There is a sentence you have said, in some form, more than once. When you said it, it did not feel like a claim you were making. It felt like reporting a fact — the way you would say water is wet, or two and two make four. The sentence runs roughly like this. I am my own person. Where I'm from is where I started; it isn't who I am. And I decide which of it I keep, and let the rest go.
That sentence feels like the most basic thing there is — the assumption beneath all the others, too obvious to argue. So try something with it. Say it — not to win an argument, only to be understood — to your great-grandmother. Or to her grandmother. Or go further back, and say it to almost anyone, in almost any village, in almost any century before one fairly recent stretch of time. And they will not follow you. Not because they think you are wrong. Because they cannot find the thing you are pointing at. You said, I'll keep the parts that are really me. And they will want to know, with no sense that they are asking anything hard: which part is that? The you that is not your father's child, not of this people, not under this God, not bound to this ground — the bare one, standing apart from all of it, doing the keeping. Where is he?
And you cannot answer. Because the self that whole sentence is about — the one standing apart from every role and every root, free to keep them or drop them and remain himself — for the great majority of the human beings who have ever lived, that self was not hidden, and was not forbidden. It was simply not there to point to. The self you reach for as the plain foundation of being a person turns out to be a self that had to be built. It has a beginning. It has, more or less, a date. And that date is far more recent than you would guess.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required.
This is the seventh of eight episodes on the roles you didn't pick and the place you're from. Last week we left the roles and turned to the roots — the town, the people you grew up among — and put the whole question to the place itself. On one side, Simone Weil: to be rooted is perhaps the deepest and least noticed need of the human soul, and the rootless modern self is not free but deprived of something the soul needs. On the other, the cosmopolitan: your town is one town among all the towns, with no claim a stranger's town lacks. Both came out strong. Neither one won. And you were left holding the whole field at once — every account of the self we have set out, all of them in view together — and feeling, for the first time, each one turn out less solid than it had seemed when you leaned on it.
But you kept one thing. After all of it, there was one secure place left to stand: all right, I can't find the detached chooser; I'm made of roles and roots. But surely I can at least sort them. Keep the ones that are really me. Set down the ones that are only where I started. That is the assumption you are standing on as you come in tonight.
And tonight it goes. Not because anyone argues you out of it — we have done arguments — but because that detached sorter, the one who stands back from his roots and decides which he will keep, came from somewhere. He was made. And once you can see when he was made, you can no longer stand on him as if he were solid ground.
Start with the world in which that sentence could not be said. Not to admire it, but to see it, because we came out of it, and we forget it was ever the only thing there was.
For almost all of human history, and for almost everyone in it, who you were was not something you found by looking inward and sorting. It was something you could read off where you stood. You were your father's son or your mother's daughter. You were of this people and not that one. You were a baker because your father was a baker and his father before him; you were the subject of this lord, a soul under this God, a member of this parish, this clan, this guild, this land. Ask a man in that world who he is, and he does not pause and search himself. He tells you whose he is, and what he is for, and where he stands in the order of things. And he has told you everything there is to tell. There is no second, truer answer held back behind the first.
Now put your question to him — the one this whole series has been built on. Yes, but which of all that is the real you? Behind the son, behind the baker, behind the subject and the soul — the one who would still be you if you set every one of them down? He does not refuse the question. He genuinely cannot find what it refers to. For him there is no behind. The roles are not an outer layer worn over the real man, with a person underneath. They are what a person is made of. Strip them away one by one, looking for the bare self beneath — son, gone; baker, gone; subject, soul, neighbour, gone — and you have not uncovered the bare self you were after. On his picture the self is the standing in the order; so stripping the roles to find the real man does not free a hidden self, because on that picture there is no hidden self under the roles to free. Remove the order and you have not freed him to be himself. You have taken apart the only self that picture knows how to name.
One caution, because this is exactly the place where it is tempting to grow sentimental, and I am not going to. That world was not better than ours. In a hundred ways it trapped you. The baker's son could not stop being a baker. The daughter was handed to a marriage and a household she did not choose and could not leave. The soul that doubted the God it lived under could be burned for it. The order that gave you a self with nothing left over also gave you no way out. You did not get to ask which of these is really me — and that was not peace; it was confinement. Everything good in the sentence you walked in with — I decide which of it I keep — was won, at real cost, as a real escape from exactly that confinement. Hold on to that. We are going to need it.
