Consider habits…how we develop and change them. This is where philosophy feeds life experience, and vice versa…as Aristotle made clear, habit is an essential element of good character, and so it matters critically what habits we develop when we are young.
Many of our habits are natural, some is deliberate choice, but much of our habitual actions are pure association. For instance, I loved my parents, both of them smoked, and so I learned as a child to love the smell of cigarette smoke. Hard to imagine, for anyone who has never smoked, I know. But for anyone who has grown up with it, as I did, it would come as no surprise to hear me say that it honestly never occurred to me that it was not ‘good’ for me, at least in a certain sense of the word.
We learn to conceive of much that we do as ‘good’ because we associate it with other things we consider good and even love love. My parents were by and large ‘good’ parents whom I sought to emulate, and so the fact that this habit that was so much a part of them would not be good for me simply did not show up on my radar. And the same holds true for most other ‘habits’ that families pass on to their young, inadvertently or otherwise (including lifestyle, eating and consumer habits, religious beliefs, etc.).
By my lights, I could not wait to ‘grow up,’ to break free of that ‘baby of the family’ status that gave them all license to treat me as a child. With four older brothers and sisters, all of whom smoked, it seemed clear to me that it was by this right of passage that smoking represented that I would finally come of age. Little did I realize that what those I loved considered ‘good’ might actually kill me one day, and at best, could actually take a lifetime to unlearn.
Difficult as it may be for us to believe today, this sense that smoking was ‘good’ remained true, even as my father was dying of lung cancer. It may have been willful blindness, I admit, but all of the smokers in my family never quite made the connection. I know that sounds unbelievable now, but it was a time before the surgeon general put warnings on every pack, and in fact, a time when we, culturally, had learned to think of cancer as something that came from within. And so it did not even occur to my family then (all of whom continued to smoke as my father gradually died), that his disease had anything to do with smoking, any more that with his career working in foundries, tire production, chemical delivery by way of crop dusting (which he directed by standing in the field itself!), or ultimately as a twelve hour a day fry cook in our family restaurant for the two decades years just prior to his diagnosis.
My point, again, is that we don’t always have all the information we need when we make the decisions that begin our life habits (just as we did not know then that tobacco companies were artificially enhancing the addictive components of cigarettes). Instead, we learn to conceive of much that we do as ‘good’ because we associate it with other things we love. And so, given all these influences, I remember feeling ‘addicted’ to smoking within a week of my first cigarette, meaning that I could barely think of anything else, at least until I’d just had one. No wonder, to a smoker, that little white worst possible enemy seems like a best friend, a calming relief from the anxiety that (little does the smoker realize) it actually causes to begin with.
Meanwhile, that there were other options that might have been better for me only occasionally occurred to me, and usually only by comparison with others who had more of what I considered better goods (usually consumer goods), though I have to admit, there was sometimes that little inner voice, the one that Socrates said, “never told me what to do, only ever what not to do”). But it was a lonely voice, since no one else in my life seemed to hear or understand it.
And so that battle raged in me for almost fifteen years. I cannot speak for other smokers, but I can say that I, at least, was well into adulthood before I realized how much this habit was costing me, and certainly before I began to compare myself to those who understood ‘good’ in a deeper, broader, more qualitative sense than I had come to think of it (which had more to do with extrinsic than intrinsic goods).
Ultimately, the sense of what I was missing came to my awareness only gradually, by way of admiration for those who somehow, inexplicably by my lights, did not smoke. I found it amazing that there were people who did not experience this constant craving, who did not feel the need to schedule their day around smoke breaks, who could actually drink a cup of coffee or eat a meal without an overpowering desire to light up. It seemed to me for a long time, as accustomed as I was to my own window on the world, my own conception of normal, that such people must have an indomitable will. I resented them, and – truth be told – loathed myself as well. Especially as I came to understand that it took no will at all for them. They needed to put no energy at all toward resisting the urge that overpowered me because they had never developed the habit to begin with.
This was a fact of reality that truly befuddled me – that there were people in the world who were free of this desire that had for so long weighed me down. The habit of smoking was so much a part of my life for as far back as I could remember, do deeply entrenched not only in my daily patterns, but in my very self-concept, that life simply did not seem long enough to make the changes necessary to become a person who was free of this self-destructive habit.
Not, at least, until I had a child of my own. Only then did I begin to understand that, just as the person I was today was paying the price for decisions made by that person I had been many years ago – so too, the person I would one day be was dependent on the choices that I would make now, as well as all those decisions that were yet to come. Gradually, I came to see that that future me was depending on the present me to learn what the younger me had not known. And that might have been the most powerful think I learned in my life. It changed everything.
Confused as I had always been about what was truly good for me, it was suddenly easier to understand what ‘good’ really meant when I held my child in my arms. Knowing, at that point, that there was nothing that I wouldn’t give to have never started smoking to begin with, I understood then that my opportunity was to be the king of parent I wish I had had – meaning, in part, a parent who didn’t smoke.
I had, of course, quit smoking when I was pregnant with her, but was able to do so largely because I thought it was only temporary. And so I had started again almost instantly after she was born. But it was not long before I realized that she too was internalizing the association between her love for me and the smell of this terrible habit.
I had also, by this time, started to wake up in pain, coughing, unable to breathe before I was even 30 years old. Having lived through my own father’s slow death, was this the future I would condemn my family to?
At this point, I had begun to fear for my health, and was reminded of my weakness first thing every morning by the pains in my chest that accompanied my first breaths. I had been able to slow down the rate at which I smoke to six or eight cigarettes on a good day, but that was only with great difficulty. In the course of a day, I spent considerable energy containing my desire, and that time was marked by severe psychic strain. I realized that while my body was craving cigarettes, the real problem was that my mind was dwelling on it. It was simply not enough to get my body to quit…not if my mind was going to continue thinking about it. And since each attempt to quit had ended with my giving in to my mind's fantasies, all the effort and stress I'd invested in quitting had ultimately been for nothing. And, what’s more, after each failed effort I had to deal with the lingering ache of my less than comfortable self-image, since I knew how weak I had proved myself to be.
And meanwhile, very little else was getting done, at least not with much enthusiasm. Naturally, I didn’t believe I’d be able to follow through on so many other things I might have accomplished in my life, so I simply didn’t try. Unable to fulfill even this task, I believed I was likewise unable to accomplish any goals that would require strength of will and endurance. And in those efforts I did put forth, my self-doubt haunted me and would not let me be sure that I would not desert the task before it was finished, thus wasting whatever effort I had already put forth. Hence, I was somewhat half-hearted in all my work, and what’s worse, I was in danger of being a half-hearted parent as well…if I could not master this one disgusting habit.
