January 11, 2026
By Stephen Stofka
An infant rests in the crook of his mother’s arm and gazes at her face. The infant may have been separated physically at birth from his mother, but the infant knows no boundaries of self. Fast forward a number of decades. When a parent dies, a child learns that the property of the dead parent forms a new self, a legal entity, that can be party to a contract. This new agent, called an estate, is even given an identification number (Source). This week I want to explore the space between self and non-self. What do we mean by self? I will leave a discussion of Atman, and other mystical variations, for another day.
At first glance, the idea of self seems rather binary. There’s Me and everything else which is not Me, the rest of the universe. But our lives are lived by degrees. We may not feel like the same person we were ten years ago, but our identity remains the same. A person may excuse their behavior by saying they weren’t themselves when they did such and such. Is Me the identity that began on the day of my birth? Does that Me end on the day of my death? That identity is objective. It was recognized by others even when I was lying in my crib and unaware of my identity. I could be lying in a coma in a hospital oblivious of my identity but that identity would persist.
Or is Me the person that experiences change, that acquires and loses abilities and characteristics? That is the subjective perspective. Perhaps Me includes both of these aspects, the objective identity and the subjective experience. As we reach our teenage years we experience an awareness of our presentation to those around us. Integrating this subjective awareness of the objective aspect of ourselves can be emotionally painful.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle built a metaphysics of a unified self experiencing change. He was a nature guy, a philosopher who speculated that things and people in the world behaved the way they did because they wanted to realize their nature. This sense of purpose, called teleology, was the central foundation of Aristotle’s thinking. He thought there was a universal form, an essence that directed a person toward a purpose. Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, had thought the essence lived somewhere in the heavens. Aristotle taught that it was within us. Of course, I wouldn’t trust Aristotle to diagnose a problem with my car but they didn’t have cars back in ancient Greece when Aristotle lived.
If I fast forward in my time machine to the late 19th century, I would get a more mechanistic view from the psychologist Sigmund Freud. He thought that if there was any unity of self, it was a fragile union, a lull in an internal battle between the id and superego. The id was our primitive drive for pleasure. The superego was a collection of societal and parental norms that we had internalized. Negotiating the conflict was the ego, who was like a person walking an ill behaved dog (the id) that constantly yanks on the leash (the superego). Aristotle thought that we expanded our sense of self outward to family, friends and our local community. Freud imagined that we internalized our family and society, that we struggled to incorporate their ideals, commands and prohibitions. Somewhere in the space between these very different views of the self we can develop our own sense of what the self is.
The other axis I want to explore is care. Adam Smith was an 18th century philosopher and economist who noted that we care the most about those who are closest to us. We would be more upset by the loss of our own fingertip than we would if a million people in China died in an earthquake. It’s as though caring behaved like gravity, a caring force that grows weaker as the distance between two people increases. Smith wrote a century before Charles Darwin but we can understand how this mechanics of caring helps guarantee our survival. Charities recognize this force in their outreach to the public, and try to bring us closer to the plight of those in far off countries.
We care about ourselves a great deal and this helps our survival. People who are at risk for suicide may have a diminished sense of self-care. Some of us have a grandiose sense of our importance to others, lack empathy for others and seek admiration to reinforce our sense of our own importance (Source). This condition is called narcissistic personality disorder, and yes, it has its own billing code (Source).
Let’s return to that pastoral scene of mother and child. A woman experiences many hormonal changes after childbirth that can make it difficult to take care of herself while coping with the demands of a newborn (Source). Increases in the hormone chemical oxytocin help increase a sense of bonding with the infant (Source). A woman’s sense of self expands to integrate and accommodate the infant’s needs as well as her own, similar to the expansionist model of self Aristotle taught. In his philosophy, the self is directed outwards. His emphasis was on unity of self seeking to fulfill a purpose. He understood that a woman’s nature was to act as care giver and keeper of the household (Source).
Freud, on the other hand, focused on the conflict within the self. The self is not a given as in Aristotle’s metaphysics. It is built from the surrounding society, our family, friends and community. It is built through managing our instinctual urges. Given all that, it is no wonder that a parent, particularly a mother, would have a prominent role in a Freudian diagnosis. In his book Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky notes that the dominant explanation for schizophrenia until the 1970s was schizophrenogenic mothering. Yes, ladies, if your kid is a schizophrenic, it’s because you were a terrible mother. A history of such pseudoscientific quackery fosters public distrust in science, yet our modern society is ever more dependent on scientific expertise.
Does caring diminish with distance, as Adam Smith noted? Maybe so. People around the world responded when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for none minutes. Chauvin didn’t care when Floyd protested that he couldn’t breathe. The video and accounts of that incident shrunk the emotional distance between George Floyd and the public. Viewers cared. Around the world, they protested the brutal disregard of life shown in the video. Many believed that Chauvin was an example of a systemic prejudice against minorities. He was the mushroom that pokes its head out of the ground, an indication of a widespread fungal network below ground.
The spread of broadcast, cable, internet and social media has accelerated the expansion of each individual self. We become outraged at the sight of a flagrant violation of basic human rights. Internet networks have evolved to promote rage bait, content that is designed to elicit anger and outrage (Source). We see elements of both visions of the self, those of Aristotle and Freud. We are a bridge between an ancient idea that humans have a natural purpose and a more modern notion that we are a disjointed assemblage of impulses and influences. There is both unification and fragmentation. We are drawn to new experiences yet shrink from the conflict of so many different points of view. To simplify our lives, we contract and consolidate our media feed so that we consume only certain points of view. This Balkanization resists any unified vision, any common agreement of principle, of ethics, of acceptable behavior. And we ain’t seen nothing yet. Hope to see you next week.
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Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash
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