More Herself? Queen Elizabeth and Selfhood

In Act III, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 Prince Hal, the heir to the English throne, has been summoned by his father, the King, to answer for the dissolute life he has been leading. The King cites the Prince’s 

inordinate and low desires,

Such poor, such bare, such lewd, such mean attempts,

Such barren pleasures, rude society

and wonders how such actions 

Accompany the greatness of thy blood

And hold their level with thy princely heart.

Hal’s response is

I shall hereafter, my thrice gracious lord,

Be more myself.

I have always been fascinated by that reply. What can it mean to be more oneself? What, indeed, is the self anyway?

*

I have an existentialist view of selfhood; that is, existence precedes essence—or, simply, you are what you do.(1) There is no pre-ordained “true you.” There is no set role to be followed, no fate that’s yours from birth. 

The death of Queen Elizabeth II has been the occasion for numerous magazine and newspaper articles about her life and her role as Queen of England. And has led me to think about her selfhood and whether her true self was other than the role she played for 70 years.

Here is one view to consider:

“She meant reliability and stability,” said Kate Nattrass, 59, a health recruiter from Christchurch, New Zealand, which is a member of the Commonwealth.

But the queen did so at the cost of great personal sacrifice. “In many ways, she was  a woman robbed of being able to be herself,” Ms. Nattrass said.(2)

This is a view that sees a conflict between the actions of the Queen and what may have been her true desires. The essential Elizabeth was suppressed to allow the ceremonial Elizabeth to thrive.

On the other hand, consider the words of 21-year-old Princess Elizabeth five years before ascending to the throne: 

And as Tom McTague wrote in The Atlantic, 

When the Queen devoted her whole life to the service of Britain’s “great imperial family,” she meant it and honored it.(3)

It was a life that at her birth she was not destined to lead. Through the abdication of her uncle, Edward VIII, and the death of her father, the role of Queen of England became hers, and while Elizabeth was not destined at birth to eventually become Queen of England, she completely embodied the role that fate thrust onto her.

Another writer at The Atlantic, Helen Lewis, pointed out that 

everyone here knows that being royal is a bloody awful job. Elizabeth II didn’t choose it, and she did it anyway.(4)

(Or did she choose it by accepting it?)

“Duty,” “self-discipline,” “work ethic,” “sense of service” were some of the terms used by other writers to describe the qualities that were evident in the seventy years of the Queen’s reign.

She was, as Beth Thames, reminds us, 

a woman who got up every day — yes, from a comfortable bed made up by other people — and did what had to be done. And she did that for 70 years. Duty called at 7:30 each morning and she answered day after day.(5)

*

Prince Hal had to be spurred by his father’s rebuke to be more himself. The self, in that hierarchal society, being independent of one’s will (indeed, the will— emotional, irrational—was a challenge to one’s true self) was aligned with destiny. 

Since Elizabeth never had to be rebuked or shamed or otherwise spurred into being regal, was her life a challenge to the belief that existence precedes essence—in that her self seemed to be governed by essence of royalty? Or would it be truer to say that Elizabeth totally accepted destiny, making self and role identical? By accepting, indeed embracing her role, she can be said to have chosen her selfhood, which was displayed for seventy years as she

remained determinedly committed to the hallmark aloofness, formality and pageantry by which the monarchy has long sought to preserve the mystique that underpinned its existence and survival.(6)

***

(1)  I discussed this many years ago in the following post: https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2011/08/ask-wrong-question.html

In another post, I posed the following thought experiment:

Charlie, walking down Main Street, spots a Baskin Robbins ice cream store ahead of him. “Boy, I’d like some chocolate chip ice cream,” he says to himself as he makes his way to the shop. “I really want some chocolate chip,” he says to himself again, as he takes a number and waits his turn. (You always have to wait on line at Baskin Robbins.) When the counterperson calls out number thirty-seven, Charlie steps forward. “I’ll have . . . er . . . that is I’d like . . . um . . . ok, two scoops of maple walnut ice cream with sprinkles.” Charlie finishes his ice cream cone and says to himself, “The maple walnut was good, but I really wanted chocolate chip.” Question: What did Charlie really want—maple walnut or chocolate chip?

https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2009/08/three-thought-experiments.html 

(2) https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/10/world/europe/queen-elizabeth-uk-identity.html?searchResultPosition=58

(3) https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/09/queen-elizabeth-ii-death-global-legacy/671377/

(4) https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/queen-elizabeth-ii-funeral-british-monarchy/671475/

(5) https://www.al.com/life/2022/09/when-duty-called-queen-elizabeth-always-answered.html

(6) https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/world/europe/queen-elizabeth-dead.html?searchResultPosition=31

 

Ask the Wrong Question . . .