Now, you might not think this would be enough to drive a person to complete distraction, but in fact there were many dreams that had come and gone along the way, at least in part because it had become my habit not to take on any challenges at all, unable as I was to conquer even this relatively small challenge. One might think that such a small thing as being unable to overcome a smoking habit would not greatly effect a life, one way or another, except perhaps as far as health is concerned. But then, not knowing what I might otherwise have become, how could I be sure that it had not made an enormous difference? I might have gone to medical or law school with all that energy, after all. I might have become a teacher and a writer…something had only dreamed about. As it was, I was afraid to even go back to college, since I didn’t think I could even sit through a class without being distracted by the desire to smoke. So, it was reasonable to wonder, who might I have become by now, if I'd believed in myself yesterday? And who could I yet be tomorrow if I could manage to change this self-destructive pattern today, and perhaps eliminate the self-doubt that holds me back?
Now, let me throw in here something I was studying in my philosophy classes at the time, because it helped me to put all this in perspective. I was studying political philosophy at the time, and came across Hannah Arendt’s argument that a person cannot have a relationship with themselves. What she means by this, specifically, I will paste in a footnote[1] (because it seems worth elaborating in detail for those who might be interested). But the upshot is that philosophers are not always right, and about this, Arendt was wrong, I think, in a way that helped me finally get myself right.
Suffice it to say that arguing against Arendt’s claim that a person cannot have a relationship with themselves, I realized that what was really going on with me was that I was holding my past against my future self. I was, in a sense that Arendt would understand, stuck in a "singleness" that my past identity would not let my present self get out of. With the consequent that my present self did not believe in my future self because my past self had let me down so often. Because I was unable to forgive my past self, I was not able to believe any promises I made to myself either.
However subjective my point of view, these were things I knew about myself – as we all know ourselves – by way of things that others could not see but surface traces of. Whatever I may have looked like from outside-looking-in --this is how I look to myself, the form of my self-concept from inside-looking-out. Despite what Arendt says to the contrary, this inside-out point of view, the one that holds these other views of self together, and in this, it is very real. And regardless of appearances to the contrary, my past self was in need of forgiveness, and my future self was in need of a promise or two, and it was up to my present self to accomplish this. It was a revelation! Whether as an effect of my past actions or a cause of my future ones, my problem was exactly a lack of self-respect. I could see clearly that I had made enough mistakes in my past life that I no longer could believe in my present self. And it seems to me that in a circumstance such as this, the very thing that was needed as remedy would be for me to be able to forgive myself for how I have acted in the past, and to make and keep a promise to myself regarding what I will do in the future. To the extent that it was within my power to restore myself this self-respect by reconciling my past with my future self, I seem to hold the power within myself to remedy the ailing condition of my self-image. My past needed forgiving, and by no one but myself, before I could go on and be as productive as I hoped to become in life.
So, consider how the power of self-forgiveness and promise making could remedy a life gone wrong and help one master an overpowering addiction (any nagging habit will do here). Suppose I realize somewhere along the line that my habitual ways are self-defeating -- maybe at some bottomed-out moment, a New Year's Eve perhaps, and thoroughly annoyed with myself for my failure to live up to my potential, I take myself in hand and make a resolution. In this rare candid moment I admit to myself my responsibility for the shape of my life, and knowing that the many things I desire to do with my life have absolute prerequisites of rather grand efforts, I reason that I am going to have to change my life if I ever hope to accomplish any of them.
Maybe I have always wanted to go to go to college, for instance, but since I could not even quit this habit, I also did not think myself capable of completing such an arduous task as getting the degrees necessary to, say, teach and write. I realize that it is because I have failed myself in such minor respects as smoking and that I am unable to believe in myself long enough to carry out the more difficult challenges now. Suppose, however it happens, it dawns on me that all the cigarettes in the world are not worth the respect it has cost me, and that I will not ever be able to truly respect myself enough to complete more difficult tasks until I have conquered this habit.
I realize that the difference in my self now and in the past is that then I did not know the extent to which my lack of perseverance was pejoratively affecting the quality of my life, but I do know this now. So I decide on the basis of this difference in present and past knowledge that my past self can be forgiven for its failure because I did not know then what I know now. And by this same reasoning, I can be sure that my future self can be trusted to keep the promises I make from now on because they will be the acts of a wiser person. So I forgive myself for starting smoking in the past, and even for failing to quit so many times, and I also make myself a promise that I will do what it takes for my future self to be able to actualize its higher potentials.
However, since my effort both originates out of respect for myself and is for the ultimate sake of earning respect for myself, this respect then will be the dominant purpose that will motivate me, and quitting smoking or finishing college or any number of other things will only be the means to it. Because of this ultimate goal, my efforts will be sincere since I have seen the smoking for what it is--a positive affront to my self-respect. Right? Following me? Well, if you do, then you can see why I can no longer hold the attitude, "what harm can one little cigarette do?" because I’ll know the answer. I’ll remember how much harm it did…to my self-respect, something I won’t ever want to give up again.
So I contemplate the best way to accomplish this goal, and I reason that the task which had earlier been made more difficult by allowing my mind to keep smoking after I had told my body to quit, will be made much easier by convincing my mind to cooperate with my body rather than allow it to work against it. Remembering that it is only after my craving is allowed to linger in mind that the body finally gives in to it, I realize that my problem is my will. So it is my mind that I must convince to quit, and if I can do this, then my body will naturally follow suit. (Btw, in this mind/body tension is another sense in which a person is separate from oneself and can therefore have dealings within oneself.)
So to minimize this mind/body tension, which makes the ordeal of quitting so difficult, I make a bargain with myself -- indeed, and in a sense, take a vow -- whereby my mind and body will work together in the task. According to this vow, I promise to reward myself for not smoking with self-respect, and to punish myself for even thinking about it with…well, sit-ups.
To this end, remembering that the idea is to make it as difficult as possible to think about smoking, I will do one of two things anytime the thought of smoking crosses my mind: Either I will choose to stop thinking about the possibility immediately, OR I will drop and do sit-ups right where I am -- no matter where I am -- until I have stopped thinking about it. In addition, each time I would even think about smoking, I would add one sit-up to my nightly regime, and then I would add one more for every second I allowed that thinking to continue.
Ok, it’s a seemingly ridiculous bargain, and yet I make it with serious intention precisely because it is ridiculous enough to work, for doing this makes it virtually impossible to smoke, or to even think about smoking. Of course, others may think us crazy -- doing sit-ups in the supermarket, for instance -- but if this strategy works, then of course I won't be doing them, for doing sit-ups is more difficult than simply choosing to not think about cigarettes, so I will simply make the easy and right choice. And if that still doesn't work, then the sit-ups will most certainly get cigarettes off my mind, not to mention work off the extra weight I put on as I eat more while I'm quitting. (By this logic, such a regime would work even better if I were dieting.) And if I can follow this through, then quitting smoking will simply happen as a by-product of simply doing what it takes to earn my own self respect. It is a heavy regime, but it is meant to work, after all (and btw, it did). And when it succeeds, I will certainly have a real reason to think myself strong in the face of a difficult task. And once we are proven by ourselves to ourselves by such self-trial, there is little outside of us that is stronger.
At any rate, given only these options -- or loss of self-respect -- which am I going to choose? I am not likely to ignore the challenge I have laid down for myself for I have so much to gain by enforcing it. Naturally I’ll be reluctant to lie down and do sit-ups in public, so I will in effect have only one other choice -- which is to forget the whole ridiculous thing, and do something more constructive.
