The Beauty of the Self
自我之美
A man calls out to someone's back on the street; the other man turns round, and it is someone else. He blushes: I was the one who got it wrong. Passing a shop, he sees a middle-aged man coming toward him in the window; he stops for a moment before he discerns that it is himself. Both times he mistook a person: the first time he took a stranger for someone he knew; the second time he took himself for a stranger. A subject who has seen this cannot not acknowledge: a living thing, when it sees wrongly, does not say the world was wrong, but says: I saw wrongly; judgment has an owner; and this owner is finite: it has an origin and edges, and where it is going, the direction is not yet its own. That sentence is the beauty of the self. This level has only one construct and does not split into halves: negation folds back onto itself, and an "I" appears. The owner asks for very little: it is only the place where a mistake can fold back, not a sovereign, and not a constant substance. For a mistake to fold back, it needs a place to land: not the world, but this one; this division is itself an edge, so the owner and finitude are one thing. The point peculiar to this level is that what is seen is itself looking. The beauty has two faces: completive beauty is having edges and lacking nothing, this one, just so; generative beauty is: I have become a question to myself; folding back is under way and has not yet closed. The paper says what the self is and is not (not self-admiration, not a constant substance, not character or reputation, and not a theory of self-consciousness); what this paper takes over from Kierkegaard's "relation that relates itself to itself," and where it parts from him; what can pass for the beauty of the self (self-admiration, persona and reputation, virtue, self-monitoring, a wholeness that only returns to itself without ever folding back, the written self); and what is left to each person. It traces where the question comes from, from two eyes looking into each other, learning "for one's own sake," "I have lost me," and "this is not mine," through Plotinus, Augustine, Huineng, Ruiyan calling the master, Tao Yuanming, Hume, Heidegger and Ricoeur. It ends by handing on to the beauty of purpose the question of where the I goes, once there is an I.
Keywords: beauty of the self, owner, finitude, folding back, reflexivity, completive beauty, generative beauty, Kierkegaard, overlap, 13DD
1. Mistaking a Person
A man is walking down the street and sees someone's back ahead of him: the walk, the shoulders, that old coat all belong to a friend he has not seen for many years. He hurries a few steps and calls out a name. The other man turns round: a stranger's face, looking at him in some surprise.
He blushes and says: sorry, I took you for someone else.
He does not say: how is it that you look so much like him. Nor does he say: the light is bad here. What he says is: I got it wrong. The judgment "that is him" a moment ago was not written on the other man's back; he made it. It was wrong, and the wrong folds back onto him.
He walks on and passes a shop; in the glass of the window a middle-aged man comes toward him, hair thinning, shoulders a little stooped, a face somewhat like his father's in old age. He stops for a moment before he discerns that it is himself. He is neither sad nor pleased; he only discerns: that is me.
In those two moments of stopping, what can be seen is one thing. Both times he mistook a person: the first time, he took a stranger for someone he knew; the second time, he took himself for a stranger. The first time, the wrong did not land on the world; it landed on him, and he took it as his: judgment has an owner. The second time, what showed was the place where the wrong lands: the face in the glass has an origin he never chose; he is this one, not any other one on the street, and this is an edge; that he has to stop before he discerns himself is because these years have brought him here, and he never decided to come here.
That point is what this paper is about.
This paper follows the reading set out in the general outline.[^1] A personal aesthetic is each person's own and comes from his own cannot-not; aesthetics is the part that subjects with judgment cannot not acknowledge together, here called the overlap. The overlap is large; what does not overlap is larger. The overlap is not everyone being obliged to agree: whoever looks cannot not see, and whoever has seen cannot not acknowledge. When someone says "it is beautiful," he is claiming that this time he has landed on the overlap, and that claim can be right or wrong. What settles out of an act of drawing a boundary is called a construct; what it cannot contain is called the remainder. The remainder gives a place where one can go on, and a direction; it pushes no one; whether to go depends on a person's own cannot-not.[^2] A beauty has two faces: when the construct has come into place, it is completive beauty, quiet; when the construct is being chiseled out, it is generative beauty, tense. The beauty of the self has both faces. A ray is a direction of judgment, not a classification of objects: the same person can also be looked at from the direction of biology, or from the direction of cognition. This paper asks about one direction only: how a living thing becomes itself, how judgment comes to have an owner, and how this owner is finite; and what the power of judgment sees in that direction.
2. What the Self Is and Is Not
This level has only one construct and does not split into halves: negation folds back onto itself, constitutes itself, and an "I" appears. What SAE: The First Critique wrote at the station of self-consciousness is exactly this: negation folds back upon itself, and the "I" appears; it also recorded that this folding back is what the question left at the previous station pointed to: who is predicting?[^3] This paper keeps that way of putting it and calls it folding back.
Folding back is that moment on the street. Having seen wrongly, one could simply say "that's not right," and let this "not right" land on the world: the man is not that man; the light is bad. Folding back is this "not right" turning round and landing on the one who made the judgment: I saw wrongly. This paper calls the one who can say "I saw wrongly" the owner of the judgment. This owner asks for very little. It need not be a constant, unchanging substance, need not be the same at all times, and need not know what it is. Nor is it a sovereign: it cannot govern its own origin, nor settle where it is going. It need only be the place where a mistake can fold back. When a judgment is right, it seems as if the world itself said it: that is him. Only when it is wrong does it show that this judgment was made by someone. When a reading is wrong, one replaces it with another reading, and that is that; the wrong here is not done with once it is replaced: it turns round and lands on the one who made the judgment. This point is not inferred: the one who stops sees exactly this in that moment. Saying it need not be aloud, either: blushing, glancing down at one's own hands, is saying it too.
