The Great Inversions II: Self Is Not an Object

Among the many things we inherit without noticing, few appear more obvious than the self.

We speak as if there were a stable entity somewhere behind experience — a persistent someone who thinks thoughts, feels emotions, remembers the past, and moves through life while remaining fundamentally the same.

The image is deeply familiar.

Experiences change.

Circumstances change.

Beliefs change.

Yet beneath these changes, we usually assume there remains an enduring object: the self.

The self appears to be a thing.

But familiar ideas often conceal familiar assumptions.

The inherited construal

The inherited picture often looks something like this:

• there exists a self
• the self possesses experiences
• the self contains thoughts and feelings
• the self persists unchanged beneath change

Experience is then imagined as a kind of activity occurring around this underlying entity.

Thoughts happen to the self.

Memories belong to the self.

Relationships surround the self.

Identity becomes something one possesses.

Again, the image feels natural because it borrows from the logic of objects.

Objects persist through change.

A chair may lose its colour and remain the same chair.

A riverbank may erode and remain the same riverbank.

The same assumption is then projected inward.

The self becomes an internal object occupying the centre of experience.

Yet something curious appears when we look more closely.

The hidden assumptions

Where exactly is this self?

One may point to the body.

Yet the body changes continuously.

Cells die and regenerate.

Appearance alters.

Capabilities emerge and disappear.

One may point instead to memory.

Yet memories fade, distort, and sometimes disappear altogether.

One may point to personality.

Yet personality shifts across contexts, relationships, and stages of life.

The problem is not simply that these things change.

The problem is that the supposedly stable self often seems to retreat elsewhere whenever one attempts to locate it.

The self appears to function like a hidden centre that explains everything while remaining strangely difficult to find.

The fracture

A further difficulty appears.

If the self exists as a complete object prior to relationships, then relationships become secondary additions.

One first becomes an individual and only afterwards enters into social life.

But this sits uneasily with experience.

Language is learned through others.

Meanings emerge through interaction.

Values arise within social coordination.

Even the categories through which one understands oneself are inherited through relations.

The supposedly independent self begins to look less like an origin and more like a product.

The image starts to destabilise.

Perhaps the problem lies in imagining the self as a thing.

The inversion

Suppose the self is not an object underlying experience.

Suppose instead that what we call self emerges through patterns of relation.

On such a view, the self is not something that first exists and then enters into the world.

The self emerges within relations among bodies, meanings, histories, and social practices.

Identity would not be a possession.

It would be an ongoing organisation of relations.

The self would not stand behind experience as its hidden owner.

The self would emerge through the very processes by which experience is construed.

The inversion appears subtle.

Yet its implications are substantial.

Consequences

If the self is relational rather than object-like, then change ceases to threaten identity in the same way.

Change becomes expected.

The question is no longer:

How does the self remain identical through change?

The question becomes:

How are patterns of continuity maintained across changing relations?

Relationships cease to be external additions to an already completed individual.

They become constitutive.

Identity becomes something continually actualised rather than permanently possessed.

Even individuality changes character.

Individuals are not isolated units standing apart from relations.

They are distinguishable organisations emerging within relations.

The world begins to look slightly different.

Not because selves disappear.

Names remain.

Memories remain.

Lives continue.

But perhaps there was never a hidden object sitting behind experience.

Perhaps what we call self was always an ongoing pattern in the becoming of relations.

The Great Inversions I: Time Is Not a Container

We ordinarily speak as if time were a kind of invisible landscape through which events travel. We say that events happen in time. We place memories behind us and possibilities ahead of us. We imagine ourselves moving from one moment to another as though we were passengers crossing a terrain that already exists.

The image is so familiar that it rarely appears as an image at all. It presents itself as simple common sense.

Time appears to be a container.

Events are placed within it. Lives unfold inside it. History stretches across it.

But common sense often conceals metaphysics.

The inherited construal

The inherited picture usually assumes something like the following:

• time exists independently of events
• moments are locations within time
• events occupy those locations
• time flows uniformly from past to future

The picture feels natural because it borrows its structure from space.

We know how objects occupy positions in space. The same logic is then quietly projected onto time. Moments become places. Events become objects. History becomes a line.

Once this construal settles into place, it becomes difficult to imagine alternatives.

Yet there is something peculiar about it.

The hidden assumptions

If time is a container, then what sort of thing is it?

Where exactly is the present?

The past is said to have gone; the future has not yet arrived. Yet the present seems to vanish the moment one attempts to identify it.

If it possesses duration, then it can be divided again. If it possesses no duration, then it appears incapable of containing anything at all.

The point is not merely that the present is difficult to define. The difficulty may indicate something deeper.

Perhaps the problem lies in assuming that moments are things.

A further problem emerges from the familiar idea that time flows.

What does this mean?

Movement itself normally presupposes time. An object moves by occupying different positions at different times.

But if time itself moves, then a strange question appears:

Relative to what?

Does time move through another time?

If so, then that second time would seem to require a third.

The regress has no obvious endpoint.

The metaphor that once appeared self-evident begins to destabilise.

The fracture

The difficulty is not simply that the picture is incomplete.

The difficulty may be that the picture transforms relations into objects.

Events become things positioned within moments.

Moments become things positioned within time.

Time itself becomes a kind of hidden object that supports all the others.

But once these assumptions are exposed, the apparent solidity of time begins to soften.

Perhaps events are not contained within time at all.

The inversion

Suppose that change is primary.

Suppose that relations among actualisations come first, and that what we call time is a construal emerging from those relations.

On such a view, events do not occupy locations in a pre-existing temporal landscape.

Rather, temporal order emerges from the organisation of relations among phenomena.

Time would not be a container in which change occurs.

Time would be a way of construing changing relations.

The inversion appears small.

Yet its implications are substantial.

Consequences

If time is not primary, then continuity is no longer a backdrop waiting for events to occupy it.

Continuity becomes an achievement.

History no longer appears as a sequence of objects distributed across a line. It becomes an organisation of meanings through which relations are construed.

Past and future cease to be places.

They become orientations within construal.

Even the present changes character.

The present is not a location separating two regions of time.

It is the ongoing edge at which potential becomes actualised.

The world begins to look slightly different.

Not because time disappears.

Clocks still tick. Calendars still function. Days still arrive.

But clocks may not measure the movement of time at all.

Perhaps they coordinate relations among changing phenomena.

And perhaps the invisible container through which we imagined ourselves moving was never there to begin with.