My text is taken from the twenty-third chapter of the first volume of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, beginning at the second paragraph. Laurence Sterne is here tilting at academic theories about the workings of the human mind—chiefly those of John Locke and David Hartley—and he focusses particularly on theories about the interiority of our mental experience. Take those views with proper, real life seriousness (he implies) and the consequences will be matter for fantasy. To underline the point, he gives his own fantasy free rein: "I have a strong propensity in me," he says, "to begin this chapter very nonsensically, and I will not baulk my fancy."
One further gloss, before I read the passage: in classical antiquity, the personification of faultfinding, mockery, and ridicule was the god Momus; and the "glass of Momus" to which Sterne refers was an imagined window placed in the human breast so that "secret thoughts and feelings" would stand clearly revealed. I have trimmed away Sterne's more baroque asides:
If the fixture of Momus's glass in the human breast had taken place…nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical [i.e. a glass] beehive, and looked in…viewed the soul stark naked…observed all her motions,…her machinations;…then taken your pen and ink and set down nothing but what you have seen, and could have sworn to….
But this is an advantage not to be had by the biographer in this planet;…in the planet Mercury (belike) the intense heat of the country must have vitrified the bodies of the inhabitants so that all the tenements of their souls, from top to bottom, may be nothing else but one fine transparent body of clear glass…so that, till the inhabitants grow old and tolerably wrinkled, whereby the rays of light, in passing through them, become so monstrously refracted that a man cannot be seen through;…his soul might as well play the fool out o'doors as in her own house.
But this is not the case of the inhabitants of this earth;…our minds shine not through the body, but are wrapt up here in a dark covering of uncrystallized flesh and blood; so that, if we would come to the specific character of them, we must go some other way to work.
A little later on, Tristram Shandy's father Captain Shandy, who is irredeemably given over to abstract philosophical speculation, attempts to explain "introspection" and "the succession of our ideas" to that embodiment of naïve practicality, Uncle Toby:
In every sound man's head [he says] there is a regular succession of ideas of one sort or another, which follow each other in train just like…A train of artillery? said my uncle Toby. A train of a fiddle-stick!…quoth my father,…which follow and succeed one another in our minds at certain distances, just like the images in the inside of a lanthorn turned round by the heat of a candle….
But it is no good: this image of the mind, as a Magic Lantern, epidiascope, or primitive movie projector, eludes Uncle Toby. His own mental life (he confesses) is harder to figure out: it resembles nothing so much as a rotary spit turning in a smoky chimney….
Then, brother Toby (said my father) I have nothing more to say to you upon the subject.
What is Sterne poking fun at here? Not the inner life, not the life of the mind, not the play of private imagination, certainly: Sterne's own pen was always at the service of his own weathercock fantasy. Rather, he is implying that the scientifically minded writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries have introduced into our ideas about the "inner world" of the mind a quite specious kind of clarity. Their vision of mental life, as carried on in a totally enclosed movie theatre located somewhere in the depths of the human brain—a theoretical picture that was widely accepted in the eighteenth century, and is still influential even in the twentieth—only confuses our ideas about the true "inwardness" of our mental life. And, if taken in dead earnest and at their face value, the implications of that picture are repugnant not merely to Tristram's Uncle Toby but also to much of our common experience. In real life, for example, reading the minds of others often proves to be easy enough while knowing our own minds may well be much harder; so, whatever may be the prime obstacle to mental lucidity and psychic candor, it can scarcely be the opacity of flesh and blood!
Still, leaving Sterne's caricature aside for the moment, the "inwardness" of mental life does remain a problem. Indeed, the idea of Inwardness is almost as perplexing a notion for us nowadays as the idea of Time was for St. Augustine. When we try to think about the idea clearly, half a dozen notions thrust their way into our heads. The personal, the private, the unspoken, the secret, the thought uttered only to oneself, the wish unacknowledged in the breast, the image in the mind's eye…all these diverse conceptions push in, elbow one another aside, and vie for our attention. So long as nobody asks us to define and explain Inwardness, we understand it perfectly well; but the moment we set about giving an account of it, we fall to stammering.
