Though we often assume that the subjective self is an intact entity, running on its own fuel, autonomous, a thinking being, the deciding authority and the center of one’s consciousness. As Nandhikkara puts it, “the inner confers a kind of unity to the living human being that is categorically different from the unity conferred by the body. It is a unity that is captured especially from within, from the first-person perspective.” (91). For example, I read a piece of news which annoys me - say a scam or an irresponsible comment by a political leaders. My dismay arrives from the fixated “I” who reacts to it. While this take is fine, we often ignore that the “I” is neither a subjective self nor a material object (obviously!). It is not material since, say when I say I have running temperature, it is not my mind or my self that is having fever. It is not my body either that is on its own having fever. The body has fever, that is what your doctor may claim. But you always claim that it “you” who is experiencing it, which is true; otherwise it is your body that must visit the doctor and seek treatment, not “you”. The doctor addresses you as the patient, but it is your body that is the subject of his treatment. To the doctor’s eyes, you are two entities - the person who is self + body, a self experienced through body, and a body that is bereft of self but that is the domain of the self. So the doctor splits you into two and deals with both the entities as objectively as he can. That is why the doctor hardly flinches and never sheds tears when you describe your misery to him. He is trained that way - not to seek objectivity in his appraisal of a human subject. Rather he is trained to distinctly see the person as two-in-one. After a while he stops bothering about your volition towards the body. He takes complete control. He decides what your symptoms mean, the treatment you require, the medicine you consume and duration you are under his treatment. He says “visit me after two weeks.” He doesn’t seek to know whether you are available to meet him after two weeks. Your life is no more in your hands; he has taken over the reins. The doctor gets such unquestionable authority over the patient because, inadvertently, we have come to believe that while the body is intact, can be defined and has its sanctity, the self is not so easily definable.
The self cannot be “seen” like the body. The self always needs the body to substitute for it, but it is not fail proof. The substitution is problematic - a fair person is fair in his disposition, in his values, in his treatment of others; but his fairness cannot be placed in public display, in a museum. His fairness has to be displayed via his actions. His actions could be found to be unfair by some, and fair by some. He is faced with the uncertainty of his fairness; so he practises it more often; he creates a system of rules to ensure fairness, so that when he acts he performs decisively in his actions. The dilemma of a fair human being is not just to be just, but to act just. Action is manifested by his body, but his body is not fairness. Though his body is not at all fairness, he cannot be fair without acting as an agent of fairness. “Human beings are not, however, identical with their bodies. Though I am bodily, I am not my body. ‘We can’t substitute for “I” a description of a body’ (BB 74)”. While we claim that fairness is bodily, the bodilyness of fairness is not distinctly it. Fairness as a value is not manifested by the body (it would be simpler it it were so); it is not manifested by one’s actions (since actions can be misunderstood - Ram is often misunderstood in his acts of dharma in Ramayana); it is not just your disposition or decision making, as it can not be put across as a proposition, if it cannot be visually proposed (as Wittgenstein would have it). The moment you say some one is fair, we assume it is his actions that are fair, not he as a person per se. Why actions? Well, only actions can be seen and we can’t say something is such unless we can see it. “He is so loving and sweet” - These are not mental attributes, these are attributes of action. He is brave, he is genuine, he is honest - all these are attributes of action. All these are problematic for being attributes of action - they are neither completely mental attributes nor are purely they action-based attributes.
From this problematic position arrives the dilemma of what is one’s subjecthood, his self, his mind, his spirit, his soul. This has led us to view oneself as a split subject - ‘we are mind and body yoked together’, we imagine. This makes it convenient to conceive of us as the master of the beast that is our body. From this position has come to being the split state of affairs when a doctor could perceive the patient as just the body as a machine under repair; but it is not just a body - the body cannot be controlled by society but a person can be. So the doctor now split the body as an objective phenomenon into the one without volition and the one with the partial volition of the selfhood of the person who is the patient. The person in the body turns out to be the intermediate agent who has to carry out the impositions of the medical practioner. But when we look deeper into this construct we see the breeches.
