The idea of a stable, singular self doesn’t reflect the diverse lived experiences of those in marginalized groups. In fact, an influential group of Latina feminist thinkers writing in past few decades has argued that the self is multiplicitous, either for some people or for all.

Gloria Anzaldúa considers the self that lives at the borderlands and highlights what she calls a mestiza consciousness. Although her work is often embraced as a celebration of multiplicity, I show that underwriting Anzaldúa’s work is a dream of unifying the self given that multiplicity is a feature of oppression. I draw on the work of Mariana Ortega in making this argument, as Ortega seeks to affirm unity and multiplicity at once. By contrast, María Lugones advocates a radical multiplicity of the self, but not in the way we usually think of multiplicity. Lugones argues against the idea that the self is either fragmented/split or unified: instead, it is curdled.

All three of these thinkers interweave the theoretical and the personal, with Anzaldúa writing in an experimental and multilingual style, Lugones drawing on examples from feminine-coded practices such as cooking, and Ortega exploring the challenges of immigrating to a land that allows some features of yourself to come to the fore while suppressing others. As you watch the video (or listen - see audio below!), consider:

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We constantly tell ourselves and others stories about who we are. What was our upbringing like? How have our individual and collective pasts shaped our presents? What are our personalities like, and what are our hopes and dreams? Being a self is, for a group of twentieth-century and contemporary philosophers who espouse narrative identity theory, in no small part a matter of these stories. We are both main character and narrator of our lives, and others can be narrators of our lives, too.

For French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, narrative theory highlights the ethical dimensions of being a self. Picking up on some key themes addressed in the earlier video lecture on existential theories of the self, Ricoeur thinks the self is both a what and a who, but that philosophy has by and large focused on the former at the expense of the latter. Narrative identity theory is uniquely poised to address the latter.

Australian philosopher Catriona MacKenzie is concerned with self-definition, or how we define ourselves via integrating various features of our identity. What matters to us is an especially important feature, and honing in on it requires that we imagine who we might be in different scenarios. She also emphasizes that self-definition is deeply shaped by our social and political contexts. When I taught a course at Pitzer College in Spring 2020 (that was a time!) called History of the Self, this was one of my students’ favorite readings!

And American philosopher Susan Brison considers how narrative can help reconstruct a sense of self in the aftermath of trauma (content warning: the video discusses sexual assault starting at 17:10). After Brison went through an unimaginable experience of self-shattering, she felt powerless and found that her relationship to her body and time were transformed. Brison gives an account of remaking the self through crafting a narrative that others take seriously, and taking issue along the way with existing philosophies of the self, such as that of John Locke.

As you read and watch the video (or listen—see audio file below), consider:

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Our culture is widely understood as self-obsessed. We take selfies and identify with our astrological signs. We spill our fears, hopes, and desires to patiently listening therapists. We self-brand in cover letters, optimize our bodies with the latest biohacks, and belabor our personal branding for social media profiles.

Given all this, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the antidote to our self-obsession is just to focus on the self less. It’s no surprise Girls star Jemima Kirke went viral for saying to young women, “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much” (I discussed this in a recent Substack Live).

But what if the problem is not that we’re too focused on ourselves, and instead that we’re focused on the self in the wrong way? We’re focused on a particular idea of the self that existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre call the ego. The ego, technically speaking, is the self as an object. The ego is the source of our pride and shame, the self that others see when they encounter us as a being in the world among other beings. It’s not quite the same as the ego in psychoanalysis, which has a more technical meaning (say, in contrast with the id and superego), nor is it reducible to the colloquial sense of ego as implying being full of oneself. Rather, the ego for Sartre is roughly what William James and his contemporaries called the me as opposed to the I. (In fact, the word ego in French is le moi.)

Pretty much everything in our society inclines us to think about the self as an object. And it’s not that we can’t, or shouldn’t, think about ourselves this way. However, the ego is not the whole truth of who we are, and we alienate ourselves from ourselves when we think of it as such. In being confused about the nature of the self, we become confused about how to live well. And so we proliferate discourses about the self that will never satisfy us. Even the solutions on offer in self-help literature encourage us to treat ourselves as objects to be scrutinized, categorized, improved, or loathed. This limits self-help’s ability to, well, help. Our constant talk of self-improvement, being our most authentic selves, and finding our true selves is masking a deep lack of awareness of who we are. And the solution is not to pay less attention to ourselves. Instead, we need to relate to ourselves in a different way.