If we are to rescue the uncle Toby in us all, and come to a proper understanding of the things that make our mental lives "inner"—if we are, in Sterne's words, to "come to the specific characters of" that inwardness—we must, accordingly, as he says, "go some other way to work." And this "other way" of thinking about mental life—notably, about its inner, private characteristics—will be the central topic of this lecture. Starting from clues to be found in Sterne's attack on the eighteenth century philosophers, let me set about unravelling the different strands, or conceptions, of inwardness and interiority that have contributed to our current confusion about the "inner life" of the mind. And let me try to follow the ripples of the resulting debate outwards from its all-too-theoretical center until we may reach, at the periphery, even those highly practical issues about law, privacy and civic trust that Philip Kurland raised for us in his own Ryerson Lecture a few years back.
II
In thinking about the life of the mind, we have inherited two independent traditions; and the most vexing difficulties that face us in this task spring from the need to square the beliefs that have come down to us separately from those two traditions. On the one hand, we possess a whole repertory of practical skills and experiences of kinds that we are accustomed to thinking of—and describing colloquially—as "inner" or "inward." We think to ourselves; we do sums in our heads and have tunes running through them; we find half forgotten people and places coming vividly and unbidden into our mind's eye—Wordworth's
Inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.
We say things under our breaths, rather than audibly; we view the world with individual, imaginative eyes—
With my inward Eye 'tis an old Man grey
With my outward a thistle across the way
(there's Blake for you); and we criticize ourselves inwardly, putting ourselves on trial before the Inner Court of Conscience, Justice Superego presiding.
This "inner" world becomes the realm in which we deal with our most personal perplexities—
But Mary was greatly troubled at this saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this might be.
As a result, many of us place a special value on the inward aspects of mental life, judging overt deeds and actions as "outward and visible signs" of "inward and spiritual" states. Yet others of us view the powers of the inner imagination as a kind of Divine Seduction: what Wallace Stevens calls "the Interior Paramour"—
Within its vital boundary, in the mind
We say God and the imagination are one.
Still, one way or another, this first tradition focusses on the "inwardness" of our mental lives in a quite direct, experiential manner. Unavoidably, it ends by straining the resources of everyday language in the interest of fidelity to this experience: that is one reason why it becomes the concern of the poets.
Alongside this first way of viewing mental life, however, we have inherited also an alternative way of thinking about the mind: one that strives to be both more theoretical and more literal minded. The exponents of this second tradition also see the life of the mind as taking place "in the interior": for them, however, it is not just the interior of our minds, but—quite literally—the interior of our heads. As the protagonist of this second view, I shall take the great Sir Isaac Newton himself. For it was Newton who spelled out in clear physiological terms the sensorium theory that was already implicit in the arguments of René Descartes: the theory that was destined—despite the indignant but fruitless protests of Leibniz—to become commonplace among "enlightened thinkers" for the next 200 years.
In Query 28 of the Opticks, for example, Newton writes:
Is not the sensory…that place…into which the sensible species of things [i.e. sensory images] are carried through the nerves and brain, that there they may be perceived by their immediate presence to [the mental] substance?
God may be able to perceive everything in the world immediately in the place where it is, but (Newton argues) we are not so favorably situated. In our case, only the sensible images of things,
carried through the organs of sense into our little sensoriums, are there seen and beheld by that which in us perceives and thinks.
And, in replying to Leibniz's objections through the pen of Samuel Clarke, Newton dots the i's and crosses the t's of his position:
The soul of a blind man does for this reason not see, because no images are conveyed (there being some obstruction in the way) to the sensorium where the soul is present.
It is not hard to see why so much subsequent philosophical debate about human understanding took it for granted that our minds (or souls) are imprisoned from birth in the depths of our brains. Once the interiority of all our mental activities is taken for granted, the problem of developing any adequate conception of the "external world" (question-begging phrase!) is like the problem facing a lifelong prisoner in solitary confinement who has no way of figuring out what is going on in the world beyond the prison walls, aside from the sounds and pictures reaching him via a television set in his cell. (That is where Captain Shandy's image of the mind as a Magic Lantern comes in.)
