Backwards and forwards

I started to write this text on Bloomsday, famously the calendar day on which James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses is set.   Joyce borrowed the title and structure of his book from Homer, although Odysseus (to give him his original Greek name) took ten years to travel from Illium to Ithaca after spending ten years fighting at the siege of Troy, whereas Leopold Bloom wanders around Dublin for fewer than twenty hours.  Joyce is said to have chosen to set his story on 16^th June 1904 because that was the day of his first romantic outing with Nora Barnacle, whom he later married, although it is not clear to me whether this act of homage was to celebrate her loyalty to him, as Penelope to Odysseus, or her disloyalty, as Molly to Leopold.   

I have been re-reading Ulysses at a leisurely pace, enjoying its jokes, provocations, and digressions, alongside its description of the many ways in which we are prone to self-deception but also capable of moments of self-enlightenment, and for its sympathetic reminder that during the journey of life youthful ambition often develops into mature disappointment.  Along with several other lengthy novels published in the 1920s and ‘30s – Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Musil’s The Man Without Qualities – Joyce’s work invites a slow pace, allowing the reader to savour the complex meanderings of plot and explorations of character.   For all my enjoyment of his work, I had not been planning to write about Joyce in this text, the theme of which is our sense of a persistent identity through the passage of time.  Then, a day or two ago, I came across this incident in Ulysses, which acted as a catalyst for my thoughts.

Stephen Dedalus, who is both a modern-day Telemachus and Joyce’s alter-ego, is in the National Library, debating with some friends and acquaintances certain aspects of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry and what they might tell us about the nature of his – that is Shakespeare’s – marriage.  In an aside to the conversation, one of the interlocutors is asked whether he intends to repay a debt he has incurred of one pound.  Initially he says yes, but then hesitates before saying:  Wait.  Five months.  Molecules all change.  I am other I now.  Other I got pound.   Stephen, his speech interrupted, thinks to himself, But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms.  This worry – that because the physical composition of our bodies is constantly changing, we are not the same person today that we were five months, or five years, or fifty years ago; and this being so, we are no longer responsible for decisions and actions made by our earlier selves – has long been a source of puzzlement for philosophers.  As Heraclitus observed, we cannot step twice into the same river.  Why?  Because the second time neither the river’s waters nor our bodies are composed of the same matter as they were the first time. 

If this worry seems a little obscure – just a game being playing with words, that allows us to contemplate defaulting on our debts with a clear conscience – consider the following story.  Jenny Erpenbeck is a contemporary German novelist whose work I much admire.  In November 2015, she gave a short speech to the Berlin Academy of the Arts, where she was being inducted, and she told this story:

Once, when I was searching for documents related to my family in the archive of this academy, I was surprised to see my own name in the list of search results, and I saw that a letter I had written to one of my teachers years ago was already in the archive.  But the older me could only read what the younger me had written once I had proven that I was still the same person.  My ID card did the trick.  Then I read the letter, but I did not recognize myself anymore.

What I like about this episode is not just the author’s surprise at unexpectedly discovering a document from her earlier life, but the sharp contrast she draws between the bureaucratic concept of identity – where an ID card with a name and a number establishes our persistence through time – and our own sense of self-identity – where we cannot remember, and perhaps no longer have any real sense of who we once were.  A few years ago, a friend of mine came across an old school magazine in his parent’s house, which included a short article that I had written aged around seventeen.  He sent me a copy, but I had no memory of writing it.  Moreover, I only faintly remembered the confused teenage boy I then was, strongly disapproving of my school and all that it stood for, while also craving the approval of my teachers and my desire to be successful in their terms. 

In the next part of her speech, Erpenbeck reflects on the nature of time and the influence it has on our sense of self:

We know only one thing.  That behind everything we can see, hear, and touch, another reality is concealed – a reality that we can’t see and can’t hear and can’t touch, a reality made of time.  We know that transformations lie before us, we know that transformations lie behind us, and we know, according to scientific findings, that the present belongs to us for 3 seconds before it plunges down the throat of the past.  That means that every 3 seconds, we produce ourselves again as strangers.

This idea, that we must constantly renew ourselves in the present, because neither the past nor the future are truly accessible, could be liberating because it provides us with a permanent sense of new possibilities; but it could also be frightening because it blocks out our memories of the past which, however unreliable they might sometimes be, nonetheless constitute the basis of our sense of personhood, of the “I” that integrates a lifetime of experience around a unique identity.  Three seconds is not long enough for us to know who we are, who we were, and who we might come to be.

Although I have several strong memories of things that happened to me as a child and a teenager, these form a minority of the total sum of my past experiences.  I have forgotten much more than I remember.  Some of my lost past is of no interest to anyone, not even me, but when my friend sent me the magazine article that I had written many years ago, I realised that I have now lost meaningful access to the person I was then, what I thought and felt, what I hoped and feared.  My teenage self seems no longer to be part of me.  Even if it is true, in some sense, that I would never have come to be the person I am today had I not been the person I was back then, it does not feel as if my younger self and my present self are connected in any important way.  It is not just that all my molecules have changed, many times over, it is also that I really feel that, as James Joyce’s character says, I am other I now.

Some philosophers have pointed out that even if I no longer feel connected to my younger self of forty years ago, I do feel connected to my former self of ten years ago.   And that former self would have felt connected to the former-former self that was ten years its junior, and twenty years the junior of my current self.  And that former-former self would have felt connected to the former-former-former self that was ten years its junior, and thirty years the junior of my current self.  And so on.  By a few steps I make a clear, albeit indirect connection between my current self and my teenage self.  I am not sure, however, that this sort of connection supplies me with much comfort.   By an analogous argument, I might say that I have thirty friends, and that each of them has thirty friends who therefore constitute nine hundred second-order friends to me (although some of my friends will be friends with the same people, so probably rather fewer than nine hundred).  Each of these nine hundred also has thirty friends, and so on, which means that I have nearly twenty-five million fifth-order friends.   It is an impressively large number, but what value to me is a fifth-order friend?   Not much. 

