In his new book, Inwardness: An Outsiders’ Guide, Jonardon Ganeri explores questions about our inner lives. He includes perspectives from a range of traditions, both ancient and modern, from the Upanishads, Socrates, and Avicenna to Borges, Simone Weil, and Rashōmon. Ganeri, who is the Bimal. K. Matilal Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, hopes to encourage his readers to consider the value—or potential peril—of turning one’s gaze inward.
What is your work about?
Where do we look when we look inward? In what sort of space does our inner life take place? Augustine said that to turn inward is to find oneself in a library of memories, while the Indian Buddhist tradition holds that we are self-illuminating beings casting light onto a world of shadows. And a disquieting set of dissenters has claimed that inwardness is merely an illusion—or worse, a deceit.
What I set out to do in my book is to explore philosophical reflections from many of the world’s intellectual cultures, ancient and modern, on how each of us creates an inner world. In brief and accessible chapters, the book ranges across an unexpected assortment of diverse thinkers: Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Chinese, and Western philosophy and literature from the Upanishads, Socrates, and Avicenna to Borges, Simone Weil, and Rashōmon. I have examined the various metaphors that have been employed to explain interiority—shadows and mirrors, masks and disguises, rooms and enclosed spaces—as well as the interfaces and boundaries between inner and outer worlds. This book is, I hope, a thought-provoking consideration of the value—or peril—of turning one’s gaze inward for anyone who has sought to map the geography of the mind.
How does it fit in with your larger research project?
Back in 2014 I proposed that philosophy needs now to take a “cosmopolitan” turn, after its “linguistic” and “postmodern” turns. I put this proposal forward in my Blueprint, and developed it in some public lectures. The cosmopolitan turn is an attitude, approach, or stance, one in which the practicing philosopher enriches their philosophical practice by deliberately seeking sources of inspiration from a range of philosophical traditions and languages. The most important thing for a philosopher is to avoid parochialism and provincialism in their thinking; restricting one’s intellectual horizons and terms of reference to a small group is very dangerous. How often does one see, in philosophy, the same small number of people being cited and discussed? A cosmopolitan philosopher is perfectly happy to work from translations because they are not scholars in the history of philosophy but active, practicing, philosophers in their own right. Cosmopolitan philosophy does have a history of its own, and one can find antecedents at every age in which different cultures have come into contact. But I think that we live in times that make the cosmopolitan approach, for the first time, not only optional but necessary. This book is one of my bolder attempts to write in a cosmopolitan spirit.
What topics do you discuss in the work, and why do you discuss them?
Let me answer this question by quoting from the conclusion of the book:
This book begins with a promise to lead you in a “careful examination” of inwardness. Inwardness, in its most generic formulation, is the presence of yourself to yourself. Back in ancient times, when sages first became aware that human beings have an interior as well as an exterior life, inwardness was seen as a precious treasure. And yet it was also easily overlooked, for the world is full of distractions and it is hard to wrench oneself away. Indeed, for the ancients, the world just is, in essence, a distraction, and what we should be doing is teaching ourselves in the arts of attention, most especially cultivating the ability to redirect the attention inwards. Such were the ideas that animated the earliest of the Upaniṣads, and I suggested that their influence can be traced through Plotinus and Porphyry to Augustine and Avicenna.
If there is a single, fundamental, problem with this way of thinking it is that it relies on too sharp a separation between inner and outer. The distinction, made real by Descartes, would have us all become recluses, renunciates, leading ascetic lives of self-contemplation. We don’t have to deny either the facticity of interiority or the value of an “inward turn” to feel that our inner and outer lives must be enmeshed in ways the ancient picture disallows. A first way to bring home this thought is to realize that the very way the external world appears, the way it shows up in our experience, is itself informed and influenced by that which is within: our preoccupations, wants, feelings, attitudes, and so much else besides. There’s nothing neutral about our encounters with the world. The world is a place that “affords” me the opportunities to satisfy my desires, and the pathways to escape my terrors. That is what the world consists of, for me, and there is one such world for each of us, each of us having our own distinct inner lives. This was the lesson I derived from Akutagawa’s brilliant story In a Grove, and from the juxtaposition between the protreptic ambitions of this story and the dramatic denouement of Kurosawa’s cinematographic rendering, Rashōmon.
