiencing monachopsis, my dear, I predict this malaise will soon dissipate and give way to an extended phase of being fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home.
Homework. Tell me your three most brilliant and useful opinions. Go to FreeWillAstrology.com.
Emma Černisis a clinical psychologist and researcher specialising in dissociation and psychosis at the University of Oxford. She lives in Oxford.
Edited by Lucy Foulkes
19 MAY 2021 (psyche.co)
Something doesn’t feel right.
You look around your room, trying to figure out what it is, but everything looks the same. Except, actually, somehow – no, it doesn’t. The world around you looks flat and two-dimensional. Or like a movie set. It’s as though you don’t recognise the room anymore. That’s not possible, right? You must be crazy.
Maybe it’s your eyesight. You look down at your hands to make sure. The object moving in front of you looks like your own hand, but it doesn’t feel like yours – you can’t feel it moving. The rational part of your brain is telling you this is your hand and that you are wiggling your fingers around – but those sensations have gone. It’s like someone else is pulling the puppet strings and you’re just watching.
What did you think was happening? Maybe you thought you were reading a description of how it feels to be drugged, or to go ‘mad’. Or perhaps it sounded like a script from a horror film involving computer simulation, telepathic control, or being trapped in a parallel universe. Unsettling, strange. Something you might watch on Netflix. But sadly, these experiences aren’t fiction at all, and no drugs are involved. Instead, they’re a part of everyday life for people who experience dissociation.
Since the 19th century, there have been arguments about what exactly dissociation is. Attempts to understand and define it have resulted in various phenomena being added to (or removed from) the concept. But, rather than clarifying the term, this has led to it being more and more contested. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association defined it as the ‘disruption of and/or discontinuity in the normal integration of consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, perception, body representation, motor control, and behaviour’– but this is incredibly broad; it covers disruption in almost every aspect of human experience. The term ‘dissociation’ urgently needs clarifying if it is to be useful at all.
Dissociation feels odd. It alters the very fabric of the world around you
What we do know is that these feelings of disintegration, of reality shifting, can be a natural stress response and, as a result, are also common in people with mental health problems. They often happen when people are highly stressed, anxious or tired – up to 66 per cent of the general population report that they’ve experienced dissociation temporarily during a traumatic event. Symptoms of dissociation also appear at high rates across a wide range of mental health disorders including post-traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders and depression, and are associated with increasedrisk of self-harm.
Dissociative symptoms are a predictor of clinical severity. In one study of people attending general outpatient psychiatry services, a clinically high level of dissociation was the strongest predictor of whether a person had made multiple suicide attempts. Dissociation symptoms are also associated with a higher number of bingeing episodes in individuals with eating disorders. They can also reduce the impact of standard psychological treatments: one study found that those who responded poorly to treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder had higher levels of dissociation than those who responded well. So it’s possible that, throughout mental health services, dissociative symptoms could be making treatments less effective, and yet they often go undetected and untreated because clinicians aren’t routinely given training in this phenomenon.
This comes back to the issue of definitions. To help people with dissociation, and to educate clinicians about it, we need to understand what it actually is. So to provide some clarity, my colleagues and I carried out a systematic review of more than 70 scientific papers that used different dissociation questionnaires, and we also conducted an in-depth interview study with people who had experienced dissociation themselves.
Among all this data, one clear theme emerged: dissociation feels odd. In the interview study, one participant described how it alters the very fabric of the world around you: ‘It’s as if what appears to be the reality around me is crumbling.’ In a beautiful analogy, another interviewee told me: ‘You try and get control of it, but it’s like a bar of soap or something, it just keeps slipping out of your hands.’ For the majority of experiences, people felt that they simply didn’t have adequate language for it. The feelings were hard to put into words, difficult to put a finger on – and, more often than not, horrible. One participant described it as ‘the worst feeling in the world’.
A core component of many dissociative experiences involves a ‘felt sense of anomaly’
Critically, people were quick to assure me that, even while the strange sensations were happening, the logical part of their brain still ‘knew’ what the reality of the situation was. One person told me: ‘It doesn’t feel like me, but deep down I do know it’s me. It’s not a case of “I think I’m watching through someone else” – it just doesn’t feel like me.’ Which got me thinking: what if the challenging, confusing strangeness was actually part of dissociation? What if there is a subgroup of dissociative experiences that are united by their strangeness?
