KARL JASPERS FORUM

Short Note 86

EPHEMERAL SELF
by Hugh Bone
11 January 2007, posted 13 January 2007

*BEING:*

*1) Being is a function of being alive.*

*2) Being is a function of the senses of a living organism.*

*3) Without senses: No being.*

*4) There is no convincing evidence of the "being" of the dead.*

*5)"Life after death" may be a "fact" for believers. Religion does not require evidence, only belief.*

*6) The being of myself, yourself, any self , exists: *

* a) in my mind, your mind, minds of other persons, as electrical impulses stored memory as words and acts transmissible via language , photos, writings, during life of the organism.*

* b) The self disappears, when the organism dies, although artifacts remain*

*7) We "exist", have a form of being, post-mortem, in the minds of persons who knew us.*

*8) When all who knew us are gone, artifacts are the only evidence of our former existence.*

*9) The world of the self is a refuge, and we need it in order to retain our identity. But it is also a prison that we need to break out of to enlarge our identities. To surrender the self is an adventure under the best of circumstances. It is always an adventure to leave what is familiar with the knowledge that the experience will change us.*

*self: A self is an abstraction, a Center of Narrative Gravity. (Dennett 1991) *

*self: A third approach may lead to: Man as the self-created product of genetic engineering.*

*self: Dialogue with the self - Think of the aggregateconsciousness of all human beings **as a "sea of consciousness" - like the seas and oceans of earth, like the air mass surrounding the earth.*

*notself: There is the self and the not-self. The not-self is the human Other and the not-human Other. *

*self: Self-understanding ..."The quest for self-understanding is a journey without end. Even in the deepest recesses of our psyche there are no experiences which, if evoked, will reveal our true identities. But the quest for such knowledge is itself a form of self-care, as ancient practitioners of the technologies of the self taught long before Freud. *

*self: Therefore, Foucault contends, we are condemned to a quest for meaning whose meaning is that our human nature is continually reconstituted by the forms we create along the way. The responsibility to create meanings and values anew is a perpetual task, but neverthelsess the foundation of all human endeavor. For Foucault, it is through such creativity that our power is revealed, and it is in our capacity to use it well that our destiny lies.*

*self: What is the self? - The self is mind and body, brain and emotions, identity and personality. It is stored memories, conscious and unconscious. _ One looks inside one's self. One stands outside one's self._ One seems to have two selves. Each self appraises itself and the other. An aware and inquiring self seeks knowledge of its nature and actions, its entire environment, the universe it inhabits.*

*self: Dialogue with the self - Think of the aggregate **consciousness of all human beings as a "sea of consciousness" - like the seas and oceans of Planet Earth, like the air mass surrounding the earth.*

*self: Self-liberation - Quoting Berry, SEFC, quoting Judith Weissman: 'The liberation of the individual self for fulfillments, discoveries, pleasures, and joys, and the definition of oppression as mental and emotional constraints...this combination existing at the heart of **Shelley's Romantic radicalism remains basically unchanged in later feminist writers.'"*

*self: MORALS - Self governance with accepted codes of behavior with respect to actions directed towards others or towards one's self.*

*self: Self is the sum - Quoting Kaplan: "Introjection is only one of the two processes by which personal identity is constituted. The other is investment - giving of oneself. I am the person that I am because of all I prize, all that matters to me in any degree whatever. *

*In proportion as I lose interest in any of them, the boundaries of my self contract, until, if I care for nothing at all, identity vanishes in a dimensionless point. *

*'In its widest sense,' **James said, 'a man's self is the sum of all he can call his'own."*

*self: Self is dissolved: "Although they begin by making man an object of knowledge, these disciplines find, as their work advances, that the self is **dissolved as its various functions are ascribed to impersonal systems which operate through it."*

*self: Image of self - Think if there were no society, no other humans, just other species. The self is, to a degree, a political construct of the nation-state and the media.*

*self: Self and a particular self. Identity is multiple, fluid and open. There are many introjections, many investments, each with many varying intensities in a changing pattern, loosely held together in memory and expectation, with many components supportive or conflicting, shifting, alignments. *

