The Reality of Selfhood

(Written For “This Me of Mine” Exhibition, 2013)

https://thismeofmine.wordpress.com/

The human self, whatever it is, is a curious thing. It is simultaneously the most familiar and the most elusive thing in the world.

On the one hand: is there anything that you could be better acquainted with than your very own self? It’s been with you at least since childhood. Furthermore, as Rene Descartes famously argued, I think, therefore I am: nothing is so certain as my own existence as a thinking being, given that, well, I’m currently thinking that I’m a thinking being.

On the other hand: is there anything that so resolutely resists efforts to pin it down than the self? No philosopher has yet succeeded in condensing its cloudy essence into a well-defined droplet. Exactly who is this “I” who does all the existential thinking, and is so logically sure of their own existence? To ask the question is still to be perplexed by it.

Little wonder then, that, in a Western world where the scientific discovery has side-lined humankind from the centre of Creation, a cynical climate of opinion has developed: the self, as traditionally understood, does not exist. Philosophers both analytic and continental—from pre-modern Hume to post-modern Lacan, from the computationalist Dennett to the intertextualist Derrida—condemn the self as a fictional construct, an unstable flux, a theatrical pretence, a neurophysiological fantasy. The ghost in the machine, it seems, has been definitively exorcized. A rash of recent books—The Self Illusion, The Ego Tunnel, The Ego Trick, and The User Illusion—testify to the eager cultural embrace of this non-self thesis.

This point of view also appeals naturally to the artistic imagination. Typically liberally inclined, artists place a premium on conceptual novelty, symbolic immersion, and boundary transgression. A stable self with a definite essence sounds decidedly boring and bourgeois. It is far more fun to envision the the self as a postmodern playground, where naughty narratives cavort carelessly with swinging signifiers.

Still, on the grounds that, when the radical becomes normative, the normative becomes radical—I am here going to stick my neck out here, and affirm the reality of the self.

Here’s my first argument. Many objections to the self invoke the idea of “multiplicity”. For example, it is often said that, at any point in time, people are complex creatures. Their personalities and proclivities are manifold and multifaceted. Hence, there can be no single self at any moment—no synchronic unity.

In addition, it is often claimed that, as the years go by, people evolve from one sort of being into quite another. Their personalities and proclivities are fluid and ever-shifting. Hence, there can be no single self over time—no diachronic unity.

Neither objection, however, is fatal. Consider any modern country, say England. Undeniably, it is exceedingly complex. It consists of a people, a land, a polity, an economy, and innumerable other elements. Moreover, each element is exceedingly complex. Indeed, even each sub-element of each element is also exceedingly complex. As such, the complexity of England today arguably rivals the complexity of an individual self, at any given moment. Yet none of this implies that England does not exist. Arguably, both England and the self retain a synchronic unity, despite being complex.

Undeniably, also, England has changed profoundly over the centuries. Contemporary Englanders sent back several hundred years back in time, and Elizabethan Englanders sent forward several hundred years in time, would be more disturbed by the disparities than captivated by the continuities. And yet, there is nothing incoherent about both generations inhabiting an ever-enduring country called England. Both England and the self retain a diachronic unity, despite having evolved.

Now, here’s my second argument. Most people, most of the time, also experience the self as being a synchronic and diachronic unity. True, I may be a complex being; but I still feel myself to be a unity that is beset by complexity, not a mere set of complex elements. True, I may be an evolving being; but I still feel myself to be a unity that has undergone changes, not a mere succession of contrasting elements. Shouldn’t such subjective impressions count for something, especially given that the self is supposed to be inherently subjective?

Many contemporary philosophers, however, turn their noses up at such subjectivity. After all, they argue, have not psychology and neuroscience repeatedly demonstrated that our subjective impressions can mislead us? When we go by how things merely seem to us, do we not fall prey to assorted visual tricks, causal misattributions, logical fallacies, probability misconceptions, and mythical superstitions? Indeed we do. By extension, they argue, isn’t the most likely explanation for the self that it is just one big misunderstanding? The self, on this view, is a persistent illusion that laypeople, not knowing any better, intuitively entertain, but that enlightened experts, with their superior knowledge, seek to dispel.

