I. In a previous essay I stated the following:
What does all this say for the doctrine of the ‘true self’? This is the idea that, beneath all of the discursive layering spread over ourselves by society, there is a nascent set of core characteristics that would emerge, but for the quashing of it by society’s norms, demands, and expectations. While I cannot argue for this here at length, I believe what I’ve said casts such a view into extreme doubt. I will limit myself to the following remark: there is nothing to us other than what we actually are at any given time of our life, those characteristics and abilities that make us up, and if you let society shape you to be a certain way throughout that life, then you are those ways, not some nascent set of dispositions that would have come to be if things were different.Here I intend to make good on my suggestion that the themes which this essay explored make trouble for the doctrine of what I there called the ‘true self.’ But first we need to get clearer about this idea than my elliptical reference to it allows, first we need to get clear about what exactly I am taking aim at. Note, however, that the doctrine of the true self (as I will call it) is hardly a rigorous philosophical doctrine defended and developed by philosophers, but instead just a sticky feature of our psychological self-conception. Indeed, it is one of several ideas that few if any philosophers would seriously put forward and defend, but aspects of which have surprising currency among non-philosophers. Indeed, aspects of the doctrine are unconsciously recalcitrant even in otherwise very intelligent people’s patterns of thought about themselves and others. Given this, it is more common to rebut ideas relating to the true self by trying to show that humans are strongly psychologically disposed to accepting them, and that the true self is an illusion borne of these tendencies. However, my argumentative strategy will be to treat the doctrine of the true self like a serious philosophical doctrine and show its deficiencies as such, rather than speculating about the doctrine’s likely psychological origin. I do this both in order to provide different grounds for purging it from our psychological self-conception and to put forward an alternative, philosophically defensible picture of the self that eschews what I consider to be the problematic assumptions associated with the doctrine.
In order to do this, it is necessary for me to interpret and develop the doctrine of the true self in ways that believers in it perhaps never would, and in ways they may even find puzzling or incredulous. Despite this possibly being the reaction by some, I believe that the ways I interpret and develop the view are basically the only way of making the idea of the true self refer to a genuine reality, rather than a psychological crutch. As well as trying to show that this development of the doctrine is philosophically untenable, my secondary hope is that merely reading my development and rebuttal of the view, without actually agreeing or disagreeing with me, will by itself have a sort of therapeutic effect on the reader (in the Wittgensteinian sense) wherein it is realised that, given what a doctrine of the true self must involve, one does not or need not really believe in a true self at all. I close with a sketch of the alternative picture of the self referred to above.