Origins of the Self

Fundamental to our humanness, is having a sense of self that organizes our experience and shapes our reality, providing the content of our identity. Personhood emerges from our human capacity to create an identity, and experience being an essence. Our sense of self, of being a person, is ubiquitous and enduring; however, the content of our personhood is ephemeral and contextually determined. It is in our nature to have a sense of personhood, but the type of person we are is mutable and fluid.

Although we may have a deep sense of being a person, we are also aware of being a different person today than sometime in the past. This mutable essence reflects the nature of the self as a process that unifies our changing states of mind. This capacity for unification is a manifestation of our essence as a being. Our experience of self is the combination of this unifying capacity with our life, as lived. The self is a combination of mental functions and experiential content that is felt as having both an essence and a fluctuating, personal identity. This combination of function and content is the self; neither function nor content can stand alone. There is not a self that represents a mental process, and then some metaphysical observer of those functions, which becomes the experience of having a sense of self. The self processes are functions of mind acting on life events, thereby creating the experience of selfhood. The simultaneous engagement of these functions of mind with situational events is the subjective experience of a sense of self.

Our sense of self, our personhood, is unlike any other mental experience. Reflecting inward, we sense being a person, an enduring experience that we are each a being. This experience arises out of our emotions, desires, and values, organized around the events of our life. Without feelings, we have no desires and are disengaged from the world, as well as from our sense of self. When we are emotionally present in our life, we sustain our selfhood.

The combining of life events with emotions and desires is constitutive of our sense of self and accounts for our changing sense of self, over time. As our emotions shift and our life events change, we come to recognize that a different sense of self has emerged. We nonetheless continue to have a sense of self, just with different constituents; but, our experience of being a self does not dissipate. We merely feel we have changed over time, never thinking we are no longer the same person. Occasionally, when we have a sudden or dramatic shift in life situations, emotions, or desires, we can feel like we are not our self, for a time. At such a time, the constituents of our self are unintegrated and we feel off, not quite ourselves. In extreme situations where there has been too abrupt a shift in emotions, situations, or desires, we may experience a traumatic loss of self. Yet, through a process of integrating our emotions with our life events, we again come to feel ourselves again, even though perhaps very differently than the pre-shift self.

The self does more than merely integrate experience with emotion; it actually binds this combination to our desires, values, and motivations. We experience this binding and integration process as an unfolding of a personal narrative, a verbal identity we hold within us. This is the process that is subjectively experienced as one’s sense of self, one’s identity and personhood. The self organizes experience by association of cognitive events with emotional tone. Our sense of self emerges from emotional states of mind that have corresponding, cognitive associations. This amalgamation of thoughts with feelings facilitates the development of narrative, episodic memories, whose coherence is experienced by us as an emergent feeling of identity.

Our personhood is built up through processes of evaluation: through the process of judging how our current emotions and experiences align with our established, narrative identity. The self evaluates our current experiences and integrates them with prior experiences. This evaluative component is inherently and irreducibly tied to how we cognitively process information. The emotions associated with our experiences are the fundamental, evaluative element that organizes the self. Through the inherently-evaluative aspect of emotions, our sense of self becomes inextricably linked to our feelings, desires, and values.

The nature of the self leaves us with the subjective experience of both a situational identity and an enduring personhood. There is a component of self based in experience and one based in unity or essence, together constituting the self. Neither the situational self nor the essential self is a viable description of the nature or function of the self—the self is both. The self is emergent to situational contingency, as well as being immutably essential.

Viewing the situational self or the essential self in isolation limits our potential for full self-actualization. Too great an emphasis on the situationally-determined self reduces the importance of the immutable. Such overvaluation of the situational-self holds out the promise of an egalitarian personhood, in which there is an infinite potential for each individual. However, this unlimited potential of the situational-self comes at the cost of our sense of having an essence. Our essential-self helps us experience a depth, meaning, and purpose to our life. Without a sense of essence, the events comprising the situational self become interchangeable. This interchangeability comes to be felt as a loss of significance beyond the immediate experiences.

Additionally, an undervalued, essential self results in nonresolvable conflicts between competing, situationally-determined needs and desires. Without an arbitrator between competing, situational experiences, we come to feel that we can never be satisfied, since we pick one experience at the cost of another experience. Our essential self exists as a supra-ordinate, coordinating function, arbitrating between competing states of mind generated by disparate feelings and conflicting desires. The essential self has a value system that allows for making coherent choices. When we act in the world with coherence, then our experiences can be felt as having purpose.

Our sense of self is shaped by the context of our life and our accumulated experiences. According to Charles Taylor, how we evaluate our experiences and emotions is based on the contingencies of life, and that the way we see ourselves is determined by the worldviews that surround us. In Sources of the Self, Taylor details how humankind’s sense of self has changed over time. In modernity, the sense of self has become increasingly independent and isolated. In contemporary western culture, independent agency of the self has nearly become synonymous with our sense of self; whereas in pre-modern times, the sense of self was non-autonomous and lacked independent agency. This changing sense of selfhood reflects the degree to which our subjective experience is set by our cultural narratives. As these cultural narratives change, the evaluations that organize our experience also change. Subsequently, through long periods of cultural evolution, there is a concomitant change in the subjective sense of self. As the content of the self changes, so too will our subjective sense of self.

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