This is exactly what my colleagues and I proposed: that a core component of many dissociative experiences involves a ‘felt sense of anomaly’ (FSA). This sense of strangeness could be about almost anything – the world around you; your body; your thoughts, perceptions, memories and emotions; even your identity – which would explain why definitions of dissociation are so broad. The exact nature of the sense of anomaly varies too: it could feel like detachment or disconnection, but could also involve a sense of unreality, unfamiliarity or ‘automatic’, ‘autopilot’ feelings, too. But drawing all this together is the strong sense that something strange is going on.
This might all seem obvious: of course, dissociation must feel odd. But the idea of linking together dissociative symptoms on the basis of this feeling is a very recent approach – one that will require further research and testing. Nevertheless, it might be a helpful new way of tackling the challenges of dissociation being difficult to describe, and difficult for clinicians to ask about. By centring our understanding on the core subjective experience, it might be possible to distil a wide range of complex clinical presentations into a broad but descriptive rule of thumb. If a patient seems to be experiencing dissociation, clinicians could simply ask: ‘Does it feel strange, even though you know it isn’t?’, and acknowledge the challenge in describing that feeling. This might not identify all types of dissociation, but for those experiencing FSA-type symptoms, it could help them feel heard, despite the confusion and strangeness they’re experiencing.
Dissociative experiences – at some level – are incredibly common. They also show us how fundamental it is to have a way to talk about what’s upsetting us, and for that to be understood. Without the means of communicating about these experiences, it’s only natural to feel worried, disheartened, alone. But however strange things might feel, no one has to be on their own. My hope for the future is that, by finding ways to break down dissociation into smaller parts and describe them better, we can help more and more people feel heard and understood – and ‘real’ – again.
“For the first time in history,”Bertrand Russell asserted in reflecting on the impact of the Industrial Revolution, “it is now possible … to create a world where everybody shall have a reasonable chance of happiness.” Indeed, we’ve pounced on that chance with overzealous want: Ours is a culture so consumed with the relentless pursuit of happiness, its secrets and its science, that it layers over the already uncomfortable state of unhappiness a stigma of humiliation and shame. But unhappiness can have its own dignity and can illuminate who we are as much as, if not more than, happiness. That’s precisely what French philosopher and Nobel laureate Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) considers in a portion of his private writings, collected in Notebooks 1951–1959 (public library).
[Oscar Wilde] wanted to place art above all else. But the grandeur of art is not to rise above all. On the contrary, it must blend with all. Wilde finally understood this, thanks to sorrow. But it is the culpability of this era that it always needed sorrow and constraint in order to catch a glimpse of a truth also found in happiness, when the heart is worthy. Servile century.
In a 1956 letter to a hospitalized friend, Camus explores how body and mind conspire in sorrow and happiness:
The solidarity of bodies, unity at the center of the mortal and suffering flesh. This is what we are and nothing else. We are this plus human genius in all its forms, from the child to Einstein.
No, … it is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life. … What you must do now is nothing more than live like everybody else. You deserve, by what you are, a happiness, a fullness that few people know. Yet today this fullness is not dead, it is a part of life and, to its credit, it reigns over you whether you want it to or not. But in the coming days you must live alone, with this hole, this painful memory. This lifelessness that we all carry inside of us — by us, I mean to say those who are not taken to the height of happiness, and who painfully remember another kind of happiness that goes beyond the memory.
Sometimes, for violent minds, the time that we tear off for work, that is torn away from time, is the best. An unfortunate passion.
Camus later revisits this osmosis between the physical and the metaphysical in a poignant reflection on our self-imposed prisons of unhappiness:
It is not true that the heart wears out — but the body creates this illusion.
Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness. If they are happy by surprise, they find themselves disabled, unhappy to be deprived of their unhappiness.
“All true happiness, as all that is truly beautiful, can only result from order,”Benjamin Franklin wrote, and yet, as Camus so stirringly reminds us, order itself, when worshiped too blindly and rigidly, can consume our fragile chance of happiness.
is professor of philosophy at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. She works on ethics and metaphysics of personal identity and is the author of The Network Self: Relation, Process, and Personal Identity (2019). She lives in New York City.
Who am I? We all ask ourselves this question, and many like it. Is my identity determined by my DNA or am I product of how I’m raised? Can I change, and if so, how much? Is my identity just one thing, or can I have more than one? Since its beginning, philosophy has grappled with these questions, which are important to how we make choices and how we interact with the world around us. Socrates thought that self-understanding was essential to knowing how to live, and how to live well with oneself and with others. Self-determination depends on self-knowledge, on knowledge of others and of the world around you. Even forms of government are grounded in how we understand ourselves and human nature. So the question ‘Who am I?’ has far-reaching implications.
Many philosophers, at least in the West, have sought to identify the invariable or essential conditions of being a self. A widely taken approach is what’s known as a psychological continuity view of the self, where the self is a consciousness with self-awareness and personal memories. Sometimes these approaches frame the self as a combination of mind and body, as René Descartes did, or as primarily or solely consciousness. John Locke’s prince/pauper thought experiment, wherein a prince’s consciousness and all his memories are transferred into the body of a cobbler, is an illustration of the idea that personhood goes with consciousness. Philosophers have devised numerous subsequent thought experiments – involving personality transfers, split brains and teleporters – to explore the psychological approach. Contemporary philosophers in the ‘animalist’ camp are critical of the psychological approach, and argue that selves are essentially human biological organisms. (Aristotle might also be closer to this approach than to the purely psychological.) Both psychological and animalist approaches are ‘container’ frameworks, positing the body as a container of psychological functions or the bounded location of bodily functions.
All these approaches reflect philosophers’ concern to focus on what the distinguishing or definitional characteristic of a self is, the thing that will pick out a self and nothing else, and that will identify selves as selves, regardless of their particular differences. On the psychological view, a self is a personal consciousness. On the animalist view, a self is a human organism or animal. This has tended to lead to a somewhat one-dimensional and simplified view of what a self is, leaving out social, cultural and interpersonal traits that are also distinctive of selves and are often what people would regard as central to their self-identity. Just as selves have different personal memories and self-awareness, they can have different social and interpersonal relations, cultural backgrounds and personalities. The latter are variable in their specificity, but are just as important to being a self as biology, memory and self-awareness.
Recognising the influence of these factors, some philosophers have pushed against such reductive approaches and argued for a framework that recognises the complexity and multidimensionality of persons. The network self view emerges from this trend. It began in the later 20th century and has continued in the 21st, when philosophers started to move toward a broader understanding of selves. Some philosophers propose narrative and anthropological views of selves. Communitarian and feminist philosophers argue for relational views that recognise the social embeddedness, relatedness and intersectionality of selves. According to relational views, social relations and identities are fundamental to understanding who persons are.
Social identities are traits of selves in virtue of membership in communities (local, professional, ethnic, religious, political), or in virtue of social categories (such as race, gender, class, political affiliation) or interpersonal relations (such as being a spouse, sibling, parent, friend, neighbour). These views imply that it’s not only embodiment and not only memory or consciousness of social relations but the relationsthemselves that also matter to who the self is. What philosophers call ‘4E views’ of cognition – for embodied, embedded, enactive and extended cognition – are also a move in the direction of a more relational, less ‘container’, view of the self. Relational views signal a paradigm shift from a reductive approach to one that seeks to recognise the complexity of the self. The network self view further develops this line of thought and says that the self is relational through and through, consisting not only of social but also physical, genetic, psychological, emotional and biological relations that together form a network self. The self also changes over time, acquiring and losing traits in virtue of new social locations and relations, even as it continues as that one self.
How do you self-identify? You probably have many aspects to yourself and would resist being reduced to or stereotyped as any one of them. But you might still identify yourself in terms of your heritage, ethnicity, race, religion: identities that are often prominent in identity politics. You might identify yourself in terms of other social and personal relationships and characteristics – ‘I’m Mary’s sister.’ ‘I’m a music-lover.’ ‘I’m Emily’s thesis advisor.’ ‘I’m a Chicagoan.’ Or you might identify personality characteristics: ‘I’m an extrovert’; or commitments: ‘I care about the environment.’ ‘I’m honest.’ You might identify yourself comparatively: ‘I’m the tallest person in my family’; or in terms of one’s political beliefs or affiliations: ‘I’m an independent’; or temporally: ‘I’m the person who lived down the hall from you in college,’ or ‘I’m getting married next year.’ Some of these are more important than others, some are fleeting. The point is that who you are is more complex than any one of your identities. Thinking of the self as a network is a way to conceptualise this complexity and fluidity.