The truth is, I’ll be so distracted by the thought of my own ridiculousness -- or the knowledge that I should be doing sit-ups -- that it will be this which occupies my attention, not smoking -- for the only remaining choice would be self-disrespect, which is out of the question. I had lived too long with that to ever go back. I had made it an absolute condition by my fully-conscious self-promise that, if I do not abide by this bargain that I've made with my best-self, then I must recognize my failure and take the appropriate blame for it.
What my new insight has taught me is that, though I am perfectly free to go on smoking if I so choose -- seeing the real cost of it, that it is a choice I can avoid – I simply cannot go on respecting myself if I do.
This is the consequent of my new knowledge, by which I came to forgive and promise this change to myself. Unwilling to live with self-disrespect, self-respecting behavior is the only option I have. This forced-choice -- between self-respect and self-disrespect, that is, between cigarettes and sit-ups – this would overcome the cognitive dissonance usually involved in this task by uniting my mind and body to work together.
Whichever choice I make, none but disrespect will ever lead to lighting up a cigarette again. But in order to have united mind and body in coordinated interaction, I must first treat them in this manner, as if they are separate, because it is true that when mind and body do not work together, they actually work against each other.
In this case, I am taking control of my mind by way of my body, and my body by way of my mind. Whereas before the body had suffered for the mind's antics of tantalizing over the idea of smoking, now I had reverse the effect so that the body conditions the mind until thinking of cigarettes will not hold the appeal that it did when that thinking had no consequent in self-respect. Whereas before my mind wouldn't let my body quit, now my body will not let my mind continue. Only then can I be working in harmony.
So, I ask myself, haven't succeeded at this, have I not built for myself a sound basis for my own respect? A good reason to believe in myself? Haven't I earned the right to know myself to be trust-worthy without the influence of another human being? Can't it be said then that I have initiated the positive power of forgiveness and promise-making toward myself in order to remedy the irreversibility of my past and the unpredictability of my future – even though Arendt claims this is not possible???
It seems to me that many other processes by which a person overcomes a bad habit will include this process of forgiving and promise-making. The extravagance of this example is only to illustrate how complex the internal mechanism of self-reconciliation can be, and how deliberate that process by which we both measure and create our self-worth can actually be. In other words, how much is earned by the power of self-mastery.
My point then is that the power of self-respect can provide for harmonious interaction of the parts of the soul, just as Plato said it would. Just as in the public realm, respect has the power to halt the mechanism of vengeful consequences and provide for social harmony. Thus my relations with myself and the consequent self-image they produce will strongly effect my actions in the world. One cannot respect others, or expect respect from them, until one can truly respect oneself.
Arendt says that without being forgiven by others for what we have unknowingly done and being bound to them for the fulfillment of promises we have made freely:
. . . "we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man's lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities --a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfils, can dispel. Both faculties, therefore, depend on plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound by a promise made only to himself; forgiving and promising enacted in solitude or isolation remain without reality and can signify no more than a role played before one's self. (237) (italics mine)
I think Arendt clearly does not give human beings enough credit for their potential for intrinsic identity. She makes being "closed within ourselves" sound like being in a void--dark and ominous. Whereas it seems to me, and as I have attempted to illustrate, that what one finds when one looks inward depends entirely upon what one has put there. Considering the importance of self-image to the overall quality of life, one's own self-awareness is an extremely important audience! And it cannot be sensibly claimed that the interaction of one's mind, body, and spirit is "without reality" when it has such strong "real-life" consequences.
Faith in the power of philosophy should not lead us to the assumption that those who are called philosophers are always correct. Indeed, it is because they often err that we ourselves are invited to challenge them, to build on them, and to advance our own and perhaps others’ understanding beyond the limits of the past.
For instance, Hannah Arendt gave us great insights into the nature of power and political freedom in her theorizing, but she rightly resisted being called a philosopher because her concern was not with the power and freedom of the individual human being, but with their interaction in groups. And for this reason, we would do well to resist her social conception of individual being, which discounts the value of the inner world, and in this, reinforces the inner alienation that has become the norm in our time.
Consider what is lost in her analysis, and what might be gained by challenging its limits.
In her book, The Human Condition, Arendt raises some critically important issues for a better understanding of self knowledge and the dynamics of human interaction. However, in the process, she gives us much to think about with regard to two unavoidable problems with which all human beings must come to terms in the course of a well lived life. She also illuminates the power that we hold for remedy of these challenges.
The problems she addresses are the irreversibility of our actions and the unpredictability of the future, along with our capacities for forgiveness and promise keeping. While it is fruitful to examine these human faculties in light of our social interactions, is too easy to think them of value only in dealing with others, and to neglect their powerful value in dealing with one’s own inner being, including ones’ relationship with one’s past and future selves.
Consider her reasoning. Since all human action has consequences, some of which cannot possibly be known in advance, the faculty of forgiveness allows us to have the consequences of our actions halted when we have unknowingly set them into motion. In other words, the power to apologize and to be forgiven by those we have wronged enables us to break the escalation of that positive feedback loop we set into motion by offending others and provoking their understandable defenses. Eliciting forgiveness from others thus allows us to return, in a sense, to conditions such as they were before we offended the other.
Likewise, the faculty of making and keeping promises allows us to help shape future events such that some, if minimal, control is being exercised over one's otherwise uncertain future.[example: marriage]
These correcting faculties, Arendt argues, serve to smooth life's continuity by releasing us from the mistakes of the past and setting up future assurances. Together they form a tremendous power by which humans are able to navigate their social existence.
These capacities for forgiveness and promise-making, as Arendt points out, are elements of the power of love. When in ongoing human affairs we inevitably misact (often because "we know not what we do," as Jesus said, but sometime because we actually mistake our self interest to be in treating others as means to our own ends), then one who learns from their mistakes will experience regret. By expressing this regret in the form of apology to those we offend, we might earn another’s forgiveness, and thus halt the ongoing effects of our error.
Without this power of apology and forgiveness, we would forever be dealing with the consequences of our past trespasses, for their consequences would never stop following and engaging us (much as original sin is said to haunt humankind). When one person’s action offends another, the expected reaction, as common rationality would predict, is a mechanical one, it is defensive, even vengeful, and the offended is likely to pass the original offense back to the first offender. While this reaction is perceived to be defense by the offended, it is likely to be perceived as further offense by an unrepentant original offender, as so will be passed back, provoking even more defense, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.
(This is the logic of the static prisoner's dilemma, which we will discuss in a later section.) Forgiveness, however, is the unexpected response, the opposite of vengeance. And, in that it calls a halt to the ongoing process of offense and defense, it can restore trust, negatively reinforcing retaliation. It is novel, originating within the offended for the sake of the offender, and in this, it is the loving response. In this, it is a statement of respect and understanding that the offender is "only human," and subject to making mistakes because of it. That the forgiver believes the offender worthy of respect despite his trespass has the power to defuse what is otherwise explosive. It breaks the chain of violent interaction that any offense, intended or otherwise, sets into motion by eliminating the offenders rationalization to offend again. As acting is creating this force, Arendt says, forgiving destroys it. (A person on the receiving end of an unrepentant offender might forgive without apology, and thus refrain from returning the offense, but is likely to end up regretting this as an error if the offender never learns and thus continues to repeat the offense. When one who has no regret is forgiven for their offense too easily, without prerequisite apology, the effect is likely to be that he will never learn, the process simply will not end, and in fact, is likely to escalate, expanding outward in chain reaction contagion. Hence the importance of teaching others that we will not allow them to mistreat us, but will forgive them if they learn.)
