On Fragments: A Piece of Art and the “I” – or Not

That is, as Stephen attempts to evade, outmaneuver, ignore or simply deny the con-straints of his past – his consubstantial family, his conflicted, divided and dominated nation, his religious training (and indoctrination, it turns out) – he thinks through the meaning of “I,” what or who am “I,” and, what is as central since always connected, the denial, the “not I.” Somehow, however, the “not I” always seems centrally part of and so connected to the I. That is how definitions work, of course, by opposites, inclusions and exclusions, Aristotle tells us – and Stephen is very Aristotelian – what is in the category and, just as important, what is not – what is “I” and what is outside of, other than “I.” The not I then is not simply a denial of being or ontological identity, but its alterity, its otherness against which – and only against which – we can know the “I.” “Not” is thus a constituent part of “I,” the “I” unthinkable without the “not I,” a key component of the definition, and of being itself.

 

That split in, or the multiplicity of “I” that Stephen posits, is something of a fairly recent problem for humanity, for the human species. It is, of course, inscribed in language grammatically in a double pronominal form, an “I” and a “me,” as being, the self can be both subject, “I,” and object “me,” in discourse or conversation. The split has inflected philosophical thought, however, only since René Descartes (1596–1650), often considered the first “modern” philosopher since he acknowledged a split in being, the self, between, a thinking feature and an acting feature, between, say, mind and body. He famously elided the rift with a constant, “I,” however, cogito ergo sum he proclaimed in the academic language of the day, Latin, “I think there-fore I am,” in translation. He got there through what he calls his Discourse upon Method, which was to doubt everything until one reached a point or a proposition that one could no longer doubt. For Descartes that was the existence of the thinker, the self, “I” itself, which was for Descartes an irrefutable certainty. It became a foun-dation for philosophy, a platform on which Descartes could build other premises and propositions.

 

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), on the other hand, would take issue with what amounts to a tautology in Descartes’ thinking since the “I” is already present in the first part of the equation as he restated the disjunction, the split in something we might call “self” or “being.” That is, Descartes had already assumed what he was trying to prove. Russell Sbriglia explains Kant’s opposition thus: