Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best books on the nature of I
Review: Excellent book! It shows in astonishing profundity how Descartes's "I think therefore I am" was just the beginning of a beginning of the serious discussion on the first-person authority.

Mr. Moran successfully demonstrates that the otherwise disprivileging similarities between the first-person perspective and the third-person one, in fact, offer us the best possible understanding of the first-person as an agent responsible for her own actions in a world dominated by Other-person-stances. The arguments he brings in defense of his position range from subtle to sublime. I especially enjoyed his extended analysis of Sartre's rakehell-gambler. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Admiring yourself for despising yourself and so on
Review: Imagine you have to finish off a piece of work tonight, or in any case it would be good if you did - if only for the relief of having got it over with. You have seen yourself lose heart and fail at similar tasks before, though they were by no means impossible to accomplish. As you set out to add a few extra hundred words to your manuscript, your poor record so far begins to haunt you. Knowing yourself all too well, as far as keeping deadlines goes anyway, you end up thinking that you, or whoever is having your thoughts, must be a gullible fool. Surely someone else, in all respects like you, could only be expected not to finish it off tonight, so why should it make any difference that the prediction of failure in this particular case concerns you and not someone else?

And yet it does matter that the thoughts about your task tonight are yours and not someone else's, and that is because - at least if you want to stay sane - you cannot abdicate from responsibility for your actions into a purely spectatorial perspective on what you will in fact do. What makes all the difference here is not that you are more intimately familiar with your past record as a writer than anyone else might be, or that you grasp all the inner circumstances of writing and its terrible difficulty in your specific case, or else that no one can see that you really have it within yourself to succeed. Rather, the crucial point is that you cannot always merely observe yourself as if you were someone else and retain a normal life as a person. If you resolve to churn out a few more pages tonight, you may of course be deluding yourself again, but your intention will differ very significantly from an impersonal assessment of how things are likely to turn out with someone who just happens to be you.

Richard Moran's wonderful book examines this and related issues in a subtle and patient way, and it does a lot to undermine the belief that it is special access to your inner life, rather than a unique responsibility for what you do with yourself, that makes you a person, someone already lodged in a world with others like you. All chapters repay in abundance close attention and rereading, but the last one - with a brilliant passage on Kingsley Amis's adulterer admiring himself for despising himself for his adultery - is a masterpiece. In addition to all its philosophical merits, this book is also a discreet source of hope for eternal procrastinators like the present writer...