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.
It is in our thinking about the contrast between such situations, disagreeable and agreeable, where the idea of the true self most naturally (but not exclusively) rears its head. For it is an apparently natural way of understanding these contrasting situations as, in one case, holding us back, forcing us to suppress ourselves, and preventing us from being what we really are. This may be thought of as an effect of our job, the people we are around, or even ‘society’ as a whole, but especially the obligations and expectations each of these may impose upon us. Whereas in the other case, and whether actual or merely imagined, we are truly able to be ‘ourselves’ and do what we were ‘meant’ to do. Instead of being forced into a situation where we warp ourselves to fit into moulds built and fit for someone else, we are able to be and express ourselves as the person we have always been, without shying away or suppressing any aspect of ourselves. Conceiving of situations in this way is (if only implicitly) to accept the doctrine of the true self.
But to conceive of these situations in this way, as in one case involving one’s true self and in the other having it suppressed, involves a leap of reasoning that requires further assumptions, beyond the fact that one situation affords a better life than the other, to licence. Specifically, the idea that within happy situations we can (1) ‘be ourselves’ and (2) do what we were ‘meant’ to do, but within unhappy situations we (or others) (1) suppress ‘ourselves’ and (2) do other than we are ‘meant’ to do. Call these the essence assumption and the teleological assumption, respectively. What exactly do these assumptions involve? What must they involve in order to make sense of them? Before getting into this, I will first go over what it seems to me cannot be involved with making sense of these points.
The doctrine of the true self cannot merely consist of identifying ways we could be or things we could do that we desire or reflectively endorse as valuable in one way or other and saying that our true self consists of these things. In other words, to the extent that there is a true self, it cannot merely be the kind of self we want to be, or value, or a self which does the kind of thing we want to do, or value.
To see what I mean, suppose that I am, to all appearances, and for all my life so far, a miser. I hardly ever buy gifts for anyone, and when I do, they are inexpensive; I always ask you to transfer even the smallest amounts of money for purchases you benefit from; I never transfer even the smallest amounts of money for purchases I benefit from, to the extent I can get away with it socially; I turn off heaters that my flatmates are using to save on electricity, and so on. But despite all this, every now and then I think to myself that I would like to be more charitable, and that if I were, this would be a good thing. Nevertheless, I simply go on behaving like I was before. In this situation, it would clearly be wrong to say that, deep down, I am a charitable person, that my true self is charitable, even though my now corrupted self is not. (“I blame society!”) In light of all available evidence, the doctrine of the true self should take this claim to be ludicrous, despite my incredible protestations. To take an even simpler example, just because I might really desire or wish to be a professional basketball player (something I can assure you could never have happened) cannot mean that being my true self would mean being a professional basketball player, or that my true self is trapped in the body of someone who can’t play basketball well.
This shows that if we are to hold on to the doctrine of the true self, merely desiring, valuing, or hoping that we have certain characteristics or that we do certain things, no matter how long, hard, and deep our desiring, valuing, and hoping for them is, cannot determine our true self to involve having these characteristics or undertaking these activities. Rather, the true self must somehow exist independently of our desires, values, and hopes for ourselves. If it did not, then there would be a sense in which we are merely making up our true self and then claiming that in unhappy situations we have to suppress it, rather than it being something which we bring into such situations, and which they go on to suppress. Put another way, the true self, if it is to exist, cannot exist by virtue of our picking and choosing things we like about ourselves or ways we would like ourselves to be. It must exist independently of such attitudes, it must be out there for us to discover (ideally in India, or Southeast Asia), as this is the only way of making good sense of cases where the true self is invoked.
Thus, I return to the essence and teleological assumptions, both of which, as we will see, can be given interpretations whereby there is something about us, independently of our desires, values, and hopes, that can play the role of the true self.
III. The essence assumption, that there is a version (or aspects) of our self that subsists throughout our life and is expressed in happy situations and suppressed in unhappy situations, seems to involve distinguishing between what philosophers call essential and accidental properties, and then assuming that each person has an individual essence from which these properties follow, an essential nature unique to them that may or may not manifest itself, in some or all respects, in any given situation.
An essential property of a thing is generally thought of as a property that something has necessarily. Or in other words, something the thing always has, in all possible situations, and thus cannot not have. For example, triangles have three sides necessarily, in all possible situations, as if something did not have three sides, it could not be a triangle. Similarly, it seems that I (Rowan) am necessarily human, that in all possible situations I might find myself in, I will be human in all of them. Even if there were something that looked and talked like me, but was not human (say, because it was a machine), then it would not be me after all.
Nothing I say here will hinge on this difference of interpretation, but other philosophers think (quite plausibly) of essential properties as those which are part of the nature of the thing in question, part of what it is to be that thing, rather than on the modal status of the property (whether it has the property necessarily or contingently). On this telling, those properties that something has in virtue of its nature are its essential properties. Thus, you would instead say that it is part of the nature of triangles that they have three sides, and that this is therefore an essential property of all triangles, and part of the nature of me (Rowan) that I am human, and therefore that this is an essential property of me. It is then in virtue of the respective natures of these entities that triangles have three sides and that I am human of necessity, so, in all possible situations, rather than it being in virtue of our having the property of necessity that it is essential, as the previous view had it.
