The Concept of Self

by Josh Buckner

Reflection on Walker Percy's A Short Quiz Walker Percy's provoking essay A Short Quiz manages to guide the reader's attention from the outside world to a quick glimpse of the inner world of the self. The format is a wide variety of questions, that when we attempt to answer, we become deeply engulfed in a search for a sure sense of self that we thought we had before reading Percy's article. Percy does not give a definite answer to the questions he poses, instead he leaves open the option to explore for ourselves. He states several popular beliefs, and allows us to freely identify ourselves with each of them. The main, implied opinion he states about the nature of our own being is that the identity of the self is ambiguous and elusive. Before I analyze his viewpoints in A Short Quiz, it is important to note that Percy does not state a single opinion or answer to any of his quiz questions. The author implies many viewpoints within the questions, and most contradict each other. This raises a hurdle when attempting to locate the author/testmaker's true beliefs. With this in mind, the viewpoints that I believe are the author's may in fact be my own, given the openness to interpretation to an essay that is composed only of questions. Walker Percy's main implication is that the self cannot be conclusively defined. Or to put it another way, it can be defined in an infinite number of ways, but none of which are fully conclusive. As Percy points out, this can be very troubling because we have been ourselves for our entire lives, "you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all."(Percy 12) He conveys the idea that we really don't know ourselves at all. Percy gives a few examples of this phenomenon. We can identify ourselves with the horoscope of any astrological sign. There are sixteen theories of the personality, and no one seems to be any more insightful than another. Not many people study ancient theories of physics while Plato is just as likely to be studied as Carl Jung. "If you answer that the study of the human psyche is in its infancy, remember then this infancy has lasted 2,500 years and, unlike physics, we don't seem to know much more about the psyche than Plato did."(Percy 12) We sometimes don't recognize our own voice or even our own appearance. We can claim that another person has certain characteristics to a certain degree while he can identify ourselves with both of two extremely contradictory groups of qualities. The conscious is defined radically diversely by religion, science, and philosophy, and there are wide varieties of definitions within these categories. Throughout Percy's quiz, he questions the validity of many of these definitions, and asks the reader to determine if any of these explanations hold true. While reading A Short Quiz, I found that many of the definitions of the self did in fact hold true. But Percy would ask how that could be, given the incompatibility of the several definitions from each other. I would assume that Percy believes that the concept of the self is so ambiguous and fluid that it can be defined in any number of ways. I must admit, before reading Percy's essay, I somewhat felt that I knew myself. Percy then proceeded to dismantle that shallow definition of myself that I had. He is quick to imply that it is easier to understand what is outside the self than what is within the self. Many people would claim that they did in fact know themselves. Yet is a very common to tell someone, "I'm just not myself today," when we do something that doesn't belong in our imagined sense of self. I believe that, no matter how well I think I know myself, I might still do things that are inconsistent with what kind of person I believe I am. For example, I think of myself as kind and generous. But I also remember several times in the past when I had been annoyed of friends who are "scrounges," or "scrubs." Why should it bother me, since I am supposed to be kind and generous? This example reaffirms Percy's belief that any characteristic of our self is subject to change. This raises a problem that all people must face. We have an ideal self, a self that we want to be and how we wish others would recognize us. Having this standard for what kind of self we want to be does not automatically make us into that ideal self. I can remember talking to people who say that they're open-minded, but the conversation later proves otherwise. Or how about the people who claim to be nice, and will do anything to prove to others how nice they are? Personally, I think it would be nice to do something kind just to be kind, not for the recognition. My point is that when we try to evaluate our own traits, we have a good idea of what we want to be, but not what we really are. I would assume that Percy would agree with this. Another topic that Percy briskly touches on is the human desire for closure when we learn something. We want the facts, we want to know once and for all, with no ifs or buts about it. But is that really possible? Practically all knowledge is context-dependent. Even scientific "facts" can be disproved by chance. Scientific journals will accept the conclusions of an experiment if the desired outcome of the experiment is achieved at least 95% of the time. This means that a scientific finding will be accepted as true, even though it's not always true. The mathematical value of pi (3.14...) is a basic concept. It is a value that allows you to find properties of a circle. We know what pi can be used for, but we don't even know what pi is, exactly. It is a value that cannot be defined by our numerical system. This is strikingly similar to how we define ourselves. We know a lot about ourselves, but something about our method of thought and understanding doesn't allow us to understand ourselves as a whole number, like 1, but we can almost understand, like pi. Or we can make assumptions about ourselves that are not 100% true. To site another example from math, take prime numbers. Prime numbers have no factor other than itself and 1. That is, it (the self) cannot be identified, except in terms of itself and what it fundamentally shares with everything else (the number 1). This throws out the "once and for all" type of knowledge, and so we must be searching for a different kind of knowledge of self. Percy's tone of A Short Quiz seems to be confused and lost. Percy seems confronted by all sorts of information that seems true, but can be countered by something else equally as true. He projects that uncertainty onto the readers, and never once hints at a direction to where to go from there. Perhaps he doesn't know where one should go to search for the self, or maybe everyone has to determine that for themselves. I planned on disagreeing with this aspect of Percy's opinion, but I realized that I could not think of a single guideline to follow on this search for the self. I did come to a useful starting point, after deliberating for quite some time in that lost/confused state of mind that Percy conveys in his writing. One thing about ourselves that we can be sure of is that we do exist. As Rene' Descartes put it, "I think, therefore I am." As long as we are thinking, our consciousness exists. From this standpoint, one could argue that the more you think about your self, the stronger its existence. Percy gives no reason for the peculiarity in which we can more readily describe what exists outside ourselves than what is within ourselves. It would be easy to retreat to say that the self is so dynamic and changing that it cannot be described once and for all, but that does not explain why it comes so naturally to be able to describe other people, even to the point of stereotyping and prejudice. I believe that the cause of our handicap in self-awareness can be derived from Einstein's definition of science. Albert Einstein pointed out that all of the information we acquire from the objective world must pass through two filters (how the senses perceive the world, and how the brain interprets/organizes that data) before we understand what we have perceived in the objective world outside of our minds. The only reality we know is the one that our senses have perceived and that our brains have altered and organized. When we try to observe and understand our own selves, what we are examining is already behind those two barriers that are our perception. But we are so adapted to the usual mode of perception that we attempt to analyze something that is behind the filters in the same manner that we would analyze what is outside of our self. This, I believe, causes much of the confusion when we look to identify ourselves. But there must be something within our consciousness that can perceive our perceiver. Philosopher/Bishop George Berkeley would insist that all of our perceived experiences really happen within our own minds, and there is no proof that anything outside our minds even exists. From this view, my perception of the world comes from my self, so taking a close examination of my perception of the world would be a good way to learn about my self. Percy and I would both agree that the self cannot be understood in the same criteria in which we understand other things that are not the self. Although Percy doesn't hint at his own beliefs or opinions on this matter, the general idea that arose from A Short Quiz was that the human self is ambiguous, dynamic, and often contradictory. Percy seems to be trying to convince us that we know very little about our own consciousness, and that any insight into the self is limited. I believe that knowledge of the self is essentially different from knowledge of what is not the self. Analyzing how we perceive the things around us is a reliable way to begin to learn about the self. Percy might agree and he might not, we wouldn't know because he was asking all the questions.