Here comes my third argument. Let us suppose that you, the reader, don’t really exist, and that I, the writer, don’t really exist either. Hence, the subjective impression that I exist is an illusion, and the subjective impression that you exist is also an illusion. Question: precisely who is suffering from this illusion? If neither of us has a self, then the illusion is simply freestanding in both cases. It is not as if you are suffering from your illusion and I am suffering from my illusion: there is literally no one to suffer from any illusion. But are there really two such illusions? If there is really no you, and really no me, then how do we count the number of illusions suffered from?

It strikes me, and I hope the reader too, that the whole idea of freestanding illusions is nonsensical. Illusions must be suffered by someone. Moreover, what goes for illusions goes for every other type of mental content too: thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, feelings, desires, and intentions. Mental content is just not the sort of thing that can exist apart from selves, floating around in some impersonal psychic ether. Hence, if you believe in mental content, you must also believe in selves.

Moreover, am I alone in finding the following hypothetical situation humorous? Some subtle philosopher seeks to convince me that selves don’t exist, with a string of clever arguments. “Says who?” I respond defiantly. What does he say now?

My point is perhaps now safely driven home. But let me wield two further blows to nullify any remaining naysayers. First, the philosopher David Hume once famously stated the following:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat, cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and can never observe anything but the perception […] the identity we ascribe to the mind of man is only a fictional one.

On Hume’s view, the self is just a “bundle” of perceptions, with no common thread to bind them together. But tell me: just who is the “I” that Hume refers to in this sentence? Hume complains he cannot find the self in what he perceives; yet he seems not to realize that he is presupposing the existence of a self to do that very perceiving. How curious for a self to mistakenly conclude it does not exist because it cannot find itself while trying to find itself!

Second, consider the very name of this exhibition: “This Me of Mine”. If we consider the “Me” that is referred to as “Mine”, then there must again be an underlying self to whom that “Me” can belong. But this case is more complicated, as there are pair of selves at issue: one the owner, the other the owned. Happily, this complication can be readily dealt with. Following William James, we can term the self that does the owning (or the perceiving) the metaphysical “I” and the self that is owned (or is perceived) the empirical “Me”. Quite simply, the “I” self is the one that is presupposed, whereas the “Me” self comprises the beliefs each of us has about ourselves—our self-concept. When the beliefs in question matter to us, we call those our identity. This is what psychologists like me empirically investigate: how, why, and with what consequences do people regard themselves as positive or negative, as effective or ineffective, as loved or unloved, as stable or changing, as part of this or separate from that, and so forth. Metaphysical speculation can be put on hold while we empirically measure and manipulate psychological states to examine their correlates and consequences.

A final reason to believe in the reality of the self, and perhaps the most profound, comes from contemplating how the world would be in the absence of any selves whatever. What would it be like? In a word: undifferentiated. Each self performs an invaluable ontological service: it explicitly distinguishes this from that, here from there, now from then, and cause from effect. Selves individuate: by planting a subjective flag in the objective world, they provides a vantage point from which distinctions can arise in the first place. Take away all selves and all distinctions of identity, space, time, or causality would vanish. There would only be complete sameness, unity, eternity, and self-sufficiency. But that’s not how things are: therefore, selves exist.

This makes the self seem very important indeed. It is crucial precondition for the world as we know it. Yet the integrity of each self also seems to depend wholly on the integrity of a tiny bit of the space-time continuum: the delicate electric sponge inside our cranium we call the brain. So, this is how it is: on the one hand, if there were no selves, we couldn’t distinguish our brains from anything else in the physical world; on the other hand, unless those brains remain in good working order, the selves that do the distinguishing will vanish. Good luck solving this chicken-and-egg riddle!

Ludwig Wittgenstein—pondering the puzzles of the world and self—one declared that whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent. However, there is an intermediate possibility: between trying to make linguistic sense of the world, and giving up the enterprise entirely, there is also the possibility of art. It provides a middle way—a means of always less explicitly, but sometimes more successfully, coming to terms with the perennial paradoxes of human existence.