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Published in Studies in Philosophy for Children: Pixie. A.M. Sharp & R. F. Reed,
Eds. , 195-208. Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre, 1996. All rights reserved.
What does the self tell itself in this infinite conversation? Pixie shows us that
the self is telling itself--and us, the self's other interlocutor--a story about itself. The
self may be characterized as a narrator in endless search of a story that makes sense.
This search is in fact what characterizes the philosophical turn of the self, and it is
what makes Pixie philosophical. The non-philosophical self presumes to identify
completely with the story it has been given by others, to be already determined, and
therefore unproblematic. We discover this aspect of the self in Pixie's sister,
Miranda, who is non-reflective and quite content, thank you! To Pixie, the
philosopher, this presumption of a non-problematic self-understanding is a great
scandal. But Pixie must also recognize that Miranda is part of her own selfhood, as
are all those with whom she shares world. I will return to Pixie's understanding of
herself as part of a larger self composed of others later in this paper.
The story Pixie seeks to construct is a myth of self. The self's story can only
be expressed mythically, because it is a creature both found and made, a fantastic
closure always in the making. Perhaps this has to do with its felt self-understanding
as timeless and disembodied, a non-temporal presence to itself. It is experienced as
an ever present emergence into the now of the moment from some place beyond
itself, perhaps that nothing which Pixie evokes as she questions space and time. It
weaves stories of the past and the future in order to create and to name itself in time,
to establish a sense of continuity, to locate and identify itself within the world.
Confronted with its own sense of being thrown into the world from nowhere, the
self is a self-maker, the teller of its own story, woven from the world in which it
finds itself, laced through with the drama of its own drives--loving, destructive, self-
destructive, egocentric, compassionate, fragmented, unified, digressive, deeply and
mysteriously goal-directed. Only the story, the narrative, provides the necessary
context for the self making sense to itself. In the story the self remembers a history,
NINE YEAR OLD PHILOSOPHER AND HERMENEUTICS 5
and works continually to harmonize its present circumstances and behavior with that
history, and with the sorts of possible futures that history and the present imply.7
Every self-story at least implies a beginning, and so is a search for its own
origins. Those origins are non-intuitive to the self, which perceives itself to have
"always" been there, yet which obviously has not, and is not perceived that way by
others, and is well aware of that too. Because self-awareness transcends any theory
of its own origins, even if that theory can be empirically verified, any account of its
origins must be mythic, for myth is the language of the non-temporal and
transcendent. But unlike the collective myths which tell the story for traditional
societies, the myth of the modern individual is continually in revision. As Pixie's
final story plays with the great Western myths of origin, and as her classmates, in
telling her story, play with it and change it once again--in the same way there is no
final, original story.
The self can never know itself through its stories, because its stories are not it,
but just about it; the self can never get outside its own ground to tell about itself. On
the other hand, the self can only know itself through its stories, because it is
essentially unsayable and unknowable in any positive sense, and can only know
itself as object at one remove, in its products, through its representation in its own
narrative process, in its dreams, in its memories, in its continuous chatter to itself, in
what others tell it about itself. Thus the self is an analogical construct, which seeks
itself through mirroring and comparison, through themes and styles of self-
construction provided by its biological, cultural, psychodynamic, and interpersonal
context. So Pixie's preoccupation with relationships is analogous to her
preoccupation with herself. The self, like Mr. Mulligan's "mind," is its
relationships, both within itself and within the world of others. It is a series of
comparisons with others, distinctions and connections between aspects of oneself,
NINE YEAR OLD PHILOSOPHER AND HERMENEUTICS 6
and between oneself and others, which results in a never ending narrative,
constantly being revised, which is also an approximation of the "real" self, the self
which is utterly sure of its own existence, but can never ultimately attain itself with
any kind of final certainty.
