The idea of self came
with the French revolution and the consolidation of Christianity as a religion
of salvation and confession of self, in which the notions of equality and
liberty are broadened. At that historic moment, a particular social being was
gradually produced a self which was the bearer of certain rights and
responsibilities and whose existence required a sort of interior that assume
the responsibility for the person’s acts and is open to normalization
programmes. The idea of self is not a notion you
free yourself from easily.
So let us further investigate the notion of self in
the following way. What do we mean when we say we understand something? What
are we saying, that there is a real me; an essence that is essentially me
somewhere inside my head .Yet where did this real me come from. How did
it originate? For the pursuit of this someone inside us, could go on to
infinity.
Performer:
Like in Ibsen’s, Peer Gynt...the continually peeling of the onion? 6
Souffleur:
The quest for the essential self...
Performer:...is
proved to be but an illusion. For as Ibsen’s protagonist, Peer, found the
centre cannot hold, because the self...
Souffleur:
…that proper little button on the vest of the world...
Performer:…is
no more than...
Souffleur:…an
oasis of solace.
It isn’t hard to see why we hold such ideas of
self. We sense how valuable it is to us, it undergirds all the principles of
our moral systems. Without this sense of self we would have no moral
responsibility; no sense of blame or virtue; no sense of right or wrong; in
short, without a sense of self we would scarcely have a culture to begin with.
Indeed if human thought were shown to be wholly deterministic then the entire
concept of moral blame would have to be rethought.
Gelderen, A History of the English Reflexive Pronouns (1998) points
out that the English expression ‘self’ itself is a modest term. In everyday, it
is not even quite a
word, but something that makes an ordinary object pronoun into a
reflexive one: ‘her’ into ‘herself’, and ‘it’ into ‘itself’. The reflexive
pronoun is used when the object of an action or attitude is the same as the
subject of that action or attitude. ‘I respect myself for achieving that’,
describes me not only as the respecter but the respected. Self is
also used as a prefix for names of activities and attitudes, identifying the
special case where the object is the same as the agent: such as, self-love,
self-hatred, self-promotion, self-knowledge.7
However the phrase ‘the self’ often means more than this. In psychology
it is often used for that set of attributes that a person attaches to himself
or herself - the attributes that the person finds it difficult or impossible to
imagine himself or herself without. The term ‘identity’ is also used in this
sense. Typically, our gender is a part of our self or our identity; yet our
profession or nationality may or may not be. Just because I do that job
it does not tell you who the real me is. In philosophy, the self is the
agent, the knower and the ultimate locus of personal identity. This self, is
the identity which is at the bottom of every action, and involved in every bit
of knowledge. ‘Subjectivity, self, me, I,’ are words consistently employed in
language. Yet do these words convey their intended meaning. Or are such words
and their associated concepts part of an overarching semantic paradox which we
knowingly employ?
No comments:
Post a Comment