Thoughts about self

Gosh darn! It's hard trying to explain the self.

Since my thought is largely focused on an evolutionary reconstruction of human brain evolution, I have been thinking, once again, with how it happens.

I'm reading Dan Zahavi's Self and Other, and I just finished a section where he analyzed Husserl's understanding of the way the self experiences the other. Beyond this conversation, my mind was being brought to my own interests; I have been saying lately that human awareness is a function of the others intentional state, but Dan Zahavi's critical standard of analysis has got me rethinking this idea into something more phenomenologically reasonable.

To say that all experience is essentially me trying to match the other, is wrong: clearly there is a simple actor - me - who is giving expression to his very personal needs; as I'm currently doing right now.

Yet I still feel that there is more to say about how it is others affect us, and how the energy we feel after being affected does something to us that cannot happen by ourselves.

To anticipate a probable objection: yes, we can feel quite good on our own, as I myself quite often do. But where do such imaginative possibilities come from? We assume, of course, that they are "ours", because when I am by myself, it is just me and my desire for self-expression. And what I feel in the flow, again, is assumed to be a natural property of being human.

This impression is understandable, but ignores something essential: what we do within ourselves when we are away from others most likely derives from pre-existing relations. As someone who has experienced trauma, studies trauma, and has read numerous accounts of the effects of early-life relational neglect on infant, child and adult mental functioning, there is very good reason to believe that these private capabilities are first made real by actual interactions with others before they are able to be recreated in an imaginative mind.

So, on one hand, a fully lived human life achieves well-being by being human; that is, by living a narrative self, enlivened by it's openness to the actions of others, and by its own meaning-making and curious wonderment about the world, the human being fulfills its indwelling biological potential. Because the potential unfolding of humanness depends on the presence and interaction with others, complete humanness requires relaxing into the I-Thou field of human relating. Gazes must look upon you with a disposition of care for affects to arise within. For the early infant (0-3 months), the touches and caresses of the mother already set a flow of back and forth contingent interactions, in which the mother's tender touch responds to the baby's affective expressions; the baby learning at an extraordinarily early stage something that will be integrated within other modalities, when touches are a bother, its expressivity learns a control; all modalities seem to process a basic "vitality form" (Stern) that is set around a rhythm of mutual recognition of the Other; but what is being recognized, other than a self?

So few ask the question: is metaphysics not poking its head into biology? If recognition stimulates the other, and all human thought and relationality occurs in what Burghardt (2005) calls a "relaxed field", why not accept the metaphysical existence of a self? How else does the brain grow, given what phenomenology shows (Zahavi, 2014), comparative psychology shows (Tomasello 2014; Tomasello 2016) developmental psychology shows (Behen, Chugani, 2015) and traumatology shows (Ogden 2006; Lanius 2014; Van Dr Kolk 2015)? It shows that brain volume goes down in negative valenced relational contexts; and goes up in positively valenced relational contexts. Tomasello shows that apes do not possess the motivational qualities to think like humans do; they don't think, in fact, because the other is experienced as a competitor first, so the self and it's own needs are primary. The apes world is not relaxed enough - there is not enough love, or too much trauma. Perhaps these two notions are inversely related.