Wellbeing and Aspirational Culture by Kevin Moore

Author:Kevin Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030156435
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The Concept of a ‘Person’

I start by staking out my own commitments: I subscribe to an understanding of psychology that draws deeply from the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I believe he is one of the few philosophers to have broken free from the tenacious hold that Cartesian dualism still has over our view of ourselves. That hold remains particularly strong in psychology but is also firmly part of the ideology of aspiration which, today, means it is part of most people’s understanding of themselves and of their relationship to the world.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett, in his book ‘ Consciousness Explained’ wrote of how—despite all the flaws it is acknowledged to have—we remain under the thrall of this picture of our inner life; a picture he called the ‘Cartesian Theatre’ (Dennett 1993). We see our minds along the lines of an ‘inner theatre’ with a stage populated by psychological states and events. ‘We’ (whoever we are) sit like a spectator in the theatre, able to observe the action, report on what is going on, and even reflect upon and judge those states and events. This is an odd idea. Yet most people seem to subscribe to it, if the way they talk about themselves and their psychological experiences is any indication. Notice that once we accept that we are composed of an interior mind counter-posed to an exterior reality the world immediately splits in two. On the one side is the ‘real’ world of sticks, stones, animals, plants, planets, and other people; on the other side are our ‘experiences’. Disturbingly, today even one’s own body is now often seen as much a part of this ‘exteriority’ as is the planet Jupiter.

The harm that this ‘split-view’ can create at the extremes has long been recognised. In the social sciences, that split is sometimes called ‘alienation’. That is, we feel like an ‘alien’ in relation to more and more of the world and what we may have to do in it (e.g., Karl Marx spoke of the alienation of the worker from their work). In psychology it goes under various terms: social psychologists might simply talk of ‘loneliness’—the sense, perhaps even in the presence of other people, that one is entirely alone, psychologically and emotionally; in psychiatry and clinical psychology the corresponding term is often ‘dissociation’ which comes in various forms—all including some level of dissociation from reality—from the reasonably innocuous experience of daydreaming to more severe dissociation from one’s memory of one’s past (dissociative fugue), dissociation from one’s feelings, depersonalisation (the feeling that the self is not real), and derealisation (a general sense of the unreality of the world). Why might we be susceptible to this kind of ‘splitting’ of our experience? Might it have something to do with the notion of a ‘person’?

In his book Individuality, Peter Strawson (1959) provided what has become a seminal analysis of the concept of a person. He begins with some preliminary comments about Wittgenstein’s (1961/1922) propositions in the Tractatus (5.631–5.641) to the effect that there

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