Let’s take a concrete example. Consider Lindsey: she is spouse, mother, novelist, English speaker, Irish Catholic, feminist, professor of philosophy, automobile driver, psychobiological organism, introverted, fearful of heights, left-handed, carrier of Huntington’s disease (HD), resident of New York City. This is not an exhaustive set, just a selection of traits or identities. Traits are related to one another to form a network of traits. Lindsey is an inclusive network, a plurality of traits related to one another. The overall character – the integrity – of a self is constituted by the unique interrelatedness of its particular relational traits, psychobiological, social, political, cultural, linguistic and physical.
Figure 1 below is based on an approach to modelling ecological networks; the nodes represent traits, and the lines are relations between traits (without specifying the kind of relation).
Figure 1
We notice right away the complex interrelatedness among Lindsey’s traits. We can also see that some traits seem to be clustered, that is, related more to some traits than to others. Just as a body is a highly complex, organised network of organismic and molecular systems, the self is a highly organised network. Traits of the self can organise into clusters or hubs, such as a body cluster, a family cluster, a social cluster. There might be other clusters, but keeping it to a few is sufficient to illustrate the idea. A second approximation, Figure 2 below, captures the clustering idea.
Figure 2
Figures 1 and 2 (both from my book, The Network Self) are simplifications of the bodily, personal and social relations that make up the self. Traits can be closely clustered, but they also cross over and intersect with traits in other hubs or clusters. For instance, a genetic trait – ‘Huntington’s disease carrier’ (HD in figures 1 and 2) – is related to biological, family and social traits. If the carrier status is known, there are also psychological and social relations to other carriers and to familial and medical communities. Clusters or sub-networks are not isolated, or self-enclosed hubs, and might regroup as the self develops.
Sometimes her experience might be fractured, as when others take one of her identities as defining all of her
Some traits might be more dominant than others. Being a spouse might be strongly relevant to who Lindsey is, whereas being an aunt weakly relevant. Some traits might be more salient in some contexts than others. In Lindsey’s neighbourhood, being a parent might be more salient than being a philosopher, whereas at the university being a philosopher is more prominent.
Lindsey can have a holistic experience of her multifaceted, interconnected network identity. Sometimes, though, her experience might be fractured, as when others take one of her identities as defining all of her. Suppose that, in an employment context, she isn’t promoted, earns a lower salary or isn’t considered for a job because of her gender. Discrimination is when an identity – race, gender, ethnicity – becomes the way in which someone is identified by others, and therefore might experience herself as reduced or objectified. It is the inappropriate, arbitrary or unfair salience of a trait in a context.
Lindsey might feel conflict or tension between her identities. She might not want to be reduced to or stereotyped by any one identity. She might feel the need to dissimulate, suppress or conceal some identity, as well as associated feelings and beliefs. She might feel that some of these are not essential to who she really is. But even if some are less important than others, and some are strongly relevant to who she is and identifies as, they’re all still interconnected ways in which Lindsey is.
Figures 1 and 2 above represent the network self, Lindsey, at a cross-section of time, say at early to mid-adulthood. What about the changeableness and fluidity of the self? What about other stages of Lindsey’s life? Lindsey-at-age-five is not a spouse or a mother, and future stages of Lindsey might include different traits and relations too: she might divorce or change careers or undergo a gender identity transformation. The network self is also a process.
It might seem strange at first to think of yourself as a process. You might think that processes are just a series of events, and your self feels more substantial than that. Maybe you think of yourself as an entity that’s distinct from relations, that change is something that happens to an unchangeable core that is you. You’d be in good company if you do. There’s a long history in philosophy going back to Aristotle arguing for a distinction between a substance and its properties, between substance and relations, and between entities and events.
