Nietzsche, in his Genealogy of Morals,
showed that rather than being eternal and unchanging, our moral sense has been
shaped by an historical development in which successive ages forget or no
longer understand what went before. Perhaps something similar has gone on with
the development of ‘inwardness’ in human beings. Over the course of long
centuries human subjectivity has been hollowed out from a life that,
originally, had little need or means for introspection and self-examination.
Human beings have always had thoughts and
feeling of their own. They knew the difference between themselves and others,
their tribe and others. These feelings were expressed in cooperation, in fight
and flight, in anger and fear. Our ancestors also felt lust and love, hope and
sadness, mirth and hatred. These were ‘inner’ experiences, not in the sense of
being logically private, but contingently private and ‘one’s own’ in that way.
To develop a sense of inwardness, the first
thing we need is to be able to fix thoughts as ‘ours.’ At the best guess, this
power arose with the development of language between fifty or sixty thousand
years ago. Use of signs and symbols allowed people to store information in
their heads. It enabled a new kind of memory, a long memory, and with it long
expectations. Words, as Plato says, go into the soul, that mix of body, mind,
heart, ego and spirit and give them form and identity, an ‘inner’ self to hang
on to in a shifting world of appearances.
The second factor is the capacity to lie
that language gives us. Where Nietzsche
speaks of the shift from ‘master morality’ to ‘slave morality,’ we can speak of
a move from bluff extroversion to a more refined inwardness. Lying does not
come naturally to the master. Normally,
what you see in the master is someone who has no reason to dissemble. The
slave, on the contrary, has every reason to lie. The master comes across as a
bit dull and prickly about his ‘honor.’
This is funny. Ancient comedy is full of jokes at the
expense of masters, who are continually outwitted by their slaves. The slaves
become clever in their servitude. They have deepened their reflections by
realizing that they are not what their masters think they are. However, to survive, the slaves are aware
that they must play along with the master’s view of things in order not to be
punished. They have to lie in their very
being, and that act carves out ever deeper terrains of inwardness. At the same
time, our idea of the ‘self’ now enlarges and becomes deep and rich with
intimations of ‘passionate self-actualization.’ Finally, they become the
masters themselves, but this time with a more developed inwardness.
Plato speaks of the “Turning of the Soul,”
where youthful preoccupations with the world are turned inward in moral
reflection. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” as Socrates tells us. We
ought to prefer reflective discontent to ignorant bliss. This moral reflection
was alien to the ancient Athenian world, so alien that Socrates was put to
death, in part because he ‘turned the world upside-down.’ He seemed to overthrow the poets and the
conventional morality of the Greeks. He seemed positively impious in the way he
undermined the verities of the age in which he lived.
Socrates asks us to examine our lives to
discover if they are worthy of human beings. As we explore this inner world, we
find out more and more about it. The
very act of looking within creates an inner landscape to explore.
Simultaneously, we discover and elaborate a language to describe and suggest an
inner life.
After Socrates’ moral turn within, Western
culture experiences the Christian religious turn within. The Christian religion
seems almost purposively designed to create deeper and deeper inwardness, an
increasingly complex idea of subjectivity and self or soul. This second stage can be summed up in the
notion of ‘confession of sins.’ In order
to confess your sins, you have to know what you have done that is wrong or
sinful. You have to watch yourself, to have a video running, as it were, of
everything you are doing in order to know where you have gone wrong. Confessing
sins of the flesh is especially good at carving out inwardness. We must learn
to inspect our emotions and desires in order to judge their sinfulness.
Now we are used to the idea that everyone
has an inner life. However, this inner life is a bequest to us from past
generations. Our progenitors mined the psyche under the influence of poetry,
religion, history and philosophy. Many miners got killed or injured to give us
an inner space as wide as the whole universe.
In fact, it is finally hard to tell where a fully developed inwardness
ends and the human world begins.
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