Every day we hear the use of the vocabulary of the ‘ego’ or ‘self’ without investigating what is meant by the term. For example, we might enjoy the compliment ‘love yourself’. Or we may well undergo embarrassment if a friend says ‘take responsibility for yourself’. Sometimes it is said by way of affront, ‘don’t take yourself so seriously’. And, under duress, we might receive the counsel, ‘be your best self’. These bromides and others invoke the idiom of self over and again. Yet I cannot help but ask: what is such a thing as an ego or self? Crucially, I pause to note at the outset and in advance that my language glides between ego and self. For the sake of this essay, the self and ego refer to one and the same phenomenon: the sense of subjectivity in which I know I am me in an ongoing and stable manner. This concept of the self requires historical context.
Four hundred years ago, the father of modern philosophy asked the very same question when he wrote ‘I know that I exist; the question is, what is this “I” that I know?’ In response, Descartes suggested I am a ‘thinking thing’, in Latin a res cogitans. We now know we do much more than think. We are embodied feelers who tell stories by which to live. The conception of the ‘ego’ or ‘self’ is admittedly complicated. I am complicated. You are complicated. True, but shall we simply declare that it is too slippery a term and thus ignore its many reservations, provocations, and ambiguities? Shall we discard it as an overly complex muddle, ultimately as an illusion? Or, as some in philosophy have attempted in recent years, should we even kill the self, in an act of egocide (not quite suicide)?
I do not think the self is an illusion or a myth. I am inclined to redescribe the self not so much as a ‘thing’ but as a dynamic field of bodily experience, one that is both open to change and stable enough to be called a unique ‘I’, even if it is not fully definable or circumscribable. Within philosophy, proposals have been submitted to the general reading public over the course of the past decade or so. I admire their genius and courage. I should like to open up a dialogue with a couple of them, if only because I find so much of their philosophical work a real stimulus and a joy to contemplate.
Two books in particular protrude in this context: Irish philosopher and sociologist Eilís Ward released Self with Cork University Press in 2022, and American philosopher David Velleman published a popular rendition of his decades-long evaluation of the self a few years ago entitled On Being Me, with Princeton University Press. Both tiptoe toward egocide in that they challenge the stubborn notion of a stable, fixed self, one that is self-legislating, self-contained, and ultimately, predictable and thereby fully knowable.
Before we discuss the specifics of Ward’s and Velleman’s daring claims, we must pause to outline what is meant by the ‘ego’ and ‘egocide’. Admittedly the concept of ego is varied: the term itself appears in Descartes initially, where it represents a stable, centralised subject, like an immovable ballast to which individual experiences attach, or it summons the figure of a strong cornerstone on which every streaming bit of experience rests. Kant and Husserl’s transcendental ego, while distinct from each other, likewise root experience in a stable subjective structure. Psychoanalysis too, from Freud to Jung, proposes an ego that retains itself as an inner theatre of constancy, conscious and unconscious alike. Take Carl Jung as a paradigm of the stable, secure ego. He writes that the ego ‘forms, as it were, the centre of the field of consciousness; and, in so far as this comprises the empirical personality, the ego is the subject of all personal acts of consciousness. The relation of a psychic content of the ego forms the criterion of its consciousness, for no content can be conscious unless it is represented to a subject.’ This interior sense of ‘being the centre of consciousness’ is personal, and thereby also represents a stable and ongoing feeling of being this unique me over the course of a lifetime. Imagine you hit your head and forget who you are; the outcome is you are a global amnesiac. Yet, the ‘stable ego’ paradigm would claim you would never confuse yourself with me. You know you are you, and forever so, quite apart from the memory of who you are or the narrative you give yourself.
Some in professional philosophy wish to make this stable ego or fixed sense of self obsolete. The strict dispatching, even murder, of the ego is named egocide. The rhetoric of egocide I pick up from Jocob Rokozinski’s provocative book The Ego and the Flesh. While I do not share his overall thesis (and do not have space here to discuss it), I can appreciate his use of violent language to describe recent trends in philosophy: to kill off once and for all not only the idea of a stable ego, but the ego altogether. What is the alternative? The inverse? The contrary? Is the no-ego or the no-self option the only one left?
Herein lies the chief problem as I see it: the either-or logic of a stable ego versus a no-ego account. While there are many options available in the discipline of philosophy (from ancient philosophy up to the present), these two arrest my attention, because they are uncompromising, unassailable, and thus, symbolic of extreme bookends manifest on the continuum of the ego: (i) the no-ego view versus the (ii) stable-ego paradigm. Allow these bookends to function as a framework of the present essay.
