Self?

"As far as any intelligent being can repeat the idea of any past action with the same consciousness it had of it at first, and with the same consciousness it has of any present action; so far it is the same personal self." (John Locke Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689: 303; cf. Joshua Landy, Philsophy as Fiction,2004: 216n25)

“Involuntary memory indicates the existence of, and affords access to, a unique and diachronically stable self.” In Landy’s view, involuntary memory is Proust’s response to Hume’s contenstion that the self is just a fictitious creation, that though we have “a type of effective identity, as a ‘chain of causes and effects’ (Hume 262),” (113) we possess no “inner coherence, no common element shared amongst the various impressions that make up the mind. 'The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one,' Hume writes (259); it is 'nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux' (252); 'there is properly not simplicity in it at one time, not identity in different' (253). Hence 'when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other...I can never catch myself...without perception...When perceptions are remov'd for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist' (252)." (Landy: 113)

Landy argues that “Proust would doubtless agree with Ricoeur (128) that Hume, whether wittingly or unwittingly, is in the above passage presupposing the very entity whose existence he denies. For if there is no me to be found, who is the I that is “always” looking for it? There must surely be a secret site of constancy after all in the “mind of man,” a part of ourself which can never be seen since it is always doing the seeing, something through which, and never at which, we stare. ‘Throughout the whole course of one’s life,’ Marcel confirms, ‘one’s egoism sees before it all the time the objects that are of concern to the self, but never takes in that ‘I’ itself which is perpetually observing them’ (F 628).” (113)

Does the terminology “secret site of constancy” not strike Landy as even a little silly? Does he not recognize the ridiculousness of predicating an ontological argument on the particular structures and divisions of a language? The subject-object divide that Landy argues assumes is necessary aspect of the faculty of sight may very well be an artifact of our way of speaking about things. Landy's argument based on disctinctions between the prepositions through and at is equally shaky.

Despite this, I should say that Landy's book is mostly brilliant and is amongst the best I've read on Proust.