The Things we Think our Self is and the Things it is Not

By the ‘sense of the self’ I mean the sense that people have of 

themselves as being, specifically, a mental presence, a mental

 someone, a conscious subject that has a certain character or 

personality, and is distinct from all its particular experience

s, 

thoughts, hopes, wishes, feelings and so on. I’ve no doubt that 

this sense comes to every normal human being, in some form, 

in childhood. It is perhaps most often vivid when we are alone 

and thinking, but it can be equally vivid in a room full of 

shouting people. It connects with a feeling that most people 

have had at some time, that their body is just a vehicle or 

vessel for the mental thing they really are.

Our natural, unreflective conception of the self seems to have six main elements. First, the self is thought of as a thing, in some sense. 


Second, it is thought of as specifically mental, in some sense. 




Third, it is thought of as single. 


Fourth, it is thought of as something that has a certain character or personality. 


Fifth, it is thought of as something that is ontologically distinct from all other things. 


Sixth, it is thought of as something that is a subject of experience, a conscious feeler, thinker, chooser.


In considering each element in turn, I use the expression ‘the self’ freely, as a loose name for all the undeniably real phenomena that lead us to think and talk in terms of the self. 

The first claim, that the self is thought of as a thing, is, in a way, the least clear. The general idea is this: it isn’t thought of as a state or property of something else, or as an event, or as a mere process or series of events. To this extent, there is nothing else for it to seem to be, other than a thing – not a thing in the way that a stone or a chair is, a sort of ethereal concrete object, but a thing of some kind. It is thought of, in particular, as something that has the causal character of a thing; something that can undergo and do things. Bishop Berkeley’s characterisation of the self as a ‘thinking active principle’ seems as good as any. In this old use, a principle manages to sound like a thing without sounding like a table or a chair.

The second claim, that the self is something mental, is also unclear, but the central idea is this: when the self is thought of as a thing, its claim to thinghood is taken to be sufficiently grounded in its mental nature alone; it may also have a non-mental nature, as materialists suppose, but its being a thing is not thought to depend on its counting as a thing considered in its non-mental nature. The self is the mental self. It’s true that people naturally think of themselves as possessing both mental and non-mental properties, but this doesn’t affect the standard conception of the mental self.

Although experience of the mental self needn’t involve any belief in an immaterial soul, it does incorporate elements that make that belief come rather naturally. The mental self can easily seem to exist self-sufficiently in a sphere of being quite other than that described by physics. Things are not as they seem, according to materialists; but they certainly seem as they seem, and this helps to explain how natural it is to think of the self as a specifically mental thing.

The third claim is that the self is thought of as single. But in what way? Not as a single assemblage or collectivity, as a pile of marbles is single, but rather, as a marble is single when compared with a pile of marbles. Furthermore, it is standardly thought to be single both when it is considered synchronically, i.e. as existing at a given time, and when it is considered diachronically, i.e. as a thing that persists through time. I will take ‘synchronic’ to apply to any consideration of the self during what is experienced as a unitary or ‘hiatus-free’ period of consciousness. ‘Diachronic’ will then apply to any period that includes a break or hiatus. Truly unbroken periods of experience are, I suggest, almost invariably brief: a few seconds at most, a fraction of a second at the least.

I’ve said that we normally have a sense of the singleness of the self. Some, however, may claim to experience it as fragmentary or multiple, and most of us have had experience that gives us – we feel – some understanding of what they mean. In fact there are reasons for thinking that the experience of multiplicity can only really affect the sense of the self diachronically considered, not synchronically. But this may be doubted: we may be subject to rapidly changing and overlapping moods, and conflicts of desire. Our thought processes can become extraordinarily rapid and tumultuous, disparate contents tumbling over one another. This may be claimed to involve experience of the self as synchronically multiple.


Source Galen Strawson 

The Sense of the Self

Galen Strawson  

LRB