Like "space," like "mammal," "It's just a word. . . People talk about it as if it
were something, but it's really nothing." Like the light when you turn off the switch,
where does the "self" go when you go to sleep? Or when I point to myself and say
"me," what do I mean? Just as Pixie mistakes the word mammal for a member of
the class of mammals, so the self in search of itself is liable to category mistakes and
part-whole confusions. What category does the self, which senses itself as outside
time but can never approach itself except in time, belong to? Can we draw a Venn
diagram of the "I"-"Me" relationship? The process of self-knowledge is in itself a
crisis classification, in that the whole and the parts are never in a final, closed
relation. In our search for self, we are continually taking parts for wholes--at times,
given the hologrammatic nature of the implicate order, rightly. Indeed, the whole is
unavailable, for if the self is only its relationships, then there is no whole. What final
category, in the multiple, ambiguous, infinite digression of the self's narrative,
provides a locus for the concept? Like Pixie's cat playing with its tail, self is
shapeshifter, trickster, constantly losing the distinction between its own shape and
the shape of the world it is a part of, or other selves--constantly drawing false
distinctions, whether within itself or between itself and the world, denying the
extent to which the world provides it with the only definition it has.
Self and body
Pixie as disembodied self, res cogitans on the nine-year-old philosopher's
continual holiday, has a fine time with her relationship with her body. Her foot goes
to sleep and she mistakes it for Miranda's; she lifts up her sleeping mother's eyelids,
NINE YEAR OLD PHILOSOPHER AND HERMENEUTICS 7
and asks "Are you in there?"; she becomes temporarily convinced that she has two
left feet. Is the self the body? Is the self in the body? Does the self have the body,
i.e. is the body in the self? Is the self-body relationship a unity that transcends both
terms? Is it a part-whole relationship or an identity relationship? Does the self
change as the body changes--as it gets bigger, and no longer able to sit on its
mother's lap, for example? The self is unimaginable apart from a body, but body
can not only be imagined, but experienced, apart from self, as in a sleeping limb, or
the sleeping body of another, or the bodies of animals. The mind-body separation is
in fact the basis of the sense of self, and emerges at around 18 months, when
children first recognize themselves in the mirror, and are able to regard themselves
from the point of view of an other. So the self cannot seem to escape having, being,
or being had by a body, and yet its experience of itself is as something separated and
transcending its body.
Self and its relationships with others
But it is not just the relationship with her body which is ambiguous. Pixie
also finds herself to be spread through all her relationships. It is the ontological
paradox of the self that it experiences part-whole confusion with other selves. This
is true even in a highly atomized, individualistic society like the modern Euro-
American. Isabel and Pixie, walking down the hall, pausing at the top of the stairs
and hugging, are paired and synchronized in a way which shows them to inhabit, in
some way, the same psychological space. Isabel is an essential element of Pixie's
self definition, in the often uncanny mirror of the alter ego. She says of her, "She's
just like me in all the things I like about myself. And she's different from me in all
the things I don't like about myself." Inherently isolated, inherently social, finding
itself simultaneously completely separated from, and an aspect of, the world in
which it is placed, only another self can clarify the self for itself, even if the very
NINE YEAR OLD PHILOSOPHER AND HERMENEUTICS 8
necessity of that clarification compromises the self's experience of pure identity and
self-unity. But as Brian's meeting with the giraffe implies, the self is only completed
in its individuality in meeting with an other. The I-Thou completes the circuit of
relation in which the self understands itself, and is free, in the way in which Brian is
freed to speak through his meeting with an other.
