Is There Still a Problem About the Self?

 

The puzzling concept of self is analyzed as a double singularity. Self₁ is the self as the bare numerical identity of personhood and self₂ is the unique set of beliefs each self₁ has about itself. These selves are shown to be discursively produced through the indexical properties of conversation. The dichotomy has been challenged by certain feminist writers. At one level, the challenge can be resolved by treating it as an observation about the multiple selves₂ any self₁ must handle. A deeper level of challenge suggests that the ways the problems of handling multiple selves₂ are dealt with affect the sense of personal identity expressed as self₁. The deeper challenge is met by showing first that the only tenable theory of selfhood is grammatical. The first person pronouns index speech acts with spatial location of speaker and speaker’s position in a moral order. In the light of that demonstration, it is shown how the problems of selves₂ can affect the way that pronouns index speech acts with positions in a local moral order but cannot affect the indexing of the content of the same speech acts with the spatial location of the embodied speaker.

The rest of his life would be spent watching her slip away from him, not knowing who he was, not knowing who she was.

—Tony Hillerman, 1989, p. 170It is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject, because language alone establishes the concept of “ego” in reality, in its reality which is that of being. The “subjectivity” we are discussing here is the capacity of the speaker to posit him [her] as “subject.” It is defined not by the feeling which everyone experiences of being him [her] self … but as the psychic unity that transcends the totality of the actual experiences it assembles and that makes the permanence of the consciousness. Now we hold that that “subjectivity,” whether it is placed in phenomenology or in psychology, as one may wish, is only the emergence in the being of a fundamental property of language. “Ego” is he [she] who says “ego.” That is where we see the foundation of “subjectivity,” which is determined by the linguistic status of “person.” —Emile Benveniste, 1983