An accidental property of a thing is generally thought of as a property that something has contingently. Or in other words, something the thing has at a given time but could lack in other possible situations. Alternatively, they may be thought of as properties that something has, but not in virtue of its nature. For example, triangles may be coloured red, but they need not be. Other triangles could be coloured yellow or blue. Yet, irrespective of what colour a triangle is, as long as it has its essential properties (such as its three sidedness), then it is still a triangle. In this way we can see that the colour of a triangle is an accidental rather than essential property of them. Similarly, there are any number of properties that I may otherwise not have, and it would (intuitively) still be me. For example, my hair is brown, I have ten fingers, I live in Wellington, New Zealand, and Hamlet is my favourite play by Shakespeare. If I dyed my hair, cut one of my fingers off, moved to Auckland, New Zealand, and decided Twelfth Night was my new favourite Shakespeare, I will have changed in ways that seem like genuine possibilities – I can really do these things – but it would (intuitively) still be me. These are accidental rather than essential properties of me, properties I do not have in all situations, or properties it is not part of the nature of me to have.
The teleological assumption, that there is some activity or way of being that is ‘meant’ for us, seems to involve assuming that each person has an individual purpose, an activity and goal that they exist to undertake and pursue, but which they may be unable to in a given situation, either because circumstances simply do not allow for it, or because something has prevented them. Philosophers call the idea that there are such purposes teleology, and the purpose of an entity or kind of entity its telos. Putative examples of this are often nebulous. However, take the human heart. Plausibly, human hearts exist in order for them to pump blood around the human body, with the goal of contributing towards the functioning of the body. It is part of the very nature of what they are that they pump blood around the human body and contribute towards the functioning of the body. To take another example, if you are religious, you may believe that God (or some other deity) created humans for some purpose, such as to live in accordance with specific religious principles, or be stewards of the earth, and this likely involves undertaking specific actions or activities during your time here.
There are two important things to note about this. First, even if something is supposed to have a purpose or telos in this way, this need not necessarily mean that it always achieves or even strives for that purpose at any given time. All sorts of things may contravene something from striving for or achieving its purpose, whether they be internal or external to the thing in question. For example, a human heart may undergo sinus pause due to functioning issues internal to it, or it may undergo cardiac arrest due to coronary artery disease. A human being may contravene the will of God (or some other deity), and thus their purpose, due to weakness of will, or the deliberate making of evil. (As I note soon below, these are just examples, I do not endorse them.) The telos of something is therefore secured merely by the existence of that thing, independently of whether it achieves it.
Second, to say that there is teleology is to say that the purposes of things explain the nature and behaviour of anything with a purpose over and above what our other, ordinary causal explanations explain about the nature and behaviour of that thing. If the purpose of something does nothing to explain the nature or behaviour of that thing, there is no work for purposes to do, and thus no reason to think that there really are purposes beyond the concatenation of forces we already accept as constituting and affecting that thing. IV. Now that we have an idea of the distinction between essential and accidental properties, and therefore of essences, as well as the idea of something’s purpose, and therefore of teleology, how might we understand the doctrine of the true self to be harnessing these ideas in its service?
I will start out simply by declaring that I do not believe in (a non-trivial conception of) essential properties, nor in the existence of purposes. I believe that all phenomena can be accounted for, metaphysically speaking, without either of these extra ingredients, making them explanatorily superfluous (although I understand purposes are useful in scientific biology). And since they are explanatorily superfluous, I do not think that they are a genuine part of reality. For me, then, the doctrine of the true self is simply a non-starter for independent theoretical reasons. Nevertheless, I want here to meet the view on its own terms. Let us suppose that there are essences and there are purposes, as just outlined. The question then becomes: do human persons have an individual essence and purpose specific to them which we can identify with the true self, thereby vindicating the doctrine’s thought that an independent self (a) can be suppressed or not in a given situation, and (b) that there are certain things that self is meant to do?
The answer to this, I believe, is a clear and resounding ‘no.’ There is no plausible story we can tell which could secure essences purposes of the kind the defender of the true self needs. This can easily be seen once it is understood what exactly it is they need.
Recall that the doctrine of the true self imagines there are situations for specific individuals in which one’s true self may be on display, so to speak, and may be suppressed, cases where they have found their calling, and where they are doing something other than what they are meant to do. My reading of this, on the one hand, is that there is a class of essential properties that every individual has independently of how their life goes, of what they turn out to be and do, properties that, no matter how they change, and no matter how they shape and are shaped by their own life and society, will always be there, no matter what. This means that for any given person, you could pick out features of them x, y, and z, that they always must have, come what may. On the other hand, there will also be a purpose or collection of purposes, x, y, and z, things they were ‘born to do’. And it is these properties and purposes they imagine to partially constitute their true self.
There are three things to note about this. First, some of the examples of essential properties and purposes I have so far provided involve generic kinds of things, such as triangles, human hearts, and human beings. However, the doctrine of the true self must involve reference to essential properties and purposes that are specific to an individual human, you or I, not human beings in general. Our true self must therefore consist of our individual essence and individual purpose. We can see this because when the doctrine is invoked, it is always with reference either to a specific person searching for and ‘finding’ who they are, or what their calling is, or with reference to the general imperative to all individuals to ‘be yourself’, ‘find yourself’, ‘be your authentic self’ and so on. It is implied in such cases that each person has their own unique character, and their own unique path laid out for them, if only they can find these things. Indeed, I think it would just be considered obvious to most people who accept this kind of thing that, even if there are substantial similarities between individuals, every individual true self is unique.
