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.
But what exactly is this “me”, this self? Descartes called it the soul: “this me, that is to say the soul by which I am what I am.” And he famously, or infamously, went on to argue that the soul is an entirely non-physical substance, capable of existing independently of the body. Given our modern knowledge of how intimately our conscious awareness is related to the brain and its workings, the Cartesian idea of an immaterial soul has today lost much of its appeal.
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