Inwardness, by Jonardon Ganeri (preamble)

j Christopher Hamilton, author of Middle Age

Inwardness Inwardness

“Ganeri’s book on inwardness does the most valuable thing a book can do: it gives pleasure and instruction at the same time. It raises numerous fascinating issues from a variety of perspectives and explores them with delicacy and tact, inviting the reader to further reflection and exploration.”

Ganeri

Where do we look when we look inward? In what sort of space does our inner life take place? Augustine said that to turn inward is to find oneself in a library of memories, while the Indian Buddhist tradition holds that we are selfilluminating beings casting light onto a world of shadows. And a disquieting set of dissenters has claimed that inwardness is merely an illusion—or, worse, a deceit.

Jonardon Ganeri explores philosophical reflections on the inner world from many of the world’s intellectual cultures. He ranges across an unexpected assortment of diverse thinkers: Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Chinese, and Western philosophy and literature from the Upani ads, Socrates, and Avicenna to Borges, Simone Weil, and Rashōmon. This book is a thoughtprovoking consideration of the value—or peril—of turning one’s gaze inward for all readers who have sought to map the geography of the mind.

Jonardon Ganeri

“In elegant prose and in an admirable cosmopolitan spirit, Inwardness explores philosophical reflections worldwide, ancient and modern, on interiority, how each of us creates an inner world.” j Stephen Phillips, author of Yoga, Karma, and Rebirth: A Brief History and Philosophy

Jonardon Ganeri is Bimal K. Matilal Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. His books include The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance (2012) and The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India, 1450–1700 CE (2011).

Cover design: Lisa Hamm

$19 . 95 ISBN: 978-0-231-19229-3

Columbia University Press/New York cup.columbia.edu PRIN TED IN THE U.S . A .

COLUMBIA

NO LIMITS

AN OUTSIDER’S GUIDE

Preamble

I

n Aśvaghoṣa’s Sanskrit play, Handsome Nanda, a Buddhist monk advises the eponymous hero that the careful examiners who know interiority are doctors for minds filled with passion and dark ignorance.1

Those rare individuals who have made a careful study of the contours of the inner world, this monk points out, are the ones best placed to offer therapeutic advice to others in distress. The Sanskrit word rendered here as “interiority” is adhyātma, an overseeing subjectivity. More commonly a different word is used: antarātman, the hidden “inner self” concealed in the depths of our being. In his magnificent historical survey of inwardness in Hinduism, Buddhism, and

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Christianity, The Truth Within, Gavin Flood notes that this term has its equivalent in the Latin interior homo.

Still other expressions, such as “remaining within” (antaḥsthita), and “facing inwards” (antarmukha), are in frequent use among thinkers from the Hindu schools, with the Buddhists preferring instead to talk of “the truth of the inner state of enlightenment” (pratyātmādhigama-­dharmaḥ).2 In ten short chapters, this book will lead you in a “careful examination” of that most virtual of all realities: one’s own inner life. The book kicks off by introducing you to the very idea of inwardness or interiority. This is not a matter of teaching anyone a new concept, such as the concept of a komainu, but, as the tenth century philosopher Avicenna put it, a question of “alerting” you to—­drawing your attention to—­ something you already know about but tend to overlook, caught up as you are in the distractions of the everyday. It is appropriate, therefore, to begin with Avicenna’s remarkable thought experiment, in which each of us is invited to imagine ourselves created all at once and flying through space, but with no sensory awareness of our body or external environment. Can it be, nevertheless, as Avicenna claims it is, that you are still aware of something, that you are even then present to yourself? A powerful metaphor in one of the most ancient of the Upaniṣads

Preamble

makes the same point: “Take, for example, a hidden treasure of gold. People who do not know the terrain, even when they pass right over it time and again, would not discover it. In exactly the same way, all these creatures, even though they go there every day, do not discover this [inner] world, for they are led astray by the false.”3 My aim is to understand—­and then to cast doubt upon—­ some of the metaphors that philosophers have drawn on, over the years, in their attempts to make sense of the phenomenon of inwardness. I begin with Aurelius Augustine’s picture of interiority as an inner space whose walls are filled with memories. It is sometimes said that Augustine invented the inner self, and, while I think that goes too far, what he did invent was a certain way of thinking about inwardness, that it is a journey into an inner sanctum. The dominant images here are of travel and of spaces that can be filled with mental objects.

In further exploring the issue, I employ a technique which I have found works very well: to juxtapose material presented in one medium with the same material presented in another as a way to triangulate medium and message. I contrast Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashōmon with the short story on which it is based, the Japanese short-­story writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s “In a Grove.” The point is to introduce

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readers to the effect named after the film, that a perspective partly constitutes a world. So, to “turn within” is not to withdraw from the world, but to engage in an act of world creation. Here the contrast is between the sparse, noncommittal first-­person minimalism of the original story, which upends and subverts the reader’s desire to work out the whodunit, and Kurosawa’s attempt to use the camera lens as the eye of God. Others, especially the Buddhists of India, depict the inward turn as the shining of a light, or a lamp that illuminates the things around it even as it illuminates itself. This isn’t a spatial metaphor but rather a metaphor of access and unveiling: inwardness is an act of revealing something hidden. The last metaphor I will explore puts pressure on the idea that the inner is a private place, and it does so by suggesting that if the aim is to see oneself then the way to do it, indeed the only way, is to look in a mirror. This move makes the subjective essentially intersubjective, because, as Socrates puts it in reply to Alcibiades, “You have observed, then, that the face of the person who looks in the eye of another person, appears visible to himself in the eye-­sight of the person opposite to him as in a mirror? And we therefore call this the pupil, because it exhibits the image of that person who looks in it.”4 The face of another is

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the mirror of oneself, and the face is, most literally, an interface between self and other. I turn to another work of fiction, Kobo Abe’s brilliant philosophical novel The Face of Another, to ponder the extent to which inwardness is constituted by such interchanges at the interface.