Second, while they could come apart conceptually, I think that the doctrine of the true self does or should have it that there is a conceptual connection between essence and purpose, between the putative nature of a given individual and their putative purpose. Specifically, I take that it would make most sense to say that one’s purpose is given by or follows from one’s nature. For example, if it were part of my individual essence that I am a philosopher, then it would make the most sense to say that my purpose, in virtue of my essence, is to do philosophy, to philosophise. If there were no connection between these things, it would be logically possible that something’s purpose is in tension with its essence. For example, suppose I am essentially human, but my purpose is to fly naked and unaided through space. Here, my essence (being a flesh and blood human that breathes oxygen to live) means that if I tried to fulfil my purpose (flying through space devoid of oxygen), I would immediately die. Positing this connection rules such cases out.
Third, the essential properties of a thing are grounded in the nature of what it is to be that thing. So, to the extent that people have individual essences, they must be fixed from the moment you come into existence and till the moment you go out of existence. If there are properties and purposes you take on or lose throughout your life, they cannot therefore be essential to you, because you can exist without them, meaning they are not part of what it is to be you. This is an important point to emphasise, as I think this requirement is essential to making metaphysical sense of the idea of the true self, but it is also the requirement that will, in what is to come, lead it into grave difficulties. Note further that this requirement is not an argument I am making, but an entailment of the theory of essence and thus an entailment of the doctrine of the true self that understands the true self as a person’s individual essence.
Now that we have all of this in place, we can say that the doctrine of the true self states that: every individual person has a unique and fixed individual essence which grounds essential properties x, y, and z and individual purposes a, b, and c. V. Before even going to consider what sorts of specific properties might actually play the role of constituting the individual essence and purpose of a person, it is worth dwelling in more depth on the idea that an individual essence must be fixed for the duration of something’s existence, and the implications of this for the doctrine of the true self.
Suppose, per this understanding of the doctrine of the true self, that every person has an individual essence and purpose which follows from it. Suppose that I undergo multiple transformative experiences, massively overhaul my life, completely change how I am, what I am doing, and who I am around. Suppose that in both my ‘old life’ and my ‘new life’ I am happy, free, fulfilled, and reflectively endorse the configuration of my life. In both cases I am apparently ‘living my best life’, despite these lives being completely different. Suppose that how I am and what I am doing makes it appear to observers that in both cases that my true self is manifest. What would the view under consideration have to say about such a case?
The defender of the true self would have to say one of three things. First, they could say that, despite appearances, in at least one of our lives, old or new, we are not our true selves. Despite the fact that we are happy, free, and fulfilled in both lives, only one (or neither) of these lives are true to who I really am, which is fixed for my entire life. On this view, what someone’s individual essence is must be strictly limited to a specific form of life, as against others. Second, they could say that, when I undergo the transformative experiences from my old life to my new one, a new person comes into existence, with a new individual essence, and the other, previous person goes out of existence. On this latter view, you could preserve the intuition that a true self is present in both cases, but only at the cost of giving up the idea that I persist through the change. Finally, you could say that both lives exhibit different aspects of my true self, where in my old life some of those aspects were present, and in my new life other aspects of it are present.
None of these approaches are attractive for the defender of the true self. If we take the first view, we have to deny that at least one of my lives is true to my true self, despite my flourishing in both. This means that even when we are in happy situations, it is always possible that we are not actually living in accordance with our true self. Worse, given this, it seems like there is no way of knowing whether or not we are living in accordance with our true self, as it means that happiness, freedom, fulfilment, and the reflective endorsement of our own arrangement of life is not sufficient to distinguish a life lived in accordance with our true self with a life that is not in accordance with it.
If we take the second view, we can preserve the idea that there is a true self on display in both lives, but we have to say that, when people undergo drastic changes, they could cease to exist entirely, and a new person takes their place. This view runs against the spirit of the doctrine of the true self, which thinks of the true self as a constant that subsists behind changes throughout one’s life, not something that is being constantly created anew each time we make changes in our life. To see this, just consider what a doctrinaire defender of the true self would want to say in a case where the transition from my old life to my new, different life was a transition from an unhappy to a happy situation, rather than from one happy situation to another. In this case, the defender of the true self would surely want to say that my true self was being suppressed in my old life but is now being expressed in my new one. Yet this telling is undercut if you allow that changes in someone’s life can mean that a new person is created, because there seems to be no reason that we should not say that in this case a new person is created too, rather than that I formerly suppressed and then found my true self.
If we take the third view, we can preserve the idea that there is a true self in both lives, but we also have to say that two completely different sets of properties and activities could nonetheless be part of the same true self. But if we allow that the true self can manifest itself in such vastly different ways, it seems that we end up with a far too permissive account of what can count as being part of our true self to fit our pre-theoretical conception of the idea. After all, alongside my old and new lives, we could potentially imagine many other situations in which I am happy, free, and fulfilled, but the character of my life, including what I am like and what I do, is completely different. But if this is the case, why should we not say that they are expressions of our true self too? Indeed, if such manifestly different situations can be expressions of our true self, what stops those situations where we are unhappy, unfree, and unfulfilled from constituting our true selves too?
It seems to me that once you accept that vastly different situations could equally be expressions of the same true self, then there is no non-arbitrary answer to these questions that could consistently rule out virtually any situation from being an expression of one’s true self, including even unhappy situations. If these situations cannot be ruled out as also being expressive of one’s true self, then the doctrine loses the ability to explain how in some cases our true self is suppressed, but in other cases it is expressed. And if it cannot do this, then the entire impetus for putting the idea forward in the first place is undermined. This problem suggests that our concept of the true self implicitly mandates that our individual essence and purpose be restricted such that only a very narrow range of possibilities for how our life could be structured would be genuinely expressive of our true self, rather than any arrangement whatsoever.