Is Newton's sensorium theory quite discredited and without influence today? I think not. On the one hand, so distinguished a neurophysiologist as Sir John Eccles happily embraces the Cartesian idea that "consciousness" is a nonphysical agency operating in the depths of the brain. And, on the other hand, those harder-headed thinkers who find Cartesianism an embarrassment do not deny the interiority of our experience: they simply replace the interior "immaterial mind" by an interior computer. Penser? Nos cerveaux le font pour nous! Our mental life still goes on "in the interior": it just happens to be the business of neurological networks in the cortex, rather than of some nonphysical soul, mind, or consciousness associated with (say) the pineal gland.
Still (I shall reply) as a model for explaining the "inwardness" of mental life, a computer in the cortex is no improvement on an "immaterial mind" trapped wherever Descartes or Newton originally located it. For both models distract our attention from certain crucial differences between "inwardness" and "interiority"—that is, from certain crucial respects in which these two inherited ways of thinking about the "inner mind" part company, and diverge from one another. On the one hand, interiority is an inescapable feature of our brains, and of all the physiological processes that go on in the central nervous system. There is no doubt at all that they are permanently located inside our heads. So, if our "mental lives" were (properly speaking) "trapped within our brains" at all, they must be trapped there from birth. On this view, our minds must indeed operate permanently (as Jean-Paul Sartre puts it) à huis clos: mentally speaking, we would on this first view be like prisoners who are born, live, and die in permanent deadlock. Yet the inwardness of mental life, as we know it and speak of it in everyday experience, is not like that at all. The things that mark so many of our thoughts, wishes, and feelings as "inner" or "inward" are not permanent, inescapable, lifelong characteristics. On the contrary, "inwardness" is in many respects an acquired feature of our experience, a product : the product, in part of cultural history, but in part also of individual development. So understood, our mental lives are not essentially "inner" lives. Rather, they become "inner" because we make them so. And we do develop "inner" lives—in this direct, experiential sense—because we have reasons for doing so. Let me now explain what I mean by this.
III
Suppose, then, that we set aside all questions about the interiority of cerebral processes, and look directly at the notion of "inwardness." Of course, this notion is far from simple. Not all features of our mental lives are "inner" in the same ways or for the same reasons; and these several distinct kinds of inwardness are easily confused. We tackle many of our mental problems using procedures that have been "internalized"; we have some highly "personal" attitudes and points of view; we deliberately keep some thoughts and feelings "secret"; alternatively, we indulge our "private" fantasies and imaginations; at other times, we feel ourselves "open to" or "shut off from" our families and friends;…and so on, and so on.
The image of the Mind as an Inner Theatre within the brain invites all these notions to come home to roost within it. But if we reject that image, we are at any rate free to examine all these different kinds of "inwardness" in their own terms. Internalization need not rest on concealment; the imagination does not operate only in private; reticence does not entail false consciousness; nor is it the secretive man who best knows his own mind; while, as for the sense of being "locked up within" one's head or breast, that feeling—far from being a universal condition of human experience—represents merely one particular form of psychopathology among others, even if it is currently a somewhat widespread one.
Let me therefore try to sort out the main differences between these notions: I shall begin with the phenomenon of internalization. Even the simplest of our mental tasks and procedures are at first performed overtly and publicly: they become parts of our "inner" lives only because they are subsequently internalized. This is a statement both about the historical development of culture, and also about the psychological development of individuals. When, for instance, the people of Milan first saw St. Ambrose reading to himself, they took him for a magician. Standing close up to him, they could hear that he wasn't reading, even in a whisper; and, besides, he was getting information off the written page faster than he could have done if he had been reading! The art of "reading to yourself," in our modern sense—reading at high speed, without articulating the words even under your breath—was apparently an historical discovery or cultural invention, and perhaps a quite recent one.
Similar discoveries and inventions occur in the course of our individual lifetimes, too. When my elder daughter was first learning arithmetic, she fell in love with adding and would ask me to set her problems to do as we walked down to school. I recall one day asking her, "Polly darling, when I give you sums to do, why do you walk like this—with your head back and your eyes nearly shut?" and she answered at once, "That way I can see the numbers more clearly against the darkness." Evidently, she had discovered for herself, not just how to do sums "in her head"—how to do what we misleadingly call "mental" arithmetic, as though all arithmetic were not in its own way "mental"—but also how she could put inner visual representations to work in the solution of arithmetical problems. For who can doubt the arrays of figures that Polly was dealing with "in her mind's eye" were internalized versions of the same arrays that she had previously learned, at school, to set out publicly on paper?
