Freddy Purcell–
In the first term of this year, I attended Joel Krueger’s module, Mind and World in Contemporary Japanese Philosophy, where we read Watsuji Tetsuro’s Rinrigaku and applied its content to philosophical issues. In this book, Watsuji forms an argument that aims to counter both the individuality and neglect of spatiality in Western ideas of the self. He does this through the primary concepts of betweenness and emptiness, concluding that because there is nothing intrinsic to the entity of the self, our selves must be constituted by the people and wider environment that surround us. I would highly recommend reading into Watsuji’s views on the self as they form a compelling and interesting argument against individualism that has stayed with me.
In the context of this module, Ellie Palmer from Edinburgh University spoke to the class about her work on the idea of the extended self and how that relates to death, taking inspiration from Watsuji. Having enjoyed greatly enjoyed the talk, I asked her a series of questions about the content itself and some possible implications of these ideas. Thank you to Ellie for taking the time to answer these questions and I hope you enjoy the interview. As always, feel free to comment any questions you have on this content down below.
Very generic to start with I’m afraid, but what first got you interested in philosophy?
I feel like I was someone who just never grew out of that annoying toddler phase of constantly questioning everything, asking, “Why?”. The other main attraction was how multidisciplinary philosophy is. I loved all subjects in school, and you can study the philosophy of art, science, technology, literature; you can essentially stick any noun on the end and engage in the philosophy of it.
You’ve studied philosophy at undergraduate, master’s and now at PhD level… How does the experience compare between undergraduate and postgraduate levels?
While studying philosophy at any level you’re constantly learning. At undergraduate I was a novice, but only became increasingly aware of much I need to learn. There is a cliché about philosophy that the more you know the less you know—the paradox of knowledge—and in my experience that is absolutely true. Moving up to postgraduate is mainly an attempt to mitigate that by settling on a specialist field, but the feeling never goes away.
What is the main piece of advice/wisdom that you would give to someone considering pursuing philosophy beyond their undergraduate degree?
It is all too easy to get burnt out, so consider taking some time out in between degrees if possible. If you are sure you will want to continue in academia to PhD level, getting some prior teaching experience during this time out will be invaluable.
Could you summarise your current research project?
My research is essentially focused on evaluating the spatial and temporal boundaries of the self. I explore the longevity of personhood grounded in the development of what I call the “extended self view”, expanding ideas of social and spatial being to encompass a wider notion of identity which can be found embodied in both our interpersonal relationships, as well as our relationships with material artefacts. I use a lot of work by the Japanese philosophers Watsuji Tetsuro and Tanabe Hajime, as well as others such as William James. I also talk a lot about the problems with present conceptions of self and beliefs in immortality, so if some immaterial non-worldly element like consciousness or a soul alone persists, either in a religious afterlife or uploaded into the digital cloud by what I term the ‘Silicon Valley immortalists’, whether this can be considered the persistence of self. I argue it cannot, that surviving death requires survival in the world due to the essential relationships we have with other things which constitute who we are. I try instead to argue for ways in which these relationships, and therefore elements of “me”, can persist beyond my own death. I then go into the ethical considerations and consequences we might encounter from such a view where one’s personal presence in the world is both spatially and temporally broader than we previously had considered it to be.
What got you interested in these topics?
Similarly to Watsuji, my project arose from frustrations with the individualist sentiment and concerns that many western philosophers focus too heavily on the temporal aspect of identity, attempting to address issues such as sameness over time before painting an adequate picture of the spatiality and constitutive make-up of persons, and undermining their relational nature. I’ve actually been working on these topics since my undergraduate dissertation and luckily for me my interest in them never waivered. Little did I know then that starting that project as an undergraduate was like opening Pandora’s Box. Like I said before, the further I progress with my research the more I realise how much more I still need to do.
If the self is partly constituted by objects, should we aim to be selective about what objects we include in our selfhood (or even try and move away from being constituted by objects at all) or is it an unavoidable part of living?
In my view, the fact that we have relationships with objects in the world that ultimately constitute our selfhood is unavoidable. I think it is what defines being human. You cannot be a self with no “other” counterpart to which you stand in relation. Not to mention the ways in which physical objects facilitate our relationships with other people, or things that we often think define us like our hobbies and interests.
