Saving the Self
Raymond Tallis defends personal identity from those who say the self is an illusion.
Come on, to the extent that postmodernists allow their own assessments to revolve largely around intellectual contraptions predicated on a particular accumulation of jargon, their own approach to the self bears almost no resemblance to the manner in which, from day to day, most of us recognize – in fact live – our own lives.
After all, what cares the biological, demographic and experiential I/“I” for “node[s] in a network of symbols and signs.” Love exists because, given the evolution of life on earth, our own species has come to embody the potential to feel love in all manner of complex and convoluted ways. Ways that clearly manifest themselves uniquely in different historical, cultural and interpersonal contexts.
Or are we to actually believe that the intellectual glop – gibberish? – that some of our more illustrious “postmodernists” spew out in almost unintelligible articles and books have any truly substantive relevance at all to those of us who, here and now, think of ourselves as being in love?
Sure, maybe. But only if and when they bring their words out into the world.
Realistically, however, how can the distinction here not revolve around I in the either/or world and “I” in the is/ought world? “I” may be a subject in any number of contexts, but the contexts themselves are bursting at the seams with the components of what we all agree is an objective reality. Again, unless we go all the way out on the reality limb and introduce things like solipsism, sim worlds, dream worlds etc.
Yes, “memetically”, “I” [in many important respects] is clearly a social and a political construct sustained in any particular community out in any particular world for any particular length of time. But to suggest that “the sense of being a substantive ‘subject’ or independent point of departure” is “merely a bourgeois illusion”?!
Who really believes that unless they reside in a pedantic la la land.