Losing and Finding the Self

“Those who grasp and clutch at self will lose it. Those who let go of self and follow me will find it.” Jesus

A key in spirituality is to come to some kind of understanding of who we are. Above the doorway to Plato’s academy was the inscription, “Know Yourself.” In that tradition, to know yourself was the quest of a lifetime. Recently, I had a student confidently tell the rest of the class that she really knew herself. Quite a feat at nineteen!

I am fascinated by what we call the self. In contemporary society we have a focus on the self like no other society before us. Yet, it is by no means clear what the self is or even if the self is. From Plato onward there has been a dominant tradition in the west that has held that there is a continuing entity we call the self. In its Christian version this idea became the idea of the immortal soul—a distinct individual consciousness with a past, present and future. The idea gels with our experience and memories. I have memories of being a little boy playing in the park behind our house in Moston, Manchester in the 1960s. It is the same “me” who married Jane in the mid-1970s. The same “me” became a minister in the early 1980s. The same “me” is now a professor of philosophy living in a different country. Much has changed: relationships, jobs, age, ideas, the body itself. Yet, there is a sense of undeniable continuity. It is this consciousness that lies behind the idea that the self must continue after death, and that, in some traditions the self continued before birth.

In the east and in a minority western tradition the existence of the self as a unitary, continuing entity has not been held. The Buddha suggested that what we call the self is illusory and is merely a bundle of: form, sensation, perception, predispositions, and consciousness. Nothing is fixed. Everything changes. Perception and consciousness combine for a while and then change. In the west, there is something of this in the mystical tradition that sees the goal of spirituality is to lose the self in God, the universal consciousness, as a drop of water would be swallowed in the ocean. David Hume—who I do not think had come across the Buddhist tradition and had no truck with the mystics—said something remarkably similar in the eighteenth century from a purely rationalist point of view. This tradition, too, gels with elements of our experience.

How to choose between these ideas? Perhaps, we don’t need to. Both views hold truth and speak truth to us at different time, in different contexts.

In our contemporary culture we have a view of the self that would be owned by neither historical tradition. It is found in the phrases self-interest and self-love. To over-simplify, self-interest is the foundation of our economic system where each pursues her own interest and an “invisible hand” makes it all work out for the good. Enlightened capitalism (that is, crude self-interest balanced by moral sentiment) has given way to unbridled consumerism. We have become self-regarding at the expense of being other-regarding. Self-love (again to oversimplify) is the mantra of popular psychology, with the often repeated idea that, “You have to love yourself before you can love others.” This is said so often that it is rarely challenged or analyzed as to what it might mean. Self-interest and self-love have opened wide the door to mere selfishness.

In the teaching of Jesus there is this: “Those who grasp and clutch at self will lose it. Those who let go of self and follow me will find it.” This comes form the Q tradition in Mathew and Luke. It is also there in a slightly different form in the Johannine tradition. It seems so counterintuitive to the popularized focus on the self. Lose the self and you will find the self. There is a very similar notion in eastern philosophy and non-attachment to self. Attachment to the self is the way of suffering. I think it is also clear that psychologically a preoccupation with the self is the road to neuroses.

In my work on the philosophy of love and morality I have been developing the idea of love as “movement from the self to the other.” (I have derived this in part from the work of Augustine of Hippo and Dame Iris Murdoch.) Love takes us from a preoccupation with the self to concern for the needs and well being of the other who we love. Love is a ceasing to grasp and clutch at the self and its own needs and interests in favor of those we love. It is a losing of the self. Yet, it is in the losing of the self that the self is found, not in splendid Cartesian isolation but in loving relationship. Know yourself? You begin to know yourself in the love of the Other.

+Ab. Andy