To describe the circumstances in which mental activities like reading and adding are transformed from overt, manifest performances to silent, invisible ones—how they are "internalized," that is—is to indicate also the reasons we have for internalizing them. Once we stop articulating everything we read, even under our breaths, we can read that much faster; once we discover ways of figuring without the need for pencil and paper, or for counting on our fingers, that, too, is an economy of time and effort; and, with more experience, we may go farther in the same direction—learning to perform all kinds of intellectual operations without even relying on visual imagery, as my daughter did. (At that later stage, we switch over to what Karl Bühler called darstellungslos Gedanke, or "imageless thought.") Accordingly, the inward aspect of such internalized mental procedures is primarily instrumental. It was the same sums that Polly solved, either with pencil and paper or in her head; it was the same passages that St. Ambrose read, either out loud or to himself; and in neither case did the resort to "inner" mental procedures contravene Wittgenstein's maxim that "inner" experiences have to be judged as correct or incorrect by the same "public" criteria as any others. (Did Polly fail to "carry 2" in her head? Did St. Ambrose mis read this text to himself? Our ways of finding out involve the same shared tests in either case!)
The point can be generalized further. As early as 1913, Miguel de Unamuno wrote:
To think is to talk with oneself, and each of us talks to himself because we have had to talk with one another….Thought is interior language , and the interior language originates in outward language. So that reason [being linked to thought, and so to inner speech] is properly both social and communal.
And, as Vygotsky and his Russian colleagues have shown more recently, inner speech in fact appears to serve as a scaffolding in the consolidation of much learning. We talk ourselves step by step through an unfamiliar task, and that murmured commentary has two functions. It both helps us to master the necessary skills more quickly and effectively, and it also—apparently—establishes neurological pathways that can be called into play in the future exercise of those same skills.
In consequence, the internalization of skills may be associated with interior neurological changes; but it is by no means to be equated with those changes. What makes reading or doing sums, thinking or talking to ourselves, elements in our "inner lives" is—precisely—the fact that we can contrast the internalized versions of those activities with their alternative, overt, and public versions: reading audibly and figuring on paper, thinking aloud and talking with other people. In the required sense, therefore, not all our mental experiences are "inner" ones: they are properly "inward" only to the extent that they have been internalized—only, that is, to the extent that we have had reason to internalize them.
Having driven a wedge between "interiority" and "inwardness" in the case of internalized thought, we can do the same for other mental activities and experiences as well. In the course of cultivating rich, full, and complex "inner lives," we repeatedly have occasion to transfer experiences that could in principle be shared and communal—experiences that we first encountered in the communal domain—into the realm of the "inward." Indeed, different people seem to develop these capacities for "inwardness" in very different directions. Speaking for myself, I tend to have music playing in my head much of the time, so that music plays a fairly prominent part in my "inner" mental life; though all of the music in question is, of course, music I originally heard performed in public. (I am not a closet composer!) In this respect, I now realize, other people have "inner lives" quite different from mine. I am not, for instance, one of those people like David Grene who can recite hundreds of lines of poetry from memory on request; so I was not surprised to find (for example) that David has poetry rather than music running spontaneously through his head; and I presume that—in the same literal sense—still other people's imaginative lives are predominantly visual, rather than musical or literary.
Nor is internalizing confined to thinking and imagination: it extends to the sphere of decision and action also. Early on in life, we master the art of "answering for ourselves" to our mentors and caretakers—saying what we want, explaining what we are doing, if necessary excusing ourselves—in a word, we become "accountable" for our actions. These, too, are things that we first learn to do openly and out loud; but, once again, we soon enough catch on to the possibility (and the advantages) of doing the same things "inwardly": thinking out our plans privately, and rehearsing to ourselves the things we are going to say later (or could say, or would say if we were challenged) about this or that situation or action.