There is another issue for the first and third responses to this scenario that I will address at length in the following two sections. Both responses have to say that aspects of my old (or new) life which are expressive of my true self, but which do not appear in my new (or old) life, must still somehow exist in me, even though, by stipulation, these aspects of my life have changed. They have to say this because the view under consideration identifies someone’s true self with their essence which grounds properties we cannot lack. Thus, if I underwent some change whereby I lost these properties, it would no longer be me. The doctrine must therefore explain how the true self, our original individual essence, somehow keeps existing through even transformative change, despite it apparently going away. But if aspects of my life that are putatively expressive of my true self have gone away, in what sense can they still be there?
Putting aside this last point, the doctrine of the true self can only plausibly accept the first response to this scenario, the response which strictly limits our individual essence to involve only a specific form of life and to rule out all others. This is because the other two options take us too far astray of our pre-theoretical understanding of the true self by either positing the constant production of new persons when significant changes occur or trivialising the notion such that any situation whatsoever might be counted as expressive of one’s true self. Going forward I will therefore assume this version of the doctrine, noting that the difficulties just raised for the view are perhaps equally as fatal as the issues I will go on to raise about the view in subsequent sections. We saw that the cost of accepting this response is twofold: first, it is possible that we could be living a happy, free, and fulfilling life and yet not be living a happy, free, and fulfilling life in accordance with our true self, and second, there is no way of distinguishing between these two possibilities. This is already more than enough to cast severe doubt on the view, but I will not push the point here.
VI. Now that we have an interpretation of the doctrine of the true self in view, we may now finally ask: what sorts of properties and purposes might a friend of the doctrine suppose to be grounded by our individual essence?
We can immediately rule out anything that applies to humans as a whole as this runs afoul of the requirement that one’s true self be unique. This rules out being human, being able to reproduce, and other such biological properties, as well as the purposes sometimes derived from such properties (such as that “humans are meant to survive” or “humans are meant to reproduce”). We will not find the true self here. Depending on your particular views, this would also rule out other, more circumscribed types of properties that could arguably be essential to a person, such as one’s gender, ethnicity, religion, nationality, place of origin, and family. I suspect that most of those interested in a doctrine of the true self would tend to view these properties as somewhat arbitrary (where another kind of person would tend to view them as essentially constitutive of who we are). After all, another person may share all of these properties in common with you, but you would each still have your respective individuality, and this individuality seems to be where your true self lies. You could change some or all of these properties, and your self would remain. Your gender, ethnicity, religion, nationality, place of origin, or family need not stop you from fulfilling your distinctive purpose. Or so it might be said.
However, it is reasonable to ask at this point: once you bracket out all of these aspects of yourself, what exactly is supposed to be left? Two distinctive features of our lives come immediately to mind: vocation and knowledge (especially of a vocation). What if the true self was to be found not in the groups one is a part of, but in undertaking a specific kind of activity, or knowing about a specific domain or domains. Thus, perhaps one’s true self lies in being a mother, father, philosopher, football player, surfer, wood carver, chef, baker, teacher, fashionista, runner, hiker, bird watcher, poet, musician, director, painter, composer, art critic, DJ, entertainer, ‘history nerd’, ‘science nerd’, someone who works a specific type of job, a stamp, coin, or Pokémon card collector, Taylor Swift fan, influencer, or whatever else it may be. On this view, finding your true self is finding the specific activity proper to your nature, and your purpose is to pursue and undertake this activity.
The fatal issue with this view is that no one is essentially any of these things and so being them cannot be fixed in the way required by the doctrine of the true self. For example, take Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of greatest composers in the tradition of European classical music (despite only living until 35). Not only is he one of the greatest ever do it, as a child prodigy, he seemed almost destined to be. When he was five years old, he could already play the keyboard and violin, could compose pieces of music, and was being carted around Europe by his father to play for royalty. By any conceivable metric friends of the doctrine might adopt, Mozart’s true self surely lay in his being a musician and composer. Yet even in the case of Mozart, it would be wrong to say that he was essentially a musician and composer. After all, there was a period of time when he was clearly neither of these things, such as during the first year of his life. But if there was a period of time where he was not these things, and it was still him, then he cannot essentially be a musician and composer. They were properties that only came about due to specific, historically contingent developments in his life, most especially his father being a music teacher, rather than something that he always was. This objection holds with complete generality for any putative property relating to an activity that might be put forward as constitutive of one’s true self, including all of those listed above. There are virtually always points in any given person’s life when they are not these things, most obviously when they are very young children.
There is an obvious response to this for the friend of the true self. It was not the property of being a musician and composer that Mozart essentially had, but the disposition to be a musician and composer that Mozart essentially had. A disposition differs from a standard property because instead of stating that something simply has a property, a disposition states that something would be or do something else under specific circumstances. For example, I am not a musician or a composer and thus do not bear the property of being a musician or composer. However, I might have the disposition to be a musician and composer if it were the case that, if my parents pushed me as hard as they could in performing and composing classical music during my childhood, I would have become a musician and composer. (Or I might not; it is more likely I do not have the requisite talent for this to be the case, certainly not to anything like the level of Mozart!) On this view, the properties constitutive of one’s true self are dispositional properties to be a specific way or undertake a certain activity.
This is not necessarily an ad hoc and unmotivated addition to the theory in response to an objection but is arguably a natural extension of the original formulation. After all, we started out by saying that the doctrine of the true self holds that the true self can be something that is suppressed, dormant, or nascent, something that needs to be found by searching for it and changing the circumstances of your life. And if this is the case, then it is plausible that in such cases, while we may not presently embody our true selves, we could do so under different circumstances, and this disposition to manifest certain properties just is our true self – the always present possibility of being a specific way or doing a specific thing. Thus, while we are not a film critic and surfer now, from the moment we came into existence and until the day we die, we essentially could be, we just need to bring about the right circumstances for bringing this about. This is also how the doctrine of the true self can address the problem raised in the previous section that it must explain how our true self somehow keeps existing through even transformative change. The doctrine can say that the dispositions constitutive of our true self exist even when they are not manifested, and this is what subsists through such changes.
Before going on to rebut this view, it will be worth putting forward another interpretation of the doctrine of the true self that must retreat to a similar line of reasoning. On this other view, the true self does not involve a specific activity proper to your nature, where your purpose is to pursue and undertake this activity. Rather, it instead involves a specific set of ‘core’ personality characteristics proper to your nature, where your purpose is to manifest these characteristics, or be in situations where they can be manifested.
My sense is that something like this is probably what most people have in mind when they think of their own or others’ true selves. They think of a version of their self as essentially embodying certain characteristics as against other, inessential characteristics. They imagine a version of themselves that is brave, compassionate, honest, nurturing, generous, charitable, creative, industrious, curious, open-minded, funny, and so on. This could of course involve negative traits, too, noting it is typically only others we think about when attributing negative traits to someone’s true self. We therefore might think of our own or others’ true self as essentially malicious, cruel, barbaric, dishonest, cowardly, lazy, incurious, unfunny, and so on. In any given case, it is of course unlikely a true self will be thought to have all of these things, but instead a select few deemed essential.
But again, the fatal issue with this view is that no one is essentially any of these things, and so they cannot properly be said to be fixed for any given individual. This can again be seen simply by noting that people as babies and young children often have none of these characteristics and thus do not have them essentially. More generally, we can easily imagine periods of people’s lives where they determinately lack the characteristics their true self is purported to have, even though we would judge that they are the same person. For example, if someone is in mourning, in prison, or in an otherwise oppressive situation that drastically changes them, we do not, except perhaps in very extreme cases, say that the person is no longer who they were. But if it is the same person, then the characteristics in question cannot be essential to them. Indeed, it is precisely in those contexts where the doctrine of the true self is often invoked – those unhappy situations referred to earlier – that someone is taken to lack the characteristics of their true self. Thus, by the doctrine’s own lights these characteristics cannot be essential to us.
Just as the doctrine that the true self consists of our engaging in activities proper to our individual nature had to retreat to the view that the true self consists in having dispositions to engage in activities proper to our individual nature, the same will have to be done for this view too. Instead of the view that the true self consists of core characteristics proper to our individual nature, it needs to say that the true self consists of dispositions to manifest core characteristics proper to our individual nature. So, if it was part of my true self to be an honest and funny film critic and surfer, these dispositional views of the true self would say that, no matter the circumstances, and even when I am not, I always can be honest, funny, a film critic, and a surfer, under the right conditions. That is, when the circumstances of my life stop holding my true self back. It is to these dispositional views we now turn.
VII. There are many problems with these dispositional views. For one thing, you cannot non-arbitrarily identify specific dispositions (to undertake activities or take on characteristics) that could plausibly play the role of uniquely forming our true selves. We seem to have dispositions to be able to do many different things and be many different ways, at virtually any point of our lives. Sure, there are some things we seem to be able to rule out, such as my being a professional basketball player, but otherwise, for most or all of the activities and characteristics listed in the previous section as those which could form someone’s true self, such as being brave, compassionate, a baker, or a stamp collector, it seems that I, at virtually any point in my life, could be many of these things, and thus am essentially disposed to be all of these ways and do all of these things.
But if I have the dispositions to be or do any of these things, what could possibly explain why some of them count as forming my true self but some of them do not? Why should it be part of my true self to be disposed to be an honest and funny film critic and surfer, rather than disposed to be a dishonest and unfunny music critic and skateboarder, when it seems not only like both of these are real possibilities for me, but also that I am essentially disposed to both? To this the doctrine of the true self could either say that all such dispositions are part of our true self or that only some are.
If they say that all such dispositions are part of our true self, then the account runs into the same two issues which were raised earlier. First, this runs counter to our concept of the true self, which mandates that our individual essence and purpose be restricted to that only a very narrow range of possibilities as genuinely expressive of our true self. Second, it would mean that arrangements of our life where are unhappy, unfree, and unfulfilled could equally be expressive of our true self, thereby undermining the ground for putting forward the view in the first place, which is that in such situations we are not our true self. If the doctrine says instead that only some such dispositions are part of our true self, then a reason for privileging one set over the other to count as our true self must be provided. If there is no reason to pick one set of dispositions over the other, then there is no reason to say that there is such a privileged set at all. Insisting upon without reason would be objectionably arbitrary.
It cannot be replied that what counts as my true self in this situation depends on my choosing between such sets of dispositions, because as I noted earlier, this would make what our true self is dependent on our actual choices, and thus something we create, rather than something we find. It amounts merely to saying that whatever we choose (and thus whatever dispositions we go on to manifest from those choices) is our true self. This would also include our choices (when it is a choice) that lead us into unhappy situations, those situations where we are unhappy, unfree, and unfulfilled. But it was the whole point of the doctrine of the true self that in such situations, this is not our true self. So, this cannot be right either.
