Ancient and modern: the illusion of the self

The second episode of our forthcoming podcast is a narrative introduction to antiessentialism - the proposition that it’s useful to resist the idea that there’s a fixed ‘self’ inside a person - an essence, or a ‘real you’ controlling who you are.

One of the things that’s most intriguing about this notion, is that it recurs over and again in different traditions and disciplines: it’s not straightforwardly the ‘property’ of poststructuralism. Neuroscientists are unpacking the way in which the self is an illusion, while others experience of ‘anattā’ or ‘no self’ in meditation - a phenomenon with strong similarities to the psychedelic experience of ‘ego death’. A foundation of existentialist philosophy is that “existence precedes essence” - or to put it another way, consciousness comes first, and we create our own values and meaning, rather than being possessed of inherent value.

Tracing stories of stories through and beyond these traditions suggests that the self itself, is a story.

And yet, if the self is an illusion, it remains a persistent and persuasive one - arguably an ‘essential’ story - in the sense that we can’t do without it, rather than that it precedes or defines us.

But what might become possible when we hold our sense of self more loosely, and assume that what we are, is an absence…?