But here is what to take from all this, a small thing that turns out to be large. That picture — the self with no behind, the self that is its place and its people — was not one strange option among many. For thousands of years, across most of the world, it was simply what a person was. The ordinary picture. The default. And your picture — the detached self standing apart from all of it with a clear view, sorting the real roles from the merely inherited — is the strange recent arrival. So when you ask which of my roles is really me, behind all of them, you are not asking the plain human question. You are asking one that, for most people who ever lived, had no behind to point to. Which means the behind you are so sure is there, in you — the place where the sorting is done — is not there because that is how persons are made. If it is there, something happened. Something built it. There is an old idea waiting at the end of all this — that you are, even now, closer to that man in the order than you would like to think — and we will come back to it. But first, the making: where this detached self came from, and who put it together.
So, the making of it. There is a philosopher, Charles Taylor — Canadian, still living — who in 1989 published a very large book with a very exact title: Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. The making of it. Taylor traces the sources of the self you take to be the plain human baseline — inward, free, sovereign, its own — the ways it was put into words and shaped, across centuries, by voices you can name. Take it one stage at a time.
First. Go back about sixteen hundred years, to Augustine. Augustine does not drop the old concern with a divine order above you, but he changes where you go to reach it. The road to the truest thing, he says, runs inward, not outward to the cosmos and your place in it. Do not go outward; return into yourself; it is in the inner man that truth dwells. That sounds like a line off a poster now, which is exactly the point. It is so deep in us that we can no longer hear how strange it once was — how far it moved the deepest thing about a person off the world outside and into a private interior reached by turning in. The inside of a person becomes a place you can go.
Second. The 1600s. Descartes, and then Locke. Now the self does not only turn inward for truth; it draws back from the world to get a clear look at it. Reason stops being a matter of being rightly placed within an order and becomes a matter of standing outside the thing you are reasoning about, surveying it, taking it apart, mastering it. And Locke carries this all the way to the self itself. Taylor has a name for the Lockean self: the punctual self — a self shrunk to a single point, a pure observer, standing back even from its own habits and beliefs and feelings, able to treat them as objects, take them apart, and rebuild them to a better design. You are no longer your beliefs. You are the one who stands over them and remakes them.
Third. The late 1700s. Kant. Kant gives this account one of its most powerful words — autonomy. The word means, literally, giving yourself your own law. For Kant the very thing that makes you a person with dignity, rather than a thing pushed about by its circumstances, is that you do not take your law from outside — not from your inclinations, not from your upbringing, not from custom or any authority handed to you. You legislate for yourself. The free will, he says, is the one bound only by a law it gives itself as a rational being — not by appetite, not by custom, not by any command from outside. Not find your place in the order — be your own order.
Fourth. Around 1800, the Romantics. They add the last piece, the warm one, the one you probably feel most. Each person, they say, has an original way of being human — an inner voice that is yours, unrepeatable, that no one else has and no tradition can hand you. And the whole point of a life is to be true to that voice. Not true to your station. Not true to your fathers. True to yourself. This is where be true to your roots gets its rival, be true to yourself — and the second cuts against the first, because it claims the truest thing about you is the voice no role gave you.
Now stand back and look at what these four have assembled. A self that looks inward for what is true. That draws back from the world to master it. That gives itself its own law. And that answers, in the end, only to its own inner voice. Inward, disengaged, self-legislating, authentic. Put the four together and you have him — the detached one, the traveller who stands back from his roots and keeps what is really his, the self that is its own author. He did not fall from the sky, and he is not the bare structure of being a person. He was put into words, stage by stage, by named voices — each giving language to a wider shift already under way — over the better part of fourteen centuries, in one corner of the world.
