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One of the most important things I ever learned came sometime around my first semester of university when I took a remedial Introduction to Philosophy course. It wasn't actually something I directly read in the class, but rather some video series I happened to be watching which basically talked about the most famous thinkers in western philosophy and gave some short Cliff's Notes of each of their thought. The thinker who completely changed my way of thought was David Hume. It was a discussion of "bundle theory" which in my view completely destroyed Descartes' cogito ergo sum argument. I will go ahead and rephrase exactly what the argument is, at least in so far as I understood it then and understand it now. The truth is I still haven't read any primary texts from Hume. Someday!
René Descartes' most famous work of philosophy is an experiment in absolute skepticism, where he doubts as much as he possibly can about the world he exists in and everything "common sense" about it in order to establish the bare fundamentals that are established by pure reason alone. He reduces his single point of certainty to "cogito, ergo sum," or "I think, therefore I am." That is to say, while Descartes could doubt all of his senses, all information gleaned from all external sources like laws of nature, etc., he could not doubt that he himself existed, because there must be something existent to do the doubting in the first place. David Hume was not the first thinker to critique the argument. The tricky part about the argument comes with this mysterious "I." WHAT is it that is thinking in this case? All Descartes' argument really establishes is that "thinking is occurring," not that there is an "I" doing it.
Ultimately, Descartes' argument is flawed due to his attachment to the idea of the self as an unchanging kernel at the center of the human being or "ghost in the machine" as Gilbert Ryle later named it. We tend to unreflexively think of the "self" as some individual core "ego" deep inside of us that we can name as an object. We think of it as some "soul" that remains consistent beneath our physical body which might change. David Hume's "bundle theory" attacks this argument in a much more broad, sweeping, and radical fashion. Hume argued against not only the existence of a "self" as a kind of soul or ego in the human being, but against the "selfhood" of all phenomena, period.
So what does "bundle theory" propose? Well, when we think of any individual THING in the world, we apprehend it in terms of properties and characteristics. What is an "apple?" Well, we can only really conceive of an apple in terms of its characteristics: being round, being red, being edible, etc. You might be able to mess around with a few of these (being green instead of red), but what we call an "apple" is generally a "bundle" of a more-or-less consistent set of properties. And that is important. This means that there isn't some "core" particular APPLENESS at the bottom of the apple. We don't have an "apple-base" that we attach roundness, redness, edible-ness, etc. to. The apple IS nothing more than a bunch of these properties occurring together in a bundle. After all, if we took away all of those properties, we would only be left with a blank "bare particular." And that wouldn't look very much like an apple at all!
This was already a mindblowing argument for me, but what affected me even more was the upshot of this conception: "I" and "you" are also nothing more than mere bundles like this. There is no "I-thing" at our center that stays as our "real self" lurking beneath everything else. This means that even this central truth that Descartes thought had to come before anything else is ultimately unsubstantiated.
The truth is that while Hume was a revolutionary in the western philosophical tradition, he discovered these truths over 1500 years after someone else first taught them in the east: Gautama Buddha. The doctrine of "non-self" or anattā is central to Buddhist thought. The idea applies as broadly as it does for Hume as well. All things, not just human beings, are "selfless" or "empty." and many of the classical Buddhist philosophical texts use arguments that are eerily similar to those of Hume so many years later. And yet, we have no evidence that Hume knew of these Buddhist sources. That is because, ultimately, they are self-evident and empirically sound to anyone who reflects on their experience with an honest and open mind.
Humans have no inherent self. Empirically, we do not discover anything in our "conscious experience" that is eternal or unchanging. When we pause and observe the "self" in action, it merely reveals itself as a fluttering (a "bundle" perhaps?) of various thoughts and feelings that are always, ultimately, transient. All other phenomena are the same: trees grow old and rot into dirt, rivers flow and twist, rocks are chipped away at and crumble. In the infinite expanse of time, nothing stays the same or eternal. The only candidates that seem to exist for something that could never change are things like elementary particles and strings that are so removed from anything like the world we live in that it certainly doesn't do much to provide us solidity or reliability of the kind of phenomena we yearn to make eternal.
