Our Inevitable Selves
Stephen Mulhall, The Self and its Shadows: A Book of Essays on Individuality as Negation in Philosophy and the Arts
Oxford University Press, 352pp, £35.00, ISBN 9780199661787
reviewed by Josh Dickson
Stephen Mulhall’s The Self and its Shadows continues the intellectual project that formed in Mulhall’s previous monograph, The Wounded Animal: JM Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality (Princeton University Press, 2008). In that study, Mulhall is primarily concerned with elucidating JM Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello (Secker and Warburg, 2003) and discussing its eponymous protagonist, a fictional novelist who spends the entirety of the text giving lectures on issues of moral and aesthetic philosophy. As Mulhall explains, The Wounded Animal was a ‘study of the ways in which philosophy and literature might learn something from each other’ and among his intentions in the current book is to ‘add … a further layer of complexity to this portrait of Elizabeth Costello’.
Of course, Mulhall’s new book is more than just this: here he brings a further layer of complexity to his own palette. A key argument in The Wounded Animal was that philosophy often fails to deal with the sense of absolute heterogeneity (the fact that each individual’s conception of an idea may be different from any other’s) present in works of literature, though here Mulhall was working primarily as a philosopher, rather than a literary critic. As the critic Michael Sayeau said in his review: ‘For all the persuasiveness of Mulhall’s argument about philosophy’s resistance to the lessons of fiction, The Wounded Animal nevertheless repeats some of the very problems that its author is out to correct.’
The Self and its Shadows, however, is a clear attempt to correct this failing, as Mulhall sheds his skin and attempts to explore a drastically transformed way of doing philosophy: instead of traditional philosophical parlance, we have the philosopher assuming the roles of literary critic, creative writer and intellectual-historian. In doing this, Mulhall doesn’t seek to transform the work of philosophy into a mish-mash of all these things: it is to show how philosophy is always these things.
The book’s central argument offers the prospective that selfhood or personal identity are always somewhat of an illusion; we are, as Mulhall argues via Nietzsche, always in the process of gathering information that amounts to a picture of ourselves rather than ever possessing the final portrait. This conception of the self, always in flux, is the true identity — that is, a non-identity. Unlike The Wounded Animal, the text’s form is considered integral in an attempt to not just argue but perform this philosophical premise. So, just as Mulhall argues that a precise conception of selfhood is an uncertain one, the figure of the philosopher in this book is a hesitant and elastic one. It is as much an exploration of his own sense of self as it is ‘the self’ in an abstract sense.
That said, it would be a mistake to consider this a solipsistic exercise, since, as Mulhall makes clear in his introduction, this conception of the self is open to all things considered ontologically stable or self-enclosed. Accordingly, philosophy is such a ‘self’ and must be considered as being in conversation, and therefore collaboration, with other disciplines in the search for understanding reality. This is an important point to emphasise and it is what I think saves the book at the outset from the potential pitfall that Mulhall’s position on the absolute singularity of ideas could encourage: namely that, if abstract inter-subjective understandings of concepts – the kind that one might think a society needs to survive – are corrupted by the realisation that everyone is reading from slightly different hymn-sheets, then we are potentially left with an irreconcilable tear in social relations. Instead, Mulhall’s previous instance on the self (an intellectual shadow that still, I think, looms over this study) as being unavoidable actually turns into something more rousing: a call for us to identify that we are communally bound up with each other, and that further understanding can only come from a recognition of this fact.
The Self and its Shadows therefore reaches out to cover ‘representatives of the arts […] as well as […] certain philosophical texts and traditions not always regarded as entirely worthy participants in the conversations of Anglo-American philosophy departments’ – an inclusive gesture that allows the study to take in Wittgenstein and Wagner, James Bond and Jason Bourne, Descartes and Kingsley Amis, Kafka and Brad Pitt, David Foster Wallace and Moses. Fictional characters are introduced and embedded in certain parts of the text, and then re-emerge in others; philosophers’ arguments used explicitly in some places and implicitly in others.