There is a further issue. Even if you could plausibly non-arbitrarily identify specific dispositions to take on characteristics and undertake activities that constitute our true self, such as that my true self is being disposed to be a honest and funny film critic and surfer (as opposed to an dishonest and unfunny music critic and skateboarder), the mere fact that we have a disposition does not necessarily provide us what we would want out of a true self. The issue is that, once you relegate the true self from the essentially actual to the essentially dispositional, it can only ultimately tell part of the story of who we actually are, in this, the only life we actually have. And if our dispositions do not tell us about who we actually are, rather than merely who we could be if things were different, then I want to say that it does not meaningfully get at something we should want to call a self at all.
Dispositions to be some way or do some things only come to be under specific circumstances. For example, suppose that as a newborn I am disposed to be a good public speaker, but have a freak, traumatic brain injury before I even begin to speak, and which means I am unable. Suppose further that being a public speaker was part of my true self. Does it still make sense to say that it is part of my true self to be (disposed to be) a good public speaker? To take another example, suppose that Mozart lost his hands in a freak accident as a young child which meant that he could no longer play instruments, and this meant he did not go on to be the great composer he was. Is his true self (in this other world) still a musician and composer? More generally, the point is that if you do not come into circumstances which enable the manifestation of the dispositions you have, then they remain mere dispositions. But there is nothing to guarantee that any particular set of dispositions supposed to constitute our true self will actually manifest themselves in one’s actual life. You could be born, live, and die, and you could even do so living a free, happy, and fulfilling life, without ever for a second achieving yourself, or your purpose.
To maintain nonetheless that there is a true self constituted by our dispositions to be specific ways and do certain things, even though we may not in any way or at any time manifest these in our actual lives, is a consistent position. But it is also an absurd one. Why, after all, should I identify my self with anything that I, in this life, am not, and will never be? To maintain that, despite their never appearing, these properties are constitutive of something deep and important about me rings hollow, especially if I live a life filled with other deep and important things that are allegedly not part of my true self. Contrary to the doctrine of the true self (developed in this way), which locates the self exclusively in our possibilities, this shows that we should identify the self with (if anything) something actually about us, and thus something essentially tied up with the situations we actually find ourselves in, and which play an irreducible part in manifesting our dispositions to be any way or do any thing at all.
Perhaps it could be replied to these two objections that the dispositions which make up our true self can be chosen non-arbitrarily, and this can be done in a way that allays the latter concerns about the possibility that no aspect of our true self may ever actually manifest itself throughout our entire lives. You could do this by (bear with me) identifying the true self with the dispositions which show up the most in true counterfactuals involving each person and other states of affairs across the total possibility space allowed by the laws governing our world. (So as not to provide a full theory of possibility, worlds, laws, counterfactuals, and perhaps other issues, I leave this part deliberately very vague.) On this view, you could say that, in the examples cited earlier, even though I lost my voice and Mozart lost his hands, in most other possible, similar situations, these events would not happen, and I would have went on to be good at public speaking, and Mozart would have went on to be the greater musician and composer he was. Thus, your true self consists of those dispositions most likely to be manifested across all possible situations allowed by the laws of our world, those you would expect, all else being equal, to be a part of your life, given who you are.
I can perhaps make this idea more intuitive (though perhaps no less confused), through a thought experiment. Suppose we have a computer that can run simulations of our universe, where you can take the zygote from which a person originates, place it in any time and place whatsoever, and then simulate how the person’s life and the world would have unfolded if they were born there instead of where they were born. Suppose you can even place the zygote at the same time and place it was born and run simulations of our world from there too. (If the world is deterministic, things will be the same, but if it is not deterministic, then things will be different each time, likely within an extremely vast range of possible differences due to branching possibilities.) Suppose further that the computer records with perfect accuracy the ways a person happens to be and the things they happen to do in each situation. Finally, suppose the computer runs one million of these simulations for every birth in human history, but where the existing zygote was replaced with yours, going back as far as this would work biologically. On the view under consideration, you could then identify our true self with, say, the ways we happen to be and the things we happen to do most often, and for the longest average time, in these simulations.
As with every other proposal we have seen, there are many issues with this view of what the true self is. For one thing, you cannot non-arbitrarily draw the line between the dispositions that show up enough to count as our true self, and those that do not. Even if you could, what we would most often be doing in these simulations is hunting, gathering, and farming, which would end up constituting almost everyone’s essence and purpose, running entirely contrary to the sorts of properties people tend actually to pick out as candidates for our true self. Yet any other timeframe within which to run simulations, except perhaps only of our own birth, would be utterly arbitrary. If we ran millions of simulations of our own birth and determinism is true, then things could only go one way, and our true self would always be who we already are in every given situation, even if our entire life is an unhappy one. This is straightforwardly contrary to the doctrine. With the denial of determinism, and by taking only the simulations of our own birth as relevant to determining our true self, we could perhaps make out how a view such as this could be rendered plausible. But putting aside the many difficulties with trying to work this view out with any kind of plausibility, and with any approximation to the sorts of properties people tend actually to pick out as constituting their true self, there is a basic conceptual issue baked into the proposal that it cannot explain away, and which we should not accept.