From The Economist:

JOSHUA KNOBE, a pioneer in the field of "experimental philosophy" at Yale, has contributed a fascinating piece to the New York Times' online philosophy forum on the intuitions of ordinary folk about what constitutes the "true self". Mr Knobe takes up the illustrative example of Mark Pierpont, a once-prominent figure in the evangelical Christian movement to "cure" homosexuality who (surprise!) felt himself strongly attracted to men. So, who's the "real" Mark Pierpont? Mr Knobe writes:

One person might look at his predicament and say: “Deep down, he has always wanted to be with another man, but he somehow picked up from society the idea that this desire was immoral or forbidden. If he could only escape the shackles of his religious beliefs, he would be able to fully express the person he really is.”
But then another person could look at exactly the same case and arrive at the very opposite conclusion: “Fundamentally, Pierpont is a Christian who is struggling to pursue a Christian life, but these desires he has make it difficult for him to live by his own values. If he ever gives in to them and chooses to sleep with another man, he will be betraying what was is most essential to the person he really is.”

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/06/ideology-and-self

(Knobe’s original piece: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/in-search-of-the-true-self/)

***

In his essay Knobe asks, “How is one to know which aspect of a person counts as that person’s true self?” “Philosophical tradition,” Knobe says, has “a relatively straightforward answer”:

This answer . . . says that what is most distinctive and essential to a human being is the capacity for rational reflection. A person might find herself having various urges, whims or fleeting emotions, but these are not who she most fundamentally is. If you want to know who she truly is, you would have to look to the moments when she stops to reflect and think about her deepest values.

But in contrast to the philosophical idea of the true self, Knobe says that people outside the field

are immediately drawn to the very opposite view. The true self, they suggest, lies precisely in our suppressed urges and unacknowledged emotions, while our ability to reflect is just a hindrance that gets in the way of this true self’s expression.

Knobe, himself, feels that neither of these definitions “fully captures the concept of a true self.” Knobe goes on to describe an experiment to test people’s ideas of a true self. To cut to the quick: the experiment determined that liberals thought that the true self was liberal and conservatives thought—well, you can guess. The findings of this study—a project of “the emerging interdisciplinary field of ‘experimental philosophy’”—Knobe says, “seem to point to an interesting new question.”

Does our ordinary notion of a “true self” simply pick out a certain part of the mind? Or is this notion actually wrapped up in some inextricable way with our own values and ideals?

(Those are two questions, but who’s counting?)

***

Well, ask a wrong question (or two) and you’ll get a wrong answer.

Knobe’s philosophical quest for the true self is grounded in the concept of “essentialism”—that is, there is underlying essence that defines the self and that is what makes it “true.”

But consider in contrast another New York Times essay, “What You See is the Real You” by psychoanalyst Willard Gaylin (Oct. 7, 1977). The essay begins as follows:

It was, I believe, the distinguished Nebraska financier Father Edward J. Flanagan who professed to having "never met a bad boy." Having, myself, met a remarkable number of bad boys, it might seem that either our experiences were drastically different or we were using the word "bad" differently. I suspect neither is true, but rather that the Father was appraising the "inner man," while I, in fact, do not acknowledge the existence of inner people. (Beautiful sarcasm, assuming you remember what Father Flanagan was all about.)

Gaylin goes on to confess that psychoanalysts have “unwittingly contributed” to a confusion that “has led to the prevalent tendency to think of the ‘inner’ man as the real man and the outer man as an illusion or pretender." We are asked to consider two cases. In the first case, a ninety-year-old man lies on his deathbed,

joyous and relieved over the success of his deception. For ninety years he has shielded his evil nature from public observation. For ninety years he has affected courtesy, kindness, and generosity -- suppressing all the malice he knew was within him while he calculatedly and artificially substituted grace and charity. All his life he had been fooling the world into believing he was a good man. This "evil" man will, I predict, be welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven.

The second case is that of a “young man who earns his pocket money by mugging old ladies.”

I will not be told [says Gaylin] that the young man . . . is "really" a good boy. Even my generous and expansive definition of goodness will not accommodate that particular form of self-advancement.
It does not count that beneath the rough exterior he has a heart—or, for that matter, an entire innards—of purest gold, locked away from human perception. You are for the most part what you seem to be, not what you would wish to be, nor, indeed, what you believe yourself to be.

And what you “seem to be” is determined by what you do. This is the existential answer to Knobe’s essentialist quest. Gaylin sums up:

The inner man is a fantasy. If it helps you to identify with one, by all means, do so; preserve it, cherish it, embrace it, but do not present it to others for evaluation or consideration, for excuse or exculpation, or, for that matter, for punishment or disapproval.
Like any fantasy, it serves your purposes alone. It has no standing in the real world which we share with each other. Those character traits, those attitudes, that behavior—that strange and alien stuff sticking out all over you—that's the real you!