The Necessary Fiction of Selfhood
Hobbes, Freud, and Callard on Adulthood
Mystics are fond of asserting that all distinctions are illusory. Not only is there no self, but there is no boundary between self and other. Selfhood is a fiction produced by the ego. But the ego is just a wobbly jockey trying to keep hold of the reigns atop the unruly elephant of everythingness.
Edge cases bear the mystic out: children, the mad, the neurodivergent, psychedelic trippers, ascetics and dervishes are not—or cannot be—socialized into the fiction of selfhood and so live with more porous boundaries (for better and for worse). And it’s not just mystics. Academic sociologists also take a holistic view of things, thus loosening their (intellectual) attachment to selfhood. From Fichte and Hegel to Freud and Foucault, it’s fashionable to say that subjectivity is an effect of a process that precedes it. Subject-hood isn’t the starting point, but “the middle of the journey.” In Heideggerian parlance, selfhood is something into which we are thrown. By what? you might ask. By Being, of course. But that only begs the question.
Noting that the boundaries of the self are acquired rather than innate, Agnes Callard offers a compelling critique of Hobbes in a podcast interview with Ezra Klein. She suggests the original state of nature is not one in which people are violent towards one another, but one in which most people are appalled by the violence they seemingly must inflict on others simply in the name of survival. It is a propensity for mercy rather than cruelty that leads to the creation of property and individual right—we need space from others to protect ourselves from the empathy we feel towards them. Without these boundaries we would be lost in a kind of self-sacrifice, or what Freud, citing Romain Rolland, calls “the oceanic feeling.” Yes—Callard’s point reminds me of Freud’s insight in Civilization and Its Discontents that culture is a bulwark against the sublime. Buber might say reification—the I-It relationship—protects us from the intimacy of I-Thou relations.
It’s probable that reality is more complex than any state of nature theorist can describe, with certain features of human nature like compassion or aggression following a distribution curve at the general population level, but also within one and the same person.
There is a sadness in the story that sees mysticism as something we have to outgrow, a truth whose power threatens our destruction. But there’s also consolation in it—adult behavior is adaptive, if not without side-effects. The negation of mysticism is not a negation of its truth, but a practical consequence of the vertigo it induces. And if, as mystics say, everything is one—then even the negation of mysticism and the formation of the fictive self are part of what it means to be one. Self is an illusion, but an illusion that Being itself “wants.” In Jewish theological terms: rachmana liba baei. The Merciful one desires our desire.
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