However, the idea that the self is a network and a process is more plausible than you might think. Paradigmatic substances, such as the body, are systems of networks that are in constant process even when we don’t see that at a macro level: cells are replaced, hair and nails grow, food is digested, cellular and molecular processes are ongoing as long as the body is alive. Consciousness or the stream of awareness itself is in constant flux. Psychological dispositions or attitudes might be subject to variation in expression and occurrence. They’re not fixed and invariable, even when they’re somewhat settled aspects of a self. Social traits evolve. For example, Lindsey-as-daughter develops and changes. Lindsey-as-mother is not only related to her current traits, but also to her own past, in how she experienced being a daughter. Many past experiences and relations have shaped how she is now. New beliefs and attitudes might be acquired and old ones revised. There’s constancy, too, as traits don’t all change at the same pace and maybe some don’t change at all. But the temporal spread, so to speak, of the self means that how a self as a whole is at any time is a cumulative upshot of what it’s been and how it’s projecting itself forward.
Anchoring and transformation, sameness and change: the cumulative network is both-and, not either-or
Rather than an underlying, unchanging substance that acquires and loses properties, we’re making a paradigm shift to seeing the self as a process, as a cumulative network with a changeable integrity. A cumulative network has structure and organisation, as many natural processes do, whether we think of biological developments, physical processes or social processes. Think of this constancy and structure as stages of the self overlapping with, or mapping on to, one another. For Lindsey, being a sibling overlaps from Lindsey-at-six to the death of the sibling; being a spouse overlaps from Lindsey-at-30 to the end of the marriage. Moreover, even if her sibling dies, or her marriage crumbles, sibling and spouse would still be traits of Lindsey’s history – a history that belongs to her and shapes the structure of the cumulative network.
If the self is its history, does that mean it can’t really change much? What about someone who wants to be liberated from her past, or from her present circumstances? Someone who emigrates or flees family and friends to start a new life or undergoes a radical transformation doesn’t cease to have been who they were. Indeed, experiences of conversion or transformation are of that self, the one who is converting, transforming, emigrating. Similarly, imagine the experience of regret or renunciation. You did something that you now regret, that you would never do again, that you feel was an expression of yourself when you were very different from who you are now. Still, regret makes sense only if you’re the person who in the past acted in some way. When you regret, renounce and apologise, you acknowledge your changed self as continuous with and owning your own past as the author of the act. Anchoring and transformation, continuity and liberation, sameness and change: the cumulative network is both-and, not either-or.
Transformation can happen to a self or it can be chosen. It can be positive or negative. It can be liberating or diminishing. Take a chosen transformation. Lindsey undergoes a gender transformation, and becomes Paul. Paul doesn’t cease to have been Lindsey, the self who experienced a mismatch between assigned gender and his own sense of self-identification, even though Paul might prefer his history as Lindsey to be a nonpublic dimension of himself. The cumulative network now known as Paul still retains many traits – biological, genetic, familial, social, psychological – of its prior configuration as Lindsey, and is shaped by the history of having been Lindsey. Or consider the immigrant. She doesn’t cease to be the self whose history includes having been a resident and citizen of another country.
The network self is changeable but continuous as it maps on to a new phase of the self. Some traits become relevant in new ways. Some might cease to be relevant in the present while remaining part of the self’s history. There’s no prescribed path for the self. The self is a cumulative network because its history persists, even if there are many aspects of its history that a self disavows going forward or even if the way in which its history is relevant changes. Recognising that the self is a cumulative network allows us to account for why radical transformation is of a self and not, literally, a different self.
Now imagine a transformation that’s not chosen but that happens to someone: for example, to a parent with Alzheimer’s disease. They are still parent, citizen, spouse, former professor. They are still their history; they are still that person undergoing debilitating change. The same is true of the person who experiences dramatic physical change, someone such as the actor Christopher Reeve who had quadriplegia after an accident, or the physicist Stephen Hawking whose capacities were severely compromised by ALS (motor neuron disease). Each was still parent, citizen, spouse, actor/scientist and former athlete. The parent with dementia experiences loss of memory, and of psychological and cognitive capacities, a diminishment in a subset of her network. The person with quadriplegia or ALS experiences loss of motor capacities, a bodily diminishment. Each undoubtedly leads to alteration in social traits and depends on extensive support from others to sustain themselves as selves.