I should like to split the difference between these two ends of the spectrum. Both monographs, to which I shall turn momentarily, offer some resources for such a balancing act, a position that hangs suspension-like between the bookends: I call this middle way the flexible ego. Yet the drift toward egocide is visible in both authors, as well as in other literature that is too legion to mention here. The exponents of egocide, in general, ask: why would I want to be defined by a single version of ‘myself’? Many of us wish to change at least aspects of our personality and habits, right? If only for therapeutic reasons, we pay good money to talk to a psychologist because we assume we can change or evolve, presumably? Such exponents of egocide, then, shall say the only way an ego can demonstrably change is due to the fact that there is no ego at all, since it is an illusion.
Let me address this concept of egocide directly, and up front: I reject the idea that you and I belong to the category of ‘illusion’. I am not persuaded this end of the spectrum can hold up any more than the other end can (i.e., that I am completely stable and unchangeable). I concur with Allen Ginsberg judgment that ‘Any fixed static categorized image of the Self is a big goof.’ The emphasis here is with the attack on a ‘fixed static categorized image’ of the ego or self, not the ego or self as such. To abandon a fixed or stable ego is not to commit egocide.
A propos of the title of this essay: true, sometimes I think I must be an illusion. Some days I am convinced that everyone I see around me is just an illusion. But are they? Well, they could be. But the question immediately posed is this, what do I mean by illusion? I don’t mean the kind of illusion proposed by Descartes back in 1641, in his famed Meditations on First Philosophy, namely, that we can legitimately doubt if the people we see walking outside of our window are really people. Maybe they are automatons underneath coats and hats, he wonders. (That robots could simulate humans is timely in 2024.) To disprove or confront that sceptical attitude, we would only have to walk outside and stand in front of one of the approaching figures who don the hat and coat. We could remove the hat and coat in order to test Descartes’s suspicion. Such a sceptical attitude here is not worth investigating because it can be verified, one by one, by asking each passerby if they are human. While AI is not yet duplicating human consciousness (not yet), I am not interested in brute scepticism that is correctable by the economy of empirical verification.
The kind of question I should like to address is the following, the question concerning the art of selfhood or ego-hood as such. Analysis of the ego defies simple verification and thus requires some speculative intervention, some level of imagination, some degree of philosophical awe and wonder. Even if I know for sure you are a human and not an automaton (lurking underneath a coat and hat), are you a human in possession of a self? Or even better: what is a human ego or self? Is the self you think you have (and that I think I have) nothing more than a fabrication of our collective imaginations? Is my sense of self, of being this particular ‘I’, really a myth reducible to C-fibers firing away in a mass of electrical circuits squeezed into the complicated manifold of the brain? Thomas Metzinger thinks so and his sophisticated books (Being No One and The Ego Tunnel) testify to this more recent trend in cognitive science and the scientific community broadly speaking. But I shall not engage with the reduction of the self to the synaptic brain.
Is the self a construction of a story or a narrative I can set into operation? Am I the author or protagonist of my selfhood? If you agree with this sentiment, then you are content to agree with our first author, David Velleman. Is the self a thing we cling to out of fear and anxiety, a spell imparted to us by late modern consumerism that can only be broken Buddhist training in emptiness? Eilís Ward suggests as much. In the background which constitutes the context of both monographs are the philosophical longueurs that mount an attack on the sense of personal identity or a stable ego, an attack proposed by the existentialist tradition of the 1930s-40s and recently in most detail by Galen Strawson; his recent essay published here in Dublin Review of Books, ‘Just Live’, reinforces the thesis that I (and you) do not consist of anything other than what our current episode of living chooses to be, quite apart from any narrative I construct.
Let me address what I think is really at stake in the trend represented in the work of Ward, Velleman, and to an extent, in Strawson’s attack of the narrative view of the self. It is called, for the sake of melodrama, narcissism – or simply, egoism. The ego, once inflated, aspires to dominate or assert itself over others (people, objects, the earth). Augustine, over 1,500 years ago called this vice a libido dominandi, or lust to dominate and master, which grows out of a swollen pride. To kill off this toxic kind of ego is fundamental to moral formation of any kind.
We cultivate moral worlds, of course, that enable us to rein in the will to dominate that irradiates out from the ego. But should we destroy the ego entirely? How can I ‘just live’ if I have no ego or self from which to gather resources to be employed in the wonderful production of living? If one is guilty of egocide, that is, the crime of killing off the self in favour of some other paradigm of what it means to be human, then it follows that one is obliged to agree with the notion that all selves are shapeshifters with no agency or willpower. For the no-ego or the no-self paradigm, I am nothing more than a mirror that becomes what it reflects.
