Benjamin Franklin (post 4): Literary scholar notes Franklin’s “self-splittings” and “self-division,” but cannot conceptualize multiple personality trait

In an essay included in the appendix of my edition of Franklin’s autobiography, a literary scholar, Michael Warner, discusses an issue about Franklin that has evidently been raised in the literary criticism literature:

“In rational thought, who is thinking?…

“Method in the arrangement of thoughts is something that Franklin teaches himself. There are two parallel self-splittings in that notion: the first divides the arranging and methodical agent from the subject who has thoughts; the second divides the teacher of method from the thinker who learns it. These splittings allow Franklin to have an internally private relation to himself: neither way of describing his action or his thinking can comprise his ‘self.’ He can carry out actions of which he is both subject and object…it requires a thorough and normative self-division…(1, p 365).

After the above passage, Warner goes on to mention Franklin’s use of pseudonyms Richard Saunders and Mrs. Silence DoGood, but does not raise the possibility of Franklin’s having a nonclinical version of multiple personality, what I call “multiple personality trait.”

1. Michael Warner. His scholarly essay in the appendix of Joyce E. Chapin (Editor). Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. Norton Critical Editions. New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 2012.