And so this capacity for "constant mutual release" contributes to our perfectibility by allowing us to start fresh when we have erred. It allows us to learn from our past mistakes and improve our conditions by making right what has gone wrong. In this way, loving respect can release the future from its burden of the past. And by the promise of certain future actions a relationship of trust and intimacy can be established between and among humans, making the future less uncertain, and even promising.
This clearly is a power which humans hold in their own hands. Just as Jesus maintained, "that it is not true that only God has the power to forgive", and that this power does not even derive from God, "but on the contrary must be mobilized by men toward each other before they can hope to be forgiven by God also."(*)[passive resistance = implicit forgiveness]
However, Arendt thinks this a strictly interpersonal power -- not an intrapersonal one. She sees this power as effective only between and among separate humans, and not in the relations a person has with himself. Fortunately, I think one need not accept this limiting condition in order to accept the rest of her argument, for, whereas I find her argument otherwise quite sound, I think that the power to forgive one’s past self and hold oneself responsible for promises one has made to one’s future is not limited to the world of interaction between ourselves and others, but is a positive power for continuity within every individual life as well. Just as in relations with others, it is a power which releases us from our past mistakes and frees us to make the future different. It is the power that allows us to break the unfortunate habits we have acquired.
In as much as Arendt confines herself to discussion about action and speech, she is necessarily talking about one person interacting with another, but I think she need not do so for the sake of the rest of her argument, and that it might be more fruitful to include in the discussion the relationship one has with oneself, for it too is subject to the power of forgiveness and promise making, despite Arendt's argument to the contrary.
If she had said that one cannot forgive himself for his actions that offend others and must acquire their forgiveness before he has a right to his own, then I would agree completely. But she does not. Rather she seems to be saying that man cannot have a forgiving or promise-making relationship with himself because there is no sense in which he can be thought of as separate from himself. To the extent that she argues this position at all, here is what she says:
"the deepest reason why nobody can forgive himself [is that] as in action and speech generally, we are dependent upon others, to whom we appear in a distinctness which we ourselves are unable to perceive. Closed within ourselves, we would never be able to forgive ourselves any failing or transgression because we would lack the experience of the person for the sake of whom one can forgive."(243)
If in this she is saying that the reason one cannot forgive oneself is that one cannot objectify self such that one can see oneself distinctly, as through the eyes of others, then Arendt underestimates the value and power of the subjective inside-looking-out self, and what’s more, the importance of how one looks in one's own eyes. She is certainly right that forgiveness is a tremendous power in human affairs, but it is arguably also a tremendous power in internal affairs within the mind of a single participant. In that she ignores this, Arendt is making assumptions that degrade the solitary human being -- that of thinking that, since we are inside ourselves, we cannot know ourselves as well as those who are looking from the outside-in. We undoubtedly know ourselves differently from this inside-out view than others know us, but certainly it cannot be thought that we know ourselves less. If anything, while there are doubtless many things we can't see about ourselves from this inner-eye, there are certainly many more which we can see that others cannot -- that is, providing we look. Indeed, if we are reflective, it is nearer the case that we know ourselves more, not less, than those who see only our outward identity. The fact that many of us are not so reflective is actually irrelevant to the truth about what we could see if we would only look.
And thus, Arendt is, along with most of the rest of us, ignoring a crucial aspect of human identity development. For being enclosed in one body does not, I think, make us one indivisible self, but an integrated system of selves. We may be one person, but we are nonetheless under the competing rule of differing interests and desires, stretched out over time. In this we are subject to the mistakes of our past person as well as to the actions of our future person, therefore subject to the same irreversibility and uncertainty that also exist in external human affairs. Humans have and use this power to construct a durable self-identity the same way we construct durable relationships with others in the world. And it seems clear by his conclusions in the Republic that Plato would agree – for as he says, “the true king is one who is master over himself.”
But Arendt proposes "a diametrically different set of guiding principles from the 'moral' standards inherent in the Platonic notion of rule," which sees mans’ relationship with the world around him as an effect of the relationship he has with himself. Rather, in Arendt's view:
"The moral code . . . inferred from the faculties of forgiving and of making promises, rests on experiences which nobody could ever have with himself, which, on the contrary, are entirely based on the presence of others…thus the extent and modes of being forgiven and being promised determine the extent and modes in which one may be able to forgive himself or keep promises concerned only with himself."(238)
In Arendt’s view, mans’ relationship with himself will reflect the relationships which he has with others, and not vice-versa, the Socratic view on which Plato elaborates. By contrast with this view, the direction of these causes and effects between self and world will be an interactive one in which the actions in one realm will effect one's relationships in the other, and vice-versa. It follows from her conception of human beings as realizing their identity only in the presence of others that we are dependent upon receiving this respect from others for our own self-respect. And this is certainly partly true. But I think the solitary individual is extremely potent in forgiving and making promises to oneself, regardless of what others may or may not know or think. Thus, identity will have its source in the balance of one's own and other's respect. And it is simply not the case, then, that one person cannot interact with oneself. Our past and future selves, while they are extensions of us, are not identical to us at this or any given moment. They are distinct in that their action was or will be on the basis of different knowledge than the "I" in the here and now knows, and in this we can and I think do look at them as somewhat separate entities from our here and now selves. Our past and future selves are people who, however much they look and feel like us, either had not yet learned what we know now, or will know more than we do now when their time comes around. In this sense, our memories seem to be people whose actions have had an effect on us, and our future selves depend upon our actions now for their security. It can be said, I think, that there is a clear sense in which one deals with these selves as if they were distinct from us in at least some respects. And it is certainly more than just the memories and expectations of those other times with which me must contend, but also with the concrete consequences of them in the here and now. Whether by active and conscious recollection, or more passive subconscious dealing, we do not just carry the idea of them around with us, but act according to these self-images. The past has created a certain momentum in our life and the future holds certain probabilities because of it. These, steered by our moment to moment choices, dramatically affect the direction we ultimately take and thus the consequences with which we must ultimately live.
And so, to the extent that we exercise control over our lives at all, it seems that we do so by interacting along the way with these ‘other people’ that we were and will become -- and what's more, by doing it in a forgiving and promising manner. Although one presumably does not "speak to" past or future selves, as Arendt would probably say is necessary for interaction, such a process as the dialogue between earlier and later parts of the self is transmitted from one to another, one way or another. And it cannot be denied that we must somehow contend with them to the extent that they affect our behavior in the present.
Therefore, human being cannot reasonably be treated as if anyone is an identical and enduring entity throughout time, as Arendt would have us conceive, but must more accurately be understood as a changing and choosing vehicle through time. Life is a journey.