An egoless shapeshifter refuses any notion of stability. But I am persuaded this position goes too far in its intention to rein in narcissism, namely, the tragic spectacle of the complete destruction of the ego. If I have no ego, I am endlessly released from myself, which means I do not possess myself as a particular ‘I’. Because there is no ego, there is no one equipped with the power to wield my agency as a subjective seat of noetic and affective powers poised for embodied action. Because egocide says I remain ‘plastic’ clay in the potter’s hand (the potter here is the environment I mirror), I am nothing but a placeholder. I cannot ‘just live’ if I do not have a living ego out from which to perform my life.
I don’t mind returning weekly to the deliberate motivation to rid myself of a clingy attachment to myself. I think that is a healthy corrective to narcissism. Yet I do not think I am either an illusion or a passive shapeshifter with no subjective willpower (philosophers call it agency). I would propose an alternative: a flexible model of being me, of being you. In this paradigm of selfhood, I would enjoy a sense of myself, that I am me, and that I can be traced throughout my life (traumas and all). I can moreover enjoy a level of willpower to consciously adopt a flexible attitude, whereby evolution is made possible. Both books here teach us how to be more flexible, even if we can resist the urge to go all the way down the path of egocide.
We are now in a position to return to the two authors under consideration. Let us begin with Ward’s statement. She attacks the late modern ‘modern’ self that TV, social media and capitalism teach us to be: that is CARRPP, or ‘competitive, autonomous, resilient, responsibilised, perfectible, and positive’; ‘put together they render us human capital’. I concur mostly with her critical assessment of late modern CARRPP. Of course, many world religions and existential philosophies would ask us to turn to our better angels and cultivate being resilient and positive, and in certain contexts, competitive to a degree. Yet I can understand her point, that CARRPP, when chained together, can be exhausting and life-draining. Her solution?
With excellent and pleasing prose, Ward outlines the Buddhist account of the non-self. For specific analyses of various Buddhist theological terms on this theme, such as skandhas and Pratutyasamutpada, you can read chapter three. Essentially, the Buddhist account says there is no essence, no permanence in the self – no thing to cling to. The Buddhist technique of ‘being myself’ assists each of us in the task of self-correction concerning the illusion that we think we are a thing to attach to. Ward insists that we are not stable, fixed ego who is held hostage to a culture of competition and fake happiness and unrealisable perfectibility. We are instead an ‘aggregate’ or ‘bundle’ of experiences that accrue over time and are dependent on others for their origination. Egocide is on the horizon.
The therapeutic benefits of Buddhist mindfulness are liberating insofar as emptiness demands that I simply bear witness to the stream of experiences that befall me, and that I realise in this streaming that I am not in control and that I am in deep relationship with the world around me (I am not autonomous). The action required is twofold: (i) to witness nonjudgmentally to conscious experience and (ii) to see myself as intertwined with others. Mindfulness can ‘reveal an ever-present flow of emotions and sensations, swirling about, rumbling alongside thoughts, themselves racing, sometimes uncontrollably. Present too will be memories, images, desires, all showing up with stories to tell, all wanting attention. It is not unusual for meditators to feel under siege by what their minds produce – jingles, earworms, repeated desires, old gripes never resolved.’
For Ward, the self creates and recreates itself over and again in an economy of self-realisation without being conscious of the fact that the self simply is this nonstop, ongoing creation. The liberation from CARRPP arises from the realisation of this simple fact: there is nothing preventing us from changing except, well, the illusion that I am a stable ‘I’. The bundle of Ward’s theory recalls David Hume’s bundle theory from the mid-eighteenth century or even Galen Strawson’s version of ‘just live’, in which the ego consists of nothing more than a series of episodes, passing from one moment to the next. I agree with Ward that late modern culture teaches us to believe we ‘must’ be competitive, autonomous, positive, and resilient all the time, because that message is ever present in the media and advertising. But that is exhausting (it leads to craving and suffering no doubt), and it is simply not something we ‘must’ adopt as objectively true.
Yet the total elimination of the self remains for me not a necessary step. Why does Ward move so quickly from CARRPP to its radical antipode, the other end of the spectrum of self-as-illusion? One must acknowledge the Buddhist theological narrative at play, and I can appreciate the need to rely on theological, spiritual and metaphysical imaginations. I know I certainly do.
