self

The autonomous individual that was taking form had, in Taylor’s view, three main components: the “self-responsible independence” brought to the forefront by Locke, the “recognized particularity” epitomized by Montaigne, and the “individualism of personal commitment” that was a child of Protestantism.3

That direct engagement with the self, with no fear of shame or abandonment, no struggling to please others, is what makes isolation feel restorative and generative when it creates the conditions for solitude. In other words, stories we create with ourselves, for ourselves, can be a way of redeeming loneliness. It's when we hit the limits of the

Murdoch believed that one of the core projects that each of us needs to undertake is to “unself”. “The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.”

For Murdoch, there is no backstage self. As long as we

Consciousness is a gathering of knowledge sufficient to generate, in the midst of flowing images, automatically, the notion that the images are mine, are happening in my living organism, and that the mind is…well, mine too! The secret of consciousness is gathering knowledge and exhibiting that knowledge as a certificate of identity for the mind.

we can enlarge and enrich experience by recognizing how Greek authors, prior to modern science, represented the thing that is both closest to us and yet is still, in some sense, quite mysterious—our own essence as a human self. Many of their ideas are utterly remote from the individualistic and secular contexts of our body-centered market

I count myself among a growing number of scientists who believe that the construction of self identity is not much better than the Lo-fi representations of other people we hold in our heads.

But maybe this is who he really is, maybe we go through life never actually being ourselves, mostly never being ourselves. Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.

Today, self-creation is no longer something some of us can do to set ourselves apart from the people we see as the masses, the crowd, or ‘la foule.’ Instead, it has become something that all of us ‘must’ do in order to maintain our financial and social position in a culture that sees reality as up for grabs, to garner the attention central to so

Susan Engel... has written “We are who we are by virtue of what we have experienced, but part of who we are is determined by what we imagine.“ Through her work with children, Engel has been able to identify five phases of increasing sophistication in childhood storytelling.

First, toddlers learn they have an extended self .(connecting to memories)