Miranda is also an essential element in Pixie's self definition, but she
represents, as siblings archetypically do, the menace of the other to the self, the one
who is so much like oneself that she threatens the self with a sense of contingency
which leads to a loss of identity. In her relations with Miranda, Pixie faces the self's
opacity to, and objectification by, the other with whom one does not choose to be in
relation, who does not necessarily share one's project. So the relationship with
Miranda, whose name means "looking," and evokes the word "mirror," is the
relationship of the stare. In the Sartrean cosmos of self and other, the stare is what
turns self into an object, what transfixes self in itness, in the "en-soi." It is the mark
of domination, of victimization, and of the master slave relationship. It is the dark
underside of the self and its relations. Miranda is the alter ego who, in
contradistinction to Isabel, is "just like me in all the things I don't like about myself,
and different from me in all the things I like about myself." That this is the case
makes of Pixie and Miranda no less a unity than are Pixie and Isabel. This is
expressed in Pixie's physical confusion with Miranda, with whom she shares a bed,
and a virus, possibly a headache, a leg when hers goes to sleep, ideas when
Miranda's uses hers to prove her wrong, and with whom she is even more mixed up
in family resemblances: Pixie has her father's mouth and her mother's eyes, Miranda
has her father's eyes and her mother's mouth. This is indeed the world of mirrors, of
repetition, and the threat to self at the prospect it is simply a generic self, a duplicate,
in fierce competition with other duplicates for the same place in the sun.
NINE YEAR OLD PHILOSOPHER AND HERMENEUTICS 9
Beyond its involvement in these individual alter relationships, the self is also
inextricably tangled up in the community of which it forms, necessarily, a part. It
internalizes aspects of all the selves in which it is in social, cognitive, or spiritual
process. The community, in particular the community of inquiry, which is
community in more concentrated, more focused form, may be understood as one
large self, which through the interaction of the selves within it, is emerging and
clarifying itself, becoming more and more "like" itself, in its tortuous approach
toward that horizon of understanding which, as Robert Corrington has so well
described it, "lures us beyond ourselves into larger stretches of experience and
world encounter."8 Each member of the community of inquiry is a sort of hologram
of the larger self of the community, in that it is both a separate piece and an
internalization of the whole. Within the community, each member occupies a unique
perspective, which by definition is just the perspective which is lacking in all the
other selves. Through the operation of the community of inquiry, each member
internalizes all the other perspectives. Each other perspective represents a part of me
which is present and functioning when the community of inquiry is functioning.
When the community is successful, it also protects, nurtures, and brings to
expression my own identity, because my perspective is necessary to the whole.
Because of its part-whole structure, the community of inquiry is potentially a
therapeutic community in relationship to the self, as is illustrated in the case of
Brian. Brian represents that aspect of the self which has the potential of giving up
talking. The text does not give information on why--whether Brian's silence
represents the wounded self, the self which has broken with nature, or the self in
protest and refusal against the absurd.9 What we do sense strongly from the text is
that Brian finally resumes talking because the community of inquiry has given him a
voice--it has affirmed his perspective as unique and necessary in the process of self-
NINE YEAR OLD PHILOSOPHER AND HERMENEUTICS 10
correction and emergence which characterizes the community, and in that same
process, healed him.
The part-whole relationship within the community of inquiry may be
characterized as a hermeneutic circle both epistemologically and in terms of the
ontology of the self. In the hermeneutic "circle of interpretation," there is a
dialectical interaction between the whole and the parts, a circular relationship, in
which each gives the other meaning. This involves, as Richard Palmer has pointed
out, a logical contradiction, for the whole receives its definition from the parts, and
yet the parts can only be understood in reference to the whole. The contradiction is
resolved on the level of meaning, in which the meaning of the whole is a "sense"
derived from the meaning of individual parts, yet not identifiable as the mere sum of
those parts. It is meaning which understanding grasps in the essential reciprocal
interaction between the whole and the parts.10 So the self understands its own
meaning through its interaction with the larger sense which emerges in the evolution
of the community of inquiry. As Pixie's story is transformed in being taken up by
the group, so the self's story, as it interacts with the community of selves, is
transformed in that interaction. In allowing itself to be affected and changed by that
interaction, the individual self undergoes a process of universalization, which is also
the coming into a kind of objectivity, although that objectivity is, like the self,
emergent and therefore never attained once and for all. And we must admit that, just
as the self remains fundamentally a mystery to itself, in that it is never fully
articulated or expressed, nor is there some ultimate point from outside itself from
which to view it; so the community, because it also is an emergent narrative, a story
it is telling itself which is never finished and which is continually self-correcting in
ways which are fundamentally unpredictable to each member of the community--so
the community is also a mystery to itself.11 Both the self and the community are
NINE YEAR OLD PHILOSOPHER AND HERMENEUTICS 11
-into which one's narrative fit seamlessly and unproblematically, break down. So
Gadamer says, "The hermeneutical problem only emerges clearly when there is no
powerful tradition present to absorb one's own attitude into itself and when one is
aware of confronting an alien tradition to which he has never belonged or one he no
longer unquestioningly accepts."16 Ricoeur calls the condition prior to the break
"belonging," which he characterizes as "a prior relation of inclusion which
encompasses the allegedly autonomous subject and the allegedly adverse object. . . .
