A philosopher friend of mine asked an astute question about my mosaic metaphor, so I thought a bit of our conversation would make a good post.

In my post Philosophy and the Narrative Self, I talked about the narrative self as a collection of stories we tell ourselves and others about who we are. I made the point that we can’t know ourselves immediately as the subject of what we know, because we can never catch ourselves in the act of knowing. That’s the connection to Kant’s transcendental ego. But the metaphor of a mosaic suggests a collection of tiles used to create a single coherent image. However, when we get closer, we see that each tile is a separate, more or less self-contained element. It’s the juxtaposition and order of these tiles that gives the effect of a single picture.

And this is what inspired my friend to ask about Hume’s “bundle.” Hume famously argued that we have no empirical basis for our sense of a unified self. When we look closely at our perceptions, for instance, we find nothing “in” individual perceptions that points in the direction of a unified, single self — just like the tiles, each perception seems to stand “on its own.” So the philosophical mystery is: If our perceptions can’t tell me I’m a self, what does tell me? Maybe I’m not a self at all, but just a heap of perceptions.

And as a matter of fact, that is how Hume is often interpreted: We are merely a bundle of perceptions, and so we have no basis for claiming that we are selves, nor are we even justified in claiming that selves exist at all. I think that reading of Hume is a bit hasty.

Let’s start with his own metaphor, the bundle. Now, Hume was a smart guy, and when a smart guy like Hume chooses a metaphor like a bundle, you either have to take him pretty seriously or you have to decide that you know better than he did what he meant to say. I don’t mean we have to roll over; philosophy is about thinking hard, and one of the ways we think hard is to critique philosophical arguments. On the contrary, what I’m rejecting is interpretations like, “When Hume chose the metaphor of a bundle he didn’t actually mean a bundle.”

What’s the first thing you notice about a bundle? Well, it’s bundled. Meaning, it’s a bundle because it’s been bundled to be a bundle. If Hume had intended a metaphor that was not about being bundled, he could have picked something else, like a heap or a pile: unordered, unconnected, uncoordinated, unbundle. But he didn’t.

And I argue (and not just because I’ve read Hume’s Treatise, a long and very tightly argued predecessor of the much shorter and — judging by most philosophers’ acquaintance with it — more popular version of Hume’s philosophy) that Hume knew what he was doing in choosing the metaphor of a bundled bundle. Moreover, I think he meant this metaphor to reveal something philosophically important about our sense of self (and consciousness).

Think about a bundle of sticks: The bundledness of a bundle can’t be found in any individual stick in the bundle. Nevertheless, a bundle presupposes that these individual sticks have been bundled — and not because one of them has a sideline in bundling. Now, think about your experience — daily experience I mean, just going about your business. Even though no single element in your experience tells you that the experience as a whole belongs to you, you know it does. Hume’s argument is that we can’t be in a position to know how our experience got bundled, but what we can know is that, without the bundling, we wouldn’t be able to have any experience to begin with.

Why not? Because if a mental event doesn’t belong to you, if you aren’t the one having that mental event, then you can’t experience that mental event as part of your experience. To borrow a little language from Kant, the bundledness of our experience is a necessary condition of experiencing, because experiencing always belongs to someone. (What would you call an experience that no one had?)

At the risk of overburdening the metaphor, have another look at that mosaic: What makes it possible for us to see the mosaic as a single picture doesn’t lie in the individual tiles. Rather, it’s because of the arrangement, the ordering of the tiles themselves. Does that remind you of bundling? And notice: To see the picture as a whole, we have to count on an arrangement of tiles, but we don’t have to know how it got that way. In more technical terms, the unity of the self may not be provable, but we have to presuppose that unity for our own experience to be intelligible to us.

But here’s where the metaphors of mosaics and bundles break down: The self changes — we learn, we forget, we reach into the future carrying the past, we grow, we decay. Sure, you could disassemble all the tiles and reassemble them to form a new “big picture,” but that presupposes a big picture that someone already has in mind. The self is more open-ended. In fact, it’s self-assembling. (Ha ha!)

So, what does all this philosophy have to do with practical affairs and life? As I said in the previous post, we often think our identity is “set,” like acting in a stage play in which all our lines are scripted. If we believe that narrative, then it becomes one of the stories we tell ourselves, and in so doing, when it comes to growth, we may gain and we may lose. I’ve worked with people who came into narrative self analysis despairing that most everything about them was fixed. But if the I that I understand myself to be is a narrative self, then there’s space for a bit of rewriting, and that will mean a revised narrative about who I am. And since that narrative about who I am is who I am, then change and growth are possible after all.

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