Many of our habits are natural, some is deliberate choice, but much of our habitual actions are pure association. For instance, I loved my parents, both of them smoked, and so I learned as a child to love the smell of cigarette smoke. Hard to imagine, for anyone who has never smoked, I know. But for anyone who has grown up with it, as I did, it would come as no surprise to hear me say that it honestly never occurred to me that it was not ‘good’ for me, at least in a certain sense of the word.
We learn to conceive of much that we do as ‘good’ because we associate it with other things we consider good and even love love. My parents were by and large ‘good’ parents whom I sought to emulate, and so the fact that this habit that was so much a part of them would not be good for me simply did not show up on my radar. And the same holds true for most other ‘habits’ that families pass on to their young, inadvertently or otherwise (including lifestyle, eating and consumer habits, religious beliefs, etc.).
By my lights, I could not wait to ‘grow up,’ to break free of that ‘baby of the family’ status that gave them all license to treat me as a child. With four older brothers and sisters, all of whom smoked, it seemed clear to me that it was by this right of passage that smoking represented that I would finally come of age. Little did I realize that what those I loved considered ‘good’ might actually kill me one day, and at best, could actually take a lifetime to unlearn.
Difficult as it may be for us to believe today, this sense that smoking was ‘good’ remained true, even as my father was dying of lung cancer. It may have been willful blindness, I admit, but all of the smokers in my family never quite made the connection. I know that sounds unbelievable now, but it was a time before the surgeon general put warnings on every pack, and in fact, a time when we, culturally, had learned to think of cancer as something that came from within. And so it did not even occur to my family then (all of whom continued to smoke as my father gradually died), that his disease had anything to do with smoking, any more that with his career working in foundries, tire production, chemical delivery by way of crop dusting (which he directed by standing in the field itself!), or ultimately as a twelve hour a day fry cook in our family restaurant for the two decades years just prior to his diagnosis.
My point, again, is that we don’t always have all the information we need when we make the decisions that begin our life habits (just as we did not know then that tobacco companies were artificially enhancing the addictive components of cigarettes). Instead, we learn to conceive of much that we do as ‘good’ because we associate it with other things we love. And so, given all these influences, I remember feeling ‘addicted’ to smoking within a week of my first cigarette, meaning that I could barely think of anything else, at least until I’d just had one. No wonder, to a smoker, that little white worst possible enemy seems like a best friend, a calming relief from the anxiety that (little does the smoker realize) it actually causes to begin with.
Meanwhile, that there were other options that might have been better for me only occasionally occurred to me, and usually only by comparison with others who had more of what I considered better goods (usually consumer goods), though I have to admit, there was sometimes that little inner voice, the one that Socrates said, “never told me what to do, only ever what not to do”). But it was a lonely voice, since no one else in my life seemed to hear or understand it.
And so that battle raged in me for almost fifteen years. I cannot speak for other smokers, but I can say that I, at least, was well into adulthood before I realized how much this habit was costing me, and certainly before I began to compare myself to those who understood ‘good’ in a deeper, broader, more qualitative sense than I had come to think of it (which had more to do with extrinsic than intrinsic goods).
Ultimately, the sense of what I was missing came to my awareness only gradually, by way of admiration for those who somehow, inexplicably by my lights, did not smoke. I found it amazing that there were people who did not experience this constant craving, who did not feel the need to schedule their day around smoke breaks, who could actually drink a cup of coffee or eat a meal without an overpowering desire to light up. It seemed to me for a long time, as accustomed as I was to my own window on the world, my own conception of normal, that such people must have an indomitable will. I resented them, and – truth be told – loathed myself as well. Especially as I came to understand that it took no will at all for them. They needed to put no energy at all toward resisting the urge that overpowered me because they had never developed the habit to begin with.
This was a fact of reality that truly befuddled me – that there were people in the world who were free of this desire that had for so long weighed me down. The habit of smoking was so much a part of my life for as far back as I could remember, do deeply entrenched not only in my daily patterns, but in my very self-concept, that life simply did not seem long enough to make the changes necessary to become a person who was free of this self-destructive habit.
Not, at least, until I had a child of my own. Only then did I begin to understand that, just as the person I was today was paying the price for decisions made by that person I had been many years ago – so too, the person I would one day be was dependent on the choices that I would make now, as well as all those decisions that were yet to come. Gradually, I came to see that that future me was depending on the present me to learn what the younger me had not known. And that might have been the most powerful think I learned in my life. It changed everything.
Confused as I had always been about what was truly good for me, it was suddenly easier to understand what ‘good’ really meant when I held my child in my arms. Knowing, at that point, that there was nothing that I wouldn’t give to have never started smoking to begin with, I understood then that my opportunity was to be the king of parent I wish I had had – meaning, in part, a parent who didn’t smoke.
I had, of course, quit smoking when I was pregnant with her, but was able to do so largely because I thought it was only temporary. And so I had started again almost instantly after she was born. But it was not long before I realized that she too was internalizing the association between her love for me and the smell of this terrible habit.
I had also, by this time, started to wake up in pain, coughing, unable to breathe before I was even 30 years old. Having lived through my own father’s slow death, was this the future I would condemn my family to?
At this point, I had begun to fear for my health, and was reminded of my weakness first thing every morning by the pains in my chest that accompanied my first breaths. I had been able to slow down the rate at which I smoke to six or eight cigarettes on a good day, but that was only with great difficulty. In the course of a day, I spent considerable energy containing my desire, and that time was marked by severe psychic strain. I realized that while my body was craving cigarettes, the real problem was that my mind was dwelling on it. It was simply not enough to get my body to quit…not if my mind was going to continue thinking about it. And since each attempt to quit had ended with my giving in to my mind's fantasies, all the effort and stress I'd invested in quitting had ultimately been for nothing. And, what’s more, after each failed effort I had to deal with the lingering ache of my less than comfortable self-image, since I knew how weak I had proved myself to be.
And meanwhile, very little else was getting done, at least not with much enthusiasm. Naturally, I didn’t believe I’d be able to follow through on so many other things I might have accomplished in my life, so I simply didn’t try. Unable to fulfill even this task, I believed I was likewise unable to accomplish any goals that would require strength of will and endurance. And in those efforts I did put forth, my self-doubt haunted me and would not let me be sure that I would not desert the task before it was finished, thus wasting whatever effort I had already put forth. Hence, I was somewhat half-hearted in all my work, and what’s worse, I was in danger of being a half-hearted parent as well…if I could not master this one disgusting habit.
Now, you might not think this would be enough to drive a person to complete distraction, but in fact there were many dreams that had come and gone along the way, at least in part because it had become my habit not to take on any challenges at all, unable as I was to conquer even this relatively small challenge. One might think that such a small thing as being unable to overcome a smoking habit would not greatly effect a life, one way or another, except perhaps as far as health is concerned. But then, not knowing what I might otherwise have become, how could I be sure that it had not made an enormous difference? I might have gone to medical or law school with all that energy, after all. I might have become a teacher and a writer…something had only dreamed about. As it was, I was afraid to even go back to college, since I didn’t think I could even sit through a class without being distracted by the desire to smoke. So, it was reasonable to wonder, who might I have become by now, if I'd believed in myself yesterday? And who could I yet be tomorrow if I could manage to change this self-destructive pattern today, and perhaps eliminate the self-doubt that holds me back?