Michel Foucault thought that something similar was going on in his culture’s endless talk of sex. The obsession with talking about sex, Foucault thought, masks a fundamental ignorance about actual pleasure. We’ve developed a sophisticated science of sex, or ways of classifying sexual practices and pathologies, at the expense of an art of the erotic.

I think we can understand the proliferation of discourse about the self as comprising a science of the self, whereas we lack an art of the self. While the science of the self distances us from ourselves, the art of the self connects us. The art of the self would have to be an art of relating to ourselves. But what would such an art look like?

We can start to see its possible contours in a story the Buddha tells about two acrobats. One tells the other that the best way for them to achieve their goal of balancing on their bamboo poles is to look after each other. But the other responds that it’s actually the opposite: the best way is actually to look after themselves. The Buddha uses this as a parable for how the practice of liberation requires looking after yourself–not as a matter of self-discovery, but as a practice of recognizing the patterns of your own mind.

Just like the assistant Medakathalika said to her master:
"I will look after myself,"
so should you, monks, practice the establishment of mindfulness.
You should (also) practice the establishment of mindfulness (by saying)
"I will look after others."

Looking after oneself, one looks after others.
Looking after others, one looks after oneself.

This affirmation of looking after oneself might seem strange at first, given that the Buddha also denies the existence of the self–at least, of a certain type (the type that is lying deep within, waiting to be discovered. Stay tuned for the July 29 course reading and video lecture, which are on this topic). But this is precisely the point: that, when we practice attending to ourselves carefully, we disentangle ourselves from self-obsession, because we begin to realize there is no solid self. And that makes us better able to take care of ourselves and others.

The practice of relating to ourselves liberates us from the idea of finding ourselves. There is simply no self to be found. There is plenty to discover all the same, though. One way to begin is to reframe our goal: instead of self-knowledge, we should seek self-understanding. Understanding is gained through self-interpretation, a complex process of paying attention to our surroundings, feelings, and thoughts, and reflecting on their possible causes.

Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne offers a key framework here. No one took the art of the self more seriously (while also not taking himself too seriously). The inventor of the essay, which literally means ‘attempt’ in French, Montaigne was constantly attempting to understand himself in relation to his world. His essays are filled with explorations of his beliefs, relationships, and even his experience of kidney stones and erectile dysfunction. For Montaigne, the entire spectrum of human life was worthy of philosophical analysis. Most of all, what Montaigne shows is how this analysis can be an art of self-relating rather than a science of the self. He advocates self-interpretation not as a practice of reason, but as a practice of experience.

What Montaigne advocates bears an important resemblance to the mindfulness practice the Buddha advocates, which can also be understood as an art of self-relating. Mindfulness is a meditative practice of cultivating careful attention to the arising and passing away of experience at all levels.1 It fosters the precise opposite of self-obsession, because it reveals that there is no stable self underlying experience. Thus, we could perhaps equally call it an art of the no-self, as it provides an antidote to thinking of the self in the way that we usually do (that is, as an object). The art of the self is an unraveling of self-obsession. While the science of the self constrains us, this art makes us freer.

I see this insight everywhere in Montaigne’s writing, but no more so than in his classic essay, “Of Experience.” I assigned this text as part of the course and made a video lecture contrasting it with Descartes’ Meditations because I think it offers an unparalleled picture of the art of relating to ourselves. At first glance, it might seem that Montaigne is obsessed with himself. After all, he says he studies himself more than anything else.

But studying himself, it turns out, reveals the multifaceted and dynamic nature of the self. Really focusing on our own experience can give us direct insight into the ever-changing nature of reality and loosen the hold of public opinion. Too often, Montaigne thinks, we just parrot things we’ve heard from other people. And we feel the need to develop opinions on all sorts of things unrelated to us (and he’s writing this hundreds of years before X). What’s the good in that when it pulls us away from attention to our own experience, and therefore also from true insight?

