{"id":9670,"date":"2024-12-22T13:36:02","date_gmt":"2024-12-22T17:36:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/philosopher-r-l-nettleship-on-love-death-and-the-paradox-of-personality-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-12-22T13:36:02","modified_gmt":"2024-12-22T17:36:02","slug":"philosopher-r-l-nettleship-on-love-death-and-the-paradox-of-personality-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/philosopher-r-l-nettleship-on-love-death-and-the-paradox-of-personality-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Philosopher R.L. Nettleship on Love, Death, and the Paradox of Personality \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cA persona is a portal we are not aware of passing through,\u201d my beloved editor Dan Frank<\/a> wrote in an unpublished poem shortly before the insentient atoms that composed him, this singular and unrepeatable person, disbanded to return to the universe. And yet despite everything we know about what happens to those atoms when we die<\/a>, the question of how they cohered into a person \u2014 the question of what makes a person, of how the myriad personae within constellate the total personality that moves through the world \u2014 is still mired in mystery. It is perhaps the greatest mystery of being alive. <\/p>\n

These are the questions that animated the English poet and philosopher Richard Lewis Nettleship<\/strong> (December 17, 1846\u2013August 25, 1892), who believed that \u201cthe individuality of anything is an ultimate fact, behind which we cannot go,\u201d but through which we must look in order to understand the sum total of human experience. <\/p>\n

\"\"
R.L. Nettleship<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Personality, Nettleship cautioned an epoch before pop psychology flooded us with platitudes and simplistic personality type tests, \u201cis probably the hardest of all subjects, and yet it is one upon which we are all ready to pronounce in the most easy-going way\u201d \u2014 pronouncements \u201cextraordinarily vague, confused, or inadequate\u201d to the task of fathoming the dimensions of a person. He writes:<\/p>\n

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We generally assume [the personality] to be a definite, self-contained, unchanging thing, round and about which all sorts of more or less separable and changing appendages confusedly float. <\/p>\n

Or it is something \u201cinward,\u201d the most inward of all things, that to which we think we should come if we stripped off all the coats of circumstances, custom, education. <\/p>\n

But we soon realize, on thinking, that there is no circle to be drawn round any one, within which all is \u201cpersonal,\u201d and without which all is \u201cimpersonal.\u201d We realize what may be called the continuity<\/em> of things. What, for instance, is a triangle? A space bounded by three straight lines. Where does \u201cit\u201d stop ? At the lines, of course. But these lines are<\/em> merely its contact with surrounding space, and the \u201cpersonality\u201d of the triangle is one thing if the surrounding space be limited to the page of a book, another thing if it be extended to the room where the book is, another thing if it be carried on to include the solar system, and so on. And though for particular purposes it is necessary to define the triangle in particular ways, it is, strictly speaking, quite true that it is continuously one with the spatial universe.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A recognition of this continuity undermines the commonsense definition of a person as \u201ca body occupying a certain place, keeping out and otherwise acting on other bodies.\u201d Nettleship writes:<\/p>\n

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Everybody<\/em> is \u201ccontinuous\u201d with a good deal more than (say) the space six feet round him and the time an hour on each side of him. The simplest memories, hopes, associations, imaginations, inferences, are extensions of personality far greater than we can easily realize. Every \u201chere\u201d and every \u201cnow\u201d is the centre of practically innumerable \u201ctheres\u201d and \u201cthens,\u201d and the centres are absolutely inseparable from their circumferences.<\/p>\n

Loss, separation, death, is failure of continuity. A being which was (so to say) always closing up with everything would change but would not die.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This, too, is why abandonment \u2014 the sudden rupture of continuity in a relationship of trust \u2014 is one of the most physiologically and psychologically devastating experiences<\/a> a human being can have, for we love with everything we are. Perhaps the most psychologically complex human experience, love harmonizes the cacophony of parts we live with<\/a> into a total experience. Its loss, its failure of continuity, therefore discomposes the total self \u2014 a stark reminder that we can never fully compartmentalize ourselves. Nettleship considers this fragmentary but indivisible totality:<\/p>\n

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The self, I, personality, or whatever we like to call that which experiences things, is one<\/em> in all that it experiences: one<\/em> in seeing, hearing, smelling, and in every modification of these, one<\/em> in every combination of these, and in all more complex experiences as well; it is this oneness which makes the unanalyzable self-hood of any and every experience. On the other hand, the self in all its experience is one of<\/em> or in<\/em> many, an experience of distinctness in innumerable senses. In a word, it is always and everywhere a whole of parts, a combining and dividing activity, able to detach any part from any other part, and yet to be in them all.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\u201cReal isn\u2019t how you are made\u2026 It\u2019s a thing that happens to you.\u201d Maurice Sendak\u2019s little-known 1960 illustrations<\/a> for The Velveteen Rabbit<\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This paradox of parts parallels the nature of reality itself \u2014 to surrender to it is to contact, as physicist David Bohm observed in investigating the implicate order of the universe<\/a>, \u201ca deeper reality in which what prevails is unbroken wholeness.\u201d The self then becomes a portal for passing through to something else, something larger and truer. A generation before Iris Murdoch observed that the triumph of the personality is the act of unselfing<\/em><\/a>, Nettleship writes:<\/p>\n

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The times when one feels one is most truly oneself are just those in which one feels that the consciousness of one\u2019s own individuality is most absolutely swallowed up, whether in sym\u00adpathy with nature or in the bringing to birth of truth, or in enthusiasm for other men. Thus, the secret of life is self-giving.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And so we arrive at the two great instruments of unselfing \u2014 death, the pinnacle of continuity that returns our borrowed stardust to the universe<\/a>; and love, which is at bottom \u201cthe extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.\u201d<\/a> Not long before he died of exposure while attempting a climb of Mont Blanc, Nettleship observes:<\/p>\n

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Death is self-surrender\u2026 Love is the consciousness of survival in the act of self-surrender.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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