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With a Little Help From My Friends: the Construction of the Self Through Others

By: Andromeda 🌊🪨

No, you didn’t just read the work of Kant, Hegel, or Schopenhauer. The burst of profundity you were just blessed with is from the diary of yours truly, written last May. As the work of great scholars is wont to do, the entry from whence this excerpt came raised several questions for me: 

Why did I write so much about Succession? 

Why wasn’t my Zoloft dosage raised sooner? 

And perhaps most compellingly, why did I imagine it being read? 

Until now, the entry was completely private. There was no Reader, so why was I haunted by the idea of one? I guess it was kind of prophetic: lo and behold, what were once my most intimate thoughts are now blasted across your screen. And in a sense, it feels like sharing them with you has made them real–can it be that by wishing you, my “imaginary audience,” into existence, I’ve wished myself into existence as well? 

These questions are evocative of Abeba Birhane’s article, “Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons,” in which she argues, “being is an act or event that must happen in the space between the self and the world.” Is that what Jerry Maguire meant? 

Birhane opposes philosopher René Descartes, who, according to her, believed that others “have nothing to do with the basic constitution of the knowing self, which is a necessarily detached, coherent and contemplative whole.” Birhane considers the “self” an amorphous and porous concept, arguing that “we need others in order to evaluate our own existence and construct a coherent self-image.”

Hang on, you may say, how are you getting “the self” from your shitty melodramatic teenage ramblings? Fear not, I shan’t leave tenuous connections unbolstered. For said bolstering, I turn to our friend Michel Foucault. In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, he writes, “the writer constitutes their own identity.” Putting thoughts to paper calcifies them. Words become fossils of existence, scraps through which you can catch refractions of my selfhood. But who is the you in question?

For Foucault, imagining a reader is an inherent quality of writing the self: “the fact of obliging oneself to write plays the role of a companion.” So, is this dialogue with the self a satisfying substitute for the formative power of genuine interaction? I’m reminded of my second philosophical boyfriend, Frantz Fanon: in Black Skin, White Masks, he writes “to speak is to exist absolutely for the other.” Can the same be said of writing, or is a closed circuit enough to sustain us? 

I’m sure it will come as a shock to none that all answers, including this one, can be found in my writing! The unsatisfying nature of an imagined companion is evident in my compulsion to imagine a real one while writing my entry. I was unable to shake the feeling of being watched when writing because I craved perception. It’s as Birhane writes: “We need others in order to evaluate our own existence and construct a coherent self-image.” I wasn’t a sufficient audience for myself, because isolation isn’t our natural state of being. The self is built from interaction, so a lack of interaction compelled me to imagine the possibility of it. It strikes me that writing the self is kind of like eating Twizzlers. Twizzlers taste awesome, and they're fun to eat, but they don't really have enough nutritional value to sustain you by themselves. You can't maintain a healthy body with just Twizzlers, and you can't build a coherent self with just an internal dialogue. Trust me, I've tried. Both.

Birhane, Foucault, and myself (perhaps the Destiny’s Child of critical theory?) all agree that, though private writing can be beneficial, it does not construct a satisfying other, and the lack of a satisfying other is ultimately the lack of a satisfying self. Foucault said that writing, “palliates the dangers of solitude.” The key word there is palliate–to the self, the simulation of the other in writing has the same nutritional value as the crayon-adjacent bullshit that Twizzlers are made of. As Birhane writes, “others"–or the proverbial kale and chicken breasts of this bizarre nutritional metaphor–“are vital to our self-perception.” No matter how much muscle you put in, it’s not possible to conceive a self without acknowledging the formative force of others–their pushing is just as important as yours. Who knew that identity construction and riding a see-saw were so similar?