In this case, the fruits of internalization are of several different kinds. At one end of a broad spectrum, internalizing increases our freedom of action: if we think out our plans silently in advance, we reduce the risk that others may intervene prematurely, as they could do if they heard us thinking our plans through out loud. At the other end of the spectrum, inner reflection can also inhibit us. We fall into the habit of watching our steps; we become our own most severe critics; we are even liable to "put ourselves on trial" within our own breasts, whenever we feel ourselves open to criticism. In this way, the cultivation of a self-critical conscience establishes within us a permanent Court of Sessions before which we can summon ourselves up for judgement at a moment's notice.
As an extreme illustration, let me remind you of Shakespeare's Sonnet 30, with its well known opening couplet:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past.
Shakespeare's "sweet silent thought" has little in common with Wordsworth's "inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude." Instead, it is a source of judgement and pain, and the tone of the whole sonnet is (at best) self-condemnatory and bittersweet. Shakespeare speaks of remembrance of the past as a hostile witness to be "summoned up" before the judicial "sessions" of inner thought; and its testimony weighs so heavily on his mind that he is always ready to penalize himself afresh:
Then can I grieve at grievances forgone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
No rule against double jeopardy can apparently protect Shakespeare against his own self-accusations.
Like all other instruments (that is to say) the arts of internalizing can be used for good or for ill, and so can be a mixed blessing. The same "inward thought" that puts us at the mercy of our own self-reproaches, and so restricts our personal autonomy, can alternatively enhance that autonomy by helping us act "on our own accounts." And the same capacity for vivid recall that is a source of pain to Shakespeare is, for Siegfried Sassoon, a source of "calmed content":
Like the notes of an old violin,
Thoughts talk to me within
My mind, that shuttered room…
Old friends whose charity shone
For me, be memory-mine.
But then, surely that is just what we ought to have expected. After all, the moral and emotional ambiguities of our inner lives are simply the moral and emotional ambiguities of our open lives
internalized. And those problems are none the less equivocal just because we are attempting to deal with them in the silence of our own breasts, rather than publicly and out loud!
IV
Let me take stock. Near the core of the Problem of Mental Inwardness (I have argued) lies a confusion between two very different kinds of "inside." Our thoughts and feelings become parts of an "inner life" to the extent that we internalize them: our cerebral processes cannot help taking place "inside us" because that is where our brains are. Once we make the initial mistake of equating these two kinds of interiority, we find ourselves tempted to carry the equation further; and, in this way, we can quickly be seduced down a road that leads to a familiar metaphysical Great Divide.
What lies at the far end of this road? On the one hand (we are told) there is an "outer" world—the public, external world of space and time, which is equated with the objective, physical world of material things. On the other hand, there is an "inner" world—the subjective, mental world of moral sentiments and personal attitudes, which is equated with the private world of inner experience. Why do I object to this metaphysical opposition? I object to it chiefly because it telescopes for purposes of theory half a dozen distinctions that in practice cut along quite different lines: the private as against the public, the internal as against the external, the moral as against the physical, the mental as against the material, and so on. Instead of respecting the complexities of our actual experience, it exhorts us to run all these contrasts together into a single, comprehensive dichotomy: between the "inner" mental world of moral sensibility and good intentions, and the "outer" material world of physical objects and brute forces.
Why are we susceptible to this temptation? Why are we so easily seduced into assuming that the sphere of the moral and the personal is essentially an "inner mental world," while the "outer, material world" is essentially the sphere of indifferent, unresponsive things? That propensity may be an error, but it is certainly no accident. For, when we mull over moral issues involving other people, we have both more occasion, and also more reason, to do so "inwardly" than we have when the issues are practical ones involving physical things alone. When something goes wrong with the toaster, it makes no difference whether you think through the resulting problem out loud or in your head. (It makes no difference to the toaster, that is. It doesn't mind!) But when you have trouble with the boss, or the children's school reports are worrying, it can make a lot of difference whether you talk your thoughts through out loud or keep them to yourself. Matters affecting other people's feelings and interests call for a certain reticence and reserve. If only to protect our freedom of decision, we hold our tongues until we have made up our minds, so avoiding premature reactions from the boss, the kids, or whoever it may be. For pragmatic reasons, quite apart from any others, "moral" issues thus become topics for "inward" thought more naturally and readily than "physical" issues do.
