self

“Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.”

Spinoza

Can we imagine a world where we first become conscious of what determines our actions and form our opinions accordingly?

I read Spinoza’s quote in the following way: we are conscious of shouting at another person and the anger we feel; consequently, our opinion is that we are angry at that person. What might have happened and caused your anger was the realization (at the crossroad of your conscious and unconscious mind) that you were caught in a lie, and you don’t want to admit it and protest loudly and angrily. And if the person was, in fact, insulting you, how does an insult actually hurt you? Most of the time, the feeling of anger has little to do with the person you are angry at but more with a complex history.

Another example is sports. If you catch a ball in mid-air, you might proclaim that you caught it, as in you guided your hand consciously to the ball by “telling” it where to go. The reality is that your hand can’t wait for your brain to make these decisions but has a shortcut to your eyes and other senses; we catch balls unconsciously, you might say. It’s the same with walking; we are not active in it, but it sure feels like we control every move. In reality, we merely point to a general direction and let our legs and the rest of our body do the rest.

Thinking about free will is hard. Try to think why you decided to get up and get some coffee. You might say you want some coffee, and that’s why, but where came that urge from? Why now coffee and not 5 minutes ago? Who and what in you “decided” that you want it now? You can say that the “I” that wants coffee we talk about here is (the whole of) you, including all your unconscious behaviors and needs. But most people feel some sort of central place within that is their “I”, the place where our thoughts come from. But then we must return to the quote above and use it to analyze this place we call “I”. Try it.

“The less the mind understands and the more things it perceives, the greater its power of feigning is; and the more things it understands, the more that power is diminished.”

“The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure.”

“I realised that all the things which were the source and object of my anxiety held nothing of good or evil in themselves save in so far as the mind was influenced by them,”

Baruch Spinoza

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Your self-image is partly formed by your past and what you remember, consciously or not. You probably have been in a situation like this: you get greeted by your classmates at a reunion with welcome cheers and fond memories; you might feel confused if you have lived all those years with the memory that you were a loner at that school and making friends was difficult for you. Why do you remember certain situations from the past differently than others do?

We have many memories and feelings about past events that we can never verify. Consequently, we can never be sure of what our “self” is or who we are because thinking of yourself as a loner instead of a more popular kid in the classroom might greatly affect your self-image. Despite this, most of what we remember and feel as a part of our self-image is probably true. However, it is hard to determine which parts; this might be a source of our insecurities about who we are.

We also add new memories every moment we live; they might not immediately affect your “self.” but some of them can have significant effects in the future without you realizing it. In this constant stream of input, finding the source of new and important events might be difficult when looking back, overwhelmed as we are by our senses. Your memories might feel focused at a certain time in the past when you remember them, but the reality is often that these memories are a collage of miner events put together later to fit your current self-image. We not only have a hard time locating the source of our memories at a later date, but we also play a part in their construction after the fact, and both of them are in constant motion.

We often feel our self, but many of us are also looking for our self. We often hold on to a self and let our inner workings or unconsciousness maintain that image of our self(s) through subtle manipulation. No matter what is happening, your self is constantly in motion, going nowhere but always becoming.

Gilles Deleuze has written about the self in his work; underneath, you can read some quotes. There is also a famous study about memories of the 9/11 attack that highlights the problems we have with memories; read it here: https://news.lafayette.edu/2021/09/07/remembering-9-11-are-flashbulb-memories-accurate-20-years-later/ or do a search for it.

“The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.”

“To affirm is not to bear, carry, or harness oneself to that which exists, but on the contrary to unburden, unharness, and set free that which lives.”

“Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.”

Gilles Deleuze