What is the ‘self’?
Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river.
Jorge Luis Borges
As I make my foray into understanding how self-forgetfulness can be developed, it dawned on me that understanding what we mean by the ‘self’ is of foremost importance. With this aim of illuminating the concept, I have been perusing the pages of Mark R. Leary’s The Cure of the Self—a book that is proving to be a riveting read.
Today’s ponderings during my reading session led me to an exceedingly interesting point of distinction that appears to set our species apart from other animals: our ability to conceive of ourselves as beings that extend across time, rather than as creatures imprisoned in the moment.
Put differently, I wonder whether what is peculiar about our species is not simply that we possess a sense of self, but that we experience ourselves as temporally extended selves—beings with a remembered past, an experienced present, and an anticipated future.
In his book, Leary elects a more general candidate for the post of “fountainhead of human distinction”: our sense of self itself. But I have certain qualms with this notion.
Leary writes that “an animal without a [sense of] self cannot simply decide to behave contrary to its natural inclinations,” suggesting that any atypical behaviour displayed by a non-human animal is attributable to “idiosyncratic patterns of physiology, experience, and environment, and [is] not [the result of] a self-directed decision” (p. 10).
Even if we were to grant that Leary’s assertion is true, I wonder: what if what we call a “self-directed decision” is simply what “patterns of physiology, experience, and environment” feel like from the inside?
In other words, our sense of volition might itself be the product of a constellation of physiological and environmental factors that are not fundamentally different from those that other animals contend with. Perhaps the feeling of “I chose this” does not, by itself, establish the existence of some special faculty that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Where this leaves us is with a question: can we really conclude that other animals lack a sense of self? And are the inferences we draw from behavioural experiments sufficient to establish that only humans possess such a feature?
For this reason, I am tempted to elect something slightly different as a candidate for what distinguishes us: our peculiar relationship with time.
Of course, other animals clearly perceive time, remember the past, anticipate what is to come, and may even engage in forms of future-oriented behaviour. So I do not mean to suggest that humans somehow discovered time itself.
What I wonder instead is whether humans discovered themselves in time.
We do not merely move from one moment to the next. We tell stories about where we have been, imagine where we might go, and understand the person who exists now as somehow continuous with the person who existed yesterday and the person who may exist tomorrow.
Perhaps, then, the peculiarity of the human self lies not simply in having a self, but in experiencing that self as a story unfolding across time.
And perhaps this temporal extension of the self will prove important for understanding self-forgetfulness. For to forget oneself may require us first to understand what this “self” is that we are so accustomed to carrying from one moment into the next.
In upcoming essays, as we further decompose the concept of the self, I shall investigate this thought further.
Stay tuned!
Sources for Further Thinkering:
The (infamous) Mirror Test – Gordon G. Gallup Jr. – Is sufficient self-recognition to conclude that an organism has a sense of ‘self’? Is it necessary?
Did this make you wonder?
What did this make you notice, remember, question, or see differently?
If this reflection added a little light to your day, you're welcome to .