Kieran Setiya’s substack post ‘Echo and Narcissus’,
which describes a process of thought familiar to many, triggered a memory of a passage in my book Mental Reality: [1]
—I turned a page in a psychology textbook and saw a black-and-white photograph of a crowd of people crushed against a wall in a soccer stadium. Too fast for subvocalized words my mind flashed with (1) the thought ‘I’m glad it wasn’t me’. For a moment this thought was completely self-concerned. At the same time, (2) a grasp of the experience of the trapped people became present, which produced (3) a strong feeling of sympathy. Concurrently, there was (4) an impulse of contrition about the occurrence of (1). This blurred with (3) and was simultaneously genuine and apotropaic.Almost immediately (3) and (4) were jumped on, and (5) accused of insincerity—of being less than immediately spontaneous and therefore under suspicion of having been dutifully produced in the wake of (1). Again almost immediately—this was a familiar routine—there was (6) the thought that (3) and (4) were not really insincere at all and that (1) occurred in thought in spite of (3), the more natural response. During this process there had also come to be present (7) the idea that I somehow make myself have (or: some agency in me makes me have) thoughts like (1) as a kind of regulatory dare to myself, and in order to keep alert in me a suspicion of myself that I think I ought to have—a suspicion of those of my thoughts that look like naturally good thoughts. And then, immediately after (1) to (7), there was (8) a rapid [p. 19] higher-order thought to the effect that the whole previous process of thought involved impulses of automatic, involuntary superstition. There was superstition not only in (4), insofar as it was an apotropaic reflex, but also in (1), because (1) wasn’t just the “fat relentless ego’s” natural self-expression.[2] It was also (although it took place in an atheist) (9) a God-daring or Nemesis-daring thought-impulse. That was its main source, even if the fat ego and the business recorded in (7) were also active. Moreover (1) was partly driven by the impulse ‘Let me see if I can’t think such a thought’. (Children may be particularly subject to this sort of impulse.)
(4) was partly superstitious, because it was an apology before conscience, superego, or God, as if some placation were needed to avert possible retribution. And (5) jumped on (4) immediately, but it too was classified, in the complex (8)-thought, as a further attempt at superstitious placation insofar as it was an attempt to achieve genuine sincerity by confessing to an earlier insincerity. The content of the impulse behind (5) was seen to be roughly (10): ‘I have human faults, but as long as I try to be truthful, I cannot ultimately be condemned’. Like everything else recorded here, the thought that (10) underlay (5) was in some sense present to consciousness.
(8) jostled or ran concurrently with a further routine thought, (11) the thought that (5) was a step in a standard regress, in which each stage condemns its predecessor for insincerity and claims to be the terminus of true sincerity. The regress ran on for a couple of stages through (5) and (6), but after that the mind couldn’t be bothered, familiar as it was with the fact that it is difficult to keep track in such disputatious regresses, partly because they confuse and become part of the thing being disputed and can never be resoundingly stopped. As the regress started and died, (12) I was aware of the indefatigable logic driving the process by which every attempt to think ‘This thought, at least and at last, is truly sincere’ is already suspect simply by reason of its explicit reference to the notion of sincerity.
The (12)-awareness, familiar from many past occasions, didn’t occur spelled out in thought. Nevertheless, its content was in some way genuinely and fully apprehended by me. It flashed on the mind as a familiar—wearisome—schema. And with it came its usual accompaniment, itself a mere schema too fast for words, whose content, to spell [p. 20] it out a bit, was (13) that although this automatic activity is indeed wearisome, experience shows that the realization that this is so is no remedy and does not stop its happening. But there was also, as always, a little accompanying shape of hope shadowing the schema, a hope (14) that the ability to be completely aware of the set pattern of what was going on might provide a way out of it. But schema (13) had already encompassed its by-product, the hope-shape, and (15) it had already reckoned it up and ruled it out.
It’s worth noticing that (1) was not just apprehended as a content that occurred. It was also thought of as some sort of doing on the part of some impish or morally anxious agency of the mind. Also alive in the mind was the issue of whether (1) was intentionally provocative (see (9)) or whether it was some sort of involuntary reflex—as when someone laughs in a way that seems unkind but is in fact just the product of nervousness. (1) also pulled in a fleeting awareness of the immediate surroundings and a new appreciation of their safety: not the soccer stadium, but bookshelves, armchair, carpet, a puddle of light on floorboards. This awareness was also part of the content of the four seconds of thought. And the whole sequence occurred in a certain moral mood. Such moods set a general context for thought and are themselves part of the overall character, and hence content, of experience. In another context I might have had little moral or emotional reaction to the picture, or I might have reacted to the same picture with distress uncomplicated by self-suspicion.
This, then, was some of the content of about four seconds of thought. Four seconds may seem to be too short a time, but it may have been less than four seconds. The speed may be partly explained by the fact that this general course of thought was well worn. The speed is, in any case, of little importance. It is only part of what may interest us in this illustration of one aspect of the nature of mental reality.
This kind of thing happens to me less now (is this neural or moral degeneration? (note November 2023: I published Mental Reality when I was 42), but I suspect that experiences like this are quite common, especially among the young. Seeing a man with terrible acne at Paddington Station, I had a strong desire to take over his acne so that he could experience normal-faced anonymity in the crowd. This immediately triggered the process of self-suspicion, the regress of doubting the sincerity of the impulse, doubting the doubt, doubting the doubting of [p. 21] the doubt, this running on to the fourth or fifth stage. Concurrently there came the thought that it was easy for me to have this desire, since I knew it wasn’t really possible, and on the other side, the thought that there was no obvious reason why I shouldn’t be just as likely to have spontaneous admirable thoughts as spontaneous egotistical ones, given human nature. Even as it occurred, this triggered the thought that there might be a special and surreptitious form of moral self-indulgence or spiritual pride in automatic self-denigration, and this, in turn, the thought that the last thought might itself be too easy.
Spelling out this content, it seems clear to me that I am doing just that: writing out content that was present to mind, not elaborating on it or adding to it. If this is some sort of delusion, then the existence of the delusion is itself an interesting phenomenon. But conversation often provides examples of the presence to mind of lightning, compacted content. As the other person is talking, there is a small, silent, pointlike explosion, and one knows one’s answer is there—although it may take some time to speak it out, although the words and syntax in which one does so are not already fixed in the explosion but are to a considerable extent chosen as one goes along, and although people characteristically expand on their initial thought in the act of vocalization. (William James presumably has a more general phenomenon in mind when he estimates that “a good third of our psychic life consists in . . . rapid premonitory perspective views of schemes of thought not yet articulate.”)[3]
This, then, illustrates one of the ways in which experience, and hence mental reality, can be complex. I think it is useful to be reminded of this sort of thing when one does philosophy of mind.
[1] Galen Strawson (1994) Mental Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 18–21.
[2] Iris Murdoch, (1970) The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul) p. 52.
[3] William James (1890/1950) The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols, (New York: Dover) p. 1.253.
Please find a unique Illuminated Understanding of both Narcissus and the conventional mind too via these references:
http://www.beezone.com/narcissus.html
http://www.beezone.com/beezones-main-stack/mind_as_separate_self.html
http://spiralledlight.wordpress.com