Me, My Self and the Photographic Eye

A Sense of Self

In order to understand Me, I need to understand what it is to have a Sense of Self.

I believe that the sense of self is built from our experiences - positive and negative - as we grow up. Both have impact, but it is the positive which give us a healthy level of self esteem. Negative experiences help to foster low self-esteem.

This issue of self esteem is crucial. John Grohol [1] puts it like this: "What is self-esteem except a sense of self that is balanced and whole?"

Shambhala Sun and Mipham J. Mukpo [2] tell us that “With a healthy sense of self, we feel wholesome, balanced, confident, pliable, at ease. The mind is more robust.”

But it is my learned friend Rene Descartes who puts the question most succinctly: "What is that 'I' that I know?" I am not an expert on Cartesian philosophy, and I don't think I can buy into solipsism yet, but am learning all the time. Descartes' writings on the self (or 'The Inescapable Self' as Timothy Chappell calls it in his eponymously titled history of Western philosophy since Descartes[3]) try to get to the very essence of what it is to be. Famously quoted as stating "I think, therefore I am", Descartes' arguments rests on the premise that he (never mind anyone, or anything else) must exist in order to think that he does.

Hmmm...

Descartes set about proving this to himself by systematically doubting (becoming sceptical about) everything else, as a kind of academic exercise in seeking to find the categorical 'I'. He says in his Discourse 4: "I noticed that while I was trying to think everything false, it was necessary that I, who was thinking this, was something. And observing that his truth, 'I think, therefore I exist' (cogito ergo sum), was so firm and sure that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were incapable of shaking it, I decided that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking." [4]

So that's okay then. I know I exist, even if you don't exist. But I still don't really understand who I am, what I am made from: the essence, if you like, of 'Me-ness'.

The search goes on...

URLs

[1] John M. Grohol, Psy.D. Self esteem and a Sense of Self. 2003

[2] Shambhala Sun and Mipham J. Mukpo: Cultivating a Healthy Sense of Self. 2003

References

[3] Chappell, T. The Inescapable Self: an introduction to Western philosophy since Descartes. pub Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003

[4] Cited in [3] above, p27.