This owner is finite. The finitude this paper means is three things. It has an origin: a face, an accent from home, a stretch of life it never chose, the years that have brought it here. It has edges: it is this one, not another one. And where it is going, the direction is not yet its own: what the construct of a human being cannot contain has already given a direction, where it can grow; but there is not yet a cannot-not of its own to take it up. Origin and edges, other living things have too; only once there is one that can say "it is I" do they become "my" origin and "my" edges. Whether a direction is one's own, too, can be asked only once there is an I. Finitude here is not fear, and not the shadow of death.
The owner and finitude are not two things. For a mistake to fold back, there has to be a place for it to land: not the world, but this one; this division is itself an edge. The reason the mistake is made by him, of all people, lies in the origin he carries and in where he stands. So the place where folding back lands is a place with an origin and edges.
Nor is the self self-admiration. Finding oneself good-looking in the mirror is a pleasure; Section 3 comes back to it.
Nor is the self character or temperament. A man's temper changes, his tastes change, his way of speaking changes; when he sees wrongly, he can still say "I saw wrongly." Character is how the owner looks, not the owner. Nor is the self a name, an identity, a record: these are what others use to identify him; in that moment of mistaking someone, none of them is of any use.
Nor is the self a theory of self-consciousness. Knowing that one is looking, remembering, waiting, knowing that these are "mine": this reflexivity belongs to this level; but this paper does not write how reflexivity comes about, only how it looks when seen.
When it is said that at this level the construct for the first time becomes itself, this "first time" is first in the order of asking: on this ray, the owner of judgment is asked about for the first time. It does not mean that before this nothing circled back to itself. A living thing keeping itself while exchanging its material circles back; a living thing whose anticipation falls through, turning back and revising what it remembered, circles back too. But there the wrong lands on what is remembered: the street has changed, the shop is a different one. Here the wrong lands on the one who made the judgment: it is not that the man has changed; I was the one who got him wrong. From this level on there is also something that was not there before: what is seen is itself looking. The stranger on the street turned round and looked at him in some surprise: he had taken the man for someone else, and the man he mistook was watching him get it wrong. Look at a stone, and the stone does not look back; look at a person who can mistake someone, and he is looking too, and can get it wrong too.
In other living things, too, researchers have found something of this. Someone kept chimpanzees in front of mirrors for a long time and then marked them with red dye; they showed signs of recognizing themselves in the mirror, while monkeys showed no sign of this capacity.[^4] Someone else watched eighty-eight children between three months and two years old in front of a mirror: from about six months to a year, the children treated the image in the mirror as a playmate; in the second year, avoidance appeared, and from fourteen months there were also signs of self-admiration and embarrassment, with three quarters of the children behaving so after twenty months; between twenty and twenty-four months, about two thirds of the children recognized themselves in the mirror.[^5] This can show that recognizing oneself in the mirror can be seen in a living thing, and that it comes out gradually; in these children, signs of self-admiration and embarrassment appeared earlier than recognizing themselves in the mirror. It cannot show that recognizing that the red mark in the mirror is on oneself is judgment having an owner: recognizing that that is my face and being able to say "I saw wrongly" are not the same thing. What it is like on the chimpanzees' side, this paper does not say for them.
All this is what research tells people, not what they see.
3. The Beauty of the Self
Once a subject has seen a living thing become itself, judgment come to have an owner, and this owner be finite, he cannot not acknowledge:
A living thing, when it sees wrongly, does not say the world was wrong; it says: I saw wrongly. Judgment has an owner. This owner is finite: it has an origin and edges; where it is going, the direction is not yet its own.
That sentence is the beauty of the self. "Owner" and "finite" are this paper's two words, already explained. "I saw wrongly" is how folding back looks. "The direction is not yet its own" is the side of finitude that can be asked about only at this level. That what is seen is itself looking too is the point peculiar to this level.
The seeing at this level is first in the looker himself. When he mistakes someone and blushes, he is folding back; but while he blushes he is not looking at it; he is thinking how to get past the embarrassment. If he stops, and does not use this moment to save face, nor to improve himself, he cannot not see: that judgment just now was mine; it was wrong, and the wrong landed on me. What kind of place it landed on can be seen too. He mistook the man because he still remembers how that friend walked years ago: that is the origin he carries; he could see only the back, not the face: that is the edge given him by where he stood. Someone else standing there might not have made the mistake; the one who made it is this one. Stopping before the shop window, he can also see: the man in the glass is what these years have brought here, not something he decided. Having seen, he cannot not acknowledge.
Seeing oneself sometimes requires standing in another place. Zeami, writing on the dance of Noh, says: the figure of me seen from the audience's seats is my riken, "detached seeing"; what my own eyes see is gaken, "self-seeing," not the seeing of detached seeing.[^6] He also says that the dance must be mokuzen shingo, "eyes in front, mind behind": the eyes look ahead, and the mind is placed behind. He wrote these words for actors on the stage, wanting them to see even their own backs, where the eyes cannot reach. He uses his own words, riken and gaken; this paper does not replace them with beauty. He presses on this paper: is seeing oneself from outside simply taking the audience's eyes as one's ruler? This paper's answer: the detached seeing he asks for is seeing even one's back, not pleasing the audience. That moment at the shop window is close to the detached seeing he speaks of: seeing oneself from outside, and discerning that it is me. It parts from him here: his detached seeing has to be trained, so that the dance can be shown to others; the shop window is something one runs into, and the seeing there is not for showing to anyone.
