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On Self

On Self: Nature

Previously, I discussed where we come from. To me, the next fundamental question about self-hood is “what are we made of?”. This question is not one we typically ask about ourselves, but it is an enlightening query; because what we are, like most things about ourselves, is not something we can choose.

Muscle and bone, tendon and tissue, fat and skin, faces and hands and shapes: we are first and foremost bodily beings. Yet, because of the advancements of civilization and the success of our ingenuity, we have little connection between our self identity and our bodily being. We have ironed out many of the experiences that for millennia have placed human consciousness squarely in the life of the body, and as a result have become unattached from our physicality and reliance upon nature. We no longer think regularly about how temperatures, rain, sunlight, and soil are the physically sustaining resource that give us life every day. We consume goods and products with little to no consideration or thankfulness for how they came to be and what it costs to make them.

Think about the computer that you are reading this blog post on. Although it might seem about as unnatural as anything could be, it is bound to nature by the very atoms that compose it. The plastics are refined bits of dead micro-organisms that, many years ago, floated upon the ocean soaking in sunlight and CO2, the glass and silicon chips are basically just refined sand, and the metals were at one point in their life buried beneath dirt and stone. We are much the same way. Although we do not think much about it, the difference between our bodies and the rock we stand on is not in substance but in association. In fact, we are very much the Earth, and the Earth is very much us.

Becoming conscious of what it is the we are made of is not as simple as being told, or else I would have stopped typing in the last paragraph. Instead, it is something that must be re-integrated to our consciousness through experiences and habits. My solution to this is backpacking. By venturing out, away from the comforts of civilization, we are forcefully made aware of the fragility of the bodily self, and jarringly placed into the mindset that my self is my body, and my body is a part of nature. This works better if conditions for backpacking are poor and you’re miserable. Cold rain, limited resources, and no google to search if you don’t know how to do something makes it abundantly clear that we are at the mercy of our knowledge, skill, and the whims of mother nature.

You may be thinking to yourself that I sound like a masochistic lunatic, and I might be, but it is not the misery that most times accompanies backpacking that I love. It is the reward you get for successfully relying on yourself. It is the sense of self-sufficiency, not in the sense that you can do it alone and don’t need others to help you, but rather in the sense that your self can survive when reduced to its bodily components. This reward often takes the form of the peaceful tranquility of morning in the woods and a sense that you, along with the flora and fauna around you, have done a good job in surviving the night. This sense of self-awareness that includes nature is not easily described, so I encourage you to go find a hiking buddy and do it yourself.

We are made of nature, and when we die we contribute our bodies back into nature. Nothing of our career, our education, our hobbies, or our achievements go with us into death. We go back into the Earth. Living in this truth allows us to live more honestly as who we are.

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On Self

On Self: The Origin Story

We have an issue knowing who we are, as previously discussed in my opening post to this series. We spend so much of our time wondering who we are, an ironic task at best, but a brutal journey if engaged with seriously. The problem is, we do not choose who we are. Our self begins to form without our consent and without our input in its earliest roots. Like an acorn planted in a field, we simply grow into ourselves without a choice in where we are planted or whether or not we actually want to grow. Accepting this premise: that the self begins before we are aware of it, is crucial to understanding the self as a whole.

So, where do we begin then?

Birth.

Some might argue that we pre-date birth in our souls, but if this is true, then this soul would not factor into our formation of self anyways because we clearly cannot know anything about ourselves before our bodily existence. Our goal is to know ourselves and about the self as they are now, not as they existed in a bygone age of perfection beyond our capability of understanding. Any such knowledge of a pre-existent soul would be meaningless without an understanding of the self in the present, so the discussion of the supernatural is irrelevant until we can grasp the natural to such a degree as to brush against the supernatural.

So, back to birth. Why does the self begin at birth and not at conception? (This conversation has nothing to do with the rights of a fetus, this is merely about the formation of the self) Before our birth, our bodies and our mother’s bodies are virtually the same. We cannot have any neurological firings that separate us from our mother until we are aware that the world around us is not merely an extension of ourselves. There must be a separation in order for the self to begin. Before birth, the world is a womb and some voices/noises. The environment that shapes our most basic neurological firings is the environment in which we do not have a self.