Rather than pursuing this theoretical dichotomy further, however, let us instead retrace our steps and look at the practical aspects of "inwardness." The public versus the private, the collective as against the personal, the open and the secretive, the overt and the internalized, the physical and the moral, and so on and so on—all of these contrasts rest on so many independent distinctions. Internalization, for instance, has nothing particularly personal about it. William Blake's idiosyncratic imagination may see "an old Man grey" where the rest of us see only a thistle; but the sums that we do "in our heads" are just the same old collective sums we learned to do like anyone else. Nor are internalized mental operations essentially private, either. It may sometimes be expedient to think over private problems silently, to ourselves; but our inner thoughts also have to do with public rather than private matters, while we can perfectly well discuss private matters out loud with our close friends and confidants. Least of all is there anything secretive about internalizing our mental operations. Someone who does not trouble to declare all his intentions explicitly cannot be criticized, on that account alone, for disguising or concealing them: his friends may be left in no doubt what he is going to do, even without his saying. Similarly, if we do sums in our heads, read to ourselves, hum Celeste Aida under our breaths, or wonder what to do about the boss: the fact that we choose, for instance, to read or calculate "in our heads" does not mean that we are trying to conceal that fact, or pretending that our thoughts are other than they really are.
Nor, for that matter, need our inner, mental lives be solitary or exclusive, unless we choose to make them so. Inner lives can perfectly well be shared. In his sonnet "Douceur du Soir," George Rodenbach represents intimacy using the image of two people sitting together in silence while the darkness falls, yet still feeling the same:
Sentir la même chose, et ne pas se le dire.
And, in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy shows us Kitty and Levin renewing their interrupted courtship by writing messages to one another using only the initial letters of the words:
W, y, t, m, i, c, n, b,—d, y, m, n, o, t?
(When you told me it could not be—did you mean never or then?)
This kind of condensation seems to be characteristic of the processes by which "inner speech" is progressively compressed and transformed into "pure thought". By use of this device, Tolstoy depicts Constantine and Kitty's timid "inner selves" reaching back toward one another. If, by the use of this personal, inner code, they can penetrate each other's reticent thoughts, that will show their feelings for one another better than anything: for it will show that, inwardly, they are still—as we rightly say—"of one mind."
V
By now, I am edging my way back toward Tristram Shandy. In the passage I quoted at the outset (you recall), Laurence Sterne plays with the fantasy that the inhabitants of the planet Mercury may have transparent glass bodies, so that their souls can be directly observed gambolling within; and he associates this particular conceit with the name of Momus, the classical personification of faultfinding, mockery, and ridicule. We may now ask ourselves: "How does Momus come in here? What does the spirit of mockery, the god of censoriousness, have to do with mental inwardness, or with the philosophical Problem of Other Minds?"
That depends on how we view this problem. If we stay with the quite general standpoint of abstract philosophy, Momus may have nothing to say to us. But from the more specific standpoints of practical life—when there is good reason to disguise our states of mind—the point of the reference to Momus begins to be clearer. For the fact that we develop an "inner life" in our early years may enable us to conceal our thoughts, but it does not compel us to do so. We have special reason to conceal our feelings, and "keep our own counsel," only when we feel ourselves confronted by censoriousness or ridicule. And, if unsympathetic onlookers cannot "read our minds" without resort to Momus' glass, that is because their mockery has forced us to adopt the disguise they would now like to penetrate.
So the Problem of Other Minds—the problem of understanding how we recognize each other's thoughts, intentions, and feelings—looks very different to us, depending on which starting point we choose. Suppose first that we start from the quite general philosophical arguments based on the assumption that mental life is essentially "interior": in that case, the standing presumptions will be in favor of the skeptic. How could anyone else know my mind, in that case, unless I choose to let them? Unless we take specific steps to show or declare our states of mind, they will presumably remain "inner" and therefore unknowable to others. But, if we see the life of the mind as becoming an "inner" life only in the course of our lives—if we recognize how far the "inwardness" of mind is a particular product generated during the development of mental life—then the standing presumptions will be reversed. Unless we take specific steps to conceal or disguise our states of mind, they will presumably remain manifest and apparent, at least to our fellows and familiars.
