“A Person Lives Within Himself”? (Column 81)

With God's help

A few days ago I heard Shalom Hanoch's song, "A Person Lives Within Himself," on the radio, and for some reason I started paying attention to the words. I saw that they stirred philosophical thoughts in me. I am of course not claiming that Hanoch really intended all this, but as is well known Agnon already referred readers who looked for the meaning of his stories to Kurzweil. So I will allow myself to be Shalom Hanoch's Kurzweil here.

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A person lives within himself Within himself he lives. Sometimes he is sad or bitter, Sometimes he sings, Sometimes he opens a door To receive an acquaintance But But most often, A person closes himself within himself. A person lives within himself Within himself he lives. Either in some stormy city Or in some village, Sometimes a storm passes And his house is broken But But most often, A person is even a stranger to himself.

And you, and you How good that you came, Without you the house is empty And the night is cold. So I watch over you As much as I can, And even so, will I Find you tomorrow? A person is close to himself (a person is close to himself) A person lives within himself.

Relations between a thing and itself

The song deals with various relations between a person and himself. He is close to himself, lives within himself, closes himself up within himself, and sometimes is even a stranger to himself. At times the self (=the house in which he lives) is broken and the person goes out of it. His partner too is in that same house (that is, within himself), or he opens a door from the "house" (=from himself) in order to receive an acquaintance into it.

These relations are of course metaphors, yet they still raise an interesting logical question. Relations are generally defined between different things. There is a relation between something and something else, as between a father and his son, between a person and an animal, between a cloud and rain, and between a dove and a flower. But what is the relation between some dove and itself, or between some ball and itself? The only relation I can think of between a thing and itself is the trivial relation of identity (that the thing is identical to itself). It seems that we cannot find any interesting relation between a thing and itself.

A logical formalization of relations presents them as two-place predicates. For example, X is the father (=F) of Y. This relation can be denoted (F(x,y (so that X and Y stand in a fatherhood relation). Two objects are required in order to define some relation between them. True, one can also speak of a one-place predicate such as "large" (=B), denoted (B(x, meaning X is large. But this is really a relation between two things (for large is always relative to Y). Such a relation generally presupposes something else in the background relative to which X's property is determined. If we say that X is red, that really will be a one-place predicate: (R(x, but that is not a relation but a property. Relations are a property of a connection, or a kind of connection, between two objects.

The connection to paradoxes of self-reference

Formally, one can speak of a thing's relation to itself by setting x=y in each of the relations mentioned above. For example, the relation of "being an element of _" which we denote (C(x,y means that X is an element in the set Y. If we now set X=Y we get: (C(x,x, that is, the set X is an element of itself. This can hold when, for example, one takes the set of all sets (it is itself a set, and therefore an element of itself).

There are, indeed, various paradoxes in set theory that are produced by relations of a thing to itself, and the example given here leads to one of the best known among them (Russell's paradox). Another example of a problematic relation of a thing to itself is the barber of Seville. He has an ironclad rule governing his relation to his customers: he shaves all those people who do not shave themselves, and only them. When we ask ourselves whether he shaves himself, we run into a paradox.

It is interesting to note that even in Jewish law such a substitution creates ambiguity and difficulty. Thus, for example, Rabbi Yosef Engel, in his book Atvan DeOraita, sec. 20, discusses the question whether prohibitions defined in terms of actions that person X performs on person Y (such as rounding the corners of the head) would be prohibited for X even if he performs that action on himself. That is, would a person who rounds off his own head transgress both as the one who rounds and as the one whose head is rounded? Why should he not transgress? After all, he really functions here as both. Because such a substitution is not trivial. When one substitutes the person himself, one creates a relation between him and himself, and it is not clear whether this is the same relation as between him and any other person.

We have reached a conclusion familiar to anyone who knows a bit of set theory: relations between a thing and itself are dangerous, because they may create paradoxes. But for our purposes the focus of the discussion is not that self-reference creates paradoxes, but that there do not seem to be meaningful propositions that contain self-reference. It is hard to think of a relation between a thing and itself beyond the trivial relation of identity.