In fact, I have already dealt extensively with a view of the same conceptual structure as this one in a previous post (see section II of Nature, Nurture, & the Constitution of Human Life) where instead of identifying the self with specific dispositions comprising the true self, I was considering a view in which we were supposed to be able to identify the self with specific biological dispositions. As my response to this proposal applies equally to the doctrine of the true self thus conceived, I quote liberally from it:
But this point just makes the same error I previously objected to. It assumes that, within our lives, we can bracket out certain environmental elements of it as inessential, or contingent, leaving only an essential core of what we are. But in reality, this is just another one-sided abstraction, albeit one much less misleading. The claim now is that certain tendencies of behaviour essentially constitute what we are, and that these tendencies constantly emerge in our lives, due to us having dispositions to act in similar ways in similar situations, all else being equal, which is to say, assuming that abnormal environments [such as Mozart losing his hands] do not temporarily ‘interfere’ with their emergence.
…The issue with the view that an individual human is essentially certain core tendencies of their biology that manifest themselves in different situations, other things being equal, is that: there is no point in our life when all other things are equal, in the relevant sense. Your actual life, at each moment, as it is actually lived, is a series of completely novel – that is, unique – environments. And as novel environments, they will only determine you to be or act in line with these postulated tendencies to the extent that they share similarities with other environments in the total set of dispositions (including all other possible environments) making up your biology. But to the extent that they do not share similarities, they will determine you to have different traits, characteristics, abilities, reactions, and to make different choices. The implication here is that these supposed tendencies are, with respect to our actual lives, at best generalisations of our behaviour across possibility space, not explanations of it. But given this, it cannot be right to identify them with our lives, even on the assumption of biological determinism, as they will necessarily fail to capture the unique differences that are due the environments you actually come to encounter. In other words, these tendencies are only idealisations of certain patterns of behaviour we might engage in, not something that, for any given concrete individual, actually happens in the precise way specified by these idealisations. But if this is the case at every moment of our lives, in every new situation, then there is no point at which all else is equal, and there is no point at which any arbitrarily selected biologically determined tendencies wholly determine what we are. At best, conceiving of ourselves as having such tendencies might function for us (probably quite effectively, on the assumption of biological determinism) as a heuristic device for deciding on future action – for deciding on what we may or not be good at, or what we may or may not be able to tolerate. But it still cannot tell us who and what we are.
In short, the issue is that, specifying who we could be across possibility space (by reference to our total set of dispositions) does not tell us who we actually are, and it is only who we actually are or presently could be in our actual world that is a plausible candidate for selfhood. After all, our self does not exist projected across all other possible worlds containing all other possible life outcomes, but in this particular world, in our particular circumstances, with our particular habits and abilities, with our particular people, in our particular culture, speaking our particular languages, with our particular concepts; in short, we exist within our own unique history, and nowhere else. Our self does not exist over an infinite set of simulations of our zygote in all possible times and places, but in this, our only and unsimulated world. To the extent that we have dispositions to be certain ways or do certain things when we are born, live, and die, it is only those that are manifested in our actual life that should be identified with us, not all the ways we might never actually be, or would have been if things were different. Whatever we are, we are irreducibly bound up with our particular history and the dispositions, characteristics, and activities that this history has forced, suggested, helped, discouraged, or endeared us to. In this sense we are an irreducibly historically constituted; our self, if it is to be anything, must be a function of our actual history, not an imagined one inhabited by an imagined self imagined to somehow be truer. VIII. It is difficult to convincingly knock down a compelling story of ourselves without offering a compelling story to replace it. I close with some thoughts about how we can reconceive of these issues in light of the above, and especially in light of the absence of a true self.
There is a reason I opened this essay with a discussion of what I have been calling “unhappy situations”, situations where we are unfree, unhappy, and unfulfilled, and where we imagine ourselves in other “happy” situations in which we are free, happy, and fulfilled. The reason is not just that I believe this is a common place for the doctrine of the true self to be invoked, as I already noted, but also because it is a clear case where the doctrine can easily be replaced with something far more metaphysically tractable. I think what people are after when they invoke the doctrine of the true self in these situations is (a) an explanation for why the situation is bad for them and (b) something to justify their wish, desire, or choice to escape it. Something about the idea that such situations are bad because they are, in some way or other, incongruent with something ‘deep inside us’ is for some reason appealing to us as both an explanation and justification for our wish, desire, or choice to escape it. And thus, we posit the true self, lying dormant inside of us, wanting to spread its wings and escape.
But notice that putting forward the doctrine of the true self is one step superfluous. For if you want an explanation for why these situations are bad, why not start with the fact that in them you are unfree, unhappy, and unfulfilled? And if you want justification to leave it, why not start with the fact that in it you are unfree, unhappy, and unfulfilled, and that you might realistically, with some deliberation and choice, change your life such that you are more free, happy, and fulfilled? In other words, it is enough to explain why your situation is unhappy merely by pointing to the aspects of it that are actually bad for you, as you actually are, and it is enough to justify a change in that situation merely by evaluating whether it is likely, with some changes to your actual life, that you might be more free, happy and fulfilled. It is simply unnecessary to invoke, nay invent, a further thing – the true self – that your existing situation must somehow run afoul of in order for it to be an appropriate subject of critique, when features of your existing situation, the configuration of your life as it actually exists, itself already warrants such critique. Out of this answer, plus the preceding conclusions, we may develop a more austere conception of the self (or indeed a conception of life without a self at all). Instead of imagining that there is a fixed, essential true self within us that may or may not agree with the situations we find ourselves in, we instead accept that: who and what we currently are is who and what we are in the situation we are actually in; who and what we were before this point was who and what we were in the previous situations we were in; who and what we will be is simply who and what we will be in the future situations we find ourselves in. On this view, we are to imagine ourselves at each point of our lives as essentially historically conditioned, as finding ourselves in a series of situations which make us the person who we currently are. Call the present member of this series our configuration of life. This is intended in the broadest sense as including all the ways we are, the things we do, the people we stand in relation to, our memories of the past, and our hopes, desires, and wishes for the future; in short, any aspect whatsoever of our present life.