Our second author is the strictly philosophical thinker David Velleman. Like Ward’s work, his book deserves special praise for its readability. Conversational in tone, it takes the reader through a journey of narrative self-discovery. In so doing he alerts his readers to the ongoing debate concerning the narrative conception of the self. The chief claim ventured in his book is relatively simple on the face of it: I make decisions about how the story of my life shall proceed, and that is how my life proceeds; I am the author of my life story. However, I am also pregiven genetic tendencies and childhood narratives (or values) about the meaning of life that shape me at the most fundamental of psychological levels. I do not have complete freedom to re-narrate my life at any given moment in time, and yet, I do have legitimate freedom (will power) to push the narrative in this or that direction. I can ‘make things happen’ since I am the author (or co-author) of my life story. The final chapter on wanting to be loved opens up an interesting possibility for self-love. How can we ‘get some distance’ from ourselves? Can we detach or bracket or observe neutrally our narratives unfold? I do not see how I can take leave of myself, but certainly I understand the need to get perspective on myself. I can thereby minimise myself in relationship with others, so as to inhabit and contemplate perspectives other than my own. I invite love the more I love myself as one person among others who can observe me. I enjoy a double perspective: ‘My personal efficacy arises from a duality in me that makes me just another person in my own eyes. That perspective on myself is not sufficient by itself to make me good, but perhaps it is the beginning of goodness – for it entails regarding myself as just one person in a world of persons. It thus initiates a train of thought that eventually leads me to recognize the symmetry between my treatment of others and their treatment of me.’ But I need agency or subjective will power to accomplish the act of dwelling in two perspectives at once.
Velleman’s position indicates I am not a thing or a stable substance that is autonomous and unrelated to anyone else. He argues instead that my narrative make sense only once it is understood as an outcome of mutual storytelling in which I emerge. His position reduces to the existential sentiment that I am what I do. So ‘being me’ is borne out in my actions.
Velleman supports this thesis when he writes: ‘I don’t like to think that I am just performing a script handed to me by history. I prefer to think of myself as the scriptwriter, inventing my life as I live it, by living it. Inventing my life would require my future to be blank, like the next page of a work-in-progress. The story thus far may limit what I can coherently write on that page, as it does for any writer, but there must be more than one thing I can write.’ Many of us can say: I have friends. I have family. I have work colleagues. I have my surrounding culture. Each of those narratives inform my own narrative of who I am. We say: I am a professor. Or I am a father. Or I am a lover of spicy food. Or I am gamer who loves to travel. And so on. These identity markers carry within them whole narratives about who I am in that specific context.
How then do we occupy a position between the two bookends, between (i) stable ego and (ii) no-ego? If I am at once a self and not rigid, then what am I? For lack a superlative, I invoke the vocabulary of a ‘flexible self’ who is contemplative, who is open to a horizon of possibilities, but who may also have a genuine sense of interior selfhood to enact new narratives and realise new possibilities. Both monographs, Ward’s and Velleman’s, make this point in various manners of tone and emphasis. I cannot be nothing. I cannot be no one. I cannot be an illusion. What is the point of living if I am simply an illusion or an episode? My model of ‘Contemplative Selving’ (of the growth toward a self that never ceases) asks this question on a regular basis: what is the point of living as an ego? And how do I live? How do I define the kind of life that is worthy of living, namely, of the lightsome illumination of love that corrects egoism? The opposite of love lies in the mindset of egotistical tragedy, the rigidity of fixed destinies and relived past hurts that force the ego to cling to itself.
Interestingly, both of our authors do make a gesture toward the inclusion of love or empathy. I acknowledge the deep wisdom of compassion that Ward highlights convincingly in Buddhism, and I appreciate the brief chapter 7 in Velleman entitled ‘Wanting to be Loved’. As Augustine says, we all want to love and be loved just as we are, as this unique self who is present to itself, one always open to growth and renewal. When I love it is me who loves (love is not a neutral feeling anyone can pick up). When I am in pain, it is mine and mine alone. The unique embodied I that defines me need not be stable and fixed, but neither should my identity as this unique I become so fleeting it results in egocide. The space between permits me to end with lines from a William Carlos Williams poem, ‘Danse Russe’:
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
‘I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!’
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades, –
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
1/10/2024
Joseph Rivera is a tenured professor of philosophy and philosophy of religion at Dublin City University. He has published three monographs and over forty articles in academic journals. A fourth monograph on the philosophical concept of the ‘world’ (is it real or not?) is near completion. A native of Missouri in the USA, Joseph has lived abroad for over fifteen years, in Edinburgh and Dublin.