Seeing another's I counts too. Montaigne says that he wrote this book only for his family and friends, so that when they have lost him they may find in it again some traits of him; had it been to seek the world's favor, he would have dressed himself up better. He wants to be seen in it in his simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice, for it is himself he paints; his faults can be read there as they are; he himself is the matter of his book.[^7] He also says: I do not paint being; I paint passing; not from one age to another, but from day to day, from minute to minute.[^8] He presses on this paper: if the self is only passing, is there still the completeness to be spoken of below, "this I is here, just so"? This paper's answer: completeness is lacking nothing, not being unchanging; he says himself that at whatever moment he looks at it, he takes it as it is at that moment.[^9] This paper meets him here: those who read him can see a man changing as he writes, his faults set down as they are. It parts from him here: he wrote a portrait for his family; this paper does not take any one way of writing to be the beauty of the self.
Seeing another's folding back does not depend on hearing what he says, either. A child is building with blocks; the tower falls; he does not hit the table; he looks at his own hands and sets the block straight again. The person beside him is seeing folding back too.
Why is it overlap and not preference? The lives people make differ, and so do the selves they want to become. The overlap is in two places. One: those who stop, each in his own "I saw wrongly," can see the same point: the wrong folds back onto the one who made the judgment, and this one has an origin and edges. Each looks at himself, and what each sees is the same point. The other is closer: the several people on the street who saw him blush face the same person and the same folding back; those who read Montaigne face the same person in the same book. That is why seeing another's I counts too: only with it do different people have one and the same object to look at. This does not depend on whether a language has a word for "I," nor on any era, nor on whether a person has lived well.
Take away goodness and see. A person of middling virtue, in that moment of mistaking someone, can still see that judgment has an owner; a good person can go through life without ever stopping to look at himself. Whether a character is good is another matter. Beauty is not correctness.
This seeing is also a different thing from pleasure or displeasure. Discerning oneself in the shop window may be embarrassing, or may have no taste at all; admiring oneself in the mirror is pleasant, yet one may not have seen the point meant here at all, only a face. The ground of acknowledgment lies in the point that is seen, not in feeling.
Understanding is not seeing either. A researcher of mirror self-recognition has lectured for many years on how many months old infants are when they recognize themselves, and how chimpanzees in front of a mirror recognize the red color on their own bodies; he could say all this with his eyes closed. In all this he was not looking; he was only using. One day he calls out to the wrong person on the street and blushes. About how the self appears he learns nothing new, yet for the first time he stops to look at it: I was the one who got it wrong. His understanding has not changed; what has changed is that this time he is looking.
Seeing can also go wrong. One may think one has seen a person's I when what one has seen is his reputation, his persona; one may also think one has seen oneself when what one is looking at is how one wants to be seen. To say "it is beautiful" is to claim that this time one really has seen, and the claim can be wrong; if it is wrong, that too has to land on the one who said it. This level is exactly where the owner of that sentence is.
Completive beauty: having edges, and lacking nothing. The man in the shop window has thinning hair and stooped shoulders; the one looking at him stops for a moment and discerns: that is me. He does not want to add anything to himself, nor to take anything away. When a person says "this is me," what he says is this one: this face, this accent from home, these years, these things done and not done. The owner is thin, only the place where the wrong folds back; the place where it lands is thick: all of this. A record is what others use to identify him; these are what he carries. It has edges, so it is one; it is not every possible person, yet it lacks nothing: to say it lacks something, one has to bring someone else's ruler to measure it; take that ruler away, and this one is this one. Completeness is lacking nothing, not being everything, and not being unchanging. Completive beauty is quiet: this I is here, just so.
Generative beauty: I have become a question to myself. When Augustine was young, a friend of his died. He says that whatever he looked at was death; his homeland became a torment, his father's house a strange unhappiness; his eyes looked for his friend everywhere and did not find him. This "not" turned round and landed on himself: he had become a great question to himself; he asked his soul why it was sad and why it troubled him so, and his soul could not answer.[^10] Folding back is under way: the one who asks is I, the one asked is I, the one who cannot answer is I. The tension is here: it may not close; a person can remain a riddle to himself for a long time. Two people are arguing, and halfway through one of them stops short: maybe I am the one who is wrong. The words have not yet been spoken; they may be said, or swallowed again; folding back is under way and has not yet closed. The completive face is this one being here; the generative face is this one in the act of folding back, not yet closed.
4. Kierkegaard's Relation
This paper takes over two things from Kierkegaard, and parts from him on one.
The Sickness unto Death is signed Anti-Climacus, with Kierkegaard as editor; "the book" below means the one who speaks in it. The first part of the book begins: a human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself, or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself.[^11] It goes on: such a relation that relates itself to itself, a self, must either have established itself or have been established by another.[^12] The next page gives the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.[^13]
The book uses its own words: relation, establish, despair, transparent. It speaks of despair as a sickness, and speaks of it within faith, not to speak of beauty; this paper does not replace its words with beauty.
The first thing taken over is folding back. "Relating itself to itself" is close to what this paper calls folding back: the self is not a thing; it is a relation turned round to face itself. "I saw wrongly" is just such a turning round.