A person lives within himself

In Shalom Hanoch's song various relations appear between a person and himself, and none of them is the trivial relation of identity. X lives in Y is usually a relation between a person and some place of residence (an owned or rented house, a hotel, a city, a country, and the like), which we denote (L(x,y. Now we have set X=Y and obtained the relation (L(x,x, which is a nontrivial relation between a person and himself. Does this combination of words have any logical sense at all? I am not speaking about whether it is true, that is, whether his self really is his house, but whether this combination of words has any meaning at all. Is it not like the phrase "virtue is triangular" or the question what is the difference between a rabbit?

Well, it is only a song, so why am I philosophizing here? The relations described in the song are perhaps metaphors, but the question is what these metaphors express. True, a person does not live inside himself, nor does he open any door there, but these are still metaphors that express some relations between him and himself. The implication is that with human beings the situation is different. A person can have nontrivial relations with himself, because a person is not an ordinary object.

I long ago thought that I and myself are brothers, since we have the same parents. But of course this is mere wordplay. I am really speaking indirectly and deceptively about the relation of my identity with myself. But the relations we encountered in the song are less trivial, and the question is whether they have meaning beyond mere identity. The intuitive feeling is that a person is an object that admits of such descriptions and relations, and I will try here to get at this.

Body and soul

Sometimes we speak about the relation between a person and his body. Thus, for example, I can love or hate my body. I can use it, despise it, want to change it. I do not love the form of my body, my hair, and so on. Seemingly this is a kind of relation between a person and himself, and it is clear why it exists only among human beings: because only they are composed of body and soul.

But this is a mistake. Such relations are not relations between a thing and itself but between two different parts that form one whole. The soul can think and relate in different ways to the body, and the body too can have some relation to the soul (for example, it influences it: when there is a wound in the body, the soul hurts. When the body takes blows, one falls into psychological depression). But these are not relations between a thing and itself but between soul and body, when together they create the whole that is a human being. Therefore there is nothing special in these relations.

Yet even within a materialist worldview people speak about relations with themselves and to themselves. A person who does not believe in a dualism of body and soul still allows himself to speak in the terms of these relations. What is the meaning of this from his standpoint? It seems from here that there is something else in a human being that allows self-reference, beyond the duality of body and soul.

Consciousness

It seems to me that the focal point is the fact that a human being is a creature possessed of consciousness. Even if a human being is a disembodied soul (without a body), he still has the possibility of relating to himself. The reason is that we are aware of ourselves. This is what is called self-awareness. Self-awareness, as distinct from awareness of things outside us, is highly unique and perhaps even involves a certain paradoxicality.

A ball or a cloud experiences nothing, neither outside them nor inside them. But a human being experiences things, and among them he also experiences himself. When I experience myself, the 'I' appears here in two roles: the experiencing agent, the subject, and the object of the experience (that which is experienced). Both are 'I'. This duality also makes self-relation possible. When I experience myself as something separate, that is, can relate to myself while the relater and the related-to function as two different objects, there is no obstacle to relations between them that are denoted as two-place predicates.

On the linguistic plane this phenomenon is marked by the term "self." 'I' and 'self' are not synonymous words, and their use in language is not identical. The term 'self' always appears when I describe myself (!) as the object of my own relation. Thus we say, "I relate to myself as such-and-such." In sentences like these, 'I' describes the subject and 'self' describes the object. There is no ontic difference between I and self, since both point to the same object (=me). The difference between them is on the logical-linguistic plane, and it expresses the fact that I can point to myself (!) in two different ways: subjectively (=I) and objectively (=self).

