 |
The Emperor’s New Self
|
|
As a small child, Hans Christian Anderson was taken to a parade where he saw Denmark’s King Frederick VI for the first time. Seeing through all the pomp and finery, the boy was astonished to discover that His Royal Highness was an ordinary human being. This small incident may have figured in a last-minute change Anderson made to “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the classic tale he published in 1837. As you will recall, the emperor in the story was snookered into parading about in his birthday suit by a pair of swindlers who presented him with clothes that were supposedly invisible to anyone who was unfit for office or otherwise a fool. Needless to say, neither the emperor nor any of his retainers was prepared to admit they could not see the outfit these supposed weavers had made for him from the finest silks. Everyone played along as the naked emperor marched off in procession under a splendid canopy, until a small child blurted out, “But he hasn’t got anything on!” This was Anderson’s last-minute alteration to “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” which he adapted from a 14th-century Spanish tale he had read in German translation. Its lasting popularity no doubt owes to the fact that we can all laugh at the pomposity of the high and mighty.
But the story becomes something else altogether once we realize that we are the emperor. Anderson’s tale is, among other things, a parable of the self. How is a self like an invisible suit of clothes? How is it not? In the story, everyone other than the swindlers thought the clothes actually existed, even if no one could see a single thread, much like the imaginary entity that answers to the name of “I”. By “imaginary entity,” I am not referring to the human being who fondly thinks of himself as “me,” any more than the clothes make the man in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” I may think that “I” am, but what exactly is there other than a thought expressed in the first-person singular? As the philosopher David Hume noted long ago, we would be hard-pressed to find an actual perceiver behind our perceptions of the world. Somewhere around the age of two that niggling little pronoun gets implanted in our impressionable young minds, and it becomes the axis mundi around which everything revolves from that moment onward. "Swifter than light the world converts itself into that thing you name," Emerson wrote in one of his journals. The world is instantly transformed into two realms: “I”, which exists “in here” and “not-I,” which is everything “out there.”
The self was memorably characterized as a “mirage that perceives itself” by cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter. Picture the emperor in Anderson’s story admiring his new clothes in a mirror, and you get the idea. Were they not woven from the finest silks, his clothing draped so lightly over his person you would think he had nothing on? Such magnificent colors and intricate patterns, and a perfect fit! And if he fleetingly suspected his outfit might be entirely threadbare, in the most literal sense of the term, did not his retainers assure him otherwise? Even after a small child blurted out the truth, the emperor was not prepared to call off his royal procession, with all this nobleman lined up behind him to carry is nonexistent train.
Unlike the emperor, who acquired his new clothes from a pair of swindlers, we each weave our own self -- although not entirely out of whole cloth. Just as the emperor relied on his retainers to tell him how magnificent his clothes looked on him, we depend on others to assist us in developing a sense of self. It begins in infancy with the active complicity of doting loved ones who do everything in their power to foster the illusion that the world indeed revolves around us. The sociologist Charles Horton Cooley coined the term “looking-glass self” to describe how we acquire a sense of self based on how we think others perceive us. They, in turn, derive their own sense of self from how they think we perceive them. In effect, we are all operating in a giant house of mirrors: it’s not “me” that I see when I think of myself but some mirror image of myself that I see in you.
Mirage or not, we must assume the self serves some evolutionary purpose, otherwise it would have long since disappeared from the gene pool. Then again, if it never existed in the first place, how could it, strictly speaking, disappear? As illusions go, I find the self to be an unusually persistent one, popping up every time I frame a thought in the first-person singular, much like a genie springing from a lamp. Since thoughts tend to arrive unbidden from wherever it is that thoughts come from, there appears to be little prospect of getting it to go away for good. There are various meditative practices that purport to address this problem. But I have found that my mind has a mind of its own. Since the self seems to have claimed permanent squatter’s rights, the best I can do is to learn to see through it.
|