Wittgenstein considers the inner being as a delusion since it has no existence per se. The inner being is not visible as an object could be and so it cannot be considered in language expositions. When you say a cat, you see it, in your imagination. It exists thus. But when you said “a mind”, you don’t see it in the same way. You only seen a man who has the capability of thinking, intelligence, and who is capable of feeling about the world around him. When you say a well-sculpted body, you immediately see such a body in your imagination. But when you say an intelligent mind, there is a struggle in your mind in imagining it. You have to substitute intelligent mind with an intelligent face, that of a writer, a chess player, a smart engineer in your locality, a clever lawyer, a topper in college, an intellectual and so on. The inner being is a delusion since it cannot come to our mind without a substitution. It always needs a “body suit”. Now this “body suit” is not the inner being also. This is why when we say a fast bowler such as Bumrah has a good head over his shoulders we don’t mean that we have seen his smartness, his solid temperament and intelligence, quite distinctively. No we haven’t. Every time Bumrah makes an error in the cricket field we wonder where that “good head” has gone now. Bumrah’s physical attributes such as his tallness, his gait are there to “see” for all of us. They don’t disappear just like that. They stay put and are quite certain for our appraisal. But again, Bumrah’s tall figure is made tall by the actions that he performs with it; these actions are prompted by his disposition and channelised by his decision making. His gait is a manner of expression that is also born out of his personality and outlook towards life, as body language experts may claim. While the body is certain in the visual domain, it is still bodily because of the inner being. This latter feature is obvious when Bumrah addresses himself - say, when he speaks of an injury, he won’t say that the body has a ligament tear or an injury to the spinal cord. He would say “his” body is hurting on account of the severe injury. When he speaks of his bowling, he may claim that “he” is bowling fast after the recovery. It is not his body that is injured; it is not his body that is bowling fast, but he, the person. At the first instance, the body is attributed by the self ( a good head), and in the next one, his self is attributed by the body (he has an injury).
Coming back to the fever example, let me ask another question:
Why do we not say that “my body has fever” or that “there is fever in my body” but claim that “I have fever”? Is it because when it comes to feverliness our whole being experiences it. But when it comes to an its on my forearm, it does not permeate my entire being. So I say that I have an itch in my forearm. Similarly, when I am upset I say “I am upset” not that “my mind is upset”. But I also say that “my mind is cluttered now”. In the first case, the feeling of upset is experienced by my being, but in the second I don’t feel that I cluttered my mind, but that the mind is messed up by itself. So, the body-self binary is tweaked in terms of whether or not we want to claim ownership to a phenomenon with or within us.
Let us wind up this discussion with some “finger-licking” chocolate advert slogans:
Chocolate commercials, whether Cadburys, Five Star, Snickers, Dairy Milk or Japp, seem to play with the body-spirit paradox - eating chocolates makes you so ecstatic and crazy that the quantifiable world of material sensibility hardly matters. Interestingly, chocolate as an eatable that has a materialistic presence (like the body has), which can be seen, smelt, licked and eaten, imagines itself as the Inner, as the spirit. It is so good to eat that you forget the logic of practical world, you go crazy, importantly you forget that it is a material good that will melt in your mouth, that once chewn will mix with your saliva and travel down your gut. The chocolaty craziness is boundless happiness, unrestricted excitement that it defeats its material existence. It then goes on to make the consumer transcend the rules, constraints, values of appropriateness and sense of the world outside. The Inner prompts you to kick the butt of the Outer. It is an interesting commercial ploy: a piece of chocolate sells better when it is projected not as a piece of chocolate, but as more than that. It is not chocolate but the chocolatiness that is to be sought after. But even chocolatiness has a beginning and end. It stays in your mouth for a minute, may be. Unlike, say, the experience of listening to good music, it wont stay forever in your memory. You don’t recall it at will, such as an A.R. Rahman song. Its experience is fairly limited to its life inside your mouth. So its subjectivity, its selfhood, (as the chocolatiness is promoted by the adverts) is neither an Inner nor an Outer. It is the body that can be eaten, but it is not just the eatablility that makes it work, it is the experience of eatability and of enjoyability. To signify this, most of the chocolate adverts visualise plenty of distruction - the Suresh-Ramesh twins who crazily disrupts the world around them annoying their father and pleasing many others, even stopping a thief and running away with the money of bank robbers; the Afro-American who pushes down a gorge cars after feeling hyper energetic eating Japp, the Cadbury’s girl who erupts inside a cricket stadium, runs to the ground to dance wildly, the “kiss-me” Dairymilk Silk that dangerously associates kissing to eating, with lips smeared with chocolate (or dark blood?), and so on. The destruction and disruption begin with the crunchy, chewy death of the body of the chocolate piece, the spirit of chocolatiness is evoked, it embodies the eater and then unveils boundless wrecking and tearing down around the world. But the spirit always belongs to the body, it cannot live outside it, it comes alive when the body is destroyed but it always has to coexist with order of the bodiness. So these commercials sign off with showing a peaceful orderly world after the consumer is done with his business. The problem of the subjecthood of chocolatiness is that it it cannot be claimed, seen or shown. It needs a substitute - but to realize it the substitute needs to self-destroy and then disrupt the orders outside. The body is its subjecthood, but the body is not its subjecthood, and so the self-annihilate or annihilate button is always on. The non-stop process of coming-to-be and not-coming-to-be enables it to be limitless, enables the eater to feel limitless and enables the eater to change the world as limitless. The limitlesness is played with in ads where having extra bigness in a dress (Perk commercial) or cutting of the extra length of trousers (Five Star commercial) is a confusing affair. In the Perk ad, two lean and stout girls tease a shop keeper by presenting one another while he fishes out a small or extra large top, fitting their supposed size. It makes sense since finding the prefect size is always a hassle, even if they give you options of various measurements and sizes to choose from: it just doesn’t fit perfectly and so your are always on the lookout for the right one, annoyingly. But the extra length of a Perk chocolate is not a measurement; it is not a precise size; it goes beyond it, since it is an experience that stands for the subjecthood of the eatable. In the Five Star ad, the brothers, chewing the chocolate, keep asking the tailor to cut short the pair of trousers. The more they eat the more they find the length of the trouser growing. They get into trouble ultimately, since the world and its sizes are quite “absurd”.
