I am indebted to the current edition of the New Oxford Review for an incisive Chesterton quotation of which I had been unaware. (Is “incisive” here a redundant word, since Chesterton quotations are almost by definition incisive?) It is appended to a perceptive review article by Terry Scambray, “Can the Human Mind Explain Itself?”, and states, “One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.” The book being reviewed is Thomas Nagel’s Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Concept of Nature is Most Certainly False (Oxford University Press, 2012), which Scambray welcomes with two cheers.
Coincidentally, when I entered my email account to send off this StAR contribution, in its initial form, what should I see in my inbox but a promotional heading for an article which has just gone onto the New Scientist site, “The Great Illusion of the Self”. This, we are told, shows that “Your mind’s greatest trick is convincing you that you’re real.” Although I have not yet read the article – although read it I certainly shall – the blurb reminds me of the famous riposte (alas, I know not by whom) to the view that pain is an illusion.
There once was a fellow from Deal
Who said, “Although pain isn’t real,
If I sit on a pin, and it punctures my skin,
I dislike what I fancy I feel.
That in its turn brings to mind another limerick – Monsignor Ronald Knox’s classic tilt against solipsism, the philosophical position that one cannot be certain of the existence of anything outside one’s own mind. It runs roughly as follows.
There once was a fellow said, “God
Must find it exceedingly odd
When he notes that this tree
Simply ceases to be
When there’s no-one about in the quad!”
I say it runs “roughly” thus because I have actually altered the wording slightly from personal taste (naughty me!). A google search will reveal the unedited original in a blink.
Wish I could say this is weird, Colin, this “illusion” of the self. But thirty-plus years ago, the “myth of the self” was already a mere convention literary critics were tossing around, esp., by the way, the Spenserian bunch (They’re *really* weird.) But it seems that science is always way behind art; half a century or so isn’t much, compared to the way science lags behind in some of their other “discoveries.”
The self is a psychological construct, not an “illusion” just because it isn’t material. But bless them, they do the best they can with those blinders they wear.
Actually, the self was a literary archetype even before it was a psychological construct. Way before Jung did his thing (where do you think he got his data?)
Now, the soul is quite another thing…..
Hadn’t yet opened this issue of NOR, but now I will. Thank you for the tip!