The second is having an origin. The book says that such a relation either establishes itself or is established by another, and takes the latter: the self is established. What this paper calls "having an origin" and "the direction is not yet its own" is close to this: this I did not make itself.
Where it parts from him is over the one who establishes. In the book, what establishes the self is that power, God; only by resting transparently in it is the self free of despair. This paper says only that there is an origin, not whose will the origin is: a face, an accent from home, a stretch of life never chosen: these are constructs, not a power in which one must rest. Nor does this paper take freedom from despair to be the beauty here: a person in despair, seeing wrongly, can still say "I saw wrongly"; his I can still be seen. The ground of acknowledgment lies in the point that is seen, not in resting in anyone. The book's sentence also contains "willing to be itself"; where one wills to go, this level does not ask, and this paper does not take it over.
5. What Can Pass for It
The method is still the same: take it away and see.
Self-admiration. Before the mirror, one finds oneself looking well today and is pleased. Take away the pleasure and see: the stoop-shouldered middle-aged man in the shop window is not the least bit pleasing, and the point can still be seen: that is me.
Persona and reputation. Others say he is a person with a strong personality, and he comes to see himself that way too. Take away the reputation and see: in a place where no one knows him, he mistakes someone and can still say "I saw wrongly." An I one takes on by following reputation is heard from others.
Virtue. There is a very old view: the beauty of a person's character is goodness showing in a person. Section 3 has already taken goodness away: in a person of middling virtue, the point can still be seen. Goodness can be in the same person with it, but goodness is not the beauty spoken of here.
Self-monitoring. Measuring oneself constantly with a ruler: good enough? presentable? what do others think? Take away the ruler and see: does he still know himself? If, once the ruler is gone, he no longer knows who he is, then what he was looking at was only the reading; he was using himself, not looking at himself. If that ruler is not his own, it has taken the place of his looking at himself.
A wholeness that only returns to itself. Hegel wrote of a consciousness in which everything has returned into itself: its object is itself; of the words it sends out, only the echo comes back to it; it lacks the power to externalize itself, the power to make itself into a thing and to endure being; it lives in dread of staining the splendor of its inner being by action and existence. He called it an unhappy, so-called beautiful soul.[^14] In the same section it judges the one who acts; the one who has acted confesses the evil and says: "It is I," and it does not answer with the same words.[^15] He also says: this beautiful soul, lacking actuality, caught in the contradiction between its pure self and the necessity for that self to externalize itself into being, is disordered to the point of madness and wastes away in a yearning consumption.[^16] He wrote this section to complete the course of conscience, the beautiful soul, evil and forgiveness; "beautiful" was the word of that age, and he himself added "so-called"; it is not the beauty this paper speaks of. Take away action and see: a person who never acts still judges every day, still returns to himself all the time; but he never calls out to the wrong person, and the wrong never lands on him. His wholeness is a wholeness that returns to itself all the time, yet never has a "not" fold back upon it.
The written self. An autobiography, a short bio, a signature: the better written, the more it looks like an I. Take away the writing and see: someone who has never written a word can still see it in that moment of mistaking someone. The written self can help one see, and can also get in the way.
Neighboring rays. The beauty of biology looks at a living thing keeping itself while exchanging its material: it is still itself; this paper looks at its saying "it is I." The beauty of cognition looks at how what is not before one still counts; there the question is about what is remembered and anticipated themselves, not about who is remembering. The beauty of perception looks at how the face in the mirror appears to someone; the color, the light and shade of this face are not the I here. The beauty of purpose looks at where the I goes. This paper looks only at how judgment comes to have an owner, and how this owner is finite.
One last sentence, which this aesthetics says of every ray: beauty is not correctness, not usefulness, not importance, not understanding. Now that feeling has come in, one more must be added: beauty is not pleasure, and pleasure is not beauty. On this ray, correctness and pleasure matter most: the goodness of a character is not the beauty here, and neither is satisfaction with oneself.
6. What Is Left to Each Person
How to live is each person's own. Some want a self that is sharply defined; some would rather loosen the "I" a little, sit down, and let it fade. This paper does not say the latter practice is wrong; the owner this paper speaks of asks for very little, only the place where a mistake folds back when one sees wrongly; it does not require an I that holds its ground firmly.
Where people discern themselves differs too. Some in a mirror, some in an old photograph, some in something another person says. The overlap is not in these places, but in the same point that can be seen in each person's moment of "I saw wrongly."
A person's I has a history. A teacher tells a man to his face where he is not what he thinks he is; the man is embarrassed for a while, and later sees himself more clearly: this is cultivation: someone helped him grow the eyes with which he sees himself. A climate of opinion says that everyone should live a certain way, be "the best version of yourself"; he follows along and measures himself; that ruler may then take the place of his own law. Take the ruler away and see: if he still knows himself as this self, and can revise it himself, it is his; if he sees himself this way only because the ruler is there, it is not.
To say "he sees himself more clearly now than he did then" is a judgment of beauty, and it can be discussed: is the folding back clearer, the edge more distinct? Discussion may find that each has a shape of its own, and then each keeps its own.
Aesthetics says only this: whoever has seen cannot not acknowledge that it is beautiful; aesthetics decides for no one what kind of person to become.
