The real you. . . (page 3)

Satanus

If it is something that you believe, think, feel or observe, then, it's not the real you. That is because you are the observer. Can the observer observer the observer?

S

Narkissos

Can the observer observer the observer?

Who knows?

Doesn't the very naming of "the observer" make "it" an object of observation, making "the observer" just move one case back in a potentially endless mirror play?

Btw, is it one case back (as in "regression") or one case further (in a construct of abstractions?)

Narkissos I understand and instinctively agree with what you say. However (deep breath) is it not possible there are other language games where it is true to talk about the "real me"? Or coming to think on it forget about calling this or that true. Is not the most relevant question if it works as a concept? If the concept of discovering one's real self is the means by which some persons are able to find something they esteem highly enough to call freedom, then who are others to poo poo that? And what's the purpose of telling another the route he took to get where he wants is the wrong one. If he is where he wants to be, then how could the route have been wrong for him?

Does that make sense, or have I slipped down that relativistic black hole you warned me off?

jaguarbass

Here is the real me with pictures and music.

http://www.myspace.com/jaguarbassquinn

Satanus

Nark

'Who knows?'

Heh. Good one. Where is poppers, anyway? The thing about stuff like this is that, people can find their own answers.

S

quietlyleaving

my understanding is that the participating participate in the participation

Narkissos

slim,

There certainly are definitions of "self" which are "true" in a functional sense, i.e. they work in a particular "play"... allowing people, for example, to become effective soldiers in war, workers in a corporation, voters and activists in a democracy, partners in a contract, marriage, relationships, etc. Many religious "games" depend on a similar or at least compatible notion of "self" which can be either "saved" or "lost"... For this very reason they are socially useful (you know, making people better citizens, employees, husbands and wives, etc.).

As long as this works, indeed, who am "I" to question it?

But when it ceases to work -- i.e., when people get unsatisfied with, or cannot believe anymore in their representation of "self" and the whole play it works in, what must they do? Keep going through the motions? Clear the main way by suicide, or declaring themselves insane or dysfunctional? Recycle their own self-deconstruction under some acceptable label as "art," "religion" or "philosophy" to be sold and bought by the mainly "functional" (thanks to misunderstanding and snobism)?

Subversion and insurrection are never "rights," they can't claim the "authority of truth," but they happen nonetheless. Within your own "self" first... and they can build their own trans-individual solidarity networks, too (which reminds me of antipsychiatrist David Cooper's formula, something like "the crazy in me speaking to the crazy in you").

slimboyfat

Narkissos,

But when it ceases to work

The thing is that for many people it appears to work for their whole lives, not just temporarily. What do you say to that? Did they simply not live long enough to see the error of their ways - because they would surely have encountered problems eventually? Or must we not concede that their conception of their real self truly worked for them, and not merely as a stop-gap until they realised it was a vacuous and even restrictive/harmful notion.

I have this niggling doubt that suggests to me somehow that this rejection of the notion of a "real self" might be a ruse. Because if I make such a rejection key to my self-understanding, then doesn't that very rejection in itself become my understanding of who I really am? It is as if you were to say to the question 'Who is the real you?'

The real me is someone who realises there is no real me.

Which affirms of the concept of a "real me" at the same time as it rejects it!

donny

I had every intention of going to bed 4 hours ago, and I've lain down twice.

Try to sleep standing up. I have heard that it prevents bed sores.

Narkissos

But when it ceases to work
The thing is that for many people it appears to work for their whole lives, not just temporarily. What do you say to that?

That I could as well have written if instead of when... I really didn't mean more: I agree that a functional self-understanding (in the sense of solid, never-doubted sense of identity) has been able to last one (or many) lifetime(s), with only minor adaptations, for the vast majority of people -- and I'd even add: fortunately so. It's far from comfortable when it isn't. But sometimes it isn't. And I'm afraid that it increasingly won't, because of social, technical, economical and political changes which are globally destroying the traditional cultural and subcultural settings where a "simple" self-understanding used to make lasting sense.

I have this niggling doubt that suggests to me somehow that this rejection of the notion of a "real self" might be a ruse. Because if I make such a rejection key to my self-understanding, then doesn't that very rejection in itself become my understanding of who I really am? It is as if you were to say to the question 'Who is the real you?'
The real me is someone who realises there is no real me.
Which affirms of the concept of a "real me" at the same time as it rejects it!

I think you are overstating your case: questioning the "real me" doesn't imply positing another "real me" as "someone who realises there is no real me". It may rather consist in recovering the old sense of persona as "an actor's mask," meaning a role in a play, a function in a structure -- even though there might be no onebehind the (plural) personae of our simultaneous or successive characters.

But I readily agree with you that this is, paradoxically, a self-understanding of sorts. And I believe at least some of us, at a certain stage, do need such kind of (fluid, functional, centreless) self-understanding, when (that is, if!) more "simple" representations of "identity" do not work anymore. And I suspect that it might be the case of more and more people as time goes by.

So by stating "perhaps there is no real me" I don't mean to deny the "right" of others to understand themselves as a "real them" (is that correct?). I just testify that this doesn't work for me. Which, in a negative sense, may be just one way of dismissing a nosy question about "the real me". (As one character in a classical French movie put it: "So you don't know me and you dare ask me who I am?") But in a more positive sense it is also a way of waving at those who equally find themselves unable to answer such a question.

The real you. . .

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