Though the book is commendably challenging, I felt at times a similar reaction to reading some of Jacques Derrida’s most highly charged pieces: no matter how much preliminary explanation the author gives about the texts to which he is referring, it can sometimes feel like the reader will never be as involved as the author is, and a form of distance and disinterest creeps in. This isn’t necessarily something for which the author can be criticised however — it is simply an indication that we are dealing with a very challenging and original text that is the work of an extremely knowledgeable and significant thinker. The Self and its Shadows strongly presents its content as the expression of the singular result of combining both the author’s personal attachments and intuitions with broader areas of discussion. The result is a text that is admirably crammed with diverse voices, nuanced and specific insights as well as creative connections. It breaks genuinely new ground, imaginatively bringing sophisticated analyses of identity to bear on figures of popular culture in an authentic and convincing manner.
Of course, Mulhall’s new book is more than just this: here he brings a further layer of complexity to his own palette. A key argument in The Wounded Animal was that philosophy often fails to deal with the sense of absolute heterogeneity (the fact that each individual’s conception of an idea may be different from any other’s) present in works of literature, though here Mulhall was working primarily as a philosopher, rather than a literary critic. As the critic Michael Sayeau said in his review: ‘For all the persuasiveness of Mulhall’s argument about philosophy’s resistance to the lessons of fiction, The Wounded Animal nevertheless repeats some of the very problems that its author is out to correct.’
The Self and its Shadows, however, is a clear attempt to correct this failing, as Mulhall sheds his skin and attempts to explore a drastically transformed way of doing philosophy: instead of traditional philosophical parlance, we have the philosopher assuming the roles of literary critic, creative writer and intellectual-historian. In doing this, Mulhall doesn’t seek to transform the work of philosophy into a mish-mash of all these things: it is to show how philosophy is always these things.
The book’s central argument offers the prospective that selfhood or personal identity are always somewhat of an illusion; we are, as Mulhall argues via Nietzsche, always in the process of gathering information that amounts to a picture of ourselves rather than ever possessing the final portrait. This conception of the self, always in flux, is the true identity — that is, a non-identity. Unlike The Wounded Animal, the text’s form is considered integral in an attempt to not just argue but perform this philosophical premise. So, just as Mulhall argues that a precise conception of selfhood is an uncertain one, the figure of the philosopher in this book is a hesitant and elastic one. It is as much an exploration of his own sense of self as it is ‘the self’ in an abstract sense.
That said, it would be a mistake to consider this a solipsistic exercise, since, as Mulhall makes clear in his introduction, this conception of the self is open to all things considered ontologically stable or self-enclosed. Accordingly, philosophy is such a ‘self’ and must be considered as being in conversation, and therefore collaboration, with other disciplines in the search for understanding reality. This is an important point to emphasise and it is what I think saves the book at the outset from the potential pitfall that Mulhall’s position on the absolute singularity of ideas could encourage: namely that, if abstract inter-subjective understandings of concepts – the kind that one might think a society needs to survive – are corrupted by the realisation that everyone is reading from slightly different hymn-sheets, then we are potentially left with an irreconcilable tear in social relations. Instead, Mulhall’s previous instance on the self (an intellectual shadow that still, I think, looms over this study) as being unavoidable actually turns into something more rousing: a call for us to identify that we are communally bound up with each other, and that further understanding can only come from a recognition of this fact.
The Self and its Shadows therefore reaches out to cover ‘representatives of the arts […] as well as […] certain philosophical texts and traditions not always regarded as entirely worthy participants in the conversations of Anglo-American philosophy departments’ – an inclusive gesture that allows the study to take in Wittgenstein and Wagner, James Bond and Jason Bourne, Descartes and Kingsley Amis, Kafka and Brad Pitt, David Foster Wallace and Moses. Fictional characters are introduced and embedded in certain parts of the text, and then re-emerge in others; philosophers’ arguments used explicitly in some places and implicitly in others.
Though the book is commendably challenging, I felt at times a similar reaction to reading some of Jacques Derrida’s most highly charged pieces: no matter how much preliminary explanation the author gives about the texts to which he is referring, it can sometimes feel like the reader will never be as involved as the author is, and a form of distance and disinterest creeps in. This isn’t necessarily something for which the author can be criticised however — it is simply an indication that we are dealing with a very challenging and original text that is the work of an extremely knowledgeable and significant thinker. The Self and its Shadows strongly presents its content as the expression of the singular result of combining both the author’s personal attachments and intuitions with broader areas of discussion. The result is a text that is admirably crammed with diverse voices, nuanced and specific insights as well as creative connections. It breaks genuinely new ground, imaginatively bringing sophisticated analyses of identity to bear on figures of popular culture in an authentic and convincing manner.