*self: The metaphysics of man often assumes that every person is a self, whot has an absolutely personal identity. _It is_ _taken for granted that deep within each psyche is a unique entity, the very core of the self, its quintessential identity, _ Theories differ chiefly in what they take to be the distinctive attributes of such a self; those which make it a self and those which make it the particular self that it is. But personal identity has many degrees and dimensions; its essential attributes whatever they are, are partial, relative, approximate.*

*self: Self and Notself - The not-self is the human Other and the not-human Other.*

*self: Self Liberation Quoting Berry, SEFC, quoting Judith Weissman: "The liberation of the individual self for fulfillments, discoveries, pleasures, and joys, and the definition of oppression as mental and emotional constraints...this combination existing at the heart of Shelley's Romantic radicalism remains basically unchanged in later feminist writers.'"*

*self: What is the mind? -there is such a thing as the self. it is eyeball to eyeball with nature and society, lodged in its animal body it depends on its brain, body and the tools **it creates to supplement and amplify its natural capacities.*

*self: Culture/personality - Culture is the personality of society - Continuing the above - "Culture is the past of a society embedded in its present, as personality is the **presence of the individual's past. Here we face the problem of the continuity of the self -- the self's perception of its constancy. When I regain consciousness I ask 'Where am I ?' but not **'Who am I?'....."What underlies the continuity of the self is a transfer of information; its retrieval is another matter. The self **that was, bestowed on its successor the patterns which **make up its distinctive being--yesterday this day's madness did prepare..*

*self: Self-definition - Quoting Patrick H. Hutton: "It is in the formalities of our words and our deeds that we define *ourselves*. Our human nature is not a hidden reality to be discovered through self-analysis, _but the aggregate of the forms we have chosen to provide public definitions of who we are._ It follows that for Foucault there is no such thing as a human nature. There are only the linguistic and institutional artifacts left behind bysuccessive generations as each took up anew the task of creating categories to explain its perception of the human condition. Since it is the lineage of these discarded systems rather than the meanings they conveyed for generations past that holds Foucault's attention, he likens his method to that of the archaeologist, who also unearths and classifies the relics of the past in terms of their practical uses rather than the abstract values they were intended to affirm"*

*self: Self as locus of experience, no Divine self, no homunculus, a self contacting other selves, a consumer of narratives.*

*self: Self-understanding ..."The quest for self-understanding is a journey without end. Even in the deepest recesses of our psyche there are no experiences which, if evoked, will reveal our true identities. But the quest for such knowledge is itself a form of self-care, as ancient practitioners of the technologies of the self taught long before Freud. Therefore, Foucault contends, we are condemned to_ a_ _quest for meaning whose meaning is that our human nature is continually being reconstituted by the forms we create along the way_. *

*self: A "person" or "self" comes into being - a subjective reality.*

*self: To say self-expression cannot cause bad behavior is to argue also that it cannot cause good behavior. It is moreover, to make an absolute division between art and life, experience and life, mind, and body _ a division that is intolerable to anyone who is at all serious about being a human, or a member of a community or even a citizen.***

*self: Choice of community - Self sustaining colonies/communities founded in the New World after Columbus. Not self-sustaining at the start, never 100% self-sustaining. Just as lives start with newborns and games and contests have ends and beginnings, the distribution of natural resources could be a periodic renewal of generational opportunities. One human right could be choice of a community. *

*self: Self as sovreign: 1) What can I think? *

* 2) What can I do? *

* 3) What questions can I ask? *

* 4) What do I take for granted? *

*self: Self-perception: How we perceive our "selves" - In recent years our basic concepts of our "selves "as subjects, as objects, as material evidence of nature's laws have changed and are changing. The brutal history of the species worsens, we think, or have some of us as Eliot says merely "grown old"?*

*self: Our _hidden" selves_ - The experts" of the various care services, like psychiatrists, would operate as high priests of **the "unconscious", exploring our inner depths, and ministering to myriad hidden needs we had been unable to extract from "hidden" selves.*

------------------------------------------------------------

Hugh Bone