Reflection on our own experience is our greatest teacher.

But lest you think that Montaigne is leaning into navel-gazing, it’s worth highlighting that this and his other essays equally reveal just how our experience is interwoven with the perspectives and opinions of others. The “experience I have of myself” teaches me in large part because it is already shaped by my social relations: I might notice an inner voice is that of a teacher or parent or friend (or, more common today, that of an influencer or celebrity with whom I have a parasocial relationship). “Our opinions are grafted on one another,” Montaigne writes, and they don’t come out of a vacuum. So even what might appear to be navel-gazing is also a way of paying attention to the world.

This art of the self provides an antidote to the idea that we need to craft a singular coherent self. That idea is encouraged by capitalism: you need to have a personal brand that is the same across all contexts. Mark Zuckerberg has stated that the rise of social media has led to the end of “the days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know.” He praised this change, saying that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

I’ll take what Zuck says about integrity with more than a grain of salt, but one thing worth noting here is that he’s identifying different images of the self with identities. He’s treating the ego as the whole truth of who we are. (In existentialism, this is a mistake because it overlooks that we are not just objects but also subjects, as you’ll recall from the Existential Self video). This expectation that we have a single identity rooted in the image we promote on corporate social media platforms actually drives a lack of integrity, I think. It leads us to neglect the art of relating to ourselves by narrowing our focus to the image-creation of the ego.

For all lecture videos and readings associated with the Identity and Selfhood course, please consider a paid subscription! Low-income and student learner discounts are available on my homepage.

G.W.F. Hegel had twentieth-century French philosophy in a chokehold. Particularly influential on this period was the so-called master-servant dialectic, which comes from Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit and asserts that self-consciousness is truly itself only in being for another consciousness. Encountering another is a dizzying and even shocking experience, resulting in what Hegel describes as a fight to the death. Luckily, through a series of twists and turns, this fight has a happy ending of sorts when each consciousness recognizes the other and each can actualize their freedom in the world.

Existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and phenomenologically-influenced psychiatrist Frantz Fanon all consider identity to be a matter of recognition in a sense, but are less optimistic than Hegel about the reciprocal recognition of freedoms. After all, social oppression, as Beauvoir and Fanon point out, often block recognition. Sartre’s famous account of “The Look” is a direct response to Hegel, as I’ve discussed elsewhere. He basically agrees with Hegel that recognition is necessary for selfhood, but thinks that Hegel’s account is overly cognitive (Sartre emphasizes the affective dimension).

This video draws together these four thinkers’ views of recognition and how it relates to our identities. You’ll see that there are some shared themes with the earlier video on the Existential Self, but here the focus is more on our social relations with others, including in situations of oppression. As you read and watch the video (or listen - audio version below!), consider:

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Who we are is not quite who we think we are. This insight is the starting point for a group of thinkers Paul Ricoeur has labeled “masters of suspicion”: Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. These three thinkers, in spite of major differences in methods, concerns, and commitments, all played crucial roles in what became known in twentieth-century as the “death of the subject.” The concepts of the subject and individual, so dear to modern philosophy, are treated by all of them as illusions that serve some purpose in collective and psychic life. For Nietzsche, the subject is a mere changeling of language. For Marx (and Engels!), the abstract individual is an artifact of capitalism. And for Freud, the ego is the projection of a surface rather than the truth of who we are.

In this lecture video, I address Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology, and Freud’s “The Ego and the Id.” I show why these thinkers have been considered contributors to the ‘death of the subject’ discourse and unpack the basic claims of these writings. Course subscribers get full access to the lecture plus readings.

As you read and watch the lecture (or listen! see below), consider:

• Does decentering subjectivity amount to eliminating it, or merely give it a new status? If so, what might that status be?

• How does the reactive feeling of ressentiment shape the idea of the self, and relate to what Nietzsche calls slave morality?

• How does capitalism construct the reality and myth of the individual?

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How do our expectations for what we can achieve shape our feelings about ourselves? How do the opinions of others, whether we know them well or not, form part of who we are? And are you defined by what’s in your bank account?