And here is what I am not saying, and I want it said plainly so it does not get lost in what follows. I am not saying this was a mistake. That self is one of the great achievements of our species, and almost everything you most admire runs on it. Remember where we started, weeks ago — the abused child who walks out, the believer who finally sets the faith down, the dissenter who says not in my name against everyone who raised her. Every one of those is the inward, disengaged, self-legislating self doing exactly what it was built to do. Take that self away and you lose all of it. Taylor knows this; he is not sneering at the modern world — he values much of it. He is doing one quieter and more unsettling thing. He is showing that it has sources — that it was made, by people, in time, for reasons — and that a thing which was made could have been otherwise, and was, for most of the people who ever lived.
You met this self once before on this show, without knowing where it came from. Back in Desert, Luck and What We Owe Each Other, we met the unencumbered chooser — the self with no commitment it could not step back from — and the charge against it then was that it was too thin to be anyone: a useful fiction for thinking about fairness, but no real person. That was a complaint about what it is made of. Here is the other half. It is not only thin. It is recent. It can be dated. And the whole time you have been using it as the solid ground you judge everything else from, it has been one particular idea, only a few centuries old.
So bring the making back to the self you walked in as.
In one of the early weeks you tried to do the thing this detached self promises — step back from every role and root at once and find the bare chooser doing the stepping. He was not where you reached. Whatever was doing the stepping turned out to be made of more roles, more language, more place. You could not find the detached self. But you could never quite shake the sense that he ought to be there — that reaching for him was the obvious, natural move, even when your hand closed on nothing. Now you know why. He is the assumption a modern Westerner grows up inside. He is the end point of a fourteen-century account that worked so well, and sank so deep, that it stopped looking like an account and started looking like the plain truth. But an idea with a date is not the plain truth beneath everything. It is one idea, a recent one, from one part of the world. And once you have seen the century it was made in, you can no longer treat it as the ground you judge everything else from.
Here is the consequence — and it is the last secure assumption, the one you have been standing on all evening. After everything, you kept one thing in reserve. Fine. I can't find the detached chooser. I'm made of roles and roots, all the way down. But I can at least sort them. I'll keep the ones that are really me, and set down the ones that are just where I started. It felt safe. It felt like the grown-up's version of freedom — not pretending you came from nowhere, only honestly sifting what you are made of.
Now look at what that consolation actually needs to work. To sort your ties into really me and just where I started, you need somewhere to stand while you sort — a position outside the ties, apart from them, from which you can rule on them: this one is part of me, keep it; that one is only history, let it go. You need a standpoint that is not itself one of the things being judged. And that standpoint — a place outside all your roles — is the very self we have just watched being made. It is the detached self: the one you could not find weeks ago, the one that can be dated. So I'll keep the ones that are really me does not escape the detached self. It relies on him. It needs the very detached chooser the whole series has shown you cannot find.
There is no position outside your ties from which to certify which tie is you — because the one doing the certifying, the one weighing this root is really me, that one is just where I started, is itself made of the ties. The one judging is one of the things being judged. You met a smaller version of this twice before, when you tried to weigh what you had earned against what you owed and noticed that the measure you were using was made of the same material you were measuring. This is that, run all the way down, on the deepest thing — on the you that is supposedly doing the weighing.
And do not reach for the accounts that survived, because they do not rescue you here, and that matters. The self whose freedom is real but made of its relationships; the self condemned to take up everything it was handed; the self that is the story it tells — not one of them gives you the outside position either. The one who is free through his relationships exercises that freedom inside them, never from above them. The one condemned to choose chooses from inside his situation, with the situation pressing on every side — that was always the point, the freedom is in the circumstances, not over them. And the one who is a story reads that story from inside it, as a character still in it; there is no position outside the book where the author sits with the whole thing finished before him. Every account left standing survived precisely by giving up the outside position. Only the consolation tried to keep it. That is why it is the one that fails tonight.
There is an old idea — older than any of the sources we have traced tonight — and once you have seen the detached self acquire a date, it stops sounding quaint and starts sounding like a plain description of where you actually are. It goes like this. You are the bearer of a story you did not begin. You came in partway through. The characters were already cast, the language was already running, the debts were already owed, the plot was already moving when you opened your eyes in it. And the question of which threads of that story are you — which you could cut and still be you, which you could not — is one you answer as one of the characters, from inside the moving thing, with no position outside it from which to read it. There never was such a position. You have spent your life looking for it and calling the search thinking for myself.
