I was reading “Sy Safransky’s Notebook” in the April, 2008 issue of The Sun magazine (ad-free) this morning, and in the second paragraph he mentioned that his wife, Norma, had hurt his feelings. That has long seemed an odd expression to me, that feelings are things that could be hurt. To say that you have feelings of hurting would seem to make more sense.
I would rephrase Sy’s condition as this: Norma’s behavior was interpreted by his brain–based on it’s understanding of itself, its host organism, and how these fit into the social environment–as being detrimental to his well-being. By putting one’s situation in such terms, we can ask how we came to perceive ourselves in ways that produce such unpleasant feelings. How did our social environment and our individual history within it, produce this person that we perceive ourselves to be?
Looking at ourselves and those we are involved with in such terms may allow us to get a broader perspective on how we have come to identify with a particular set of desires, beliefs, feelings, etc. We may come to identify ourselves more as a particular organism–a human being–with certain built-in physical requirements and a range of pre-programed means of getting those requirements met: sensory apparatus, emotions, memory, etc. We had no conscious say about how this organism was shaped by evolution, and none about the social environment it was born into. Our perception of being in conscious control of the organism’s behavior is an illusion born of the social requirement for a locus of responsibility.
Our lack of conscious control of who we are does not preclude change in our perception of who we are. As the brain learns new information about how it works–how it negotiates the physical and social world–its perception of itself changes. We become different people. In learning how our feelings arise–how they have been shaped by biology and the social environment–our feelings change. It is possible for us to become less identified with what we feel, and more identified with the organism as a whole.
In coming to see ourselves as a particular organism in a particular context, we may also come to see that the organism and its context evolved within the much larger context of a specific planet, solar system, galaxy, universe…
If you’ve been perusing “my” stuff for awhile, everything I’ve written today will no doubt sound familiar, but hopefully, in circumstances that are different enough to put the ideas in a slightly altered light. The repetition is at least helpful for me…
So here’s another tidbit that may broaden your idea of who you are. An article in today’s New York Times online called, “Bacteria Thrive in Inner Elbow; No Harm Done,” by Nicholas Wade. A great paragraph from Nicholas:
“Since humans depend on their microbiome for various essential services, including digestion, a person should really be considered a superorganism, microbiologists assert, consisting of his or her own cells and those of all the commensal bacteria. The bacterial cells also outnumber human cells by 10 to 1, meaning that if cells could vote, people would be a minority in their own body.”
The moral of the story (supplied by yours truly): Take care of yourself; you’re responsible for the well-being of a quadrillion other organisms. Hopefully, if you take care of them, they will take care of you, and we’ll all live happily ever after.
We Need These Folks, Too