Because, yes, we all yearn for it. We all rebel against the selflessness and transcience of phenomena and try to erect something out of all this nothingness. The Buddha would say this yearning is a form of attachment and something to try to avoid. Analytic thinkers like Thomas Metzinger would say we developed the mistaken idea of an "ego" as an evolutionary advantage to make us more attentive to the physical wellbeing of "our" bodies. What do I think? I don't view the creation and sustaining of "selfhood" as an inherently negative thing like the Buddha does. I say that it only leads to suffering if we do it without knowing exactly what we are doing.
I say that the tension between sustaining meaning and sacrificing it and handing it over to the void is something that all humans must learn to recognize. This tension is THE life force of humanity in all eras of time. All humans must take it as a duty to in some way "appropriate" what is before them and turn it into something meaningful that is sustained in their thoughts and deeds. I believe that this is the real meaning of the incredibly fine and difficult concept known as "Ereignis" in the later texts of Martin Heidegger. However, it will not help us if we do not "appropriate" ourselves from the nothing in the correct way. We must appropriate our SELVES and with it our BEING, not an "identity."
But how is an "identity" different from being "who you really are?" Is this not just quibbling over words? I would like to express the exact difference. It might seem to be subtle at first, but it is actually something extremely significant.
Understanding the above Buddhist teachings was something that helped me a lot. A lot of people might have found the idea of "non-self" sort of unsettling: "I don't really exist? There's no real 'I' in my deepest heart of hearts?" Of course, the teaching doesn't truly deny that "we" exist, but denies that we exist in the way that we are inclined to think we do: as a kind of precious inner being guarded deep inside of us that is isolated from everything else in the world. And this teaching was quite refreshing for me.
In my younger years I had a very artistic sensibility and I was very jealous of creative figures who I saw as remarkably original, visionary figures that truly couldn't be compared with anyone else. I saw the ideal artist as a "strange" figure, influenced by no one and possessing some kind of special inner world that no one else could fully plumb. I felt like I simply lacked this when I tried to "turn inward" and it made me feel quite coarse and boorish. This is, of course, a romanticized distortion of any artist. No artist or thinker is fully original, because no human exists cut off from and unrelated to other human beings. And, of course, even if they were, most of them don't have that when they're a young teenager lacking most life experiences like I was.
Regardless, I found it very humbling in the best possible way to come to the conclusion that no one really has some secret special soul inside them that acts as a muse and gives them all their insights. It was much more compelling and relaxing to think that we were empty at our core and that our "selves" were bundles of experience and conception that we accumulated ourselves, but were at the end always transitory and ephemeral. It was a way of equalizing us all and putting us on a similar footing. No one owns any secret, eternal self that gives them special insights. Their selves all come from historical conditions, which can be open to all.
But most of us do not have the opportunity to join a Buddhist temple and constantly be reminded of "our" inherent emptiness and lack of selfhood. When we feel that void, we have a constant desire to fill it. The thinker who best illustrated this from a non-Buddhist context is Martin Heidegger. In my understanding, Heidegger actually describes something somewhat similar to the Buddhist conception (as much as he might deny it): self is an appropriating event of sorts. But it is not some "subject" that does the appropriating. The self IS this appropriation. The appropriating happens when being itself comes to presence and unfolds in its proper historical sway. We receive it and BECOME this unfolding by receiving it and thus making ourselves real as a part of this being. This is all very strange stuff which is very hard to convey and sounds like gibberish until you really put yourself in the right state of mind. Some will think that this means he is a pure mystic. Whether a mystic or not, I found his work incredibly helpful in gaining an understanding of what does NOT allow us to get a "real" sense of "who" we are and thus rejecting a lot of useless bullshit in my life.