Sometimes people say that the person with dementia who doesn’t know themselves or others anymore isn’t really the same person that they were, or maybe isn’t even a person at all. This reflects an appeal to the psychological view – that persons are essentially consciousness. But seeing the self as a network takes a different view. The integrity of the self is broader than personal memory and consciousness. A diminished self might still have many of its traits, however that self’s history might be constituted in particular.
Plato, long before Freud, recognised that self-knowledge is a hard-won and provisional achievement
The poignant account ‘Still Gloria’ (2017) by the Canadian bioethicist Françoise Baylis of her mother’s Alzheimer’s reflects this perspective. When visiting her mother, Baylis helps to sustain the integrity of Gloria’s self even when Gloria can no longer do that for herself. But she’s still herself. Does that mean that self-knowledge isn’t important? Of course not. Gloria’s diminished capacities are a contraction of her self, and might be a version of what happens in some degree for an ageing self who experiences a weakening of capacities. And there’s a lesson here for any self: none of us is completely transparent to ourselves. This isn’t a new idea; even Plato, long before Freud, recognised that there were unconscious desires, and that self-knowledge is a hard-won and provisional achievement. The process of self-questioning and self-discovery is ongoing through life because we don’t have fixed and immutable identities: our identity is multiple, complex and fluid.
This means that others don’t know us perfectly either. When people try to fix someone’s identity as one particular characteristic, it can lead to misunderstanding, stereotyping, discrimination. Our currently polarised rhetoric seems to do just that – to lock people into narrow categories: ‘white’, ‘Black’, ‘Christian’, ‘Muslim’, ‘conservative’, ‘progressive’. But selves are much more complex and rich. Seeing ourselves as a network is a fertile way to understand our complexity. Perhaps it could even help break the rigid and reductive stereotyping that dominates current cultural and political discourse, and cultivate more productive communication. We might not understand ourselves or others perfectly, but we often have overlapping identities and perspectives. Rather than seeing our multiple identities as separating us from one another, we should see them as bases for communication and understanding, even if partial. Lindsey is a white woman philosopher. Her identity as a philosopher is shared with other philosophers (men, women, white, not white). At the same time, she might share an identity as a woman philosopher with other women philosophers whose experiences as philosophers have been shaped by being women. Sometimes communication is more difficult than others, as when some identities are ideologically rejected, or seem so different that communication can’t get off the ground. But the multiple identities of the network self provide a basis for the possibility of common ground.
How else might the network self contribute to practical, living concerns? One of the most important contributors to our sense of wellbeing is the sense of being in control of our own lives, of being self-directing. You might worry that the multiplicity of the network self means that it’s determined by other factors and can’t be self-determining. The thought might be that freedom and self-determination start with a clean slate, with a self that has no characteristics, social relations, preferences or capabilities that would predetermine it. But such a self would lack resources for giving itself direction. Such a being would be buffeted by external forces rather than realising its own potentialities and making its own choices. That would be randomness, not self-determination. In contrast, rather than limiting the self, the network view sees the multiple identities as resources for a self that’s actively setting its own direction and making choices for itself. Lindsey might prioritise career over parenthood for a period of time, she might commit to finishing her novel, setting philosophical work aside. Nothing prevents a network self from freely choosing a direction or forging new ones. Self-determination expresses the self. It’s rooted in self-understanding.
The network self view envisions an enriched self and multiple possibilities for self-determination, rather than prescribing a particular way that selves ought to be. That doesn’t mean that a self doesn’t have responsibilities to and for others. Some responsibilities might be inherited, though many are chosen. That’s part of the fabric of living with others. Selves are not only ‘networked’, that is, in social networks, but are themselves networks. By embracing the complexity and fluidity of selves, we come to a better understanding of who we are and how to live well with ourselves and with one another.
To read more about the self, visit Psyche, a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophical understanding and the arts.
[Oscar Wilde] wanted to place art above all else. But the grandeur of art is not to rise above all. On the contrary, it must blend with all. Wilde finally understood this, thanks to sorrow. But it is the culpability of this era that it always needed sorrow and constraint in order to catch a glimpse of a truth also found in happiness, when the heart is worthy. Servile century.