Now, let me throw in here something I was studying in my philosophy classes at the time, because it helped me to put all this in perspective. I was studying political philosophy at the time, and came across Hannah Arendt’s argument that a person cannot have a relationship with themselves. What she means by this, specifically, I will paste in a footnote[1] (because it seems worth elaborating in detail for those who might be interested). But the upshot is that philosophers are not always right, and about this, Arendt was wrong, I think, in a way that helped me finally get myself right.
Suffice it to say that arguing against Arendt’s claim that a person cannot have a relationship with themselves, I realized that what was really going on with me was that I was holding my past against my future self. I was, in a sense that Arendt would understand, stuck in a "singleness" that my past identity would not let my present self get out of. With the consequent that my present self did not believe in my future self because my past self had let me down so often. Because I was unable to forgive my past self, I was not able to believe any promises I made to myself either.
However subjective my point of view, these were things I knew about myself – as we all know ourselves – by way of things that others could not see but surface traces of. Whatever I may have looked like from outside-looking-in --this is how I look to myself, the form of my self-concept from inside-looking-out. Despite what Arendt says to the contrary, this inside-out point of view, the one that holds these other views of self together, and in this, it is very real. And regardless of appearances to the contrary, my past self was in need of forgiveness, and my future self was in need of a promise or two, and it was up to my present self to accomplish this. It was a revelation! Whether as an effect of my past actions or a cause of my future ones, my problem was exactly a lack of self-respect. I could see clearly that I had made enough mistakes in my past life that I no longer could believe in my present self. And it seems to me that in a circumstance such as this, the very thing that was needed as remedy would be for me to be able to forgive myself for how I have acted in the past, and to make and keep a promise to myself regarding what I will do in the future. To the extent that it was within my power to restore myself this self-respect by reconciling my past with my future self, I seem to hold the power within myself to remedy the ailing condition of my self-image. My past needed forgiving, and by no one but myself, before I could go on and be as productive as I hoped to become in life.
So, consider how the power of self-forgiveness and promise making could remedy a life gone wrong and help one master an overpowering addiction (any nagging habit will do here). Suppose I realize somewhere along the line that my habitual ways are self-defeating -- maybe at some bottomed-out moment, a New Year's Eve perhaps, and thoroughly annoyed with myself for my failure to live up to my potential, I take myself in hand and make a resolution. In this rare candid moment I admit to myself my responsibility for the shape of my life, and knowing that the many things I desire to do with my life have absolute prerequisites of rather grand efforts, I reason that I am going to have to change my life if I ever hope to accomplish any of them.
Maybe I have always wanted to go to go to college, for instance, but since I could not even quit this habit, I also did not think myself capable of completing such an arduous task as getting the degrees necessary to, say, teach and write. I realize that it is because I have failed myself in such minor respects as smoking and that I am unable to believe in myself long enough to carry out the more difficult challenges now. Suppose, however it happens, it dawns on me that all the cigarettes in the world are not worth the respect it has cost me, and that I will not ever be able to truly respect myself enough to complete more difficult tasks until I have conquered this habit.
I realize that the difference in my self now and in the past is that then I did not know the extent to which my lack of perseverance was pejoratively affecting the quality of my life, but I do know this now. So I decide on the basis of this difference in present and past knowledge that my past self can be forgiven for its failure because I did not know then what I know now. And by this same reasoning, I can be sure that my future self can be trusted to keep the promises I make from now on because they will be the acts of a wiser person. So I forgive myself for starting smoking in the past, and even for failing to quit so many times, and I also make myself a promise that I will do what it takes for my future self to be able to actualize its higher potentials.
However, since my effort both originates out of respect for myself and is for the ultimate sake of earning respect for myself, this respect then will be the dominant purpose that will motivate me, and quitting smoking or finishing college or any number of other things will only be the means to it. Because of this ultimate goal, my efforts will be sincere since I have seen the smoking for what it is--a positive affront to my self-respect. Right? Following me? Well, if you do, then you can see why I can no longer hold the attitude, "what harm can one little cigarette do?" because I’ll know the answer. I’ll remember how much harm it did…to my self-respect, something I won’t ever want to give up again.
So I contemplate the best way to accomplish this goal, and I reason that the task which had earlier been made more difficult by allowing my mind to keep smoking after I had told my body to quit, will be made much easier by convincing my mind to cooperate with my body rather than allow it to work against it. Remembering that it is only after my craving is allowed to linger in mind that the body finally gives in to it, I realize that my problem is my will. So it is my mind that I must convince to quit, and if I can do this, then my body will naturally follow suit. (Btw, in this mind/body tension is another sense in which a person is separate from oneself and can therefore have dealings within oneself.)
So to minimize this mind/body tension, which makes the ordeal of quitting so difficult, I make a bargain with myself -- indeed, and in a sense, take a vow -- whereby my mind and body will work together in the task. According to this vow, I promise to reward myself for not smoking with self-respect, and to punish myself for even thinking about it with…well, sit-ups.
To this end, remembering that the idea is to make it as difficult as possible to think about smoking, I will do one of two things anytime the thought of smoking crosses my mind: Either I will choose to stop thinking about the possibility immediately, OR I will drop and do sit-ups right where I am -- no matter where I am -- until I have stopped thinking about it. In addition, each time I would even think about smoking, I would add one sit-up to my nightly regime, and then I would add one more for every second I allowed that thinking to continue.
Ok, it’s a seemingly ridiculous bargain, and yet I make it with serious intention precisely because it is ridiculous enough to work, for doing this makes it virtually impossible to smoke, or to even think about smoking. Of course, others may think us crazy -- doing sit-ups in the supermarket, for instance -- but if this strategy works, then of course I won't be doing them, for doing sit-ups is more difficult than simply choosing to not think about cigarettes, so I will simply make the easy and right choice. And if that still doesn't work, then the sit-ups will most certainly get cigarettes off my mind, not to mention work off the extra weight I put on as I eat more while I'm quitting. (By this logic, such a regime would work even better if I were dieting.) And if I can follow this through, then quitting smoking will simply happen as a by-product of simply doing what it takes to earn my own self respect. It is a heavy regime, but it is meant to work, after all (and btw, it did). And when it succeeds, I will certainly have a real reason to think myself strong in the face of a difficult task. And once we are proven by ourselves to ourselves by such self-trial, there is little outside of us that is stronger.
At any rate, given only these options -- or loss of self-respect -- which am I going to choose? I am not likely to ignore the challenge I have laid down for myself for I have so much to gain by enforcing it. Naturally I’ll be reluctant to lie down and do sit-ups in public, so I will in effect have only one other choice -- which is to forget the whole ridiculous thing, and do something more constructive.