American philosopher and psychologist William James answers these questions and more in his account of the self in the Principles of Psychology. James, well-known along with his novelist brother Henry for a stream of consciousness approach to our psychological life, argues that the self is multilayered. From the most superficial (your material possessions) to the deepest (your values and feelings about yourself), the self has a variety of constituents that James separates into four distinct types. Undergirding the other three is what James calls the pure ego.

Enjoy reading James’s chapter, which has some whimsical—or cringe, depending—takes on yachts and land and sciousness (you’ll soon get what that is)!

As you read and watch the video (or listen—see audio file below), consider:

• to what extent is the social self determinative of who we are, especially when we consider that we have very many social selves?

• how do you understand what James means by the pure ego, or the I of the self (as opposed to the me)?

• do you think his account of the material self is so determined by his bourgeois landowning context that it’s worth rejecting, or do you just think his examples are reflections of his own social standing but we could equally replace them with others and have the idea be just as valid?

• what do you think of James’s formula for self-esteem?

• how should we hierarchically order our various selves, and what does it mean to do so?

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From 2023-2025, I was deep in the weeds writing my book, an academic monograph called Self-Relation: A Phenomenology of Ambiguity. I revised it in 2026 based on helpful anonymous peer reviews, and it’s set for publication in May 2027 (!). The basic idea is that the self is characterized by relating to itself, and this means that the self has a strange sort of identity relative to other things in the world. I draw on existential phenomenology, especially the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to make the argument. Along the way, I offer novel readings of key themes in phenomenology, including anxiety, self-objectification, freedom, bad faith, and responsibility, and argue that ambiguity is a better way of thinking about the self than either unity or multiplicity.

TBH the primary audience for the project is definitely academic, so there is a good amount of jargon and other scholarly shortcuts. However, I also did my best to make it engaging and accessible for those not already steeped in existential phenomenology. And I thought it might be fun to share an excerpt from it as part of the Identity and Selfhood course here on Substack, as a kind of pairing with last week’s lecture video on existential selfhood.

Here’s the table of contents:

Below is a portion of the Introduction.

Introduction

“We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers,” Nietzsche writes.[i] Sustained by a dynamic, teeming world, we exist initially and for the most part without explicit awareness of ourselves. At the same time, nothing is more familiar to us than we are. We are constantly in relation to ourselves. Selves, we might say in a riff on Heidegger, are the beings for whom our being is an issue. From the sheer reflexivity of conscious awareness, to the reflective stance we sometimes adopt, to the self-presentations we fashion or bear in different social contexts, selves are self-relating. This book is an attempt to give an account of this relational self.

Established patterns of thinking lead us to conceptually unmoor the self from its relations, and to think of it as an independent entity or individual. Some historians of ideas think this view of the self emerges only in certain times and places, such as the European Renaissance or Enlightenment.[ii] If that is the case, then we might envision overcoming this concept of the self by providing arguments against it that either usher in a new age of understanding the self differently, or that overcome the idea of the self altogether. Yet it may be that the patterns of thinking that lead us to conceive of the self as independent of its relations are not so easy to dismiss; they might be rooted in the structure of reflective thought. If reflection is thinking thematizing itself, then this act brings about a distinction between itself as subject of consciousness (the thematizer) and itself as object of consciousness (the thematized). From here we are a mere hop away from treating the latter as an underlying substance that bears the capacity to think as a property, although such a view may show up in very different ways in different time periods and geographical areas. When self-consciousness grasps itself in the act of reflection, it recognizes itself as having already been there; this leads us to think that there must have been some thing there all along, making experience possible. As Dieter Henrich puts it, self-consciousness has a tendency to move from reflecting to understanding itself as a being capable of reflection.[iii] And we tend to conceive of this being as a singular entity persisting over time, throughout the lifespan: not reducible to the body, but rather associated with the ‘mind’, whether thought of in terms of personality, commitments, an eternal soul, or whatever appears to reflective thought. In phenomenological terms, we might say that this conception of the self is furnished by what Husserl calls the natural attitude, or the tendency to take the world as mind-independent reality.

