SELF AS MERE SYMPTOM by David Dulley or being selves at all. And, finally, there are those moments of total self-forgetfulness when one is so completely absorbed in some emotion or activity or train of thought or imagination that "self" has no meaning.
This doesn't seem to be true of all emotions. However full we are of hate or anger, we are always conscious of a self that is hating or fearing or displaying the anger. Pure hatred, fear and anger are a poet's fancy, not something one experiences. An ethical system could perhaps be constructed on the basis that some emotions are ultimately selfless, while others always demand a self. It would be a mistake to try, for it would be just the sort of emotionalintellectual struggle upon which the self seems to grow fat. It thrives on reductionist analyses of itself.
If there is any truth in this description of how human beings perceive their selves as functions of their mental states, then it is difficult to sustain the case for self as an independent entity. It is not the adjective "selfish", a useful word, but the noun "self" that is suspect. "Self - selfish" is not analogous to "wasp - waspish" ; it is more like "mawk - mawkish" where "mawk" does not actually connote a viable concept.
The consequence of all this is to reduce the self to a mere symptom of mental comfort or malaise. This seems satisfactory. We free ourselves of an obstreperous chimera blundering about in the china-shop of our lives and our last moments should be less beset by self-related anxieties. And the Furlong-Toynbee conundrum will not trouble us so much in the meantime.
In dealing with any subject but religion it would be frivolous to suggest that a fundamental problem could be alleviated by abandoning a word. But as Walter Schwarz has written, "metaphors are essential in religion, which deals with otherwise inexpressible concepts" and "selective literalism" is a dangerous trap in a religious context.
Reviewing Philip Toynbee's "Autobiographical Journal", Monica Furlong wrote : "the journal is a monument to a certain sort of self-consciousness, and poses again and again the peculiar conundrum of religion which is how, or whether, it is possible to lose the ego by the struggles of the ego or whether these struggles merely compound the problem." I know the answer. The ego does not get lost in the struggle. It thrives on it and becomes more invasive and divisive than ever. Anyway, mine does.
Granted that the other principal conundrum of religion is how to make the ego or self (Ms Furlong doesn't seem to be using "ego" as a Freudian technicality) merge or lose itself in some larger reality where it will no longer be a nuisance, the problem remains. How •••••• do human beings successfully instruct their egos to get lost ?
We need Occam's razor to excise a spurious entity.
At a meeting of the Society for Process Thought, Dr Kathleen Wilkes of the Department of Psychology at Oxford pointed out that although "human being" is a scientific term, "self" is not. I think she meant that it is not amenable to the normal processes of scientific investigation. One finds oneself discussing the meaning of a word instead of investigating a phenomenon.
DAVID DULLEY lives in Highgate, London.