“Sensations happen in a rather strange part of the world, so strange that, strictly speaking, they don’t happen in the world as such — at least, not in the way that explosions happen — but in an isolated annexe called the self, and if that annexe is missing or halved the sensations float around in a sort of elsewhere.”
The most promising sentence-opener in English is: “I have no idea why I was thinking about this, but…”
Whatever follows — and really an entire continent of speculation, memory, amateur philosophizing, and cultural musing is accessible from this juncture — it is all but assured of being interesting. The very fact that the speaker doesn’t know why she was thinking about something — that it reached the surface via mysterious currents of feeling and association, rather than in the rusted vessel of social convention — is the guarantee of its allure. Socially sanctioned subjects (we’ve talked about meetings before, I had a meeting today, therefore…) are like the newspaper stories recounting campaign maneuvers or earnings reports: they’re on the front page because they’re the sorts of things that go on the front page.
Whereas an I have no idea why I was thinking about this subject is more like a newspaper story about a semi-blind, bottom-dwelling shark whose life expectancy is measured in centuries. The story may have no bearing on your life (Hybrid Work: The New Normal?), it will give you no usable advice (No Need to Stand Up For This Workout!) — but it will remind you of the awesome depths above which our daily lives flutter and splash.
Jonathan Miller — a British public intellectual of absurdly broad range — was, until his death in 2018, the great I have no idea why I was thinking about this writer. Reading his collection On Further Reflection feels like taking a day-long walk with your brightest and most eccentric friend — you never know whether he’s going to bring up medicine, art history, linguistics, or the theater, but you do know that you’ll be fascinated, and that when you leave him the world will seem to shimmer with half-discernible significance, like a library to a child just learning to read.
Here’s Miller watching his cat be disconcerted by a wet street:
“What had prompted her to test the puddle so cautiously? Something about the appearance of its questionable surface enabled her to distinguish it from the safely supportive surface of the brickwork… In what way does a reflective surface disclose itself as something fundamentally different from the unreflective surfaces which surround it?”
And thinking about the ways in which the conventions of TV deepened the experience of watching Kennedy’s assassination:
“… the repetition offered a new form of mourning and provided a crash program in grief. Unaided, the mind has a deliberate tempo in this matter, for mourning is some sort of spiritual labour, a lengthy moral exertion…”
And wondering about the peculiar fact — one I would have gone to my grave without noticing — that chapter summaries in old-fashioned novels (In which is recounted the amusing way that Don Quixote…) are written in the present tense, even when the chapters themselves are written in the past tense:
“Presumably it’s because the chapter in which the narrated events occur has a current existence: that is to say, the summary or synopsis point out the receptacle or container in which the narrated events have a present existence.”
For all his erudition, there’s something almost childlike about the range and intensity of Miller’s interests. His intelligence somehow escaped that winnowing that takes place in adolescence, when acceptable subjects of inquiry are sorted from the unacceptable. He would, you get the sense, stare with equal delight at a book of deconstructionist philosophy and a dandelion on the college lawn.
Nowhere does his sunny curiosity serve him better than in his meander through the peculiarities of corporeal existence, “The Body in Question.” My favorite bit has to do with a mystery I’d never thought of before, not even to realize that it was mysterious: where exactly do we experience our sensations? In other words, when you have a headache, where do you feel it? Well, I feel it in my head, you might say (worrying about the state of Miller’s head). But watch how deftly he picks apart your intuitions.
“If you have a ring on your finger and your hand is resting on the table, it makes perfectly good sense to say that the ring is resting on the table too. But if you have a pain in your hand and your hand is resting on the table, it sounds very odd to say that the pain is on the table as well.”
I feel, reading this, as if I’ve just watched a magician disappear a coin. Familiar objects, familiarly handled — and yet what just happened? It does sound odd to say that the pain is on the table. Why is that?
Here’s how Miller distills the vapor:
“Sensations happen in a rather strange part of the world, so strange that, strictly speaking, they don’t happen in the world as such — at least, not in the way that explosions happen — but in an isolated annexe called the self, and if that annexe is missing or halved the sensations float around in a sort of elsewhere.”
I love so much about this sentence. The deceptive innocence of its chatty formulations (rather strange part of the world, sort of elsewhere), pointing with familiar fingers at uncharted psychic space. The gleeful boyishness that led him to choose explosions as his ready-at-hand instance for an event located in the world (think of the range of examples that were available to him!). The notion of the self — that foggy companion — as an isolated annexe (and the British spelling of annex). And the casual profundity of the notion of that annexe being halved or missing. The missing self! Here Miller has wandered into the room where Descartes and the Buddha and Hume have been quarreling for centuries, and with a tap of his ring upon the table he’s brought the group to silence.
And then, having done all this, he doesn’t race to his study to see if his thought can be built out into a book (The Isolated Annexe: The Self and Sensation in Daily Life). Instead he meanders happily off into the next patch of brilliance — now a riff about how the brain’s awareness of the body resembles an electoral college (the mouth given vastly more sensory votes than the leg); now an appreciative discussion of the mindless efficaciousness of the intestine.
This non-grasping relationship with its own fruitfulness is the surest mark of the I have no idea why I’m thinking about this mind. The mental depths aren’t greedy; they don’t hoard. The no idea mind — which Miller inhabited like a favorite chair — has the infinite resourcefulness, the hilarious bounty, of dreams, and it much too rarely makes its way into the anxiety-provoking realm of books. It exists in a strange — and sacred — part of the world.
Thanks much for this. I just ordered a used copy--the last one!--from Amazon. You may like John Searle’s Philosophy of Consciousness course on YouTube. It’s his entire course at UC Berkeley in maybe 2015? If you aren’t deep into Searle-ishness already, you’ll love his lectures. He’s got one on Language that is great, too. One summer I listened to both,