Any given configuration of life is of a greater or lesser degree of value. To the extent that, among other things, we are unhappy, unfree, unfulfilled, and do not appreciate, identify with, or endorse aspects of our situation – whether that be characteristics we have taken on or activities we take part in – our configuration of life is of lesser value. To the extent that, among other things, we are happy, free, unfulfilled, and appreciate, identify with, and endorse aspects of our situation – including the characteristics we have taken on and the activities we take part in – our configuration of life is of greater value. Of course, what sorts of things will be of value to specific people in specific situations will itself depend on their particular configuration of life, including how they are and tend to be as people. Something that is valuable within one person’s configuration of life will not be valuable in another’s. Call the aspects of our configuration of life which contribute or take away from its value its patterns of value, positive when they contribute and negative when they take away.
While the past configurations of our lives are fixed, we have greater or lesser power in our present situation to affect change in our present configuration of life, as well as its future trajectory. Depending on the specifics of your situation, there may be aspects of it, including your own habits, preferences, and dispositions, as well as your living or employment arrangements, if times are tough, that you are unable to change. On the other hand, and again depending on the specifics of your situation, virtually all of these things may be subject to change, whether due to foreseen or unforeseen changes to your environment, your own choices to change it, or your own choices to change yourself. Call the total set of real possibilities for our present configuration of life to change our potential trajectories. This does not include changes we merely imagine to be possible, or which are possible only in situations other than our present configuration of life.
Each of the potential trajectories for our configuration of life will have different patterns of value, and for different periods of time, where the same or similar things figuring in those patterns may be of value to a different degree and in different proportion across different trajectories. Perhaps one trajectory is likely to be extremely valuable in the short-term but just as likely to go bad quickly after. Perhaps another configuration is likely to be mildly valuable over a long period of time, with little risk of it ever getting bad. Perhaps another is likely to be hard for a time but will pay off with greater value in the future. Perhaps in one trajectory having a family and being a mother or father is massively valuable, but in another where you pursue a life wholly organised around writing novels, having a family is of much less value. Perhaps there are potential trajectories rife with positive patterns of value where you are a great surfer, and separate ones where you are a great film critic, but perhaps there are none with such positive patterns of value where you are both. Perhaps pursuing some trajectories allow us to steer our configuration of life to something like what it was before pursuing, but other trajectories do not.
What we can know about our potential trajectories and their attendant patterns of value is unfortunately quite limited. All that we can do is make our best guess about how likely pursuing any such trajectory is to bring about the particular patterns of value we most want, or which are most positive, and about how long we can then expect them to be a part of our life. We can only do this based on a careful examination of what we are, what we have previously tended to be, and how we might expect to change in pursuit of a given trajectory.
We saw that those who invoked the doctrine of the true self want an explanation of the badness of unhappy situations, and justification for the wish, desire, or choice to escape these situations. This alternative picture of things can easily provide both: the badness of our unhappy situations lies in the negative patterns of value in our configuration of life, and we are justified in the wish, desire, or choice to escape such situations because there are potential trajectories of our life in which there are more positive patterns of value, or in other words, because there is a real possibility that our life could be more valuable. (This of course assumes that there is always a better possibility, but I think this is virtually always the case, especially where things are bad for someone.) There is no reference, on this account, to a further thing, a true self, or essences, or purposes, or callings, or meaning, or self-actualisation in order to be able to intelligibly tell this story. There is just an irreducibly historically conditioned situation, our configuration of life, and our steering it, to the extent we can, between different potential trajectories, towards more value, positive patterns of value, and away from less, negative patterns of value. I cannot see that anything further is needed to tell the story of our self.
If there is nothing further to our self than our configuration of life, then there is no longer any point in worrying whether how we are and what we are doing is really being true to who we are, as how we are and what we are doing just is who we are. Nor is there any point in worrying where our patterns of value came from. Whether some pattern of value is positive or negative in our configuration of life need not depend on the origin or source of that pattern. So, just because some pattern within our life comes about, and would otherwise not have come about, due to our friends, family, job, laws, specific institutions, or our broader socio-cultural milieu (i.e. from “society”) does not necessarily mean that it will be of positive or negative value. And this means pointing out that the origin or source of some aspect of our lives is ultimately traceable to something other than our self and our choices does not automatically undermine or determine its value. On this view, the origin or source of something is irrelevant, the only question is whether that thing is actually valuable. All we therefore need to worry about instead is whether we are content with our configuration of life and its particular patterns of value, and if not, whether, how, to what extent, for how long, and with what likelihood things could be better, or worse, if you take different courses of action. I do not mean to imply that such worries are easy or unimportant, relative to those attendant to the doctrine of the true self. Such worries are, in fact, extremely difficult to navigate, and of the utmost importance for our lives. However, when they are formulated in this way, and not distorted by a phantom version of our self haunting us and making us question whether we are living up to it, we get a much clearer view of the nature of our situation, and its stakes.
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