7. Where the Question Comes From
How a living thing becomes itself was looked at very early, mostly not under the name of beauty, and often for the sake of something else: for cultivating oneself, for liberation, for salvation, for acting, for writing. The sources run in four directions, appearing almost at the same time: seeing oneself through another's eyes; learning for one's own sake; loosening the fixed I; taking nothing as I. Later, the self became something to be carved, questioned, awakened to, and was also written and performed (Zeami and Montaigne, already written about in Section 3); in modern times someone looked inward and could not find a constant I; someone said that the self is a relation that relates itself to itself (already written about in Section 4); someone looked at the whole of a person from death; someone divided identity into two kinds. In the twentieth century, researchers were still watching chimpanzees and infants in front of mirrors (already written about in Section 2). What follows runs in this order, leaving out what has already been covered. For each figure, the paper reports faithfully what he discerned, why he looked, where he presses on this paper, and where this paper parts from him; other traditions appear in their own words.
Two eyes. In the Alcibiades I attributed to Plato (its authenticity is disputed), Socrates says: when someone looks into another's eye, his face appears in the eye opposite, as in a mirror, and there is a small image of the one looking, which is why it is called the pupil; an eye looking at another eye, at the best part of it, the part with which it sees, will in this way see itself. So too the soul: if the soul is to know itself, it must look at a soul, and above all at that region of the soul where its virtue lies, wisdom . . . and further up, the god.[^17] He says this to urge a young man in a hurry to govern the city to know himself first. He discerned that seeing oneself requires borrowing another place. He presses on this paper: since seeing oneself requires another's eyes, is the beauty of the self inseparable from others? This paper's answer: in that moment on the street, the mistake was revealed by the face of the man who turned round; others often move first; but the wrong landing on the one who called out, the folding back, happened inside him. That other place can be another person, or it can be a shop window. This paper meets him here: seeing oneself requires standing in another place, on the same road as Zeami's detached seeing. It parts from him over the ruler: for him, seeing oneself means looking toward wisdom, and further up toward the god; this paper's ground is in seeing, not in a wisdom fixed in advance.
For one's own sake. Confucius said: "The learners of old learned for their own sake; the learners of today learn for the sake of others."[^18] He said it about learning. He discerned that learning can be for showing others, or for making something of oneself. He presses on this paper: the self of "for one's own sake" is something to be grown in learning; in saying that the owner is right there in that moment, does this paper drop the stretch of growing? This paper's answer: growing is the generative face, written about in Section 3; what one grows into, whether one attains virtue, is each person's own. This paper meets him here: learning for the sake of others, like the I one takes on by following reputation, does not count. It parts from him here: he takes the attainment of virtue as the completion of learning; this paper says that beauty is not correctness.
I have lost me. At the opening of "Discussion on Making All Things Equal" (Qiwu lun) in the Zhuangzi, Nanguo Ziqi sits leaning on his armrest, looks up at the sky and breathes out, "vacant, as if he had lost his counterpart," as though the half of himself that stood over against him were gone. Yancheng Ziyou, standing in attendance before him, asks: "Can the body really be made like withered wood, and the mind like dead ashes?" Ziqi answers: "Just now I have lost me; do you know it?" He goes on to speak of the piping of men, the piping of earth and the piping of heaven.[^19] The chapter was written to make the discourses on things equal. Ziqi discerned that the fixed I can be loosened. This question presses on the most vital point of this paper: why must judgment have an owner at all? This paper's answer: what kind of I Ziqi lost, the commentators explain differently, and this paper does not decide it for him. This paper says only: when judgment is wrong, for the mistake to fold back there has to be a place for it to land; that need not be an I that holds its ground firmly. This paper meets him here: the I can be loosened; it need not hold its ground firmly. It parts from him here: the chapter speaks of losing the self for the sake of making things equal; this paper looks at the folding back of judgment, and urges no one to lose it, nor to keep it.
This is not mine. In the Discourse on the Characteristic of Not-Self of early Buddhism, the Buddha says to the monks: form is not self. If form were self, it would not lead to affliction, and one could have form as one wishes: let my form be like this, let it not be like that. It is because form is not self that it leads to affliction, and one cannot have it as one wishes. So too with feeling, perception, choices and consciousness. So any kind of form should be seen with right understanding as it really is: "This is not mine, I am not this, this is not my self" (netaṁ mama, nesohamasmi, na meso attā).[^20] He said this so that the monks might be free from suffering. He discerned that of form, feeling, perception, choices and consciousness, not one is an I that can fully command and is constant and unchanging. He presses on this paper harder than anyone, in two places. One: from "judging is happening" to "judgment has an owner," is this not one step too many? The other: the discourse says that everything should be seen this way: this is not mine; yet this paper says that the mistake is "mine." This paper's answer: this paper's owner is not a further thing besides the five aggregates, nor is it taking any one of them as a constant I; it is not a thing, and is seen only in that moment of "I saw wrongly." When this paper says that the mistake is "mine," it means taking it as one's own, not possessing it: the mistake lands, he cannot make it not land, nor can he say "let my judgment be like this, let it not be like that." This paper meets him here: there is no I that can fully command and is constant and unchanging; this paper's owner, too, cannot govern its own origin nor settle its own direction. Whether this is one step too many, Section 9 keeps a place for. It parts from him here: he looked in order to be free of clinging; this paper looks at folding back, and says neither that one should cling to it nor that one should leave it.