Against this background, the title that S. Y. Agnon gave his book, From Myself to Myself, is especially interesting. The book contains speeches, biographies, and autobiographical passages, and ostensibly is directed from him to himself. But it would have been more correct to say from me to myself, not from myself to myself. Agnon describes it as though he serves as two different objects that communicate with one another, and not at all as a subject. Perhaps there is an allusion here to Ibn Gabirol's famous line in his Keter Malkhut , I flee from You—to You, and hide from Your wrath—in Your shadow (I flee from You—to You, and hide from Your wrath—in Your shadow).[1]

I think, therefore I am

This phenomenon finds an interesting expression in Descartes' famous cogito argument: I think, therefore I am (in Latin: Cogito ergo sum). In this argument I prove to myself the existence of myself. At the beginning of my book The Sciences of Freedom I discussed an additional philosophical significance of this argument, since it indicates that the existence of the soul is much more certain and necessary than the existence of the body. Indeed, it is a condition for the conclusion regarding the existence of the body. The materialist intuition sees the existence of the body as something obvious, and the existence of a soul as unfounded metaphysical speculation. But the cogito argument demonstrates to us that in fact I am aware first and foremost of the existence of the thinking soul (=that which thinks), and only afterward can I think the fact that I exist and perhaps even become convinced that this is true.

But even when I deal with the existence of the thinking soul apart from the body, the thinking soul serves in two different roles: it is the entity that discusses this very argument, and it is trying to become convinced of the existence of another entity, namely itself. It is the subject that thinks the argument and it is the object of the argument. The identity between these two is the philosophical sting that Descartes exploits in this argument. When I become aware of my own existence, that is different from becoming aware of the existence of any other thing. In contrast to any other perception, here there is an identity between the perceiver and the perceived, and the argument is based precisely on that.

The cogito rests on a tension between two aspects: on the one hand this is the same object, and at the same time it functions in two different senses and roles. This is the duality between the I and the self deep within the soul. But when one thinks about it a bit more, one discovers that the matter is very strange. How can a thing perceive itself? To perceive something, after all, you must look at it from the outside, or at least be other than it. Perception itself is part of the perceiver; can a person also perceive the fact that he is perceiving (within his perception of himself)? It seems so, but it is indeed very strange. It is like a pair of mirrors in an infinite reflection, as one sees below (source: Inbal-Israel):

Aharoni's critique of philosophy

It is interesting to mention here Professor Ron Aharoni's illuminating book (Aharoni is a mathematician from the Technion), The Cat That Is Not There. The title of the book is based on a saying of William James that likens philosophy to a blind man searching in a dark room for a black cat that is not there. This expresses the futility of philosophical inquiry and its inferiority in comparison to the empirical sciences.

In his book Aharoni argues that the very definition of philosophy as a whole, with all its variety of arguments and fields, is nothing but a collection of mistakes whose common basis is, in one way or another, a confusion between subject and object. His claim is that such a confusion necessarily leads to contradictions and paradoxes, and therefore all significant philosophical arguments are based on a conceptual and logical mistake. In particular, he criticizes the cogito argument on this point. He claims that it contains a hidden assumption of identity between the perceiver and the perceived. In his view, in order to formulate such statements and give them a clear meaning, one must distinguish between these two objects and regard them as two different things.

According to his approach, arguments that confuse object and subject can be interpreted in one of two ways: either we are really dealing with two different objects (the perceiving I is not the same object as the perceived I), or the statement that confuses them is nothing but a meaningless collection of words. In the first case, philosophy becomes a branch of empirical science, since here there is an object perceiving the existence of another object (which, to be sure, is related to it in a very intimate way but is still different from it) by means of observation, and in the second case it is simply nonsense. In effect, his claim is that anything beyond empirical science is nonsense.[2]

Maharit on overcharging in the sale of slaves

This distinction reminds me of an innovation by Maharit. Jewish law determines that if a sale transaction is made at a price that deviates by more than a sixth from the market price of the item, the transaction is void. This is the law of overcharging. In addition, one should know that the law of overcharging exists only for movable property, but not for land and those things compared to it (such as slaves). Now Maimonides rules that there is no law of overcharging in the sale of Hebrew slaves and even laborers (Laws of Sale 13:15). This view raises several difficulties, and in particular many challenged him on the ground that the comparison of a slave to land applies only to a Canaanite slave. A Hebrew slave or a laborer certainly was not compared to land. So how does Maimonides derive from land that there is no overcharging in a Hebrew slave or a laborer?