The truth is, I’ll be so distracted by the thought of my own ridiculousness -- or the knowledge that I should be doing sit-ups -- that it will be this which occupies my attention, not smoking -- for the only remaining choice would be self-disrespect, which is out of the question. I had lived too long with that to ever go back. I had made it an absolute condition by my fully-conscious self-promise that, if I do not abide by this bargain that I've made with my best-self, then I must recognize my failure and take the appropriate blame for it.
What my new insight has taught me is that, though I am perfectly free to go on smoking if I so choose -- seeing the real cost of it, that it is a choice I can avoid – I simply cannot go on respecting myself if I do.
This is the consequent of my new knowledge, by which I came to forgive and promise this change to myself. Unwilling to live with self-disrespect, self-respecting behavior is the only option I have. This forced-choice -- between self-respect and self-disrespect, that is, between cigarettes and sit-ups – this would overcome the cognitive dissonance usually involved in this task by uniting my mind and body to work together.
Whichever choice I make, none but disrespect will ever lead to lighting up a cigarette again. But in order to have united mind and body in coordinated interaction, I must first treat them in this manner, as if they are separate, because it is true that when mind and body do not work together, they actually work against each other.
In this case, I am taking control of my mind by way of my body, and my body by way of my mind. Whereas before the body had suffered for the mind's antics of tantalizing over the idea of smoking, now I had reverse the effect so that the body conditions the mind until thinking of cigarettes will not hold the appeal that it did when that thinking had no consequent in self-respect. Whereas before my mind wouldn't let my body quit, now my body will not let my mind continue. Only then can I be working in harmony.
So, I ask myself, haven't succeeded at this, have I not built for myself a sound basis for my own respect? A good reason to believe in myself? Haven't I earned the right to know myself to be trust-worthy without the influence of another human being? Can't it be said then that I have initiated the positive power of forgiveness and promise-making toward myself in order to remedy the irreversibility of my past and the unpredictability of my future – even though Arendt claims this is not possible???
It seems to me that many other processes by which a person overcomes a bad habit will include this process of forgiving and promise-making. The extravagance of this example is only to illustrate how complex the internal mechanism of self-reconciliation can be, and how deliberate that process by which we both measure and create our self-worth can actually be. In other words, how much is earned by the power of self-mastery.
My point then is that the power of self-respect can provide for harmonious interaction of the parts of the soul, just as Plato said it would. Just as in the public realm, respect has the power to halt the mechanism of vengeful consequences and provide for social harmony. Thus my relations with myself and the consequent self-image they produce will strongly effect my actions in the world. One cannot respect others, or expect respect from them, until one can truly respect oneself.
Arendt says that without being forgiven by others for what we have unknowingly done and being bound to them for the fulfillment of promises we have made freely:
. . . "we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man's lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities --a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfils, can dispel. Both faculties, therefore, depend on plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound by a promise made only to himself; forgiving and promising enacted in solitude or isolation remain without reality and can signify no more than a role played before one's self. (237) (italics mine)
I think Arendt clearly does not give human beings enough credit for their potential for intrinsic identity. She makes being "closed within ourselves" sound like being in a void--dark and ominous. Whereas it seems to me, and as I have attempted to illustrate, that what one finds when one looks inward depends entirely upon what one has put there. Considering the importance of self-image to the overall quality of life, one's own self-awareness is an extremely important audience! And it cannot be sensibly claimed that the interaction of one's mind, body, and spirit is "without reality" when it has such strong "real-life" consequences.
Faith in the power of philosophy should not lead us to the assumption that those who are called philosophers are always correct. Indeed, it is because they often err that we ourselves are invited to challenge them, to build on them, and to advance our own and perhaps others’ understanding beyond the limits of the past.
For instance, Hannah Arendt gave us great insights into the nature of power and political freedom in her theorizing, but she rightly resisted being called a philosopher because her concern was not with the power and freedom of the individual human being, but with their interaction in groups. And for this reason, we would do well to resist her social conception of individual being, which discounts the value of the inner world, and in this, reinforces the inner alienation that has become the norm in our time.
Consider what is lost in her analysis, and what might be gained by challenging its limits.
In her book, The Human Condition, Arendt raises some critically important issues for a better understanding of self knowledge and the dynamics of human interaction. However, in the process, she gives us much to think about with regard to two unavoidable problems with which all human beings must come to terms in the course of a well lived life. She also illuminates the power that we hold for remedy of these challenges.
The problems she addresses are the irreversibility of our actions and the unpredictability of the future, along with our capacities for forgiveness and promise keeping. While it is fruitful to examine these human faculties in light of our social interactions, is too easy to think them of value only in dealing with others, and to neglect their powerful value in dealing with one’s own inner being, including ones’ relationship with one’s past and future selves.
Consider her reasoning. Since all human action has consequences, some of which cannot possibly be known in advance, the faculty of forgiveness allows us to have the consequences of our actions halted when we have unknowingly set them into motion. In other words, the power to apologize and to be forgiven by those we have wronged enables us to break the escalation of that positive feedback loop we set into motion by offending others and provoking their understandable defenses. Eliciting forgiveness from others thus allows us to return, in a sense, to conditions such as they were before we offended the other.
Likewise, the faculty of making and keeping promises allows us to help shape future events such that some, if minimal, control is being exercised over one's otherwise uncertain future.[example: marriage]
These correcting faculties, Arendt argues, serve to smooth life's continuity by releasing us from the mistakes of the past and setting up future assurances. Together they form a tremendous power by which humans are able to navigate their social existence.
These capacities for forgiveness and promise-making, as Arendt points out, are elements of the power of love. When in ongoing human affairs we inevitably misact (often because "we know not what we do," as Jesus said, but sometime because we actually mistake our self interest to be in treating others as means to our own ends), then one who learns from their mistakes will experience regret. By expressing this regret in the form of apology to those we offend, we might earn another’s forgiveness, and thus halt the ongoing effects of our error.
Without this power of apology and forgiveness, we would forever be dealing with the consequences of our past trespasses, for their consequences would never stop following and engaging us (much as original sin is said to haunt humankind). When one person’s action offends another, the expected reaction, as common rationality would predict, is a mechanical one, it is defensive, even vengeful, and the offended is likely to pass the original offense back to the first offender. While this reaction is perceived to be defense by the offended, it is likely to be perceived as further offense by an unrepentant original offender, as so will be passed back, provoking even more defense, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.
(This is the logic of the static prisoner's dilemma, which we will discuss in a later section.) Forgiveness, however, is the unexpected response, the opposite of vengeance. And, in that it calls a halt to the ongoing process of offense and defense, it can restore trust, negatively reinforcing retaliation. It is novel, originating within the offended for the sake of the offender, and in this, it is the loving response. In this, it is a statement of respect and understanding that the offender is "only human," and subject to making mistakes because of it. That the forgiver believes the offender worthy of respect despite his trespass has the power to defuse what is otherwise explosive. It breaks the chain of violent interaction that any offense, intended or otherwise, sets into motion by eliminating the offenders rationalization to offend again. As acting is creating this force, Arendt says, forgiving destroys it. (A person on the receiving end of an unrepentant offender might forgive without apology, and thus refrain from returning the offense, but is likely to end up regretting this as an error if the offender never learns and thus continues to repeat the offense. When one who has no regret is forgiven for their offense too easily, without prerequisite apology, the effect is likely to be that he will never learn, the process simply will not end, and in fact, is likely to escalate, expanding outward in chain reaction contagion. Hence the importance of teaching others that we will not allow them to mistreat us, but will forgive them if they learn.)