Hermeneutics . . . begins when, not content to belong to transmitted tradition, we
interrupt the relation of belonging in order to signify it." This interruption he
characterizes as "distanciation," which initiates a dialogue with the object, resulting
in what he describes, using Gadamer's concept, as a "fusion of horizons." The end
result (which is only a temporary result in an endless process) is a dialectical
movement resulting in "appropriation," whereby the knower "makes what was alien
become one's own."17
Belonging is a an original condition of self-unity, either before the doubling
of consciousness--i.e. before 18 to 24 months og age--or when the doubling of
consciousness is non-problematic, because of the presence of a "powerful tradition
which absorbs one's attitude into itself." Philosophy, psychoanalysis, and art
represent a rupture in that unity, a self-problematization of the subject: the self turns
on itself, becomes its own text, and enters into dialogue with that text. Pixie's
dialogue with herself is paradigmatically a philosophical rather than a
psychoanalytic or artistic one--she questions, reasons, identifies contradictions,
makes generalizations, identifies part-whole relationships, etc. in a way which is
identifiable as "philosphical." It is in dialogue with this "text" which is herself, that
the dialectic unfolds.
The hermeneutical dialogue, Gadamer suggests, has the structure of a game,
NINE YEAR OLD PHILOSOPHER AND HERMENEUTICS 14
the to and fro, fateful character of play. In it, the player puts her identity at risk, in
that "the game tends to master the players. . . .The real subject of the game . . is not
the player, but instead the game itself. The game is what holds the player in its
spell, draws him into play, and keeps him there." Thus Gadamer can say, "all
playing is a being-played," in the sense that "the player experiences the game as a
reality that surpasses him."18 Play has ontological significance, in that when things
are represented in play, there is a "transformation into the true." Through the playful
representation of art, philosophy and psychoanalysis,19 and over against the "world
of aims" and "biological conceptions of purpose," "what is emerges. In it is
produced and brought to light what otherwise is constantly hidden and withdrawn."
Gadamer thus calls play the "clue to ontological explanation." He summons in
illustration tragic or comic drama, which, when it is successful, is a kind of self-
representation of being which "leaves behind it everything that is accidental and
unessential, e.g. the private particular being of the actor. He disappears entirely into
the recognition of what he is representing. But even that which is represented, a
well-known event of mythological tradition, is raised by its representation to its own
validity and truth."20
Gadamer's ontology of play has implications for an understanding of how the
community of inquiry functions and develops which cannot be taken up here. From
the point of view of the hermeneutics of self-understanding, what is important is that
the self gets absorbed into this larger play of the dialogue with itself and the world.
