Let’s consider persons, a single person, someone living today. Compare this person to one from long ago, say 2000 years ago. For the contemporary person we have a handy reference, each of us using ourselves, our own sense of who we are for the comparison. It’s this reflective sense of self that we’re questioning. Would this sense of Self move back through history intact? Would you as you sense yourself, if transposed back two thousand years, be unable to function, become isolated, a madperson without any capacity to relate to the world?
Did someone living around the beginning or the Christian Era have a Self at all to reference, an ambience of personality, of self?
I’ve referenced this concept, that once there was no Self, several times on THINQon, but there have never been any comments on it. Which is striking in how, if accepted, our ideas about our species would so dramatically change. It would be a deathblow to fundamentalists of every sort.
Darwinism, if Selfhood became an evolving entity, would shift from the biological. Fundamentalists of every sort would recieve a death-blow, since historical continuity would be shifted inward, historical events loosing status, at the same time weakening the dates and ceremonies that fundamentalists hold standard.
This is more than idle speculation on my part. Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self traces emerging selfhood and the turn inward from antiquity to the present.
Hardly possible to imagine yourself without an inner Self to refer to, but any thoughts on this? So you think it’s an important concept? So you think that accepting it as fact would benefit us moving forward through our troubled times?
