You are what you think | Basic Research On the Self

What follows was originally published in 1981. (You can tell from the sentence “Would it be worth getting an answering machine?” Yes, folks, not only was there a time when not everyone had a cell phone. People actually used to talk to each other on the phone rather than send a text message.) See the posts Something I wrote a long time ago and More thoughts from the past.

For the most part, the events of everyday life appear intelligible. We’re able to deal with almost any situation, no matter how inconvenient or confusing it may seem at first, in a manner that’s sufficient to satisfy our immediate interests. But since socially constructed worlds are inherently unstable, and our knowledge of everyday reality is essentially inadequate, anxiety is inevitable. We don’t experience anxiety as a problem of knowledge, however, but as a problem of who we are. We’re concerned about “me.” What will happen to me? What does this mean to me? What am I doing here? What will I do next?

“Who we are” is not only a matter of the externally obvious job, marriage, address, appearance, and acts of charity, but of the unseen life of the mind. What we think and feel depends on where the mind spends its time, as in “his mind is either in the clouds or the gutter” or “I can’t get it out of my mind.” We are what we think, that is, we are what occupies, invades, crosses, and rests on our minds in the course of a day.

Thinking originates in the events and activities of everyday life. Whatever fills your time will necessarily fill your mind. It follows that if you want to effect a change in yourself, the place to begin is the everyday environment that sets off the thoughts that preoccupy you day after day. You could start with what is obviously under your control, adding or subtracting routines, individuals, exercise, music, reading material, etc. If this isn’t enough, you can move on to the things that you thought were necessary and permanent but that in fact are also subject to change in the course of a lifetime: what you eat, your job, where you live, your sex, or the way you relate to friends, parents, and children.

For most people, it is social interactions that are of prime importance in determining what will be on their minds, what they think of the world, and how they feel about themselves. A day is a succession of populated situations that create the human environment. There are, first of all, the important people in our lives—those we live with, seek out, avoid, and can’t avoid. We also move among those unseen individuals we presume are handling our mail, driving bread to the local store, and running the computers that send us bills. We don’t notice them until they go on strike. There are the people who figure in our lives as individuals but whom we never meet face-to-face: Marlon Brando, the president, Barbara Walters. Then there are those predecessors who still exert an influence on our opinions and actions: Machiavelli, Plato, Rimbaud. Both the people we know personally and those we only know about stand out against a background of nonindividuals who are even more anonymous than the milkman: the latest victim on the local news, the other members of the television audience, the “public” of public opinion polls—the “generalized other” (1) we compare ourselves to when appraising who we are.

A change in any of the personnel who fill daily life effects a change in your thoughts and thus in yourself. The temporary absence of someone who is an integral part of your everyday activities, or the two-week visit of a brother- or sister-in-law, is a time when you don’t feel like your usual self. Your mental scenery is dramatically different. It is inevitable that you will be altered by the opinions, actions, and mere presence of other people. Daily encounters have a way of making an impression that sticks in the mind. It takes a while to recover from time spent with domineering, paranoid or timid individuals. The ideas and feelings set in motion by an argument, or an afternoon tryst, do not disappear as soon as the other person is out of sight. They go into the margins of awareness, the outskirts of the mind’s attention, where they persist until their emotional significance is exhausted or neutralized.

Suburbs of Awareness

In order to map the peripheral regions of the mind—those areas we never focus on directly—we first have to outline the region of consciousness that is center stage.(2)

There are no isolated objects in the mind. A thought—who was that calling while I was in the shower—is always located in a dense mixture of other, related thoughts: If it was important they’ll call again. It was probably another wrong number. Would it be worth getting an answering machine? As in a magnetic field, the contents of consciousness are organized along lines of force that converge on a central theme, the mind’s magnetic core. A fringe of related thoughts surrounds the central core as does an arrangement of iron filings. They create a context, a frame of reference, that gives the theme its particular meaning. As trains of thought move from station to station, the contextual surroundings continuously shift and regroup.

