déjà vu

A good account of déjà vu in the life of Walter Scott, from a nice blog about Scottish history:

In February 1828, Sir Walter Scott was breaking himself down by over-hard literary work, and had really fallen to some extent out of health. On the 17th he enters in his Diary, that, on
the preceding day at dinner, although in company with two or three beloved old friends, he was strangely haunted by what he would call ‘the sense of pre-existence;’ namely, a confused idea that nothing that passed was said for the first time – that topics had been discussed, and the same persons had stated the same opinions on them. The sensation, he adds, ‘was so strong as to resemble what is called a mirage in the desert, or a calenture on board of ship, when lakes are seen in the desert, and sylvan landscapes in the sea… There was a vile sense of want of reality in all that I did and said.’

This experience of Scott is one which has often been felt, and often commented on by authors, by Scott himself amongst others. In his novel of Guy Mannering, he represents his hero Bertram as returning to what was, unknown to him, his native castle, after an absence from childhood, and thus musing on his sensations: ‘Why is it that some scenes awaken thoughts which belong, as it were, to dreams of early and shadowy recollection, such as my old Brahmin Moonshine would have ascribed to a state of previous existence? How often do we find ourselves in society which we have never before met, and yet feel impressed with a mysterious and ill-defined consciousness that neither the scene, the speakers, nor the subject are entirely new; nay, feel as if we could anticipate that part of the conversation which has not yet taken place.'

Read about this experience today and you'll mainly find speculations about its neurological cause. That's all fine of course. But it's not what interests me here. Instead I want to pay a philosopher's attention to its phenomenology. What exactly is its correct description?

Let's start by considering what it's not. It's not this: Every morning I get out of bed on the same side, reach for my glasses, shuffle off to the loo, brush my teeth, and so on. I do all this in pretty much the same way. Then this morning I think: it is for me just as if I've done exactly this before. But nothing about this strikes me today in the way that déjà vu strikes me. An experience can be phenomenologically identical to another experience - it can be of the same things, things perceived and situations lived through in the same way, brought under the same concepts - and not be experienced as uncanny. It's not part of the content of such experiences that in some way it's for me as if I've experienced just this before.

What more is needed? It might be said: I need to also not have had this experience before. But why should that matter? Can I really not have déjà vu unless I haven't had the experience? Perhaps it's completely lost from my memory. I suggest that in such a case, I could still have déjà vu. And what about: I need to also not have an actual memory of having this experience before. (You visit York, but while you are there, and for at least two years afterwards, labour under the false impression that you're in Harrowgate. On your visit you are wearing your trilby and sporting your cane; you walk down the high street, stopping at a certain cafe. A couple of years later a friend says 'Would you like to go to York for the day?' and you say 'marvellous, yes, I've never been', and then, when they leave you for a while, you walk down the high street with your trilby and cane, going into a café, and you think 'Oh, goodness, I feel like I actually have been here before - but I can't have been here; I've never been to York before!' And then later you realise your earlier mistake.) What I contend is that: this experience would be unlike the déjà vu experience. You may articulate the experience using just the same words. But it would have none of the same essential uncanniness about it.

When the "déjà vu" concept was introduced - apparently the Société Medico-Psychologique met in Paris in 1896 to coin the name - the (correct) proposal was made that "déjà vécu" might be a better term. The reason being that it's part of the experience that one has not simply already been here and done that, but rather that it is for you somehow as if you'd already lived through this very moment. The way I'd like to characterise this makes use of the contrast between numerical and qualitative criteria of identity. You have two cushions on your chair. They are qualitatively identical - both red; both made by Ikea - but, ex hypothesi, are numerically distinct: there are two of them. Or: you are talking with your ex-colleague about their cushion, and you say 'I used to have one just like that', and then you realise that it's not only qualitatively the same but numerically identical: she commandeered the one that you left behind at your old workplace. Now, with déjà vu, when I talk of it being as if this very moment had already happened to me, I believe I'm saying that the present and the imagined past experience are not only qualitatively, but also numerically, identical.

Which of course is nonsensical, since experiential moments are individuated by when they occur. The confusion here seems to me akin to that met with in those who think of time as having a rate of flow, or as a river. Something which presupposes time, or which happens in time, is now incoherently invoked to characterise time itself. (We do something similar when we imagine that we either inhabit or own our very own bodies!) It's as if time itself has become a ticker tape from which scenes could be excised and played over again - even though time in fact is that in which we play any such scenes on any such tape. What I'm saying is that déjà vu is a confusional experience not only in that it may baffle she who has it, but also in that the phrase we properly reach for to characterise it doesn't really make sense. Déjà vu involves, that is, not only a particular illusion of having experienced this moment before, but also an illusion of sense: the illusion that the phrase 'I have experienced this moment before' makes sense.

It seems to me, finally, that this intrinsically confusional character is not restricted to the concept of déjà vu, but attends more widely to a range of concepts for the uncanny. With déjà vu we want to say 'it is as if, in some sense, this experience now is a repetition of one before', but when we try to spell out that sense, we will reject readings which make sense of it, only to leave one - the correct one - that's a nonsense. And something similar occurs, I contend, with (for example) synchronicity: we want to say 'it is as if, in some sense, this emotionally significant inner psychological event meets with its spontaneous external symbolic registration' - but then, when we try to make this sense clear to ourselves, we shall reject as topic-changing any readings of 'registration', 'symbolism' etc which do make genuine sense of it, and only accept such a reading as makes instead a kind of nonsense of it. As Lindeman & Aanio have suggested, superstitious beliefs typically involve a fundamental ontological confusion in which attributes which are only intelligibly attributed within one are now attributed within another of the physical, psychological and biological domains. It turns out that we just are - when our brain is glitching; when we're aiming incoherently to control the uncontrollable - drawn to try to play particular language games in contexts which are foreign to them. This, surely, is a significant result that may surprise many a philosopher: when we say "it is for me somehow as if I've lived through that moment before / that crow standing there is somehow an external manifestation of my grief" the right way to understand these words, the only way that does justice to the experiences in question, is as expressive of nonsense.