Idiocy

Desmond offers an intriguing argument for a unified self, for an “idiotic” self in the original sense of idiotes , what is one’s own. There is an irreducible “mineness” to all our actions and experience, a mineness that cannot be reduced to categories or analyzed in terms of outside forces: “The human self – and this is felt singularly by each singular self – has an ineluctable sense of itself as itself and itself alone. This is I. We have this taste of self, smell of self, aura of self that each singular lives alone for itself, and lives inwardly. It is the inner taste of itself of inwardness itself.” This is not a static unity but a “unity in process, in incarnate becoming, in ageing.” There is a “radical singularity that is consistent with agapeic creation as given for the otherness of the creature.” It is an “elemental self” that “is itself and nothing but itself.”

His discussion of weariness is most provocative:

“One is weary beyond all tirednes. One wants to lose consciousness of self, but one cannot. One seeks sleep but repose evades one. One is gall to oneself, riveted to oneself as this tired and fashed self. One is insipid to oneself and inescapable, though one seeks reprieve in sleep. One is fastened to self as the unpalatable staleness of oneself, and this self-fastening is felt as an insupportable burden. But there is no deliverance. One can get up and try to lose oneself in activity, in objectification and objects. All the advice is to do just that, and hence for a time to forget oneself. But now the distraction fails, and one is again an infinitely weary energy, a listlessness of being that is indissolubly bound to itself and will not sink into the sweet oblivion of sleep. Each singular self is thus indissolubly bound to itself and know itself as its own self, even though it would escape itself into sleep or into doing or into distraction, even into violence.”

Every self is a “this” and thus is “lived from within as mine and nothing but mine.” There is “an idiocy, an intimacy of being that is on the other side of determinacy, and that to be itself must remain on that other side.”

On the other hand, “within the elemental mineness, there is not the pure self-transparency of either the Cartesian or the transcendental ego. There is an elusive, shifting, floating, nonobjectifiable mineness. This mineness, as thus beyond determinate encapsulation, is also not mine, in the sense of a determinate possession that I can simply claim. What is most my own is not my own.” Even while the elemental self is “idiotically mine and mine alone,” precisely in that idiocy, it is “never possessed even while my own, it is never owned by me.” The self’s self-unity is “not that of a closed whole, becuase its own internal wholeness opens out, within its own wholeness.” No finite explanations and reductions can capture the self, and thus “there is a certain infinite promise at work here that transcends all logics of determinacy.” A logic of determinacy is necessary, but “an exclusive logic of determinacy cannot deal with the promise as inexhaustible.”