Some wanted to claim that according to Maimonides (and other medieval authorities), every person is compared to land, and not only a Canaanite slave. But Maharit, in a responsum (part 2, Choshen Mishpat sec. 19), offers a major innovation in order to explain Maimonides' position. His claim is that this law is not learned from land. He explains that the law of overcharging was stated only where there is a seller, a buyer, and an object. But in a transaction involving the sale of a slave, the seller and the object are the same object (a person sells himself as a slave), and in such a case the law of overcharging was not stated.

There are several nontrivial difficulties in his words (beyond the fact that he offers his own novel exposition of the verses), but the very distinction he makes invites reflections relevant to our topic. Is it really possible that a person sells himself? Is a situation possible in which the seller and the object are the very same object? Is this not like Baron Munchausen pulling himself by his hair in order to get out of the pit? In a certain sense, in such an act of sale the seller makes himself disappear from the world as a legal entity (one might say that this is a legal suicide). There was here a person who owned property, and he had ownership over various objects and over himself as well. Now he sells himself, and as if by magic, together with the transfer of ownership over the object, the owner too disappears. He ceases to be a legal entity and becomes property bought and sold by others. Thus, seemingly, he cannot buy himself back from his owner, because there is no buyer here (he is the object and not the buyer).

But all this is not correct. Even if we accept Maharit's innovation, it concerns only the law of overcharging and not the possibility of the transaction itself. It is clear to all opinions that Jewish law indeed allows such transactions. A person can sell himself as a Hebrew slave or a Canaanite slave. True, Jewish law determines that his body is acquired (his body is acquired) (Kiddushin 16a), but in the case of a Hebrew slave who sells himself this is apparently a sale of the body alone. The soul, which "owns" the body (that is, is its seller), remains independent. By contrast, in the case of a Canaanite slave it may be that with the sale the seller disappears altogether. He is acquired to his master in all respects. If that is the situation, then a person really can sell himself, and once again in this situation he functions in two different ways: he is the seller and he is the object sold.

Repentance

Another example that comes to mind in this context is the process of repentance. To sharpen the point, let us take as an example a person who acts according to only one fundamental value: maximum reward and minimum punishment. He observes every detail of Jewish law with absolute devotion, and all of it in order to avoid punishment as much as possible and receive maximum reward. Now we wish to convince him to serve God "for its own sake." It seems that there is no way to do so. To convince him, after all, we must use his own assumptions. And from this it follows that at most we can convince him to serve God for its own sake because in that way he will receive more reward, and again we have left him serving for the sake of reward. It is impossible to formulate an argument that takes a person out of the system of assumptions acceptable to him (unless it contains an internal contradiction). This is of course also true of a person who holds a more complex set of values. There too, in order to convince him to change some value, we must rely on his own assumptions, and if there is no contradiction in them, we will not be able to do so.

The question is how a person himself changes his values or his assumptions, and beyond that, in practice people are sometimes persuaded by the arguments of others. How does this happen? By the same token, we may ask: how does a person repent? Repentance involves some kind of value change (showing this would require a lengthy discussion; see, for example, here). Suppose there is a person who holds a set of values X and now decides to change them to Y. The moment he wants to do so, he already believes in Y, meaning the change has already been made. Alternatively, if at that stage he still does not believe in Y (but rather in X), why should he want to change his values to a system he does not believe in? Notice that the root of the problem is that what we have here is a person's action upon himself. I change the values of myself. This is again a nontrivial relation of a person to himself, and it once again brings us into philosophical and logical problems.

One can of course view a change of values as something that "happens to us" and not something that is "done by us" on our own initiative. But repentance is supposed to be an intentional act and not something that merely happens to us. We are required to repent of sins and to make correct value decisions. Sometimes this is even focused on a particular time (the Ten Days of Repentance). It is not something that happens to us, but something we are required to initiate and do. Repentance that happens to us from outside and without our initiative is valueless. There is value only in acts and decisions that we ourselves make. The process of repentance presupposes that a person can act upon himself, whatever exactly the meaning of that statement may be.

Back to the song: a person lives within himself, opens a door, closes himself off, is a stranger

Be that as it may, our intuition is that a person indeed can act upon himself. He can hold the rope at both ends and create relations and actions between himself and himself. This is a rather mysterious phenomenon, and Shalom Hanoch points to it in his song quite innocently.