Carve your own statue. Plotinus says: go back into yourself and look; if you do not yet see yourself beautiful, act like the maker of a statue that is to be beautiful: he cuts away here, smooths there, polishes this, makes that clean, until a beautiful face shows on the statue; so you too: cut away what is excessive, straighten what is crooked, bring light to what is dark, and never stop carving your own statue, until the godlike splendor of virtue shines out on you.[^21] He said this for the soul's ascent to beauty itself. He discerned that a person can be at once the material and the one who carves; only by going back into oneself and looking can one see that one is not yet beautiful. He presses on this paper: what to cut away and what to keep, the measure is there before the one who carves; is this the same as what this paper calls "the direction is not yet its own"? This paper's answer: close in wording, not the same thing. His direction is a good fixed in advance; this paper's "the direction is not yet its own" speaks of finitude: origin and these years, not a good fixed in advance. This paper takes only the first half of what he says: go back into yourself, and look; the "not yet beautiful" one sees there is measured by his ruler. What to carve oneself into over a lifetime takes a direction of one's own; this paper does not write about that.
I had become a great question to myself. That passage of Augustine's was written about in Section 3. He wrote to confess, to give himself over to God. He discerned that a person can be opaque to himself: the one asking and the one asked are the same, and no answer comes. In the same passage he says to his soul, "Hope in God," and his soul does not obey; he says it was right not to obey: what it was being told to hope in then was only a phantom, less true than the friend who had died.[^22] He presses on this paper: the questioning is in me, but the answer is not with me. This paper meets him here: folding back can stay open for a long time. It parts from him here: throughout the book he places the answer with God; this paper looks only at the question itself, and does not answer it for him.
The original face. In the Zongbao edition of the Platform Sutra, Huiming catches up with Huineng and asks him to teach the dharma. Huineng says: "Think neither of good nor of evil; at just this moment, what is the original face of Senior Ming?" At these words Huiming had a great awakening. Huineng also says: "If you turn your light back, the secret is on your side." Huiming says: "Though I was at Huangmei, I had truly never understood my own face."[^23] This exchange is not in the Dunhuang edition; the Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp has it, in different words. He asked in order to bring about awakening. On one reading, what he discerned is this: when neither side, good or evil, arises, asking what "you" are takes apart the kind of recognizing that recognizes oneself as a thing. He presses on this paper: he asks about the original face just when neither good nor evil is thought of, when judgment has stopped; this paper's owner appears just when judgment folds back. Is a person's original face before judgment? This paper's answer: what the original face is, this paper does not say on Chan's behalf; this paper says only that in the moment when judgment is wrong and folds back, an owner can be seen; it is not a thing, and does not call itself original. This paper meets him here: he tells Huiming to turn his light back; and Huiming himself says that after many years at Huangmei, he had "truly never understood" his own face. It parts from him here: he asked for the sake of awakening; this paper does not take awakening as the beauty here.
Calling the master. In the Song-dynasty Gateless Barrier there is a case: every day the monk Yan of Ruiyan called to himself, "Master!" (zhurengong), and answered himself, "Yes!" Then he said: "Be wide awake!" "Yes!" "Hereafter, never be fooled by others!" "Yes, yes!" Wumen comments: old Ruiyan buys and sells by himself, bringing out a lot of gods' heads and demons' masks; "one who calls, one who answers, one who is wide awake, one who is not fooled by others: take any of them for it, and it is still not it." The verse says: "The root of birth and death from countless eons past, fools call the original man."[^24] They spoke in order to break attachment. They discerned that the one who calls and the one who answers can be divided layer upon layer, and whichever of them one takes for it, it is not it. This case presses on this paper's choice of word: this paper too calls it by nearly that name, the owner (zhuren, the word inside zhurengong). This paper's answer: this paper does not take it as the original man, nor call to it every day; it is not a thing that can be called and made to answer; it is seen only in the moment when a mistake folds back. This paper meets them here: take a master for it, and it is still not it. It parts from them here: they asked in order to break attachment; this paper looks at folding back itself.
Mr. Five Willows. Tao Yuanming wrote an autobiography that does not give his own name: "No one knows where the gentleman came from, nor are his surname and courtesy name known. Beside his house there were five willows, and so he took his sobriquet from them. . . . By nature he loved wine, but his family was poor and could not always get it. . . . He often wrote to amuse himself, showing something of his aims. Forgetting gain and loss, he ended his days this way."[^25] Shen Yue's Song shu says that he wrote it "to portray himself," includes the piece in the biography of Tao Qian, and adds that "people of the time called it a true record." He wrote it to portray himself. He discerned that a few ways of living are enough to draw a likeness one can recognize. He presses on this paper: in portraying himself, he first took away his name and his origin; yet this paper says the owner has an origin. This paper's answer: what he took away was his native place, his surname and courtesy name, what others use to identify him; the origin this paper speaks of is what he never chose, and in this piece it is still there: "By nature he loved wine, but his family was poor and could not always get it." He presses on this paper again: the self written out is already a composition, yet people of the time took it as a true record; is what the reader sees him, or the him that was written? This paper's answer: both can be looked at, and both can be seen wrongly, as Section 3 said. To see the him that was written is to look at a work; what this paper looks at is whether the one holding the brush is there in the writing: he does not write his name or his native place, and draws himself from outside; this is a standing in another place to look at oneself. It parts from him here: what he wrote is a way of living; this paper does not take any way of living as the content of the beauty of the self.
