While our concept of self perhaps lacks the ethical connotations of the soul, both embody our search for transcendental values and meaning. The self is not something fixed and static, but something we seek to develop in ourselves and others.
“This me [ce moi] … by which I am what I am”. This was the strange and resonant phrase Descartes used in the seventeenth century to characterise the unique individual subject of conscious experience – what is often called the self.
Some have sought to question the very idea of the self. In the Buddhist tradition, there is no such thing: there is simply a succession of psychological states that arise and pass away, but no enduring subject. The philosopher David Hume took a similar line in the eighteenth century, arguing that the idea of an enduring self is a kind of fiction or illusion. But the fact that our experience is constantly changing is no reason to deny that there is an enduring subject which undergoes these changes. Each of us has a powerful sense of a “me”, something that makes me what I am, a core self, which may no doubt change and develop over time, but which nevertheless retains its distinctive identity.
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