To delve into the nature of who we are is among the most perplexing philosophical quests – an instance of simultaneously being the knower and the known, the subject and the object of knowledge. And yet, despite its paradoxical nature, the question feels most natural to us, not because it has been posed since the dawn of human inquiry, but because it is fundamental to our existence.
Who Am I Not?
I cannot ask ‘Who am I?’ without admitting I don’t know myself, or, to put it more accurately, admitting that who I think I am does not quite capture the experience I have of being myself. There is a gap between self-concept and self-experience, without which there would be no need to pose the question. While a plethora of psychologists have attempted to shove human experience into fixed conceptual categories, still the wilderness of our inner life transcends the borders of its various representations.
To ponder ‘Who am I’ demands our willingness to accept the obscure mystery, complex multidimensionality, and indefinite depth of our experience of subjectivity, beyond the safety of the definitive self-concepts we take for granted.
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Sign up to our Free Weekly NewsletterWhat is peculiar about how we form a self-concept is that it is done through negation. I can only create an idea about who I am by negating who I don’t believe myself to be. This can be as broad as ‘I am not a tree’ to as relative as ‘I am not evil’ or ‘I am not tall’. The negation principle is not only the mechanism of formulating a definition of self but also the source of subject-object duality, for without defining the borders of ourselves against what we perceive as other, the duality that characterizes our ordinary experience ceases to exist. Like a sculptor carving features out of primary material such as marble or wood, the shape of the sculpture is formed by what the artist removes or subtracts from it.
Likewise, we carve out of the ever-fluctuating stream of our experience of self a conceptual self-image by removing from our pool of self-identification that which we don’t want to include.
The Sculpture in The Theatre of Self
The idea that we are neither who we think we are nor who we present ourselves to be is not new. Prominent philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre all touched upon the inauthenticity of masking oneself in different ways according to their respective theoretical frameworks. Among the pioneering thinkers who have addressed this matter is Carl Jung, a psychologist who has dedicated all his works to grasping the nature of selfhood. If we are to understand Jungian terms using the aforementioned analogy, we could say that the sculpture is the persona, the sculptor is our ego-consciousness, and the primary material is the self.
The persona is a mask with which we identify and interact with others, formed according to the aspects of ourselves we deny and exclude from our ego-consciousness. The mask is not a real thing, but rather a false or illusory self. This is not because the characteristics contained within the persona are not who we are, but because they are affirmed at the expense of renouncing other aspects of ourselves. According to Jung, we project all aspects of the self that we don’t integrate into consciousness. Whatever qualities we think we don’t have, we see in others. Projections represent the meeting point between our internal and external worlds.
To wear the mask of the persona is to experience a theatre of self, where we meet all the disowned parts of ourselves under the disguise of otherness. As Jung writes, “Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face” (Jung, 1951).
Playing Hide and Seek
In The Book: Against the Taboo of Knowing Who You Are, Alan Watts recounts narrating a myth to his children:
“God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. […] The secret which my story slips over to the child is that the Ultimate Ground of Being is you. Not, of course, the everyday you which the Ground is assuming, or “pretending” to be, but that inmost Self which escapes inspection because it’s always the inspector.”
Watts was famous for introducing Vedanta philosophy, based on the Upanishads, to the Western world. While his views may seem quite a stretch from Jung’s notions of persona and projections, we can easily see the parallelism between his myth and the way that a sense of ‘otherness’ or duality is created in the process of forming a definition of self. While the persona isn’t real, our identification with it creates a false sense of self, which is why Watts argued that “our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing – with our own tacit consent”.
According to him, what we really are lies behind the mask of our apparently isolated, independent, and separate ego. This is the same as Jung’s notion of the self, to which our personal ego is connected as a part to the whole.
Reclaiming Yourself
The journey of individuation, the goal of Jungian psychological development, involves consciously integrating the parts of ourselves we have renounced. It is a journey of return to the original order of the primary material before it was sculpted, to follow our analogy. As we reclaim more and more aspects of ourselves, we enter ever more inclusive experiences of our subjectivity, where the line between self and others blurs and eventually vanishes.
Viewing our self as the ontological ground of everything is certainly an odd idea, more so because the aforementioned authors don’t intend to outline a metaphysical theory but communicate an experience. The Sufis call the first step towards that experience “the flipping of the heart”, which is the act of turning our consciousness inwardly into the depths of our subjectivity, where the open secret of who we are longs to be realized. This secret, which Watts calls ‘the greatest taboo’, lies at the essence of all mystical philosophies, such as in the Sufi’s Unity of Being theory, the Kabbalist’s Sefirot, Meister Eckhart’s Christian mysticism, and the monist philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism.
