The Threat of Solipsism: Can You Insult Me?

     “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

                                                  ―Eleanor Roosevelt in This is My Story  

When, in the blog entry entitled “Are there Really Seven and A Half Billion Human Beings in the World,” we discussed a possible corrective to the notion that reality exists independent of human experience. By pointing out that the real is what is experienced we attempted to lead the reader to understand that all metaphysical theories or theories regarding reality, even those such as realism which claim that reality is mind-independent, must still accept the fact that when we experience others as independent of ourselves, it is still us that is experiencing this. The human other is an experienced other. Experience is how we know that the other exists! In point of fact, we do not even ignore nor do we question whether the other is. The other simply arises in our experience against the uniqueness of our subjectivity--again something we "take for granted" and do not thematically encounter.* We can not know this in any other way. Please note that I say “human experience,” is what is necessary to know the other as other. I did not say that the other exists in our mind or self. This is an important distinction. What we are saying is that solipsism, the view that all that exists must exist in mind (or self) only, is not the view that our project supports. If one has arrived at that conclusion that we have fallen prey to solipsism, it is hopefully a product of a lack of the proper elucidation of our project or the incomplete elucidation of our project and not the result of the erroneous nature of our view.

The answer to our question posed as the title of this blog entry may provide us with a way into a lucid and more complete understanding of our view. “Can you insult me? It would seem that if our project was in fact solipsistic in nature, we would probably be compelled to answer “no.” How could the other as an aspect of my mind or an aspect of my self, insult me? Would it not seem absurd to answer “yes” to our question? I don’t see how I could insult myself, without first qualifying to myself that I am seeing myself both as an object to be insulted and as the subject who insults. As we know, the self is always a subject, never an object. Can a self insult and simultaneously be insulted? Only in some weird fabrication of what a self or what an insult is. It would have to be a fabrication which takes us far afield from our usual way of talking about subjects and objects. However, within the framework of our project, the other can certainly insult me precisely because the other is being experienced as other not as my self or my mind. Yet, Eleanor Roosevelt’s aphorism is not without value. It is certainly the case that I must be vulnerable, i.e., in a mental state of self-doubt or some such state, enough to receive the others insult as such. If I am not in a condition of vulnerability at the moment of receiving the insult, however we account for that invulnerability, I cannot receive the insult as such. I have not given my consent. The insult would probably not be experienced as a painful event. It may be viewed as a failed intent on the part of the other to hurt me.

Now that we have become a bit more informed about our present project, I hope we can understand how we may avoid the pitfall of solipsism. No matter how objectively independent a reality seems to us, it is this “seems to us” that reveals the necessity of its seeming being experienced. The other is as real as we experience it, her, or him to be. We may conclude from this that nothing remains outside of our experience except another’s experience. Is this last possibility truly the case? Can our experience of another’s experience be experienced? (The awkward phrasing is intentional.) Why not? Must we say that this is impossible even if I truly experience that I have experienced another’s experience?

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*This is a most significant point. We will, of necessity, explore this in detail in a subsequent blog. This will be discussed as "existence as a predicate."