Why Write in Third Person?

For those who read my previous blog post regarding the "25 things about me" and noticed that I wrote the whole thing in third person, well here's my philosophical explanation for the supposed "creepiness" (here's hoping this makes sense to those who aren't in to philosophy!):

It begins with an analysis of time. We often perceive time as a series of sequential moments happening one right after another. Time is dissectible, one millisecond is completely distinguishable from the next millisecond. This commonsensical notion of time is a bit problematic, and does not accurately depict how we engage time in lived experience, for if each moment in time were completely separate from one another, if each present was an entity unto itself, we'd have no idea how to string a series of events together into a complete whole.

Take this sentence you're reading right now: if each moment in time were completely distinguishable, if each word you read were a completely new experience, you'd have a lot of difficulty making any sense out of what you read. In comes Edmund Husserl. Husserl formulated a way to speak about time to solve this "problem," basically stating that every present, every now, is "thick," containing what Husserl called "retention" and "protention." "Retention" is our ability to retain what has just preceded the now, while "protention" is our ability to anticipate what is going to happen in the immediate future. In other words, in every present moment, the immediate past and future are indistinguishable from the present. This is absolutely necessary or we'd have an incredible difficulty knowing how to comprehend the combination of syllables (which occur in different moments in time) into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and so forth.

Enter Jacques Derrida. Derrida studied this notion of retention and the now, how the living present is "always folding the recent past back into itself" [Lawlor]. In a sense, this now and this retention are indistinguishable, but they must also be differentiated - memory is different than perception. Thus, in every moment, there is difference, there is a momentary gap that occurs in the blink of an eye.

What does this have to do with my previous blog? Well think about when you talk to yourself, think to yourself, or even, the fact that when you read something (like this sentence) you are also saying the words "in your head." In these moments, you become both the subject and object of the action simultaneously. When you speak to yourself, you speak as if you are another person, you objectify yourself. "In other words," Leonard Lawlor states, "in the very moment, when silently I speak to myself, it must be the case that there is a miniscule hiatus differentiating me into the speaker and the hearer." When you talk to yourself, there is a kind of differentiation what goes on, a brief instant in which your brain distinguishes between you (the current thinking agent) and you (the thought being thought). You are yourself and someone else at the same time!

If this hasn't made any sense to you thus far, think about what often happens when you reflect on your past experiences or a past time period in your life. This happened to me recently as I was cleaning off my bookshelves and I was trying to find anything that could be cleaned out and recycled. I started going through the shelves and shelves of notes from classes in college, notebooks full of sermon notes, the original notes of songs I wrote (and other songs I started writing that the world is better off for never having heard!), prayer journals, and so forth. As I read who I was then, I was taking a step back, imagining someone else (my previous/past self) writing down those things, thinking those thoughts that were written on the page. And while taking this step back, while objectifying myself, I could say, "That's not me, that's somebody else!" (i.e., that's not who I am today). This is precisely how autobiographies are written (and how they are so easily embellished!) - the individual reflects back on who they were as if they were somebody else.

Translation - we do the exact same thing nearly every second of our lives as we talk to ourselves, think to ourselves, or even read something on a page and at the same time are telling ourselves what we're reading.

So, my "third person" blog was basically an experiment of this truth, to point out that when I wrote down 25 things about me, I was, in effect saying, "Hey Brock! Yeah you, you like this. You like this thing about you. You had this thing happen to you - what did/do you think about it? You prefer this. You are like..."

So now, the question is: How can we ever achieve an objective standpoint from which we view our subjective selves?