A sense of self, the sense that is hardwired into the neurology of self-referential loops within our brain, cannot be formed until we recognize that there are others in the world, and the first other we create is our mother. Our brains are forced to take in the information that there is a world besides the womb, and there are others besides ourselves at birth. This recognition draws a hard line between the neurons which have been firing as reactions to the information fed to us in the womb, all of which form a basis for our self, and new neurons which must begin to parse the information our senses are gathering about the new world we find ourselves in. So upon entry into the world outside the womb, we begin to form a self. This is the foundation of the id.

If your reaction to this is to say: “Well, this is a bunch of malarkey, I don’t have any memory of my birth and it doesn’t play a role in the actions I take or who I am.” I would respond that the self is not a cohesive structure that is always in agreement with itself. We have passions and desires that are inherent to our humanity that we do not always want or accept from ourselves. Our birth is the beginning, the root of self, and that root is the one we do not always want to acknowledge or give voice to. It is the id, the underlying instincts and desires that make us human. It is ultimately the desire to be free from the pain of being separate.

The issue with the departure from the mother is that our self is fundamentally dependent on her. Our entire identity as a separate entity from the doctor whose hands we arrived in and the hospital room we suddenly found ourselves in is based entirely upon the neurons that wired together while we were still a part of our mother. We are simultaneously inseparable from mom and irreconcilably separate from her. We can’t be unborn, and we can’t rewrite our existence as a self-existent being. This disgruntled beginning is a fundamental piece to understanding the human condition. We hate being alone in ourselves, but we can never be truly united to others either.

This only becomes worse as our identities become less complex and more defined. This only becomes worse as we develop an ego.

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On Self

On Self: an introduction

There is a lot of talk regarding identity swirling around in popular conversation today. Among my generation much of this conversation is in reference to personality-typing systems like Love Languages, Meier-Briggs, and Strength-finders. At Olivet this conversation is centered around the Enneagram, probably the most philosophically aware personality-typing system when properly understood. All of these conversations claim to be aimed at helping our communities better understand themselves and operate more efficiently, but there is a deeper motivation to these conversations. This motivation deals directly with a key aspect of the human condition, and that is the existence of the self.

We are obsessed with the self. We move away, we go on long trips, we break up relationships, we leave jobs, we start new careers: all in an effort to “find ourselves”. So where does this idea of the self come from? Where are the roots of identity and distinction between persons? What separates me from you? Who are the key players in the game of self-building? What are the pros and cons of self-building? Is any of this differentiation real? What do religion and sociology have to say about it? These questions are the subject of The Cogitator’s series: On Self. 

The study of the self can be quite trippy and deconstructive, so hang on with me as we get into the self-referential nature of these ideas and define key terms.

Self: a reference of an individual to the individuality of the individual making the reference. (see where this gets trippy?)

Ego: the conscious self that seems to be responsible for decision making and accomplishment/failure. This is the operative form of the self; our inner dialogue.

Id: the subconscious self that consists of the underlying mechanisms of our psychology/neurology. The conditioned aspects of our self that we do not have active control over. Our basic drives and instincts.

Consciousness: Another way of referring to the ego/id relationship as a whole, particularly when referring to the social aspects of the self.

None of these definitions are wholly accurate, as the ideas represented by the words are far too complex for a few descriptive sentences, but they give a basic idea of what I mean when I use them. The clarification of these terms is a basic goal of this series. Likewise, these concepts are not necessarily reflective of reality, but they are the way the conversation around self has been framed by countless others, so they are useful.

My engagement with this topic largely comes from the type of art that I enjoy, so I will be making occasional references to these artworks as they intersect our conversation. In fact, it is my belief that all art comes into contact with the question, what is it to be human?, at some level.

Let’s get into ourselves.