And so this capacity for "constant mutual release" contributes to our perfectibility by allowing us to start fresh when we have erred. It allows us to learn from our past mistakes and improve our conditions by making right what has gone wrong. In this way, loving respect can release the future from its burden of the past. And by the promise of certain future actions a relationship of trust and intimacy can be established between and among humans, making the future less uncertain, and even promising.
This clearly is a power which humans hold in their own hands. Just as Jesus maintained, "that it is not true that only God has the power to forgive", and that this power does not even derive from God, "but on the contrary must be mobilized by men toward each other before they can hope to be forgiven by God also."(*)[passive resistance = implicit forgiveness]
However, Arendt thinks this a strictly interpersonal power -- not an intrapersonal one. She sees this power as effective only between and among separate humans, and not in the relations a person has with himself. Fortunately, I think one need not accept this limiting condition in order to accept the rest of her argument, for, whereas I find her argument otherwise quite sound, I think that the power to forgive one’s past self and hold oneself responsible for promises one has made to one’s future is not limited to the world of interaction between ourselves and others, but is a positive power for continuity within every individual life as well. Just as in relations with others, it is a power which releases us from our past mistakes and frees us to make the future different. It is the power that allows us to break the unfortunate habits we have acquired.
In as much as Arendt confines herself to discussion about action and speech, she is necessarily talking about one person interacting with another, but I think she need not do so for the sake of the rest of her argument, and that it might be more fruitful to include in the discussion the relationship one has with oneself, for it too is subject to the power of forgiveness and promise making, despite Arendt's argument to the contrary.
If she had said that one cannot forgive himself for his actions that offend others and must acquire their forgiveness before he has a right to his own, then I would agree completely. But she does not. Rather she seems to be saying that man cannot have a forgiving or promise-making relationship with himself because there is no sense in which he can be thought of as separate from himself. To the extent that she argues this position at all, here is what she says:
"the deepest reason why nobody can forgive himself [is that] as in action and speech generally, we are dependent upon others, to whom we appear in a distinctness which we ourselves are unable to perceive. Closed within ourselves, we would never be able to forgive ourselves any failing or transgression because we would lack the experience of the person for the sake of whom one can forgive."(243)
If in this she is saying that the reason one cannot forgive oneself is that one cannot objectify self such that one can see oneself distinctly, as through the eyes of others, then Arendt underestimates the value and power of the subjective inside-looking-out self, and what’s more, the importance of how one looks in one's own eyes. She is certainly right that forgiveness is a tremendous power in human affairs, but it is arguably also a tremendous power in internal affairs within the mind of a single participant. In that she ignores this, Arendt is making assumptions that degrade the solitary human being -- that of thinking that, since we are inside ourselves, we cannot know ourselves as well as those who are looking from the outside-in. We undoubtedly know ourselves differently from this inside-out view than others know us, but certainly it cannot be thought that we know ourselves less. If anything, while there are doubtless many things we can't see about ourselves from this inner-eye, there are certainly many more which we can see that others cannot -- that is, providing we look. Indeed, if we are reflective, it is nearer the case that we know ourselves more, not less, than those who see only our outward identity. The fact that many of us are not so reflective is actually irrelevant to the truth about what we could see if we would only look.
And thus, Arendt is, along with most of the rest of us, ignoring a crucial aspect of human identity development. For being enclosed in one body does not, I think, make us one indivisible self, but an integrated system of selves. We may be one person, but we are nonetheless under the competing rule of differing interests and desires, stretched out over time. In this we are subject to the mistakes of our past person as well as to the actions of our future person, therefore subject to the same irreversibility and uncertainty that also exist in external human affairs. Humans have and use this power to construct a durable self-identity the same way we construct durable relationships with others in the world. And it seems clear by his conclusions in the Republic that Plato would agree – for as he says, “the true king is one who is master over himself.”
But Arendt proposes "a diametrically different set of guiding principles from the 'moral' standards inherent in the Platonic notion of rule," which sees mans’ relationship with the world around him as an effect of the relationship he has with himself. Rather, in Arendt's view:
"The moral code . . . inferred from the faculties of forgiving and of making promises, rests on experiences which nobody could ever have with himself, which, on the contrary, are entirely based on the presence of others…thus the extent and modes of being forgiven and being promised determine the extent and modes in which one may be able to forgive himself or keep promises concerned only with himself."(238)
In Arendt’s view, mans’ relationship with himself will reflect the relationships which he has with others, and not vice-versa, the Socratic view on which Plato elaborates. By contrast with this view, the direction of these causes and effects between self and world will be an interactive one in which the actions in one realm will effect one's relationships in the other, and vice-versa. It follows from her conception of human beings as realizing their identity only in the presence of others that we are dependent upon receiving this respect from others for our own self-respect. And this is certainly partly true. But I think the solitary individual is extremely potent in forgiving and making promises to oneself, regardless of what others may or may not know or think. Thus, identity will have its source in the balance of one's own and other's respect. And it is simply not the case, then, that one person cannot interact with oneself. Our past and future selves, while they are extensions of us, are not identical to us at this or any given moment. They are distinct in that their action was or will be on the basis of different knowledge than the "I" in the here and now knows, and in this we can and I think do look at them as somewhat separate entities from our here and now selves. Our past and future selves are people who, however much they look and feel like us, either had not yet learned what we know now, or will know more than we do now when their time comes around. In this sense, our memories seem to be people whose actions have had an effect on us, and our future selves depend upon our actions now for their security. It can be said, I think, that there is a clear sense in which one deals with these selves as if they were distinct from us in at least some respects. And it is certainly more than just the memories and expectations of those other times with which me must contend, but also with the concrete consequences of them in the here and now. Whether by active and conscious recollection, or more passive subconscious dealing, we do not just carry the idea of them around with us, but act according to these self-images. The past has created a certain momentum in our life and the future holds certain probabilities because of it. These, steered by our moment to moment choices, dramatically affect the direction we ultimately take and thus the consequences with which we must ultimately live.
And so, to the extent that we exercise control over our lives at all, it seems that we do so by interacting along the way with these ‘other people’ that we were and will become -- and what's more, by doing it in a forgiving and promising manner. Although one presumably does not "speak to" past or future selves, as Arendt would probably say is necessary for interaction, such a process as the dialogue between earlier and later parts of the self is transmitted from one to another, one way or another. And it cannot be denied that we must somehow contend with them to the extent that they affect our behavior in the present.
Therefore, human being cannot reasonably be treated as if anyone is an identical and enduring entity throughout time, as Arendt would have us conceive, but must more accurately be understood as a changing and choosing vehicle through time. Life is a journey.