With the recent, untimely death by his own hands of my friend Jason “Old Boy” Kuzniarski, I felt that it was time to explore a little deeper just what it is I have been talking about in this forum, in order to try and help myself make sense of this event.
What exactly is this so-called “Self” of which I have been speaking?
The Self was one of the many discoveries made in the State of Nature that was brought back from the jungle, in order to be used to re-shape Society. In the State of Nature, Man’s greatest concern is Self-Preservation and his greatest fear is that of Violent Death. By Nature, he is a Solitary Individual, therefore, in order to live naturally, his greatest concern must be Self-Interest.
“Self” is the modern replacement for “Soul.” The idea of Soul went out of fashion after Machiavelli’s exhortations against the possibility of living according to Virtue and the lack of certitude about what exactly the Soul even is, despite 2,000 years of philosophy exploring this topic.
One of the first—if not the first—to have used “Self” in its modern sense was John Locke. He described it in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690 as, “that conscious thinking thing, whatever substance [it is] made up of…which is sensible or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends.” It forms a continuity that “unites existences and actions …in time into the same person: so whatever has the consciousness of present and past actions, is the same person to who they both belong.” The Self is one’s personal identity that is the result of the choices and experiences that occur throughout one’s life. It exists as an immaterial Consciousness or Ego, which acts as a storage unit that holds these life shaping moments, in the face of a very rapidly changing material body that is constant in flux.
But how would this natural way of living work within the confines of Society? It must be changed from pure Self-Interest into, what came to be called, Enlightened Self-Interest or Self-Interest Well Understood.
In Modern Philosophy, there was a sharp turn made (pretty much an “about-face” or 180˚ turn) away from cultivating or perfecting, seemingly impossible, Virtue toward the emancipation of personal Desire as the ordering principle of Society. It was a way to make the goal of Happiness much easier to realize. Instead of setting a person's two components—Body and Soul—against one another as the Ancients had with their demands of Virtue, if the second component Soul—or Self—is allowed to cooperate in the satisfactions of the Body—instead of being trained to restrain them—then the division in Man can be overcome and earthly satisfaction achieved.
This simple solution, however, was exploded by Rousseau in his critique of the new type of Man—The Bourgeois—that is the resultant of this new schema. He was quick to point out that Locke’s Natural Man would hardly be distinguishable from the rest of the Animal Kingdom and would not be industrious or rational, but rather idle and irrational—motivated exclusively by the Passions. Rousseau removed the floor from beneath Man—that Hobbes and Locke needed in order for their very simple plans to work—and helped to found the Modern Psychology of Self, popularized by Freud, which attempts to look at the Sub-conscious “Basement” to see what really lies beneath all our Rationality and Civility.
We keep chasing this Self back further and further into the jungles of the State of Nature, but its essence remains elusive and this understanding, more and more, comes to seem to be its essence. The Self now seems to be this mysterious, ineffable, indefinable, unlimited, creativity—knowable only thru its deeds. It has come to replace God—of which it is the impious mirror image—as the grounding for all motivation, action, and “values.” It’s become the source of all things. It now creates god(s) in its image, not vice-versa, as in the old Biblical stories.
This Self is also the anti-thesis of Nature—not bound by the Laws of Natural Science, it is the only source of Freedom in a mechanically, deterministic world. It’s emanations are now proof of Free Will, but are random swervings really the same thing as making a Free Choice? Our Psychology today posits that the Sub-conscious trumps the Rational Consciousness and, in reality, we are really at the mercy of something even worse than God’s Will: Unconscious Desire. We are simply this uncontrollable ball of emotions that are ready to burst out at any moment, with no mediating force to counter-balance.
In the Ancient conception of Man, the “Soul” was capable of exercising control over the Passions and pointed the lower motivations in Man toward higher goals and achievements. Man had a real Freedom that allowed him to order his world and, although he was still at the mercy of Nature/God, his Reason could aid in an ordering and hierarchy that gave Man power over his life.
Our current language of the "Self" has none of these edifying and inspiring components and the greatest change is that the good man used to be the one who cared for others, whereas now it is the one who cares exclusively for himself. Survivalism has replaced Heroism. Selfishness is now a good thing instead of a Moral Vice.
The word “Soul” expresses very different images and ideas than does the word “Self,” yet we have quietly accepted the substitution and the poverty of our language mirrors the poverty of our realities. We are told that Man is Self, and Self is naturally Selfish (period) whereas, Soul invokes images of divine and lofty goals and enterprises, and requires a Society dedicated to it in which this beauty can flourish. This whole dilemma becomes even more problematic when one of the most beautiful Souls I have ever met was an Atheist.
I wonder where an Atheist’s Soul goes when he dies?
