The "I" and the Self

The difference between the "I" and the self is one of the most vexing questions in the history of thought. It is only the boldest psychonauts that have taken up the question. The other problem is one of terminology and language. So few voyagers into inner space have taken up the problem; that language and world views change between psychonauts that they have trouble building on each others work. It must be said the most difficult problem of discovering the difference between the self and the"I" is that most people use the terms interchangably, and do not distinguish between the self and the "I". We shall see why this is so later in the essay. Let us begin with two modern psychonauts: Immanuel Kant and Sigmund Freud. Immanuel Kant realizid that the "I' and the self were different, but this realization is obscured by Kant's colorful teminology. For the self, Kant's term was the "transcendental unity of apperception", or "t,u.a." for short. For Kant the "I" is the moumenal self. Let us look at the t.u.a. to begin with. By "transcendental" Kant means that it is created by the subject; it is not a feature of reality, or the noumenal (thing in itself). In simpler terms Kant held that the self is a creation of the subject, not a feature of reality. By unity, Kant means that the t.u.a. unifes and organizes a subjects experience of the world, This unifying and organizing of experience leads to apperception. The best analogy would be a ship far out at sea on a night the stars are not visible.There seems no difference in directions. The t.u.a. would be the compass. What seems a confusing mass of data is oriented and organized. This is the apperception; that experience can be grasped and used. This orientation also applies to values, and our relations with the phenomenal world. The phenomenal world is our everyday world. This is not the real world; that Kant calls eithe the thing in itself or the noumenal world. Kant denies that the real (noumenal) world contains space, time, causality, or any of the logical catagories that we commonly ascribe to the material world. All these relations are put into the world by catagories in the subject. In simpler terms, the phenomenal world is created by reason and catagories put into the everday world by the subject. These catagories are not in the noumenal (everyday) world. The noumenal world does not does not have space, time or any of the relations that apply to the everyday world of matter. The noumenal world cannot be reached by reason, but only by an emotional intuition.The "I" is a creature of the noumenal world for Kant. The simplest way to understand this is that Kant posits a soul beneath our rational intellect. An immortal soul, since it is not subject to space and time. An immaterial soul, since it is not subject to any of the relations that effect the everyday world of matter. In other words Kant's "I" corresponds to the religious idea of a soul. If all this seems vague and confusing, that is because it is. Maybe we can get more clarity form Sigmund Freud. Freud posits two psychological entities: the ego and the id. The ego is the self and the id is the "I." Let us take a quote from Freud's book "Civilization and its Discontents" to observe how Freud uses these entities to explain psychic processes. "This ego appearl to us as something autonomous and unitary, marked off distinctly from everything else. That such an appeauance is deceptive, and that on the contary the ego is continued inwards, without anysharp delimination, into an unconscious mental entity we desginate as the id and for which is serves as a kind of facade" Freud's terms are less colorful than Kant's, but the theories have some similarties and some differences. As with Kant the ego or the self is a facade, it does not possess the reality of the id of "I". For Freud the id is an entity of primordial drives that the ego seeks to mediate. Again the ego sats as a compass in the everyday world. Instead of the "I" being a soul it is the seat of primodial drives That must be mediated by the ego or self. It is now time to leave Freud; to continue our investigation it is necessary to go futher back in history to Iamblichus and the neoplatonist and hermetic philosophers. We shall now enter the strange world of the neoplatonic and hermetic philosophers of antiquity and the Renaissance. Long before Freud, the neoplatonists and hermetic philosophers made more progress than anyone in understanding the difference between the "I" and the self. The trouble with recognizing there disconeries is they are buried in obscure symbolic language and strsnge metaphysical systems. Iamblichus was not the orginator of neoplatonic psychology, but did more to develop it than anyone else. For the neoplatonist and hermetic philosophers, humans lived in three worlds; matter, spirt, and soul. Let us look at each world. Matter is the physical body, The physical body is just a shell for the higher parts of a person for Iamblichus. Spirit and soul use the physical body as a tool. The spirit is the astral body or the soul vehicle (I shall use astral body for the sake of clarity). The astral body is the conscious mind or the self. It is the medium that sense data or experience is written or impressed upon. The astral body was thought to be made of the same matter as the celestial bodies, thus the term "astral." According to some myths, the soul took on parts of the matter of each celestial sphere as it descended to Earth. This is how the astral body came to be created. This would seem a obvious tie in with astrology. For the ancients the planets were a nexus of emotions that were connected to, or corresponded with material objects and pursuits on Earth. It seems the ancients understood that emotions were the carriers of information long before Kant and Freud. An easy example is the planet Mars and its correspodences. Mars corresponds to all things martial: bravery, battle, weapons, etc. This subtle material that makes up the astral body is the seat of our emotions and much of our intellect. It is the place where emotions and intellect are unified, and acts as an intermediary between the soul and the body. It is the self. The soul is the part of humans that is directly from God. This is the part of a human that the neoplatonics and hermetics believed was imperishable. This is of course, Kant's noumenal "I", it also correspond with Freud's id. Although Freud would never assert that the id is immortal. What is this mysterious entity the "I"? The "I" is the desire to expand, it is what defferentiates living from non-living things. It is the appetite to grow and expand in space and time. It is what is left when all experience is abstracted off. This is why the neoplatonics and hermetics identified the "I" with God. In normal consciousness it is not a seperate entity; it is mixed in with all experience. This is the reason that the "I" and the self are use interchangably. We think in scanarios, and out of these scanrios we abstract parts off. This is called imagination. The self and the "I" are abstacted out of the scanarios we think in. They are not independently existing entities; they are abstractions. The "I" can also be called the will. The "I" or the will creates the self, by either its satisfaction of frustration. Satisfacton and frustration generate the emotions. When the emotions are systemtized into habits and unconscious reactions we have the self. The self is the seat of our intellect. The self is like a lens that directs the desire to expand into some channels and blocks other channels. This is why one person may enjoy expanding physically and become an athelete or collector. Another person may enjoy expanding intellectually and thus become an expert bridge platyer or scholar. Of course, most of the self is unconscious it is unsublated emotions and reactions that are mostly learned in childhood. To help gain a greater understanding of the self and the "I", we shall examine one more thinker the hermetic philosopher Paracelsus. Paracelsus came up with a useful analogy that of the homunculus. The homunculus is an artificial man. The term means little man. Frankenstein's monster is a crude example. Paracelsus did not mean it to be a physical creation; he was referring to the little man in the head. The function of the homunculus is to approve certin emotions and courses of action and to deny other emotions and actions; thus providing a human with a conscience.