In short: what we learn during infancy and childhood is not the art of showing our minds. (That comes naturally enough.) Rather, we learn to conceal our minds, to be reticent, diplomatic, secretive—to keep poker faces or stiff upper lips—in a phrase, we learn to wear masks. Some people never get very good at this: lacking effective disguises, their minds show plainly on their faces. Others become past masters of concealment, and profit by this capacity. But secrecy or disguise (as I have been arguing) represents only one variety of inwardness among many others. The secretive person is one thing; the reticent person is quite another; the reflective person, the imaginative person, and the introspective person are all of them different yet again—at the very least, they differ from one another in the uses to which their "inwardness" is put. If that were not the case—if all inwardness were, in essence, secretiveness—it would follow, paradoxically, that the true virtuoso of the "inner life" was Richard Nixon.
Having got this far, we are much of the way home, but we still have some way to go. At this point, I shall widen my angle of view further and try to show you how the ripples from the Problem of Inwardness finally expand into the larger social realm.
I referred in passing earlier to the powerful image of the mind as a "locked room" dramatized in Jean-Paul Sartre's play Huis Clos; and also to the sense of "entrapment" that Sartre so effectively conveys—the sense of despair at our seeming inability to "get outside" our own heads. This feeling of entrapment (I suggested) is in part an ontological illusion: a consequence of confusing the "interiority" of neurological processes with the "inwardness" of mental experience. But there is more to it than that; and, if we are to explain why Sartre's solipsistic imagery has such power over our imaginations at this time, we should look beyond philosophy to our own social history. For the power of the Inner Room model cannot be accounted for by looking to its philosophical merits and defects alone: in addition, it resonates in significant ways with elements of our present-day psychological and social consciousness. And following up the things that I have tried to bring to light in this discussion of "inwardness" can help us (I believe) to recognize—and perhaps even to counteract—a certain false consciousness that is typical of our own time.
Why, then, are we so open (nowadays, particularly) to the feeling of being "trapped" within our own individual personalities—prisoners in our own brains, so to say? Or to the correlative idea that, morally speaking, the larger cosmos is merely absurd? Or for that matter to the despairing cry with which Sartre closes the play, "L'enfer, c'est les autre!" ("Hell—that's other people !")? The locus of all these preoccupations may appear to be internal to our individual minds, but their real roots lie (I shall argue) outside them: specifically, in the public and external world of social, moral, and political interactions.
Most immediately, no doubt, the development of an active "inner life" is our own work; but, less directly, it depends also on the kind of support we have from others. If the larger world of social and moral relations proves strong and reliable, we are able to move freely between personal inwardness and public openness. In that case, our inner lives can be not just active, but also effective: internalization serves as an instrument of autonomy, so there need be no sense of discontinuity between the "inner" and the "outer." If the public moral world proves fragile and untrustworthy, on the other hand, internalization may serve rather as a mechanism of defense. The inner life of the mind is then less a base for effective outside action than a refuge or asylum from the public world: and the problem of transcending solipsism in that case becomes, not just an intellectual problem, but also an emotional one. In passing to and fro between the private world of inner experience—which is seemingly protected against intrusion by external agencies—and the public world of space and time—from which nothing good can apparently be expected—we shall then experience a clear discontinuity.
When Sartre's hero cries out that hell is other people, the message that comes across to us is the message that we are, nowadays, more than usually inclined to regard other people as hell. So, the task of transcending our sense of entrapment on the emotional level depends not merely on our own self-command: it requires also that we should not have any objective reason for feeling betrayed. And, in that respect, many people today would feel that we live in an unhappy time. In general (as Philip Kurland has suggested) ours is a society and an age in which the Law is too often called in to redress the failings of Morality, in which few people place much social reliance on "fellow feeling" or on "civic trust." It is an age in which few people any longer take "civil morality" for granted; in which reliance on professional advice is reinforced by the threat of malpractice suits; in which urban life leaves us with few real "neighbors"—a time whose social fragmentation is embodied in the young Colorado man who is currently suing his own parents for $300,000, arguing that their negligent upbringing left him a psychological cripple and entitles him to monetary damages.