Philosophers commonly question this naive attitude toward the self. Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch point out that “No tradition has ever claimed to discover an independent, fixed, or unitary self within the world of experience.”[iv] Rather, “all of the reflective traditions in human history—philosophy, science, psychoanalysis, religion, meditation—have challenged the naive sense of self.”[v] That is, despite immense geographical, cultural, and historical variations with respect to the sense of self, no philosopher ever really believed in a unitary self, upon careful consideration; this sense of self is rather the naive notion with which thinking furnishes us. We discover this naive notion in the act of reflection, but further reflection (reflection of the kind that the traditions above, in their manifold ways, foster) reveals its inadequacy. From Hume’s skepticism about the self to the Buddhist teaching of anatta to Fichte’s claim that the I is pure activity and therefore cannot be considered a singular thing, we find philosophers rejecting the notion of a singular self. It is a fiction to think that such a naive belief ever held sway in philosophy, though it is true that few have effectively overcome it.

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What does Kierkegaard, writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, mean by describing the self as a relation that relates to itself? Why does Heidegger insist on using the term Dasein rather than writing about subjectivity? What does Sartre’s claim that “existence precedes essence” mean for a theory of the self? This video investigates existentialist themes in these three thinkers’ approaches to the self and identity. I touch on self-relation (the topic of my upcoming book on existential phenomenology), nothingness, anxiety, and authenticity. The unifying theme throughout these thinkers’ approaches to the self is the idea that the self is both situated and free.

The readings this week are challenging, and I discuss them in chronological order—which means, in this case, from hardest to easiest. Feel free to reverse the order in your own reading, starting with Sartre, then moving on to Heidegger, and then reading Kierkegaard.

As you read and watch the video (or listen! see audio file below), consider:

• why does The Sickness Unto Death suggest that we despair because we are partially, but not entirely, self-created? How do you experience the tension between self-creation and being determined by surroundings in your own life?

• how does lived experience attest to the vertigo of freedom?

• why do existentialists deny human nature, and what’s at stake in saying there is still a human condition: namely, the condition of needing to take up our existence?

• how does the picture of anxiety here differ from the popular view today?

• and how does starting, as Heidegger does, from our practical engagements in the world shift the focus in studying the self relative to the more introspective approaches we’ve seen in other thinkers?

Please also see the syllabus, linked below, for suggested additional materials (I’ve done a few videos on different aspects of these thinkers’ work I’ve included in the suggestions in case you want to go deeper)!

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When people are looking for a work of philosophy that can provide solace and a space for reflection on personal challenges, there are a few books I recommend: Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, Boethius’s The Consolations of Philosophy, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker. The latter takes the form of a series of ten chapters, called “Walks,” in which Rousseau reflects on the challenges of old age and the isolation he experiences after his painful exile from his home in Geneva. Written in the two of years before his death in 1778, the book offers an engaging set of musings on philosophy in relation to everyday life. Even though Rousseau is giving major sadboy energy throughout, this book somehow always lifts my spirits, since my first time reading it as a heartbroken undergrad sitting under the dogwood trees on my campus in Connecticut. It’s a kind of fever dream for the lonely dreaming of finding salvation by floating, like Rousseau does, in a boat on the middle of a lake.

I’ve decided to pair Walks 1-3 of this book with Charles Taylor’s chapter on Rousseau in The Sources of the Self, highlighting how Rousseau’s practice of withdrawing into himself relates to the romantic idea of seeking an inner voice of nature untouched by society.

As you read the text and watch the video (or listen to it as an audio file—see below!), consider:

• How does Rousseau’s withdrawal into himself counteract and/or increase his isolation? Do you think this withdrawal is just a way of responding to his own particular sad circumstances by seeking comfort in solitude, or do you think it has broader applicability?

• How does the idea that the self is misunderstood in society but peaceful in nature function in this text?

• In the Third Walk, Rousseau describes undertaking the isolated practice of meditation at age 40. This “strict self-examination” seems in some ways similar to Descartes, but in contrast, Rousseau is not aiming for certainty with this practice. He also recognizes that he can’t succeed in getting rid of all his assumptions and doubts. What is the upshot of Rousseau’s meditation?