Let’s agree, then, that there is something right in the idea of inwardness, insofar as it exists only because there is something right too in the idea of outwardness. The question I wanted to answer is: what sort of structure does inwardness have? What, in Sartre’s words, is the systematicity of “the system of interiority”; what, to put it in Pessoa’s terms, is “the geometry of the abyss”? Augustine provided me with a first answer, an answer exemplary in its clarity and persuasive power, if, in my opinion, ultimately unsatisfactory. He said that to turn inwards is to find oneself in the library of one’s memories, walls stacked high with recollections waiting to be pulled down and others, more remote, which can be called from the stacks. As charming a metaphor this is, its grip on the imagination is only as strong as its ability to exclude other, rival, metaphors. That’s indeed the reason why, in this inquiry, I have found that works of fiction are indispensable argumentative aids. For in literature, unlike academic philosophy, no one metaphor can hope for imperial domination over the imagination. To subvert the grip of Augustine’s picture and expose its inherent absurdity, it was sufficient to bring into play another use of the metaphor of a library, as found in Jorge Luis Borges’ story The Library of Babel. This was the first of several appeals I made to Borges, whose fictional fables are works of pure philosophy.
We have already begun to enter the world of shadows and mirrors, masks and disguises, and a third metaphor for inwardness leads us only further down that path. This is the metaphor of the interface. Sartre was not the only one to feel that there is something essentially intersubjective about the subjective, and there has been a long tradition, beginning with Socrates, of thinking that you can only know yourself by seeing yourself reflected in the eyes of others. Kobo Abe’s novel The Face of Another is a masterly exploration of the thought, with particular emphasis on the vital role that one’s face performs as intersubjective medium and membrane between self and other. Is it the case, as the protagonist starts out believing, that a face is simply a mask, a disguise for one’s “true self” within? Or is it rather, as he comes to think as the novel progresses, that the network of expressions, behaviours and social interactions that a face sustains are actually in some way constitutive of one’s interior life?
If the layers of the Upaniṣadic self constitute one sort of nesting, then another is to be found in the idea that dreams are nestable. Here we must distinguish between the dreaming subject, the one who is dreaming, and the subject-within-the-dream, the one to whom, within the dream, a dream-world is presented. If I dream that I am flying, the first use of the first-person refers indexically to the dreaming subject, while the second use designates the subject position within the dream. The subject-within-the-dream is a more purely interior being than the dreaming subject, and for that reason has been thought of as being closer to one’s true self. Again, though, the relation is repeatable, and we can imagine that the subject-within-the-dream is dreaming too, a dream in which there is another subject-within-the-dream; and so on. Borges comes to our aid again, exploring the implications of this scenario for the reality of subjects. Thinkers in the classical worlds of China and India found this idea very conducive: a passage in the Daoist classic Zhuangzi develops the argument, as does the Sanskrit epic poem, the Yogavāsiṣtha. The philosophical lesson is, I believe, that inwardness is the essence of subjects.
Jonardon Ganeri
Jonardon Ganeri is the Bimal. K. Matilal Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is a philosopher whose work draws on a variety of philosophical traditions to construct new positions in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. His books include Attention, Not Self (2017), a study of early Buddhist theories of attention; The Concealed Art of the Soul (2012), an analysis of the idea of a search for one’s true self; Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves (2020), an analysis of Fernando Pessoa’s philosophy of self; and Inwardness: An Outsiders’ Guide (2021), a review of the concept of inwardness in literature, film, poetry, and philosophy across cultures. He joined the Fellowship of the British Academy in 2015, and won the Infosys Prize in the Humanities the same year, the only philosopher to do so.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