There are two cheap things a person does with all this, and I am doing neither, and the whole honesty of tonight depends on my not doing them. The first is to hear the outside position is gone as so there is no author at all — you were only your roles the whole way down, the self was a story you told yourself. I have not said that. Losing the outside position is not the same as losing the self. The accounts still standing keep a real power to direct a life — only without the outside view. The second is to seize the opposite conclusion: all right, no detached self, but surely there is some author in here; I just cannot name the kind. I will not hand you that one either, because there is definitely someone home, take my word for it is its own tidy verdict, and the truth is that whether any real author survives the loss of that position — or whether author is simply the wrong word for what is left once the position is gone — is exactly what tonight does not settle. I have dated the detached self. I have not told you what, if anything, stands in its place.
And two last things this is not, because they are the easy exits and they are right there. It is not the modern self is a fraud, throw it out. The power to step back from a role and judge it is real, and precious, and it is how people have broken out of every order that ever confined them — I said that and I meant it. What has been dated tonight is not that power. It is the picture of a you standing wholly outside all your roles to use it — the detached position, not the stepping back. The stepping back is yours. The outside position was never real. And it is not, on the other side, well, it is all just history, so choose whatever self suits you. That is the relativist's shrug, and it gets the whole thing backwards. Seeing that your favoured starting point has a date does not free you to choose any starting point you like. It takes away the one you were using to judge all the others. That is not liberation. It removes the last secure place you had to judge from.
So what do you take away from tonight that you did not bring in?
A month ago you lost the first thing — the detached author, the one who stands behind everything you are and picks. You went looking and he was not there. But you kept something in reserve after that, a consolation, a smaller security: all right, no detached chooser — but I can at least do his easiest job myself. I can sort. Keep the real ones, drop the rest, from some honest, level place. Tonight that went too. Not the chooser this time, but the place he would have stood. The clean, level position you were going to sort from is the same self we have just dated, and no one occupies it — not because some self has died, but because no actual, tied-up person can stand there. The detached chooser was already gone. Tonight the position he would have held goes with him.
And notice what is still standing, because it is not nothing, and I will not let you leave thinking this was a demolition. The power to step back from a role and weigh it — real, still yours, as valuable as it ever was. The accounts of who you might be without the detached self — the self made of its relationships, the self condemned to its freedom, the self that is a story — all still hold, all still in play, none of them refuted tonight. The question of who you are is still entirely yours. What is gone is only the easy position you wanted to answer it from. You have not been handed you are no one. You have been handed your own life, and the question of it, without the shortcut you were hoping to use.
This is the seventh of eight. One to go. And I will tell you now what the last one does, because it is not what a last episode usually does: it does not hand you an answer. After seven weeks of removing one secure assumption after another, I am not going to spend the eighth fixing a new one in place for you. Next week the whole question comes back out to your own street, the one you drove in on the first night, sharper than you have ever held it — and I put it in your hands, and stop. That is the last hour. It is the most important one.
But take this away tonight, and take it as something to test, not something to believe. Take your own version of the sentence we began with — I'll keep the parts of me that are really me, and let the rest go. Now make it concrete. Pick one. A role you are sure is only where you started, that you could set down and still be yourself. Or a root you are certain is you, that you would sooner die than give up. And then, before you rule on it, stop, and look for where you are standing to make the call. The level place. The position off to the side, outside the role and outside the root, from which you get to certify this one is me, that one is only history. Look hard for it — the way you looked for the chooser, and the way you looked, last week, for some neutral place to stand above your own town. And you will find what you found both times. The position you are reaching for is the detached self. It has a date. And you are not standing in it — because that kind of outside place is not where a tied-up person ever stands.
You will still have to decide. That is the part no one gets out of. You will keep some threads and cut others this week, with or without a clean place to do it from, because a life does not wait until you feel sure of your footing. The only thing that changed tonight is that you can no longer tell yourself you are reading the answer off some neutral standpoint outside your ties. You are choosing from inside the very thing you are choosing about, with no position above it. And whether there is a real author in there doing the choosing, or whether author is the wrong word now for whatever is left — that, as I said, is the one thing tonight does not settle, and I am not going to pretend otherwise on the way out. Take that to your own street. We finish next week.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.