In trying to explain the appeal of such works as Sartre's Huis Clos, therefore, I find myself tempted to trespass into both psychiatry and political theory. On the one hand, the personality weaknesses most typical of those who consult psychoanalysts nowadays are apparently quite different from the classic hysterias and obsessions of Freud's own late Habsburg Vienna. Growing up within the modern, isolated nuclear family, without sufficient social interaction and support, people develop what Heinz Kohut has called a "vertical split" in their personalities. The inner life becomes a place of refuge, to which alone they can safely attach real value; while the outer, practical sector of their lives strikes them as valueless and unrewarding.
On the other hand, I find myself echoing some of Philip Kurland's arguments about privacy and the law. In a society that is short on civic trust, the processes of the law are a poor substitute for the assurances of civil morality. (The law of privacy, for instance, is a poor substitute for proper respect between individual moral agents.) A world in which nobody accepts anybody else's good faith is, indeed, a world of faultfinding, criticism, and mockery—a world that deserves to have Momus, the god of Ridicule, as its tutelary deity. And if we are to find our ways back out of Sartre's solipsistic trap, we shall have, at some point, to recognize that the roots of solipsism are both theoretical and practical, both intellectual and emotional. In spite of all Descartes' maxims, there are, on the intellectual plane, some things that it is more un reasonable to doubt than to believe; and meanwhile, on the emotional plane also, there are some people whom it is more un reasonable to doubt than to trust.
The political theorists of the seventeenth century set us speculating about the Origins of Society. Thomas Hobbes, in particular, accustomed us to thinking of the State of Nature—the condition of human beings for whom there are not yet any effective bonds of communal life—as characterized by fear. His arguments have encouraged us to imagine our primate forerunners skulking around the forests of East Africa in terror of the stab in the dark, the sudden blow from a club—what the Book of Common Prayer calls "battle and murder, and sudden death." Still, there are times when I suspect Hobbes of overdramatizing the horrors of the State of Nature: George Schaller and Jane Goodall have taught us a more tranquil, and a more charitable, view of our fellow primates. And, in any event, I wonder whether the question that Hobbes poses is one that should really be preoccupying political scientists today. Standing where we do, we surely have reason to speculate less about the Origins of Social Life than about its End. For us, today, the State of Nature is surely significant, less as the condition of human beings who are not yet in society, than as the condition of human beings for whom there are no longer any effective bonds of communal life. Our own condition, that is to say, is threatening to become, not pre-social, but post-social.
The bonds of community are not dissolved by the fear of mutual violence alone. They can be dissolved as effectively, if more subtly, by the mere absence of mutual trust. Without civic trust, there is no civil morality; and a community short on civil morality can be even more a-social than one that is torn apart by mutual fear. (As Hobbes himself understood, fear itself can actually be a bond.) So perhaps it was always a mistake to think of the State of Nature as an especially violent state. Maybe, we should think of it rather as a world in which our social bonds have worn themselves out, and in which we have lost touch, with one another—a world in which we are indeed "driven in on ourselves," driven to take refuge in the asylums of our "inner lives," for lack of external openness and public understanding—in short, in which we are all of us opaque to one another. If that is indeed our case, we should probably think about the State of Nature in terms of a different image. Rather than being a world of weapons, it will be a world of masks.
So, you see, the Problem of Inwardness is a topic whose ramifications go far beyond all purely abstract philosophical concerns. Its ripples spread out further, to stir and enhance our contemporary sense of personal isolation and civic decay. And that, I believe, is just the kind of thing that Laurence Sterne himself understood very well. For Sterne is a critic we should take care not to underestimate. Just because he is such fun to read, we may too easily conclude that he wrote his books with nothing but fun in mind. Yet Sterne had a more serious purpose, too. It was not for nothing that he chose to have printed on the title page of Tristram Shandy as a motto some words from Epictetus:
Tarassei tous anthropous ou ta pragmata alla ta peri ton pragmaton dogmata
—"What upsets people is not things themselves, but their theories about things." Even the most abstract philosophical
dogmata, if misconceived, can lead us into misunderstanding and self-doubt far beyond the narrower bounds of technical philosophy itself. And, over such notions as the "private," the "personal," and the "inner life" especially, the philosophical clarification of our ideas can still serve us (as Epicetus believed that it should) as a means of improving our self-knowledge.