My point here is that tenuous connections to our past selves are as uninteresting as tenuous connections to distant contemporaries, they do not help us to establish a meaningful sense of who we are now.  While certain decisions that I made earlier in my life might continue to have an impact on me for many years, they do not determine my sense of self in the present.  In the modern world, as life expectancy has risen rapidly in all countries, for the first time in history there are millions of people in their eighties, for whom there is a sixty-year gap between their present selves and their former selves as young adults.  It is not just the risk of loss of memory through cognitive impairment that creates a gulf between old people and their past, it is also the fact that they face the impossible task of connecting their ageing selves with their youthful selves, selves that are now remote and inaccessible; water – as Heraclitus reminds us –has long passed under that bridge.

There is a famous saying by the nineteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.  I think he meant by this that while we can impose some sense of meaning, some plausible narrative framework on our past, this does not help us when we are confronted by the decisions that we must take in the present, which will affect our future.  In ancient stories – such as Homer’s Odyssey – the hero might travel to the underworld to meet with friends or family now dead, who are able to reveal something of the future about which they have better knowledge than do the living; or. one of the gods will give encouragement to a despondent hero by foretelling of future triumphs; or, the hero will travel to a famous oracle to ask for a sign to help them decide how to act.  The idea that future outcomes were already determined and could be revealed by contact with the dead or the gods or the prophetic, is much less widely believed today, which is why Kierkegaard’s remark brings us so little comfort.  We cannot understand the future as we understand the past.  Both are mysterious.  At best, we can understand the present.

To give a practical example, consider the importance of saving for a pension.  None of us know how long we are going to live, but we can make an informed guess, by taking account of actuarial tables that project life expectancy for those in each age cohort.  These are averages, across the population, but they give us working assumptions with which to plan.  We can also make some reasonable forecasts about how much we can save from our income, what the rate of investment return might be, and what the rate of inflation might be over our lifetime.  In brief, we can calculate how much of our current income we need to set aside in a pension from the ages of twenty-five to sixty-five, to have enough to live comfortably from sixty-five to ninety-five.  What we cannot know, is any meaningful sense, when we are twenty-five, or thirty-five, or forty-five, is what sort of person we will be when we are seventy, eighty, or ninety.   We save for a pension because, whoever we turn out to be we will surely need money for food and shelter.

Despite not knowing who the future “I” will be, we nonetheless save in our pensions because we care about the well-being of this future “I”.  We defer consumption today, denying our current self, to provide for tomorrow, for a self about whom we know little.  I note that this is paradoxical, and yet I recommend to all my readers that they make pension contributions during their working years.  It would be negligent to care nothing for our future selves, even though it is quite likely that this future self will have only a sketchy recollection of the various past selves who funded their pension.

I have also been reading some essays by Georg Simmel, collected in a volume called The View of Life, which was first published in German in 1918, the year of Simmel’s death and, by pleasing coincidence, the same time that James Joyce was writing Ulysses.  Simmel is not widely read now, except in academic circles (and probably not widely read even among academics).  He was a contemporary of Max Weber and wrote on a wide range of subjects, the most notable of which – Philosophy of Money – remains the best book I have ever read on the social meaning of money. 

In the book I am currently reading, Simmel analyses the way in which, by means of reflective thought, humans have transcended their natural environment while remaining grounded in that same environment.  We are, he says, bounded in every direction, and we are bounded in no direction. He uses the example of time to illustrate his argument, noting as Erpenbeck does, that our sense of the present is fleeting, but also qualitatively different to our fragmentary knowledge of the past and the future.  If all we knew was the continuous, Heraclitic flux which lacks a definite and persistent “something”, he says that we would neither know the boundary over which we want to reach out, nor the subject that reaches out.  Yet, as Simmel makes clear, we are aware of both the boundary and the self that transcends the boundary.  The present is what we are immediately aware of, but it is not the sum of all our knowledge. 

Kierkegaard was wrong: life can be understood backwards and forwards, but it can only be lived in the present.  To the extent that it makes any sense to speak of the essence of human life, it is found in our capacity to go beyond ourselves – beyond the immediacy of the “now” – to set limits for ourselves by reaching out beyond them.  For each of us there is a dualism in our experience: the continuous life flux of our immediate current experience – Erpenbeck’s 3 seconds – and the closed form of our individual life, that starts at birth and ends at death – which is documented by Erpenbeck’s ID card – about which we can construct a narrative, a biography, an historical self, even though we cannot remember much about our distant past and do not know about our distant future. 

What does this paradox of transcendence mean?  If, as Stephen Dedalus worries, I am by memory, and knowing the fallibility of memory, what does this mean for my sense of self? I am not sure.   I certainly do not think, despite the prompting of Dedalus’s friend, that it means we can default on our debts in good conscience.  I would suggest, tentatively, that we should avoid feeling bound by decisions, beliefs, and ambitions that we made or held many years ago; and that we should not assume that our future selves will think or want the same things that we do now.  

Just imagine if, forty years from now, someone sends me a copy of this text: Will I remember writing it?  Will I remember the person I was when I wrote it?  I do not know for sure, although I am much more confident that whoever I am forty years from now, I will want a warm bed to sleep in and good food and drink to keep me going through the day.  For which reasons, I remain confident about the enduring value of pensions. 

Now, it is time for my current self to return to Ulysses.