What is important about it for this essay is that most of what we see as our "identity" is a very small and incomplete picture of who we really are. I see this everywhere today. More and more people are isolated and have no real sense of community. More places are melting pots without any direction or purpose. Nothing brings people together. So young people are desperate to look unique in any way: they plaster themselves with repulsive tattoos and piercings, they wear the most outlandish and strange clothing possible, they plaster about a thousand katakana words around a vaporwave skyline for TEH AESTHETIC, and so on, and so on... A lot of the time it manifests as gay, fake edginess like LE HECKIN KAWAII BAPHOMET THIS REALLY PISSES OFF THE OLD CHRISTIAN REPUBLICANS xD. This is stupid. It basically means that you are still controlled by them, just in the opposite direction.
In the past, most people introduced themselves and thus thought OF themselves as their profession: I'm a programmer, I'm a baker, I'm a nurse, I'm a teacher... and so on. On the internet today, we might substitute a hobby or an interest or a political position instead: I'm an illustrator, I'm an otaku, I'm a gamer, I'm a YouTuber, I'm a streamer, I'm a Marxist, I'm a liberal, I'm a conservative, I'm an American, I'm a Swede, I'm an Englishman, I'm a Scorpio, I'm an INFJ... None of these things are interesting to me. None of them really fill in that sense of void that we have when we look up in the sky and feel our pull and drive towards some kind of meaning-making.
The modern era is one where we are desperate to find communities where we feel like a part of something. I think about this in otaku fields especially. Go to a modern anime convention in the states and you'll see the most crazy-looking freaks you can imagine, but of course what they consume and create is always pretty tame and repetitive. Whereas if you look at an OG Comiket from the late 90s, the amount of creativity is staggering, but everyone is dressed pretty normally. They just are wearing random plaid button-down shirts and khakis. I think that's a sign that the old attendees had a proper sense of selfhood and purpose and that in the modern era people are so desperate for a community and meaning that they plaster garbage all over themselves like an angler fish just to get someone, anyone, to pay attention to them.
In the modern era people are isolated and atomized and spend most time in front of a computer. But this isolation does not create real genuine individualism. It rather crushes the individual as what makes him who he is. now the only way he can express that individualism is via purchasing power. A real sense can't come through isolation and can't come through an accumulation of things that you like in the world. It cannot be an "identity." An "identity" is static. It sits inert. It reduces who we are to something that can sit in a Twitter bio or be stamped on a document like a fingerprint. I would call an identity a sense of self that comes when we are lost in the milieu and distractions of the world around us. None of it really fills a gap in ourselves. But what other choice is there?
Beliefs are dangerous as they are the sign of a mind that has ceased to function. Identities are dangerous as they are the sign of a person who has ceased to grow and change. I've spent a lot of my life trying to prove myself and achieve some sense of self-worth and self-mastery by something external to myself: things I have created, things I like, things I dislike, places I have been, places I live, places I was born, and so on. None of it works. But I do not believe that conception of a self inherently leads to clinging and suffering as some Buddhists might say. The self is a construction and a fiction, but it is the most fundamental and important thing we have, even if it is so effervescent.
Nevertheless, we cannot create our own self-image without some reference to things that are external to us. But they can never take the primary position. The things we like in the world, be they subcultures, fashions, fandoms, political positions, jobs, or whatever else, are like water that fills a leaky vessel for only a while. We have to give up the primacy we give to these things to have any sense of self and fill our void. Abandoning any "identity" does NOT turn you into a faceless drone and rob you of your individuality. It does just the opposite. You can only truly be yourself when you stop trying to have an "identity.
In order to really undestand who you are and what matters, you must realize that you fundamentally not at home anywhere in the world and that it is up to you how to respond to and appropriate the circumstances around you. Part of that of course can include "things" in the world. Certainly, I would say that there are certain films, albums, games, anime, etc. that are very important for who I am. But at the end of the day their importance lies in me and you, not in the things themselves. When you want to be yourself, you must first realize that nothing can ever make you whole but you. Only then are you free. And only then you find your place on the earth.