A bundle of perceptions. Hume says: for my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure; I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. He also says that, setting aside some metaphysicians who claim otherwise, the rest of mankind are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.[^26] He looked in order to find out where the idea of personal identity comes from. He discerned that looking inward, one finds no constant I. He presses on this paper: this paper says it sees that judgment has an owner; looking inward, can one see it? This paper's answer: what he looked inward for was a thing, and what he found were all perceptions; on this, this paper agrees. This paper's owner is not one more thing besides these perceptions, nor any one of them; it is the moment when a mistake turns round and lands on the one who made the judgment; it has to be looked at in "I saw wrongly," and searching inward item by item, one will not come upon it. This paper meets him here: not a constant substance, on the same road as "this is not mine." It parts from him here: he looked for a thing; this paper looks at the folding back of judgment.
In each case mine. Heidegger says: death, insofar as it "is," is essentially in each case mine;[^27] death is a possibility of being that Dasein itself has to take over in each case; with death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-being.[^28] He looked in order to bring the whole of Dasein into view. He discerned that there is something no one else can do for one. He presses on this paper: if finitude has death as its ownmost possibility, does this paper not make too light of it by writing finitude as origin and edges? This paper's answer: that no one else can do it for one can be seen without waiting for death; in that moment of mistaking someone, a bystander can say "you got it wrong," but cannot say "I was the one who got it wrong" for him. This paper does not take death as the definition of the beauty of the self, and does not write of the fear of death. This paper meets him at "in each case mine": no one else can do it for one, which is close to this paper's "owner." It parts from him here: he looks at the whole of Dasein from death; this paper looks at the owner of judgment from a mistake about a person.
Two kinds of identity. Ricoeur divides identity into two kinds: one is remaining the same, which he calls idem; the other is selfhood, which he calls ipse. Character can change, yet a person can still keep his word; keeping a promise is the model of self-constancy, which can be made clear only in the dimension of "who?"[^29] He looked in order to answer the question "who?" He discerned that remaining oneself through change does not rest on some unchanging thing. He presses on this paper: selfhood cannot do without promise-keeping, and a promise is always kept toward someone else; this paper's owner is only the capacity to own up to a mistake; is that not too thin? This paper's answer: this paper deliberately takes the thinnest point; being able to say "I saw wrongly" comes before promise-keeping; promise-keeping this paper does not write about. This paper meets him here: not some unchanging thing. It parts from him here: this paper does not take promise-keeping as the beauty here.
8. The Question Left Open
He gets home, and has forgotten about mistaking the man. The man in the shop window still lingers a moment in his mind: these years, what brought him here?
With an I, judgment has an owner. But where does this I go? Its origin is not of its choosing. What this level cannot contain has already given a direction: where it can grow; but there is not yet a cannot-not of its own to take it up. Where it goes, this level cannot contain.
The world does not push anyone to ask this. A person can go through life owning up to mistakes and correcting them without asking where he is going; if he cannot not ask, that is another ray. This ray stops here.
The question left open is: once there is an I, where does the I go. That is the beauty of purpose.
9. What Would Make This Paper Wrong
If any one of four things held, this paper would be wrong. First, those who stop cannot make out, in their own moment of "I saw wrongly," that the mistake has landed on themselves: what they see is only one judgment replaced by another, like one reading replaced by another; "it was I" is only a habit of speech; take it away, and nothing seen is lost. The question of not-self discussed in Section 7 is the most direct pressure on this item. Second, seeing a person's I is shown to be seeing his goodness: take away goodness, and no one sees the point any longer. Third, another's I is shown to be invisible, only inferred: watching the man who blushed, reading Montaigne, what one sees is only movements and sentences, and "he got it wrong" is inference throughout; then what this paper says about seeing another's I falls through, and the overlap is left with only the layer of each person facing himself. Fourth, finitude is shown not to belong to this level: an I can have no origin and no edges, and a direction set wholly by itself from the start; then what this paper calls "finite" is only something added on. This paper does not think any of these will happen, but it writes them here, and leaves them to those who look to test.
Acknowledgments
This paper is the tenth ray paper in the aesthetics branch of the SAE (Self-as-an-End) philosophical system and is published under the sole name of Han Qin. The author made the final decision on all philosophical arguments and choices, and alone is responsible for the final text.
Both drafting assistance and review were carried out with large language models. Drafting and internal precision audit were done by Claude (Anthropic); the structural gate and pre-publication sign-off were handled by ChatGPT (OpenAI). The material on the history of ideas used in Section 7, "Where the Question Comes From," was first gathered by ChatGPT's deep research, and its sources were then checked item by item. This paper, together with the second edition of the general outline and the other twelve ray papers, passed final review by both the internal precision audit and the structural gate, and passed a key-sentence acceptance check. The author thanks these systems and the research and engineering teams behind them. The author ruled on their comments one by one, and both acceptances and rejections are on record; the record of revisions and withdrawals across rounds is not reproduced here.
Notes
[^1]: Han Qin, SAE Judgment and Aesthetics, 2nd ed. (2026), §5.1, "How to Read the Rays," DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19296710.
[^2]: Han Qin, SAE: The First Critique (2026), DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21439120.
[^3]: Han Qin, SAE: The First Critique, chap. 5, §3, "The Road's Later Stretch: from Selection to Mutual Non Dubito," the fourteenth station.
[^4]: Gordon G. Gallup Jr., "Chimpanzees: Self-Recognition," Science 167, no. 3914 (1970): 86–87, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.167.3914.86.
[^5]: Beulah Amsterdam, "Mirror Self-Image Reactions before Age Two," Developmental Psychobiology 5, no. 4 (1972): 297–305, https://doi.org/10.1002/dev.420050403.
