134. Notions of the self

It is a common thought that promises and commitments require a self that is constant, being in future what it is now and wanting what it wants now. I find that a suffocating notion of self and other. In my view, commitment is aimed at ongoing interaction with someone for mutual growth, mentally, spiritually or economically. Some stability of relationship is required to utilize its potential, but not fixity of self.

According to Buddhism and David Hume, who appears to have been inspired by Buddhism, the self is an illusion that results from misguided thinking in terms of substance. There is only a flux of momentary perceptions, thoughts and feelings without a self. There is as little underlying substance behind ‘I think’ as in the phrase ‘it rains’. Montaigne also had this insight.

In Buddhism one can surrender the illusion of self in intense, disciplined meditation, freeing oneself from the miseries of life that follow from the thirst and cravings of the self, in peace of mind and feeling at one with the world, in Nirwana. Here, there is a parallel to Schopenhauers notion of the will to life as the source of all misery.  

In eastern philosophy there is also a stream, but not a dominant one, that does not surrender but seeks the individual self (purusha) but that was static, eternal, and autonomous. 

While I accept that the self is not unitary but fragmented into multiple, shifting aspects of self, and is ‘on the move’, constructed and reconstructed in experience, I do think there still is a workable notion of identity, as I discussed in item 8 of this blog. If we surrender all notions of the self, how can we, indeed, still talk of intentions and agency? What remains of character? The self is the seat of action in the world, and we live to employ it in that way.

For Kierkegaard also, as for me, the self is not a compound but a process, in a dialectic of inside and outside. He said: the self is a relation that relates itself to its own self. That may sound mystifying, but I think it is exactly right. It can be explained if we turn to Damasio’s account, discussed in item 8 of this blog, and repeated here, as follows. The brain forms images or ‘maps’, in neuronal structures, of the interior body, of organs. Those internal images in the brain are fed by the physiology of organs, and in turn play a role in the regulation of those organs. Next, from observation of external objects and experience with actions those body maps are affected, and a new level of images or maps arises. Here, from interaction with the outside world the notion arises of the self as an independent player in that world. Next that leads to the build-up of a biographical self, with memories of earlier experiences, and expectations and plans for the future, and the whole of all that forms the identity of the self.    

In my argument for otherhumanism I did plead for kenosis or ‘emptying the self’, in the sense of opening up to the other human being, in empathy and benevolence, and inviting its opposition. But I pleaded for that not to lose the self but to enhance its flourishing.

The self needs the other to free itself from its prejudices and to grow, intellectually and spiritually, on the basis of opposition from the other to which one must learn to open up, in empathy. I argued that this even yields economic advantage by utilizing differences between people to create innovation by novel combinations.