When me becomes I

Great Debates
1

When me becomes I

A child’s symbolic action world is built from the outside in. We are sad because we cry; we do not cry because we are sad. Only when we ‘look’ at our self do we know what is going on.

A vital fact about all objects is that there is both an inside and an outside. We are born recognizing our self as a ‘me’. The ‘me’ is an object before ‘me’ becomes ‘I’, i.e. an executive subject. Only after this happens in an infant’s life can s/he “back away” from her or him self.

The child discovers first that s/he is a social product. Perhaps this will show us why we are so often mere puppets jerked around by alien symbols and sounds. Perhaps this is why we are so often just blind ideologues (blindly partisan).

In order to separate the ego from the world it seems that the ego must have a rallying point. It must have a flag about which to rally. That flag is the “I”. The pronoun ‘I’ is the symbolic rallying point for the human’s ego; it is the precise designation of self-hood. It is concluded by those who study such matters that the ‘I’ “must take shape linguistically”. The self or ego “is largely a verbal edifice”.

“The “I” signals nothing less than the beginning of the birth of values into a world of powerful caprice…The personal pronoun is the rallying point for self-consciousness.” The wedding of the nervous ability to delay response, with the pronoun “I”, unleashed a new type of animal; the human species began. The ‘I’ represents the birth of values.

Upon the discovery of the “I” the infant human becomes a precise form, which is the focus of self-control. The creatures previous to the arrival of humans in the chain of evolution had an instinctive center within itself. When our species discovered the “I” and its associated self-control centers a dual reality occurred. “The animal not only loses its instinctive center within itself; it also becomes somewhat split against itself.”

Becker, the winner of the Pulitzer for “The Birth and Death of Meaning”, notes that Kant was perhaps the first to impress upon us the importance of the fact that the infant becomes conscious first of itself as a “me” and then only as “I”. This order of discover has been shown to be universal.

I have noticed when an infant becomes an I, when all of a sudden they behave in a self-conscious manner. Have you noticed such a change taking place in a child?

Why is ‘I’ capitalized and ‘me’ is not?

Quotes from “The Birth and Death of Meaning”—Ernest Becker

2

Just a guess [if I followed Mr. Becker’s line of thought] : because English-speaking people are egoists? :stuck_out_tongue:
[explanation : “I” pronoun is the only one capitalized in all the languages I know]

edit :

further developing : as far as I know, there is no pronoun in ideogram-based languages and with the help of wikipedia I can testify that the “I” pronoun is not capitalized in Latin-based languages, nor Russian, nor German

3

Some thoughts from an earlier thread.

4

I think that the “I” is capitalized because “I” is the person, it is the Subject and not an object like the “me”.

5

Expanding on what Papy said, I have to ask the OP, does this only apply to babies who speak English? Because Chinese babies would use the same word – 我-- to express both “me” and “I.” And it is neither capitalized nor not capitalized.

(I’m beginning to miss those hit-and-run OPs that appeared in GD so frequently up until about a week ago – a clip from a blog with two questions. At least I understood those. Or me understood those. Or something.)

6

Anything that you read only once and comprehend is a waste of time–you already knew the stuff.

7

Your Christmas cards must be a riot.

But seriously: do Chinese babies not have the same development process that English-speaking kids do?

Also, do you really believe that crying makes one sad, not the other way around? I don’t think anyone takes antidepressants because they chop too many onions.

8

I think he’s saying that’s how children think.

9

I believe all humans have the same development process broadly speaking.

Regarding the second matter:

“It is through feelings, which are inwardly directed and private, that emotions, which are outwardly directed and public, begin their impact on the mind; but the full and lasting impact of feelings requires consciousness, because only along with the advent of a sense of self do feelings become known to the individual having them.”

First, there is emotion, then comes feeling, then comes consciousness of feeling. There is no evidence that we are conscious of all our feelings, in fact evidence indicates that we are not conscious of all feelings.

Antonio Damasio, Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, testifies in his book “The Feelings of What Happens” that the biological process of feelings begins with a ‘state of emotion’, which can be triggered unconsciously and is followed by ‘a state of feeling’, which can be presented nonconsciously; this nonconscious state can then become ‘a state of feeling made conscious’.

Human emotion and feeling pivot on consciousness; this fact has not been generally recognized prior to Damasio’s research. Emotion has probably evolved long before consciousness and surfaces in many of us when caused by inducers we often do not recognize consciously.

The powerful contrast between emotion and feeling is used by the author in his search for a comprehension of consciousness. It is a neurological fact, states the author, that when consciousness is suspended then emotion is likewise usually suspended. This observed human characteristic led Damasio to suspect that even though emotion and consciousness are different phenomenon that there must be an important connection between the two.

Damasio proposes “that the term feeling should be reserve for the private, mental experience of an emotion, while the term emotion should be used to designate the collection of responses, many of which are publicly observable.” This means that while we can observe our own private feelings we cannot observe these same feelings in others.

Empirical evidence indicates that we need not be conscious of emotional inducers nor can we control emotions willfully. We can, however, control the entertainment of an emotional inducer even though we cannot control the emotion induced.

I was raised as a Catholic and taught by the nuns that “impure thoughts” were a sin only if we “entertained’ bad thoughts after an inducer caused an emotion that we felt, i.e. God would not punish us for the first impure thought but He would punish us for dwelling upon the impure thought. If that is not sufficient verification of the theory derived from Damasio’s empirical evidence, what is?

In a typical emotion, parts of the brain sends forth messages to other parts of the body, some of these messages travel via the blood stream and some via the body’s nerve system. These neural and chemical messages results in a global change in the organism. The brain itself is just as radically changed. But, before the brain becomes conscious of this matter, before the emotion becomes known, two additional steps must occur. The first is feeling, i.e. an imaging of the bodily changes, followed by a ‘core consciousness’ to the entire set of phenomena. “Knowing an emotion—feeling a feeling—only occurs at this point.”