[^6]: Zeami 世阿彌, Kakyō 花鏡, section 舞聲為根, in Nose Asaji 能勢朝次, Zeami jūrokubushū hyōshaku 世阿彌十六部集評釋, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1940).
[^7]: Michel de Montaigne, "Au lecteur," in Les Essais, ed. Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), 3.
[^8]: Montaigne, "Du repentir," in Les Essais, 3.2, 805.
[^9]: Montaigne, "Du repentir," 805.
[^10]: Augustine, Confessions 4.4.9, in Augustine: Confessions, ed. James J. O'Donnell, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
[^11]: Søren Kierkegaard [Anti-Climacus], Sygdommen til Døden (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1849), in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vol. 11 (Copenhagen: Gad, 2006), 129; English in The Sickness unto Death, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 13.
[^12]: Kierkegaard, Sygdommen til Døden, SKS 11:129–130; Hong and Hong, 13.
[^13]: Kierkegaard, Sygdommen til Døden, SKS 11:130; Hong and Hong, 14.
[^14]: G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807), in Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 483–484 (¶658 in A. V. Miller's numbering).
[^15]: Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 490 (¶667).
[^16]: Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 491 (¶668).
[^17]: Plato (attributed), Alcibiades I 132e–133c, in Platonis Opera, ed. John Burnet, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901).
[^18]: Lunyu 論語, "Xianwen" 憲問, 14.24 (chapter numbering follows the CHANT text).
[^19]: Nanhua zhenjing 南華真經, juan 1, "Qiwu lun" 齊物論, with the commentary of Guo Xiang 郭象, Sibu congkan edition.
[^20]: Saṁyutta Nikāya 22.59 (Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta), Mahāsaṅgīti edition, SuttaCentral, segs. 2.1–2.5, 7.1; trans. Bhikkhu Sujato.
[^21]: Plotinus, Enneads 1.6.9, in Plotini Enneades, ed. Richard Volkmann, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1883), 95–96.
[^22]: Augustine, Confessions 4.4.9.
[^23]: Liuzu dashi fabao tanjing 六祖大師法寶壇經 (Zongbao edition), Taishō 48, no. 2008, 349b24–29; for the Dunhuang edition, see Taishō 48, no. 2007, 338a23–29; Jingde chuandeng lu 景德傳燈錄, juan 4, Taishō 51, no. 2076, 232a10–11.
[^24]: Wumen Huikai 無門慧開, Wumen guan 無門關, case 12, "Yan huan zhuren" 巖喚主人, Taishō 48, no. 2005, 294b19–27.
[^25]: Tao Yuanming 陶淵明, "Wuliu xiansheng zhuan" 五柳先生傳, in Tao Yuanming ji 陶淵明集, juan 5, Wenyuange Siku quanshu edition; Shen Yue 沈約, Song shu 宋書, juan 93, "Yinyi zhuan: Tao Qian" 隱逸傳·陶潛, Wenyuange Siku quanshu edition.
[^26]: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London, 1739), 1.4.6.3–4; ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), 252.
[^27]: Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Halle: Niemeyer, 1927), §47, 240.
[^28]: Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §50, 250.
[^29]: Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), fifth study, 116–124.
References
Works of the SAE system cited here are archived on Zenodo, with the Chinese and English versions in the same record. The DOIs cited are concept DOIs, which always resolve to the latest version, so version numbers and access dates are not given. All are single-authored (Han Qin). Drafting and review assistance is described in the Acknowledgments.
Amsterdam, Beulah. "Mirror Self-Image Reactions before Age Two." Developmental Psychobiology 5, no. 4 (1972): 297–305. https://doi.org/10.1002/dev.420050403.
Augustine. Augustine: Confessions. Edited by James J. O'Donnell. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Gallup, Gordon G., Jr. "Chimpanzees: Self-Recognition." Science 167, no. 3914 (1970): 86–87. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.167.3914.86.
Hegel, G. W. F. Phänomenologie des Geistes. In Werke, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, vol. 3. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970. First published 1807.
———. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Halle: Niemeyer, 1927.
Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888. First published 1739–1740.
Kierkegaard, Søren [Anti-Climacus]. Sygdommen til Døden. Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1849. In Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vol. 11. Copenhagen: Gad, 2006.
———. The Sickness unto Death. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Lunyu 論語. CHANT text (Kanripo KR1h0004).
Montaigne, Michel de. Les Essais. Edited by Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965.
Nanhua zhenjing 南華真經. Commentary by Guo Xiang 郭象. Sibu congkan edition.
Nose Asaji 能勢朝次. Zeami jūrokubushū hyōshaku 世阿彌十六部集評釋. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1940–1944.
Plato (attributed). Alcibiades I. In Platonis Opera, edited by John Burnet, vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901.
Plotinus. Plotini Enneades. Edited by Richard Volkmann. 2 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1883–1884.
Qin, Han. SAE Judgment and Aesthetics. 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19296710.
———. SAE: The First Critique. 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21439120.
Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Saṁyutta Nikāya. Mahāsaṅgīti edition. SuttaCentral, bilara-data. Translated by Bhikkhu Sujato.
Shen Yue 沈約. Song shu 宋書. Wenyuange Siku quanshu edition.
Taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經. Vols. 48 and 51.
Tao Yuanming 陶淵明. Tao Yuanming ji 陶淵明集. Wenyuange Siku quanshu edition.