The core and its context do not exhaust the contents of the mind at any given moment. There are also the suburbs of awareness: everything else that is on your mind but not related to the center of attention. This is the margin of consciousness. We are always aware of our immediate environment: the interior of a room, sunlight, the sound of rain, the feel of a chair. We do not turn off our perceptions when the mind retreats to its interior thoughts. If you’re reading a newspaper, your surroundings recede to the margin and remain unobtrusive. When the doorbell rings, you return to the paramount reality—the real world. When your attention is called to a pain in the chest, the body—which you are always potentially aware of—moves from the margin to the center of attention. Similarly, we are always implicitly aware of our “self,” of our own self-consciousness. When a scene in a movie reminds you of your own life, your thoughts shift from the portrayed situation to your self. These three regions—outside world, body, and self—are always present in the margin, but as soon as we look at them directly they gravitate to the center of consciousness.

When you stop doing one thing and take up another—when you stop reading and go to the kitchen—your interrupted thoughts do not disappear abruptly. They fade out into the margin, only to fade back in later when they find an opening. This is what makes consciousness seem continuous. If you’ve just spent the afternoon dealing with a personal problem, and at six o’clock you go out to dinner with friends who are having a casual conversation about current events, there will be a period of transition, not a clean break. Your margin will be full of ideas that keep washing to the center, grabbing your attention whenever there’s a lull in the conversation. The margin is where potential interruptions are stored. It is the source of intruding thoughts that disrupt concentration.

Editions of You

It is through the selection and organization of the things that pass through our minds—what we emphasize, downplay, ignore, dismiss—that we create our own environment, our own personality and identity, our individuality. A great many things may get into the margin but it’s what dominates center stage that reflects who we are. The ingredients that go into a self-image come from the world we encounter. But our formulas for putting these ingredients together are not original prescriptions we’ve written by ourselves. “Identity” is a full-blown idea we encounter readymade in the world. Religion and psychology, for example, provide methods for designating models of how to be, what to think of ourselves, how to spend our time, how to live a life. If your mind is drawn to considering a religious point of view, if you pray often, if you reflect on yourself in relation to a god, then you have adopted a basic religious self. If you spend all your time thinking about your sex life—Was I good enough? Can I get him interested? How do I look? How long has it been? Is this what other people do?—then you have been influenced by a prevailing sexual preoccupation. If you concentrate exclusively on your feelings—Why am I unhappy or depressed? What’s wrong with me? Why doesn’t she like me?—then you have fallen victim to psychological preoccupation, encouraged by a climate that reinforces a conception of the individual as little more than a set of emotional, sentimental, and romantic variables.

We incorporate standard models of identity from our social environment, emulating some people (older brothers, stars, the courageous), disdaining others (ingrates, fanatics, the naive). We can sew these human images together in a unique and original way and create our own version of what a personality can be. Most of us will simply adopt a combination of the common images available for mass consumption. When individuals are motivated by standard responses, presented with standard identities, the behavior of large numbers of people becomes highly predictable. We can be moved to buy products “used” by Robert Young or Brooke Shields, or to support a candidate endorsed by the Moral Majority. Of course no one thinks of himself as merely a carbon copy of traditional or “trendy” ideas. And it’s true that no one is an unalloyed stereotype. When we recombine diverse pieces of advice on how to look, think, act, and feel, we regard ourselves as original models. The illusion of individuality becomes another device for creating the mass mind. The object of rethinking your self-conception is first to identify the ideas that tell you who you are, and then to question where they come from.

Image source: JT’s Blog

Footnotes:

(1) A theory of the self as social product is described in G. H. Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society. The term “generalized other” is Mead’s.

(2) The organization of consciousness into theme, thematic field, and margin is presented in Aron Gurwitsch’s The Field of Consciousness. My use of the term “margin,” however, is not meant to conform to his definition. For Gurwitsch, the relation of relevance among objects of consciousness is a matter of material contents, whereas for Schutz relevance is a matter of importance and interest to the self.