Whether or not we can have some kind of conscious influence about what objects constitute our selfhood is complicated. In our daily lives we are very much “thrown into” the world, and the objects we encounter or people we interact with and form relationships with are not often entirely a matter of choice. There are, however, choices we might make about the physical environment I want to exist in that will have some significant impact on this, like moving to another city or country. Our physical environments shape the kinds of relationships that can form there, not only with objects but also with people. Watsuji also has things to say about this, but it’s not necessarily an idea unique to him. Outside of philosophy, it is something that shapes design choices in architectural theory, for example.
Whether there are certain kinds of objects one should or shouldn’t strive to form self-constituting relationships with is hard to say. I suppose that would depend on your own personal philosophy, who you want to be, what you want to be associated with, whether or not you want relationships with objects that will stick around much longer than your own body and consciousness. My aim at this stage in my project is simply to draw attention to the relationships that do exist, and their self-constituting and persisting nature.
Is it possible to have an object be part of your self, but not possess it? Can any tension arise if someone owns an object that is part of you?
Sure. This is the case with our relationships to other people too; we don’t own them but still invest our identities in them. For this aspect involving how other people constitute our identities, Marya Schectman and Christine Korsgaard would be good people to check out. It’s based on your relationship and interactions with the object, and of course I interact and have a relation with objects that I do not possess. Whether tension can arise if someone owns an object that is part of you, I think people actually do experience exactly these tensions more frequently than you might expect. Some examples that spring to mind relate to things like use of land or buildings in your local community. A lot of people experience very personal, identity constituting relationships to these spaces they interact with daily. For example, when a building is demolished, or land is changed in a way that people don’t agree with, it does feel like some kind of personal loss akin to the loss of something one might less controversially consider constitutive of the self such as a body part.
If we exist beyond death through our relationships with others, do the memories and perceptions of these people distort the self from its original being, particularly since there is no active input from the individual anymore?
For the first part of your question, the answer is yes. An example I often use is someone like Vincent Van Gogh. The perception we have of him and key words we might use to describe him relating to him being a successful artist are considered now the most fundamental qualities of his identity but were qualities not perceived to be true until after he had died. And it’s not as simple as these qualities being true before he died and people simply not being aware of it, but they became true through his posthumous interactions with other people through his art. It is also important to note here that this isn’t just something that happens after a person has died. The self I am trying to describe is far less individualistic, as I mentioned, and a big part of this involves less prioritising your own personal perception of who you are and more focus on other’s perceptions of who you are. You might be convinced you have X Y and Z characteristics, but if every other person you interact with in society sees you a completely different way due to your actions and behaviours, that seems to me a much more important determiner of qualities that make up your actual personal identity than we currently give credit.
Following on from this, is there mutuality or equality of power in the relationship between the dead and those that remember them?
You could argue that there is an asymmetry in some sense. I think the biggest imbalance is in the choice to continue the relationship or not which at first seems to lie primarily with the living. The impact of social media on the dead provides an interesting example here. This is a unique age which has provided us with widespread access to the vast digital lives of those that have passed away. However, one of the most important differences from other ways in which we would historically interact with and memorialise the dead is the ability to switch those interactions on and off with such ease; with the click of a button on my phone I can view thousands of photos and messages, remnants of someone who has passed away, but I can equally quickly hide all traces of someone I once had such a deep intimate relationship with. I would highly recommend Carl Ohman’s new book The Afterlife of Data for anyone interested in that side. There could also be some kind of power imbalance that works the other way, because the living don’t always choose how they remember or interact with the dead. You could argue there is some kind of power in persisting through a physical object that reminds everyone who interacts with it, especially involuntarily, of your existence. Think of something as powerful as a statue of someone like a slave owner in the middle of a city that you had to walk past every day. That is such a powerful legacy through which someone like that is not only able to ‘live on’, but also force people to have a relationship with and share space with that person.
If we do have a relationship with the dead, does this mean we have ethical obligations relating to how we treat them? What form do you think these obligations might take?
That’s a good question. My primary focus up until this point has been our ethical concern towards the living and even to future living persons as a result of these ideas, and the ways our relationships with the dead can improve morality in the world of the living inspired by the works of figures such as Tanabe Hajime and Uehara Senroku. I’m not super sure yet exactly what form such obligations towards the dead themselves should take. There are a few good people working on these kinds of questions I could recommend though, such as Michael Hauskeller.