• What are the roles of resignation and hope in this text?

• Why does Rousseau think that he should not be defined by his reputation?

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In this video, I explore what John Locke means by the identity of consciousness and how he defines the terms ‘person’ and ‘self.’ I also get into some of the criticisms Locke’s view has faced, which are also covered in the Atkins reading provided to course subscribers. It’s a bit more technical than the material I included in the main video lecture for this week, “British empiricist approaches to the self: Locke and Hume,” so that’s why it was what I chose to cut from the main video (which was already on the long side for the course!). So consider it an optional extra if you want to do a deeper dive with this week’s material.

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My first teaching job after completing my PhD was a one-year sabbatical replacement at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. I was replacing both the continental feminist philosopher in the department and the specialist in “modern philosophy” (which refers to 17th and 18th century philosophy, roughly from Descartes through Kant). One of the things that excited me most about this job is that I was teaching Philosophy and the Arts to a bunch of theatre kids—Muhlenberg has a top Theatre program. But what surprised me is that I equally enjoyed teaching Modern Philosophy, in no small part because it meant teaching Locke and Hume.

In fact, this video is longer than it’s meant to be (my lectures are usually 10-25 minutes) because I was having so much fun with this material. The full lecture ended up actually being 38 minutes, so I’m going to post the remaining material later in the week as a bonus.

What I find most interesting about these thinkers is that they are responding to a secular and increasingly scientific effort to understand the world through empirical observation, or observation by the senses. This is in contrast to approaches rooted in rationalism, such as Descartes’. And an empirical approach to the self means that we’ll have to go looking for answers about who we are in the material world around us, not by appealing to a speculative principle such as the soul.

Oh, and because I found that Locke gave me a chance to talk about Freaky Friday (the 2003 Lindsay Lohan version, specifically).

As you read the text and watch the video (or listen to it as an audio file—see below!), consider:

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What does it mean to introspect, and what do we find when we engage in this activity? Introspection, or looking within, might reveal to us thoughts, feelings, imaginings, desires, and more. Certainly, Descartes and Montaigne find those things when they investigate the landscape of their mental lives. However, Descartes asserts that none of those things are certain. The contents of our inner lives are open to doubt—and indeed, he does doubt them as part of his process of seeking indubitable knowledge in the Meditations. Montaigne would agree, but he’s much less concerned with certainty than Descartes. For Montaigne, self-study is more a matter of sensation than reason, and nothing is considered irrelevant to it. From our basic bodily functions to our reflections on the meaning of life, our identities are variegated and in flux.

This lecture video contrasts 1) Descartes’ method of discovering the self through a process of reason that whittles down experience to what cannot be doubted with 2) Montaigne’s method of discovering the self through a process of attending to sensations in their proliferation. I explain in the video why I consider these two philosophers out of chronological order, and why each of their views has an important role to play in the philosophy of selfhood.

As you watch the video (or listen to the audio—see below), consider:

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When you think about the self, you likely associate it with something inside yourself. Perhaps it’s some core that subsists beyond the fluctuations of your body and its appearance in different contexts, or some felt sense of being alive, or an inner moral compass or capacity to reason. In this video, I follow philosopher Charles Taylor in tracing the origins of inwardness through Plato and Augustine’s accounts of reason and the soul, and put his account in dialogue with the Katha Upanishad, which introduces an idea of the atman as beyond the senses or even reason.

As you watch the video (or listen to the audio if you prefer—see below) and read the texts, consider the following:

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• why the question of identity is an important one in philosophy

• how capitalism and social media drive us toward an interest in the self

• what you can expect to learn in this course

• why I’m interested in this topic both personally and professionally

All materials for the course will be available here on Substack; for an immediate overview of the syllabus and the weekly schedule, see the reading list here.

The course will run with a weekly release of a video or occasional other material. For this course, I’m additionally offering the lectures in audio form in case you’d prefer to listen instead of watch, or if you’d like to watch, and then listen at a later date, or some variation of this! The audio version will be at the bottom of the posts.

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