Ads such as Lotte Choco Pie playfully look at the unseeability of life as a problem - the naughtiness of trouble-making kids in a classroom, the loneliness of a young man on his birthday night, the ungettable silence in a park as the girl keeps chattering to the boy, all these are first resized, visually, with the coming-to-be of the choco pie and then challenged with the chocolate. So it is called “life ka pause button”. So life is the unseeable entity and the choco pie makes it a seeable one. You sit bored in a classroom, but how do you see boredom? When you respond to it with a choco pie. It pauses boredom and by pausing it freezes the moment, for the concerned boredom-maker of a teacher to see and laugh at it. It pauses loneliness as a young man sits listlessly in his room - as friends stream into his room carrying aloft the choco pies with small candles lit on them, he realises what he hasn’t been seeing so far, that he was lonely and that he is no more left alone. It makes one wonder how you may understand boredom and loneliness otherwise - you can see a yawning kid, with sleepiness wriiten all over his face. But that is not boredom, that is only the expressions of a bored kid. The same with loneliness. You need the opposite emotion, the visualised opposite emotion, to realize it, to bring it in a seeable fashion to you. It pauses “life” by making life realizable, by counterpositing it.
This is the caption of the advert for the Gone Mad chocolates. It says “I’m the New Craze. Try Me”. How would this caption sound if it assumes a third person narrative and says “This is the New Craze. Try it.” Well, it perfectly get across the same meaning, though the sense, the feeling and the impact might be different with the first person “I”. Let us look at this closely.
First to take note of is the anthropomorphising of the chocolate. The chocolate becomes an object of desire because of the subjectivity it derives with anthropomorphization. In fact with the term “craze” it almost takes on a feminine voice. The captions becomes sleazy and tempting; it is also the signifier of crazy world of the counter-culturalists. When you say “It is the New Craze” it is not so inviting a claim, since it is an objective attribute. But, again, like the human subject the chocolate here is caught between its body and its delusional selfhood. How does it know that it is the new craze among the chocolate connoisseurs, since it can turn into a craze only when consumed. If it is consumed it disappears, it does not last to be a craze, right? No, it won’t. Because one could only consume the craziness of the chocoloate-hood not the body of the chocolate. The chocolate selfhood, though realised and substituted by the body, is not to be defined by its “appearance”. As one eats the chocolate, the company would produce more and more of them and the “craze” never dies - in fact it proliferates itself with the increasing desire of the consumer. So it could bravely invite the consumer to “try” it, that is to eat it, since it won’t come to an end. The craze is a boundless domain of excitement, elation and deliciousness, once it takes on a subjecthood with the first-person “I”. The “I” turns itself indestructible since it is a delusion; as you try to taste it it transfers itself to the body only for you to realize the real craze has flown away as you were relishing it in your memory, in language constructs of “craze” and “try me”. Now you buy another one and one more until you feel sick but never satiated. That is the condition of the post-structural consumerism - the craze of eating is “not in the pudding”.
Reference:
Nandhikkara, Jose. Being Human: After Wittgenstein - A Philosophical Anthropology, Vol. I. “The ‘I’: A Living Human Being”. 81-101. Bangalore: Dharmaram Publications, 2011. Print.
Adytude. “Top 11 Chocolate Ads for World Chocolate Day 2019!”. YouTube. Published on 1 July 2019.
Cool Mr. Hari. “5Star Ads 2011-2018”. YouTube. Published on 22 Jan 2018.
Collection funny. “The best advertisement ideas of Japp in the World”. YouTube. Published on 16 Dec 2015.
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