This ammounts to a loss of self, a becoming vulnerable to something which is not
under the individual self's control. It is this Hegelian "moment of negativity" which
results in appropriation, or a new self-understanding on a higher dimension. So
Kierkegaard has the young man in Repetition say, "Did I not get myself again,
precisely in such a way that I must doubly feel its significance?"21 On one level, we
NINE YEAR OLD PHILOSOPHER AND HERMENEUTICS 15
may understand Pixie's final crisis, leading to the plays of the final chapters, as such
a process. Her disastrous category mistake at the zoo, followed by her sickness,
followed by the transformation beyond recognition of her story into four stories by
her classmates, suggests this dialectical movement of self-loss followed by what
Ricoeur, describing appropriation, calls "the self-interpretation of a subject who
thenceforth understands himself better, understands himself differently, or simply
begins to understand himself."22 Above all, Pixie "loses" herself in the
transformation of her story by her classmates into the play of art, but through that
self-loss begins to understand herself better.
The Pixie plays
The four stories which emerge from Pixie's story can be seen as the playful
self-representation of Pixie's and her classmates' inquiry, and the community of
inquiry's appropriation of the foundational metaphors of the Western philosophical
tradition. The plays function as a "transformation into the true" of the ideas with
which Pixie and her community have been in dialogue throughout the novel. From
the point of view of the hermeneutics of self-understanding, Ricoeur refers to this
process as "refiguration by narrative." The self, he says, "does not know itself
immediately, but only indirectly, through the detour of cultural signs of all sorts,
which articulate the self in symbolic mediations."23 So Pixie and the other members
of the community of inquiry tell the original philosophical stories over again--or are
the stories telling them?--in an effort to find themselves there: to find their origins,
which involves evoking the origins of everything; to define the mind-body relation;
to address the problem of parts and wholes, not only intrapersonally ("If I replace all
my parts again," says the Tin Woodman, "will I still be me?") but interpersonally,
i.e. the part-whole relationship between the individual and the community of
individuals ("No one was happy. the best pair of eyes would say, `We're really no
NINE YEAR OLD PHILOSOPHER AND HERMENEUTICS 16
good, because we can't run'"); to solve the mystery of personal identity beyond
physical transformation, and the origin and nature of difference between persons; to
address the mystery of self's lived experience as transcending the body, even while
aware of itself as body. Each story represents the self's effort to "start from the
beginning," and to tell the "big story" which will satisfy all the appearances.
The fact that each person has taken Pixie's story and transformed it into
something which is both the same as the other stories and also quite different, is not
only characteristic of the horizonal multiplicity of the community of inquiry, but
helps us understand the role of narrative in self-construction. Each person is telling a
story about him or herself which is both common--sharing a tradition, or a set of
pre-understandings--and unique. Each self tells itself, indeed "produces" itself,
writes its script, directs, and plays the leading role. It must do so, in order to "give
shape to things and put them in order." So, in the fourth story, Brian plays himself,
and the Pixie he plays is the Pixie of his own representation, the only Pixie he
knows. Each self tells the story, not only of her own self, but of all selves, from a
perspective which is unsharable by other selves; yet there is a common horizon, if
infinitely receding and never determined once and for all, in which the perspectives
converge. That horizon, as Corrington's discussion of the hermeneutics of Royce,
Peirce, and Gadamer shows, is visible to all members of the the community of
inquiry, if never completely attained.
The final story--a story identified with Plato, but much older than he24--which
tells yet again the grand Western story of the forms or edoi, of knowledge as
remembrance, and of the relationship between beauty and truth, can be read as a
grand analogue for the lived experience of the self: the sense of ontological
uniqueness we cannot help but experience ourselves as; the sense of being
incarnated, i.e. come from beyond yourselves, combined with the sense of being
NINE YEAR OLD PHILOSOPHER AND HERMENEUTICS 17
"thrown" into a world in which "nothing ever comes out quite right," thereby
implying the existence of a world, or at least a conceptual realm, in which
everything is just right; the sudden opening within the self, the sense of significance
associated with the experience of beauty and of great art; the irreconcilable longing
for homecoming, for "being back home where we belong again, and we're happy."
