Nature of the self

Against the Platonic dualism that makes the soul a pilot lodged in the body, Thomas holds the soul to be the form of the body in the Aristotelian sense: the human being is not a soul using a body but a substantial unity, a single being whose soul is the formal principle. The self is therefore a substance, but a hylomorphic substance, not a pure spirit. The difficulty proper to Christianity, personal immortality, is resolved by making the human soul a form indeed united to the body yet subsistent, capable of operations (intellection) that do not depend on an organ, and thus able to survive death while awaiting the resurrection.

Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 75-76

The Platonic self is a substance (a reality subsisting in itself, the permanent bearer of identity): the soul is a simple, immaterial and immortal reality, distinct from the body and akin to the Forms. It constitutes the person's true identity, the body being only a provisional garment from which it separates at death.

Plato, Phaedo, 78b-80b, the simplicity of the soul · Plato, Republic, 611b-612a

If bodies are passive, made of inert ideas, then that which perceives and wills must be of a wholly different nature: an active, simple and indivisible substance, which Berkeley calls spirit or soul. The self is therefore not one idea among ideas but that which has them and acts upon them, known not by perception but by a notion we have of our own activity. Here is a sharp break with Hume, who in introspection will find only a bundle of perceptions with no subject: for Berkeley, to remove the perceiving subject would be to remove that without which no idea would exist at all. The self as substance is saved at the very point where matter as substance is denied.

Principles of Human Knowledge, §§2, 27 and 139-142 · Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, III

The self is thought as a substance or a simple thing, not as a bundle of impressions: Descartes defines the subject as a thinking thing (res cogitans), a substance whose whole essence is to think, and Leibniz makes the soul a monad, a simple indivisible substance. The substantialist position is clearest in these two thinkers.

Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, II · Leibniz, Monadology, §§ 1-7

Marcus identifies the true self not with the body or the breath but with the ruling faculty, the intelligence that judges and governs. This rational soul, a fragment of the divine, makes him chiefly a substantialist about the self; yet his insistence on perpetual flux, where the body is a river and memory a vapour, blends in a note of impermanence close to the bundle conception.

Meditations, II, 2 · Meditations, III, 5 · Meditations, V, 11

The "I think" of transcendental apperception accompanies all my representations as the formal unity of the subject, yet Kant refuses, against the paralogisms, to infer from it a known soul-substance: the noumenal self is postulated without being an object of knowledge. The weighting thus blends a regulative substantialism with the continuity of unified consciousness, the bundle pole being excluded.

Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Deduction (B131-B135) · Critique of Pure Reason, Paralogisms of Pure Reason

The self is no fixed substance hidden behind existence: it is a task, something made through one's choices, whose unity is only the narrative unity of the project that takes it up. For Kierkegaard the self is a relation that relates to itself and must be won; for Sartre the for-itself has no given essence. Hence a conception of the self as constructed, close to narrativism.

Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death · Being and Nothingness

All consciousness is consciousness of something: it is therefore no substance, no thing-self lodged within it, but a presence to itself separated from itself by a nothingness. It is this gap, not an ego (against Descartes and Husserl), that makes the for-itself never what it is and is what it is not: the condition of its freedom and its temporality.

Being and Nothingness, Part 1, ch. 1 (the for-itself is not what it is) · Being and Nothingness, Part 2 (the transcendent ego; cf. The Transcendence of the Ego)

The self is neither a substance nor a fixed essence: it is what it makes of itself through its choices and its history. In The Second Sex as in her Memoirs, the subject appears as a becoming constituted by a life-narrative, a series of projects taken up and reinterpreted, with no core given once and for all, hence a clear narrativist dominance.

The Second Sex (1949), becoming-woman · Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958)

Montaigne finds in himself no fixed substance. The self is "the sway", a flux of moods, opinions and states contradictory from one instant to the next, closer to a shifting bundle than to a stable soul. What nonetheless holds it together is no essence but, it seems, the continued writing of the Essays, which recaptures this passing in a self-portrait never closed: hence a narrative strand that tempers the sheer patchwork of the parts. For him the self is not given, it is composed in the very telling.

Essays, III, 2, "Of Repentance" and II, 1, "Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions"

The soul is not a simple, immortal substance but an aggregate of very fine atoms distributed through the body: it forms with the body and scatters at death, as atomism requires. The self thus reduces to a transient material composition, which corresponds to a bundle theory rather than to a substantial subject.

Letter to Herodotus, 63-68 (the corporeal nature of the soul) · Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, III, 417-829 (the material, mortal soul)

The mind (animus, the seat of thought) and the vital breath (anima, spread through the whole body) are not a simple or immortal substance but a compound of very small, very mobile atoms mingled with the flesh. Born with the body, this bundle comes apart when the assemblage breaks up: the self has no identity beyond its material composition, and there can be no transmigration. Lucretius adds an argument of his own: even were our atoms to gather again after ages, it would not be us, for the thread of memory would be severed. This is a bundle theory.

On the Nature of Things, III, 94-322 (animus and anima, the nature of the soul) · On the Nature of Things, III, 843-861 (were our atoms to reassemble, it would no longer be us)

The butterfly dream undoes the assurance of a stable self: on waking, Zhuangzi no longer knows whether he is the man who dreamed the butterfly or the butterfly dreaming the man. The "self" is not a substance enduring beneath change, but a provisional knot in the flux of transformations, a boundary that one must "forget" (wuwo) so as to merge into the course of things. This dissolution of the substantial self, close to a bundle of states without a bearer, echoes Buddhist anatta even before any contact between the two traditions.

Zhuangzi, ch. 2 (the butterfly dream) · Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (sitting in forgetfulness)

For Nietzsche the unified "self" is a fiction: the subject is only a multiplicity of drives in struggle, a society of instincts whose apparent unity results from a provisional command. This dissolution of the substantial ego brings his psychology close to a bundle theory, inferred from his analyses rather than professed under that name.

Beyond Good and Evil, §12 and §19 · Posthumous Fragments, 1885, 40[42]

Individuality holds only by the principium individuationis, the space and time that parcel the single will into a multitude of separate beings; the soul-substance is a fiction. What is indestructible in us is therefore not the person, doomed to come undone, but the impersonal will that ran through it.

The World as Will and Representation, vol. II, ch. 41

From his rejection of intuition Peirce draws a radical consequence about the self: there is no immediate self-consciousness, the self is a late inference, which the child constructs to account for its errors and the ignorance others reveal to it. Above all, since all thought is sign, man himself is a sign: what I am unfolds in the semiotic fabric of my thoughts referring to other thoughts, with no substantial core beneath the flux. We are far from Descartes's thinking thing; the position leans toward the bundle, but a bundle reinterpreted in terms of signs rather than pure perceptions.

Some Consequences of Four Incapacities (1868)