From my (e)mail box: a question about ‘the self’

A dear friend of mine just sent me an e-mail, asking: “What do you say to those who believe that the self is just an illusion?”

I trust and know this question was not asked trivially; perhaps my hasty reply (and some further comments) may be of some interest here too.

It goes as follows:

“The kind of people who say that they believe such a thing are usually using it to say something esoteric or theoretical. I usually ask them to tell me what they mean by “the self” and say that all I mean by the term is something like this: the self is the thing that is relevant to this body and the processes and things that reduce in and out of it.

If the self is an illusion, then, what is the “my” of my body? Who is this “me” who claim this body as his own?

Or something like that. Anyhow, I think people who say such things have been trained to say them by equally weak-minded people and, if I have the courage to tell the truth, I tell them that they should disabuse themselves of being so slavishly attached to concepts they cannot begin to describe with the least bit of sense.

None of this asserts an individuated self or a non-problematic self — I dispute those (non)things for similar reasons — but it does say that the self is something instead of nothing — it is not an illusion.”

Upon further thought, there may be a more generous sense in which the self is an illusion in the literal sense that it has an appearance that is presented through representation. Charles Taylor and Emmanuel Levinas say more about this than one might ever care to read about.  Nonetheless, while I reject the modern, liberal “autonomous individual” and the other derivatives of the Cartesian ego cogito, I do not think that Augustine was (only) waxing poetic when he wrote “my inner self is a house divided against itself” in his Confessions. (Follow M.Z.as he reads Augustine, by the way.)

In short, some (like Norris Clarke in Person and Being and my esteemed teacher John Crosby in The Selfhood of the Human Person) emphasize the dominus sui of the human person and I do not — in fact I see that move as a phenomenological mistake. I do, however, think that there is room to assert the self as more than illusory and representational, as a something relevantly individuated through the body and what follows from that, but not a self-determining individual. (Something more akin to Martin Buber’s relational I and Thou)

Among the (Western) personalists and postmoderns I know of, this might be something of a middle way between — and beyond — them both.

(Since I have indulged in a good bit of name and book dropping in this post, allow me to make one final suggestion for a much more systematic treatment of the matter: Christos Yannaras’ Person and Eros.)