Here’s something you can try at home. Or on the bus, for that matter. You can do it with your eyes closed or open, in a quiet room or a noisy street. All you have to do is this: identify yourself.
I don’t mean stand up and say your name. I mean catch hold of that which is you, rather than just the things that you do or experience. To do this, focus your attention on yourself. Try to locate in your own consciousness the ‘I’ that is you, the person who is feeling hot or cold, thinking your thoughts, hearing the sounds around you and so on. I’m not asking you to locate your feelings, sensations and thoughts, but the person, the self, who is having them.
It should be easy. After all, what is more certain in this world than that you exist? Even if everything around you is a dream or an illusion, you must exist to have the dream, to do the hallucinating. So if you turn your mind inwards and try to become aware only of yourself, it should not take long to find it. Go on. Have a go.
Any luck?
Source: Book I of A Treatise on Human Nature by David Hume (1739–40)
Admit it. You failed. You looked for the one thing that you always assumed was there and found nothing. What does that mean? That you don’t exist?
Let’s get clear about what you would have found. The moment you became aware of anything it would have been something quite specific: a thought, a feeling, a sensation, a sound, a smell. But in no such case would you have been aware of yourself as such. You can describe each of the experiences you had, but not the you that had them.
But, you might protest, how could I not be aware that it was I having these experiences? For instance, it is true that when I looked at the book in front of me, what I was aware of was the book and not me. But in another sense I was aware that it was me seeing the book. It just isn’t possible to detach myself from the experience, which is why there is no special awareness of I, only an awareness of what I am aware of. That is not to say, however, that the ‘I’ can be taken out of the equation.
That may sound convincing, but it won’t do: the problem remains that this ‘I’ is a nothing. It is like the point of view from which a landscape is painted. In one sense, the point of view cannot be taken from the painting, for it is of a landscape from a particular perspective, without which the painting would not be what it is. But this point of view is not itself revealed in the painting. For all we know, the point of view is a grassy knoll, a parked car or a concrete office block.
The self which has the experiences can be seen in exactly the same way. It is true that, if I look at the book in front of me, I am aware not only that there is a visual experience, but that it is an experience from a certain point of view. But nothing about the nature of that point of view is revealed by the experience. The ‘I’ is thus still a nothing, a contentless centre around which experiences flutter like butterflies.
On this view, if we ask what the self is, the answer is that it is nothing more than the sum of all the experiences that are connected together by virtue of sharing this one point of view. The self is not a thing and it is certainly not knowable to itself. We have no awareness of what we are, only an awareness of what we experience. That doesn’t mean we don’t exist, but it does mean that we lack a constant core of being, a single self that endures over time, which we so often assume, wrongly, makes us the individuals we are.
See also
| 56. | Total perspective vortex |
| 62. | I think, therefore? |
| 65. | Soul power |
| 88. | Total lack of recall |