By this point in the book, you will have been “alerted” to an inwardness implicit in the human condition, and you will have a feel for the pros and cons of several of the leading metaphors that thinkers have drawn on to domesticate the idea. Whichever metaphor one chooses, the inner world has a certain structure, and I move on to look at that structure and what can be said of it. Two leading motifs guide these chapters. First, that the inner world is layered, like a Matryoshka doll or an onion. Now the challenge is to find some correlate to the notion of “peeling away” the outer layers to reveal what is hidden within—­a kernel, the kernel of truth within. No text has spoken more powerfully to this aspect of self-­discovery than the marvelous poetry of the earliest Upaniṣads, predating the Buddha by several centuries. Yet perhaps the truth about the structure of the within is that it is more like a hall of mirrors, and a better way to picture it would be through such phenomena as the mise en abyme, or the trope of the dream-­inside-­a-­ dream. There are powerful echoes of that line of

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thought in the famous parable of the butterfly in the Daoist Zhuangzi, a text I read in juxtaposition with Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Circular Ruins”; Borges’s short stories often supply deep explorations of the philosophy of inwardness in fiction.

The second motif is that to gain a handle on the idea that the phenomenology of the first-­ person position has a certain distinctive structure is to think that there are different parts in dialogue, coconstituting the self. I will show that this, indeed, is what is at stake in some of the most powerful deployments of the trope of the double in literature, referring to the Tamil writer Mauni and, again, to Borges, and drawing on insights into subjectivity offered by existentialist thinkers Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-­ Paul Sartre.

Novelists are only human in their desire to hide their inner selves. It was Italo Calvino who put the matter most strongly, saying that “the author, since he has no intention of telling about himself, decided to call the character ‘I’ as if to conceal him, not having to name him or describe him more than this stark pronoun.”5 In the final chapters of this book I look at how, through his use of pseudonyms, the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard sought to disguise himself; and at how, through his contrasting invention of the heteronym, the Portuguese poet Fernando

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Pessoa sought to simulate, and thence dissimulate, himself. As I move to the end of the book, I disrupt the narrative that has so far played out with the troubling idea that perhaps Avicenna was wrong after all, that perhaps it is just an illusion that there is something within worth paying attention to. Perhaps it is rather as the brilliant French philosopher Simone Weil has said, that the “feeling for reality” which she calls joy is a matter of putting oneself in the world, and it is a fundamental error to think that the direction of attention can or should be turned on its head.

Her alarming aside, that “to say ‘I’ is to lie,” hints at the thought, also implicit in Calvino, that to speak of oneself is simply a way to hide.

So this brief book is about the interiority of human life, about the various metaphors that have been employed to explore it and explain it, about the phenomenological structure of the subject position, and about the value or otherwise of turning one’s gaze inward. I invoke ideas from many of the world’s intellectual cultures, analyzing, sometimes critically, their appeal to metaphors of light, of mirrors, of masks and shadows, and of interior spaces. I draw on expressions of contemporary subjectivity in novelists and filmmakers. At the end, I turn to those troubling dissenters who have said, with an edge, that inwardness is merely an illusion—­or, worse, a deceit.

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j Christopher Hamilton, author of Middle Age

Inwardness Inwardness

“Ganeri’s book on inwardness does the most valuable thing a book can do: it gives pleasure and instruction at the same time. It raises numerous fascinating issues from a variety of perspectives and explores them with delicacy and tact, inviting the reader to further reflection and exploration.”

Ganeri

Where do we look when we look inward? In what sort of space does our inner life take place? Augustine said that to turn inward is to find oneself in a library of memories, while the Indian Buddhist tradition holds that we are selfilluminating beings casting light onto a world of shadows. And a disquieting set of dissenters has claimed that inwardness is merely an illusion—or, worse, a deceit.

Jonardon Ganeri explores philosophical reflections on the inner world from many of the world’s intellectual cultures. He ranges across an unexpected assortment of diverse thinkers: Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Chinese, and Western philosophy and literature from the Upani ads, Socrates, and Avicenna to Borges, Simone Weil, and Rashōmon. This book is a thoughtprovoking consideration of the value—or peril—of turning one’s gaze inward for all readers who have sought to map the geography of the mind.

Jonardon Ganeri

“In elegant prose and in an admirable cosmopolitan spirit, Inwardness explores philosophical reflections worldwide, ancient and modern, on interiority, how each of us creates an inner world.” j Stephen Phillips, author of Yoga, Karma, and Rebirth: A Brief History and Philosophy

Jonardon Ganeri is Bimal K. Matilal Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. His books include The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance (2012) and The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India, 1450–1700 CE (2011).

Cover design: Lisa Hamm

$19 . 95 ISBN: 978-0-231-19229-3

Columbia University Press/New York cup.columbia.edu PRIN TED IN THE U.S . A .

COLUMBIA

NO LIMITS

AN OUTSIDER’S GUIDE