The abrupt interruption by Robert of this grand evocation of the vision which
dominated Western self-understanding for thousands of years returns us with a jolt
to the postmodern world, where no story--neither the idealist's, the realist's, the
empiricist's or the pragmatist's--can claim that it is more than a story. This is
Wittgenstein's world of language games which do not translate into each other, and
Pixie's "third mystery," the aporia created by the epistemological relativism which is
the current condition of Western philosophy. The novel ends with the implicit
suggestion that it is this "third mystery" that she is now ready, through the self-
enlargement she has experienced, to take on.
Conclusion
Pixie, our philosophical heroine, has represented the self for us:
disembodied, timeless, ageless, voice, doubled, shapeshifter, "smaller than small and
bigger than big," inherently digressive, a compulsive storyteller, a story in search of
itself requiring constant revision, a continual crisis, a never-ending conversation
with itself, involved in an infinite regress in search of its ground, spread through its
internal and external relationships, multiple, in constant transition, pure identity yet
completely determined by its environment, radically free and radically contingent,
ambiguously related to its body, unpredictable, charismatic, flashing, unstable, a
mystery to itself, a walking fallacy of composition, an aspirant to becoming a perfect
other, an idea in search of becoming a thing, a thing longing to become its own
ideas. . . . Pixie shows forth these characteristics of the self as only the quixotic,
NINE YEAR OLD PHILOSOPHER AND HERMENEUTICS 18
enthusiastic nine-year old philosopher can. Like many 9-year old philosophers, she
has so many questions she hasn't the time to pause and go about answering them.
This is as it should be, for "the structure of the question is implicit in all
experience,"25 and the experience of the self is, in hermeneutic experience, the
ultimate question.
ENDNOTES
1. I am assuming, although this is not the place to argue it in any detail, that at
each phase of the life cycle, the self is most vividly revealed in certain of its
aspects. Those aspects are present in persons throughout the life span, but
they are represented paradigmatically in the particular phase of the life cycle
in which they are most strongly expressed.
2. The major terms for the discussion of hermeneutics in this paper are drawn
principally from Paul Ricouer, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Hans George Gadamer,
Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1975), and Philosophical
Hermeneutics (Berkely, CA: University of California Press, 1976).
3. The psychoanalytic literature is filled with accounts of this process. A few of
the classic philosophical narratives on the emergence of self-consciousness
are found in George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1934); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Child's
Relations With Others," in The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), which includes a discussion of Lacan's
analysis of the role of the "specular image” in the formation of self; and John
MacMurray, Persons in Relation (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press,
1961).
4. It could also result, it could be argued, in the end of itself--a merging of the
en-soi and the pour-soi which abrogates the doubleness which is the
determinative characteristic of the human self.
5. G.H. Mead, Mind, Self, & Society; and Jean Paul Sartre, Being and
NINE YEAR OLD PHILOSOPHER AND HERMENEUTICS 19
17. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, pp. 105, 117, and passim.
18. Truth and Method, pp. 95-96, 98.
19. All of these practices may be characterized as spiritual, and can be grouped
with the practices of various spiritual traditions, all of which involve the
hermeneutic relationship to the self.
20. Truth and Method, pp. 96, 97, 101, 103.
21. Quoted in Patricia A. Johnson, "The Task of the Philosopher: Kierkegaard--
Heidegger--Gadamer," Philosophy Today 28,1 (Spring 1984): 3-18, which is
an excellent exploration of the "movement of retrieval" which results from the
moment of self-loss in dialogue.
22. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, p. 158.
23. Paul Ricoeur, "Narrative Identity," Philosophy Today 35,1 (Spring 1991):80.
24. Mircea Eliade calls Plato "the outstanding philosopher of `primitive
mentality', that is the thinker who succeeded in giving philosophic currency
and validity to the modes of life and behavior of archaic humanity." The
Myth of the Eternal Return (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955).
25. Truth and Method, p. 326. And see this section of Gadamer's text, entitled
"The Hermeneutical Priority of the Question."
THE NINE-YEAR-OLD PHILOSOPHER
AND THE HERMENEUTICS OF SELF-UNDERSTANDING
David Kennedy
Northern Michigan University
September, 1992