Two Contradictory Pictures of the Self

Think for yourself and the city of Dis. It almost seems, with horrible irony, a cliché: the fully mature human being uses their own understanding to judge how to act, to live, to be. As Kant meant it, that means: accept nothing on authority; reject the authority of parents, teachers, religions, cultures, traditions, the community, the poets, the philosophers, the great books – everything is under suspicion for the mature, enlightened one who uses their own understanding, who needs good reasons, objective evidence, the best ‘rational’ (objective evidence-based) explanation, all subject to the immutable thinking-grammar of logic. If that is what is meant, then I would question whether it is compatible with maturity. It seems more the attitude of the teenager in rebellion.

      In the sense that Kant understood his slogan, I think the perfect image for it is to be found in Dante of all places – in his depiction of the city of Dis and its inhabitants (from the Inferno). Dis as a prefix means 'apart,' 'asunder,' 'away'; it has a privative or reversing force; it can be contraction of 'dives' meaning wealth; it can also refer to a Roman God of the underworld - all these meanings are in play for Dante. 

     Virgil and Dante have passed through the upper circles of Hell where the sinfulness of the various carnal sins is graphically pictured – carnal sins being the terrible addiction to things that are in themselves good (sex, food, wealth), the addiction destroying intellect and love in the person. (Intellect recognizes the true value of these goods and orders one’s life accordingly. Addiction, excessive love for food, sex, or wealth, destroys one’s capacity to love oneself genuinely, to love others, the Creation, and God.) 

      In Dis they confront sinners of a radically different nature: those who actively reject God and any idea of the Good external to their will. All Good, which is to say, all reality for these sinners must be conferred by a private/subjective act of will; nothing is intrinsically good or real. To Virgil’s astonishment, Dis is not a prison for these souls, but a fortress. All their energy is spent keeping God (love, reality, goodness) out! (I learned this from Dreyfus and Kelly, All Things Shining.) 

      Why? Milton’s Satan gives the answer: he “would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven”; “A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.” In other words, Satan will not conform himself to and love any Good, any reality, he did not create himself. But like us, angels cannot create value. The souls are damned precisely because they define themselves as “autonomous,” self-contained. They are utterly deluded in that they see themselves as little absolutes, as gods. 

   We can make a picture of our selves as autonomous, as the source of all value and reality, and thus define ourselves, others, nature, God according to what fits in with our self-image; or we can acknowledge reality and goodness are objective realities not reducible to our self-conceptions (wishes, desires, etc.) and live so as to conform our finite and fallible minds and hearts to reality, to goodness - as parents do everyday when they love and care for their children; as a gardener does when they love and care for their garden; as the language student does when they strive to understand the rules of use of the foreign language; as nurses and doctors do when they assess their patients needs; as the astronomer does when they try to solve the mysteries of the physical universe; as the philosopher does when they contemplate reality as a whole and our place in it; as the theologian does when they attempt to imagine the ungraspable essence of the Divine. In all these cases, from gardener to theologian, being a good one comes from patiently and lovingly attending to a reality that is not reducible to the self; failing is mostly caused by placing one's own self and its wishes over this patient attention to reality. In a way, the main failure is a failure of love. 

You can't be both autonomous and have the humility necessary to search for truth or to do your duty. Don't go to any autonomous doctors. Do let an autonomous teacher teach you. 

   Even the decision what to do with your life is limited by the reality of your self. I was somehow meant to teach. I was not meant to be an engineer. Teaching is a recognition of my own reality, my limits, my gifts (such as they are), my loves. And I did not create myself. The Enlightenment idea that we define our own life purposes, without qualification, makes no sense to me. 

      By making themselves into little absolutes, the autonomous exclude themselves from genuine love, settling for a narcissism that can only be counterfeit. They exclude themselves in their lack of humility from real goodness, from reality itself so as to be the final judge: this for Dante (and I think for all the monotheistic religions) is sin at its most radical. For Kant, and then in a remarkably similar spirit despite the radical differences between them, for Nietzsche, their embrace of autonomy is a function of their rejection of God, in Kant’s case at least as conceived by the great religions.

      If someone asked me whether I affirmed the value of ‘thinking for yourself’ – I would have to say: well, depends on what you mean by that. If you mean conforming your mind and heart to reality, to the truly good, then yes; if you mean what Milton’s Satan meant, then no. And sorting that distinction out is perhaps the first act of thinking for yourself.

Afterthought

Notice how the answers to questions like "What is real?" or "What is good?" or "What can I know?" depend on answers to questions like "What am I?" or "Who am I?" If I reserve to myself the right to determine what is real and good, then I have just made my self or my will to be the only thing that is good per se. I have just taken away from nature or community any intrinsic value. If my self-determination requires me as a farmer to get rich so that others won't look down on me, then I can transform the fertile, sustainable, beautiful farm that I inherited into an agrobusiness nightmare: the farm I inherited, the land, makes no claim on me, if my ego-centered suffering over how other perceive me is the standard for the real and the good. (Of course, that stupid perception and the failure to honor good farming - i.e. to honor what is good - are also responsible for the destruction of the farm.) The point is to recognize the reality of what is other to myself, to acknowledge the claims it makes on me (children!), is already to acknowledge limits to my will, things not are resistant to my will as objects of care. But your self-image, world-image, community-image, God-image (if any) - and much more - are all intertwined.