Advancing the Human Self. Ewa Nowak

(…) Continuity makes everything homogenous and nothing is more structureless than the homogeneous (…) Or I expressed it in a wrong way: Conversely, homogeneity implies continuity.⁹⁰

But, still, such implications presuppose basic dialogical relations between myself and someone else in the commitment, trust, and mediation of language.⁹¹ Otherwise, single episodes can “be connected without necessarily being coherent,”⁹² but they must be voiced.

3.3 Between Narrative, Silence and Dysnarrativa

Modern-day research findings across cultures raise objections to a structured or even narrated self. One rather “should embrace the significance of the silence (…). Needless to say, as there are various kinds of silence, we must examine its extent and meaning with careful attention (…) Silence that conveys the presence of the ‘Nothingness’ may well be telling more than any spoken words,” whereas “quick verbalization may easily destroy the life of the image.”⁹³ Instead,

the hidden secrets of silence and non-verbal interaction [are to be explored]. There is a great deal being expressed non-verbally through body movement, facial expression, eye contact, breathing etc. (…) Amplification of the image is usually being unfolded in ←34 | 35→silence, which, of course, is not only true of Japanese psychotherapy but is also the case cross-culturally with practitioners where image is central.⁹⁴

In the Japanese tradition, continuity and continuous self-narratives are not considered as a relevant contribution to the self, as the latter need not to be conceptualized as a unity or diachrony of conscious contents. Kitarō Nishida, who can be regarded as a Far Eastern hermeneutic thinker, held a more daring view called “mu no ba sho.” According to this philosopher, the contradictions and dissonances lived or performed by an individual neither presuppose nor imply “an ultimate discretedness”⁹⁵ of herself (they do not ruin its coherent representation as one of a synchronic – not diachronic – multitude). “The unity of consciousness, namely the self, is not possible in a merely straight-lined process. All the phenomena of my consciousness are many,” Nishida asserts, “and, at the same time – as mine – also one. This is a unity of opposites in the shown sense;”⁹⁶ it is likely that it is possible to articulate and story this unity in language, logic, semantics, and narrative forms very different to ours, but probably as open-ended forms. Also, narration, as a tool for giving shape, structure, and content to the human “I,” has a completely different meaning in each of these cultural circles. An example of functioning at the interface between these two cultural ‘tectonic plates,’ which never formed a monolithic continent, if only because they attach very different importance to the role of narrative in defining the self and its vicissitudes, is Megumi Yama, an American psychotherapist with Japanese roots. She examines two completely different models of the self. Each of these models is encased in a strong normativity that has endured for hundreds of years. The Japanese model, an example of “Eastern selfhood,” is non-egological, decentered, “speechless,” and “blank,” while the American model, which is an example of “Western selfhood,” is individualistic, centered (egological), permanently storied and restoried. “It is even doubtful” if the Japanese psyche really has a “center” or a “conscious self.”⁹⁷ The true Japanese “self” is nothingness and can be explained using traditional myths, like the one about heavenly ancestors. A person who is asked about their “self,” even in a diagnostic or therapeutic context, expresses herself sparingly and cautiously; it is not her who is the main agent, ←35 | 36→actor, or inventor of what is happening to her. She is also not influenced by others who dominate over her “I,” because in her native culture, such an “I” simply does not exist. In conversation with others, such a person does not attribute specific features, intentions, or labels to her listeners, because this would be a sign of her domination over them. Instead, she tries to guess and infer the qualities of others from a broader context and relationship.⁹⁸

The Japanese therapist acts in a similar way. Instead of asking what am I?, she prefers to ask what emptiness is and whether a given person experiences it properly, meaning that she releases herself from the limits of her psychosomatic condition to open herself to the whole and draw energy that is essential for her own life activity,⁹⁹ as Yama emphasizes. Nonetheless,

what at first glance appears to be ‘Nothingness’ is not literally nothingness but may well contain everything that might gradually unfold into the future. But it cannot be understood by ordinary rational thinking and therefore cannot be expressed with words at first. Put another way, I could say that in the ‘Nothingness’ there are buds of all the possibilities which do not have any words; these possibilities are not yet even images that could be apprehended in a dream.¹⁰⁰

Seemingly the “nothingness” is filled with energetic potentialities which cannot be considered in terms of Freud’s unconscious nor in terms of Dostoyevsky, Bakhtin,¹⁰¹ or Miłosz,¹⁰² for the polyphonic, polymorphous, multiple, meandrous, serial-pluralistic etc. selves explored by these authors rather develop in line with the fluxus of chaotic technological stimuli surrounding and penetrating a Western individual. In the Polish psychotherapeutic tradition, two names may, to some extent, correspond with the Japanese psychoenergetic tradition, e.g., Antoni Kępiński and Kazimierz Dąbrowski. It is, however, not silence and nothingness, but the immanent mental potentials of a disintegrated self that is able to re-integrate, and, therefore, to re-empower herself and to rise above crisis. ←36 | 37→A positive disintegration process requires dialogical space in which “internal dialogism” can be facilitated by the external one. However, the dialogized self, the narrative self, the post-narrative self,¹⁰³ and the “Japanese” open self are distinct concepts regardless of their weakening nucleus. Premodern Western concepts of the self were focused on such a “nucleus,” whereas the contemporary concepts were less and less “nuclear,” as Denis de Rougeamont demonstrates:

… distinguish the person from all it is not individual, persona, ‘strong individuality’, sensitive soul, intellect, even elementary and often deceptive self-consciousness – the fact remains that belief in a distinct self and recourse to an absolute value of the person are virtually universal in the West (…) Far from dissociating the self, the psychological researchers of the 20th century name and reveal those forces tending to dissociate it, the neuroses assailing it on all sides, and recover, by the detour of their ‘objective’ descriptions, the Pauline opposition of the two men in me: the tyrannizing natural man (tyrannized in turn by the law) and the liberating spiritual man (…) there are so many realities approved in the West and ignored in the East,¹⁰⁴

      and vice versa.

3.4 Literary Narratives on Becoming Posthuman

Contemporary literature loves voicing experimental narratives of transhuman and posthuman protagonists, while records on the authentic