A clear expression of the split relation between a person and himself is found in the song's central phrase, "A person lives within himself." This phrase probably points to the very distinction between I and self. The I dwells within the self and is not identical with the self. There are two objects here with a relation between them.

Among other things, Hanoch in his song uses the Talmudic expression A person is close to himself (a person is close to himself) (Sanhedrin 9a). The Talmud explains in this way why a person cannot testify about himself, and grounds this in the law of relatives. Just as a person cannot testify about his brother or his son, all the more so he cannot testify about himself, for I am close to myself. Here one could interpret this as identity (identity too is a kind of closeness), but it seems to me that the plain meaning here is that the witness must be alien to the litigant. Testimony must be imposed on the person from the outside, and therefore when there is identity between them, the testimony is invalid.

Further, we also see in the song that the person is sometimes open to his surroundings (he opens a door) and willing to bring in from them, into himself, a partner or an acquaintance. In the very opening of the door one can see an action of mine upon myself. I open the doors of my self toward the other. The opener is I and what is opened is something in my own self. This is a door that is the boundary between me and the environment, between subject and object. Opening the door reveals to me that I am not only a subject but also present in the objective world outside me (I open a door and discover myself outside, like that joke: go check whether I'm outside). As a result, I can observe myself and judge myself and create various relations with myself.

Now we can go on and ask: when the other enters through that door, will he be found inside me or inside my self? It seems: inside my self, but not necessarily inside me. I (the subject) will see him as an other, but on the plane of the object he can be integrated into my self. I, as distinct, will observe my self as an object that integrates with another person. This is essentially the meaning of friendship, love, or couplehood between us.

In other cases the person closes himself within himself, that is, he is unwilling to integrate anyone else into his self. The 'I' is always closed to the world, for it is the subject. But the 'self,' the object, can be open or closed according to our decision (the decision of the I). We thus find that something within us always remains closed, isolated, and distinct, and my integration with others is always limited and not absolute. It takes place on the plane of the object and not on the plane of the subject. The subject always looks at all this as a distinct entity from the outside. The same is true of a couple relationship. People usually speak about it in terms of an almost mystical union, but even within a couple relationship it is important to make the distinction: the union can take place on the plane of the objects, but at the same time both sides remain two different subjects. It is not right to aspire to abolish this barrier, if only because it is impossible.

The song also goes on to tell us that sometimes a person is a stranger to himself. This description raises the problem even more sharply. Estrangement here means that he does not like, or is alienated from, what he sees in himself. This opens up a distance between the I and the self. Why does this happen? I suddenly see that the self does not live up to the standards of the I. But they are identical, are they not? A person should always live up to his own standards, since he and his self are one and the same. By what criteria does he judge himself and find himself wanting? Is it not according to criteria accepted by himself? If we are dealing with an aesthetic judgment, fair enough. It may be that he himself does not live up to his own ideal standards of beauty. But an aesthetic judgment is made about his body and not about his self, and therefore the problem does not arise here at all. What happens when he is a stranger to himself and not only to his body, that is, to his character and his values? Here the situation is more serious. By what values does he judge himself and his values—if not by his own values? If he believes in those values, then what is the problem? These are indeed his values, and everything is fine. And if he does not believe in them, then how does he nonetheless see them in himself (after all, he does not espouse them)? This is a reflection of the problem in repentance discussed above. But it turns out that apparently such a split too can exist in us. If we can intentionally decide to change ourselves, then a prior condition for this is that first we judge ourselves strictly and decide that the situation indeed requires change. Estrangement is a condition for change.

[1] On this is based the title of Rivi's well-known book of poems, From You to You I Flee.

[2] The reader may wonder how a mathematician can make such a claim. From conversations I had with him, it became clear to me that his view is that mathematics too is, at bottom, an empirical science. I should note that I personally did not agree, and still do not agree, either with his conception of mathematics or with his description of philosophy. But his book is brilliant, and as a lover of philosophy it gave me quite a few moments of embarrassment.