"Inside" and "outside" are not appropriate metaphors for inclusion and exclusion when we are speaking of the self.
The self of the sign-user can never be grasped because once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified (thing beheld) to which a signifier (word) can be conjoined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally.
Semeotically speaking, the exile from Eden is the banishment of the self-conscious self from its own world of signs.
The self is literally inconceivable. Unlike a tree or a star or you, it cannot be conceived under the auspices of a symbol--and is referentially mobil. To be self conscious is to be aware of one's own unformulability in its world of signs. Whereas an organism exists as an open system responding to those segments of its environment to which it is genetically programmed or to which it has learned to respond, a self must be placed in a world. It cannot not be placed.
Whether the self exists or not or in what manner it exists may be beside the point, because for two centuries men have acted as though it did exist and each has fondled it in his own way. This is a modern phenomenon, and like other things modern, it has run a rapid course. Under the sails of philosophy, religion, politics, and the arts the self was invented shortly after the middle of the eighteenth century.
Many streams have come together to encourage a concept of the unique and individualistic self. For one direction they join with tremendous roiling in the revolutions of the last quarter of the eighteenth century. From that time to this, all revolutions have been economic and political in nature rather than religious, and the revolutionaries have been social levelers who wish to change the state of men from subject to citizen.
Man's whole environment and self are woven out of concepts. Concepts are our ultimate reality; here we register many of our experiences; here our ego was born and grows.
When the ego, as a category of the human spirit, was not much developed, intentionality was not sufficiently organized to control attentionality. Indeed, man's attentionality is especially vulnerable to words since they constitute his species-specific environment.
The self may be little more than "a metaphor" which the individual constructs in the course of his biography to use as a comparison with which continuously to scan his own mental content.
Ideas are self-actualizing archetypes that mold human perceptions and even human individuality in the case of the idea of "the person." They are always present as something added to and organizing empirical data.
The ego cannot really be said to defend the self as a whole: what it defends is its own integrity and equilibrium. That may have the effect of preserving the self, but the ego's struggles can be detrimental to the self as a whole.
The self is "inside the skin," but it is not biological. The self is the social actor. It is symbolic-mental and it exists in the present and biographical past. It is shaped by history but does not exist before its own formation; it is a social construct epigenetically grafted onto a biological organism but it is not that organism.
The Individual (with a capital letter) is a complex of institutions, including law (property, contracts), political citizenship, and economic relations of production.
Annual confession was made compulsory for all Christians in 1215, the same year as the Magna Carta. It provided Western civilization's main demonstration of its ideas of the person--as something formed, knowable, responsible, and rational.
The modern self is encased in a thick weave of legal identity, political citizenship and rights--and if you trespass on them, it can sue you at law.
As the locus of certainty and truth, subjectivity is the first principle from which everything arises and to which all must be reduced.
All experience is the result of the brain dancing to patterns of nerve firings. Dozens of these electrochemical storms scud across the cortex every second to create our brightly lighted plane full of conscious impressions of life. In humans, one of those storms is a net of ideas labeled "me" or "I," which is no ordinary net since it contains the grand idea that it is the natural target for all the other fleeting nets in the conscious plane. It includes among its many stored memories the rather mistaken belief that it is the observer doing all the watching inside our heads. However, it is the brain that maps out and "consciously" displays each of the nets--including the self-awareness one. What the self-awareness net actually does is sort the habits of thought that can be used to control the replay of experiences inside the brain. It may be extraordinary in having this control but it is a very ordinary net in the way it goes about the job. Everything going on in the brain is in fact the result of the well-organized firing of nerve cells, and self-awareness is not a special type of firing but simply a new sort of firing pattern.
Our ability consciously to put on the correct social mask to go with the social occasion is an important reason for self-awareness. With the increasing complexity and specialization of modern culture, this need has probably led to a sharper sense of self than ever before. We are so aware of having to keep up a mask in public that our own inner world of private thoughts is thrown into sharp relief. Just as a tight pair of shoes can make us uncomfortably aware of our feet, the way that society forces us to wear a mask seems to have inadvertently made us more aware of the inner self we are masking.
Creating an inner driver has nevertheless made an enormous difference to the humble hominid brain. It opened the door to cultural evolution so that we could steadily evolve a better mind over the past forty thousand years. By learning to turn our attention inward and focus our awareness on our own minds, we have come up with all sorts of new tricks, ranging from personal memory to emotions. Nor is this necessarily the end of the story. With human culture in the twentieth century developing at an accelerating rate, major changes to the human mind are possible. Indeed, once we have realized how plastic the human mind is, we can think about taking its shaping out of the hands of cultural evolution. Rather than relying on the blind forces of cultural evolution, we could consciously decide where we want to go with our minds and how we are going to get there.
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