What is the self? How might we know it and how might we describe it? Is it wine in a bottle, to be drunk by the years (D H Lawrence, parodying philosophers)? Is it mind on one side and body on the other, discrete substances communicating somehow via the pineal gland (Descartes)? Is the mind like a computer, potentially fathomable by neuroscience? Is the self a delusion, fostered by Mother Nature in order that we survive and procreate? (Though this begs the question of who, therefore, is Mother Nature?) Furthermore, how might we understand the self from within the self?

The quest for self-knowledge recurs throughout literature, philosophy, science, theology and myth. In the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the eponymous hero leaves the city of Uruk and travels into the great wildness of life, in an attempt to understand the meaning of his life and to contend with the knowledge of death. In the Upanishads all creation originates with the emergence of the self - ‘I am!’  - and reality is the creation of mind. In the materialist tradition, this distinction is maintained and yet reversed - the tangible, unyielding world precedes and succeeds the finite self.  

Questers abound, and I have sufficient space only for an insufficient survey: Inanna in the Underworld, Isis and Osiris, Odysseus, Hercules and his trials, Theseus in the Labyrinth, Jesus in the wilderness, Buddha on his quest for enlightenment, sundry Grail Knights trotting nervously through enchanted forests, Hamlet tasked with avenging his father. Later, we encounter the heroes and heroines of bildungsromans (novels about the ‘building of a self’), including: Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, Martha Quest by Doris Lessing, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Valis by Philip K Dick, Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas and so on. More recently the digital age has fostered a quite ethereal online-self, which sets forth across the cyber-wilds. Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) has propounded a theory of the self: “You have one identity…Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” In response we might leaf through our dusty old tomes and cite Shakespeare once again, the seven ages of man (and woman) and how we play so many parts as we journey through life, from the mewling infant to the schoolchild to the responsible adult and beyond. Is there an indivisible core self, beneath these roles and social codes, untainted by mortal flux? Or, as Georges Bataille wrote, are we ‘discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure’ - yearning, all the time, for ‘our lost continuity’?