"The Presence of Yourself to Yourself": A Politics?

"Going inward" is in the zeitgeist. A growing range of conditions today lead people far and wide to the isolation or angst that invites or demands a more sustained sense of inwardness: the sense, as Jonardon Ganeri puts it in Inwardness: An Outsider's Guide, of "the presence of yourself to yourself." The isolating conditions of the pandemic and systemic injustice, the narrowness of relating through social media, the challenge of holding to what one knows to be valid against the forces of widespread deception are all, in various ways, instances that require turning to one's inward sense of self and one's experience. Meanwhile, ever more present cultures of mindful awareness, ranging from the popular trends of McMindfulness to ancient meditative traditions, invite practitioners to cultivate inwardness as a path toward resilience, compassion, community, or enlightenment. In the face of these pressures, imperatives, and invitations, this every day "presence of yourself to yourself" becomes not more familiar but more intense as a condition of both anguish and solace.

But what is this "presence of yourself to yourself"? Ganeri explores this question in a compact book of a dozen short chapters. To investigate, not to answer: if the inquiry is as enigmatic to the casual questioner, Ganeri demonstrates that it is essentially a question, one that can be thematized and adumbrated but not settled because inwardness is an experience without a stable referent. The self that senses the presence is the self that is sensed; inwardness is a process that undoes categories of subject and object. This makes inwardness a worthy and compelling philosophical topic, one that Ganeri unfolds in insightful and often effective ways through brief encounters with literary and philosophical sources. His explorations also verge, in intriguing ways, on themes of power and politics. However, Ganeri does not take up those connections, resulting in a one-sided conception of subjectivity. For the political theorist, to be a subject connotes both and at once being a perspectival, agentic, empowered self—a "subject of" experience—and a self who is "subject to" the power and agency of others and structures. Thus, this otherwise engaging and gratifying text is less a resource for political theory than a discourse marked by its near absence—and an invitation to bring political thinking into the compelling and vital terrain Ganeri has mapped in this book.

Inwardness thematizes inwardness without, as I have already intimated, forming an overarching argument about it. Indeed the book ends by posing the question of whether inwardness ought to be "expanded" through further inquiry and practice or instead "revoked" as a pernicious fiction, a question whose individual and philosophical stakes the preceding discourse artfully lays out. Ganeri begins with a conceptualization of inwardness that is offhandedly familiar as the cultural legacy of the Global North (invoking Avicenna and Augustine, with a nod to their common root in Plotinus), as disembodied consciousness that moves within the interior "space" of mind as a storehouse of memory. He swiftly finds this conception wanting, noting how attending to a sensation or a memory transforms it. Thus the self who is "stored" in the hall of memory is also actively re-making these memories; a creative subject quickly scrambles Augustine's conception of inwardness and its intuitive appeal. Most intriguing to me at this early juncture of Ganeri's exploration is the appearance of the sensing body and its sensorium as informing our critical examination of inwardness. Ganeri performs a similar decentering operation upon early Buddhist conceptualizations of conscious awareness as a lantern that is both self-illuminating and illuminating the inward self, a concept that he finds convincingly rejected by first-century Buddhist scholar Nāgārjuna.

Raising critical doubt about foundational images of inwardness from west and east opens the terrain Ganeri then explores. Reading Atugawa Ryūnosuke's "In a Grove" alongside its film adaptation as Rashōmon, he explores that one's inwardness is known by attending not to "what's inside" a person but to how...