Since a person changes after death, namely in the lack of functioning body and mind, do we have the same kind of self?
The self changes constantly through life too so I actually don’t think this is that big of a deal. Elements are lost and gained all the time, the self is flexible, not rigid, and so the overall integrity of the self remains after death just as it did during these fluctuations in life. There are times when we are unconscious in life, or our bodily functioning or physical integrity is compromised, every cell in our body replaces itself several times throughout the course of our lives, but we do not think then that we are a different “sort” of self. I don’t underestimate the importance of body and mind to selfhood, but the biggest difference really is simply that beforehand you were alive and now you’re not. I argue self continues to exist, but not that this persisting self is living in some way. That is significant, yes, and the self undergoes a substantial ontological shift to non-living so if you wanted you could introduce a classification of premortem/post-mortem selves for convenience, but I don’t think it is entirely necessary.
Do you think that we, particularly as a Western society, ought to view death differently? Do you think a different view could be personally beneficial when considering our own mortality or dealing with bereavement?
I think the primary problem is not how we view death but changing how we think about the self, and our view of death changes accordingly in the ways I’ve mentioned. Something else I think we ought to change is how we view the relationships between the living and the dead. In a lot of western cultures, both in secular and religious societies, the dead are separate and detached from the world of the living. But our presence in the world carries on in some way, and this is already a phenomenon people experience after the death of loved ones. Many people experience the continued presence of the dead in the world regardless of their view of anything like an afterlife or a soul or spirits. Interestingly this is often manifested through physical artefacts, often mementos and other objects associated with them.
In answer to the second part of that question, my arguments do not make light of the experience of grieving. A huge part of a person is undeniably still lost in their death, and what we grieve are often things like the ability to have a two-way conversation with our loved one, or to give them a hug, which these ideas don’t satisfy. Although some may find comfort in understanding the existence of the person they loved, or their own self after death, isn’t entirely gone from the world.
Do tech bros seeking immortality by uploading themselves into computers or other such means actually have a chance of succeeding?
I am not so familiar with how the proposed technology would work exactly so I can’t comment on the technological possibilities, but I am sure that even if they did succeed in mind upload, the persistence of their consciousness alone would not entail the persistence of their “selves”. Mind upload alone seems to me a very terrifying state of existence. A mind with no relations to the external world, with no body, is very limited in what it would actually be able to think about. Any knowledge that requires experience of the world, any concepts other than a-priori truths, would cease to have meaning. My hobbies and relationships with others and anything I associate with being a part of my identity while I was alive in my body would be no longer. Just look at cases of people being left in sensory deprivation tanks for a prolonged period of time. It doesn’t take long for the mind to go insane and for a person to “lose themselves” in that kind of a state. Just imagine an eternity of that. How could what remains be likened to my self as I was in the world? Mind upload into some digital cloud can’t be the end goal; there seem to be many stages missing. Will my mind then be able to be transferred into some other body? Will it exist in some San Junipero-like afterlife where I have a virtual replica of my body and the physical world? In these alternatives, we are still then forced to acknowledge the importance of being a physical, spatial self with relationships to other things.
Should we be concerned about our legacy from the basis of your argument, and could this lead us to consider future generations ethically?
Absolutely, this is precisely what I am hoping this research project will ultimately lead to. That there will be an “afterlife” in the sense that other people will survive us and the world we left behind will continue to exist, but also that we remain in some way a part of it or influential to it through our legacy is already what morally motivates many of our actions throughout our lives, and my research further exposes exactly the extent to which our relationship to the world that succeeds us remains. I think the added benefit of this is that through understanding how my self is so intertwined with other people and the world that survives me, it also pacifies any instinct for self-concern at the same time as benefitting others.
Are there any philosophical traditions outside of Japanese philosophy that you find useful or interesting in thinking about death?
There is some amazing work on collective immortality that has been influential to me for obvious reasons. A key one that inspires my answer to the previous question is Sam Scheffler’s work, but interestingly there is also a similar sentiment present in much of African philosophy. If you take a look at John Mbiti and Ifeanyi Menkiti for instance, or applying Ubuntu philosophy to ideas like personal versus collective immortality, you’ll find some obvious links to Watsuji’s philosophy and my own project.
(Cover Photo: MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty Images)