The Self 1

The self is a manner of demarcation of private and public, or control or beyond control. It is thus an organising principle of social and physical life. The political and legal conception of the self entails the identification of the entity conferred volition,rights, responsibilities, obligations, and liability. The modern conception of the self is of an autonomous individual human. This is the starting point of the allocation of the roles and responsibilities of the individual agent in modern capitalist life. This conception of the self is a social construct. However, such a model which organises social life, as well as the person's subjective conception of their role and agency in the world, is not a coherent conception of subjective experience. It has shoehorned an inconsistent subjective experience of being into alignment with a social organizing principle, thus distorting the interpretation of subjective expetience. From a phenomenological point of view, the world is a series of interacting drives. By drives I mean forces with a life of their own. By forces I mean any object, or mental state which is irreducible to another in the sense of containing the causal potential to change a physical or mental fact of the world from one to another over a period of time. What is deemed "internal" is no less a perceived fact, albeit one that is perceived in privacy and in the immediacy of one's perception. The reaction to perceived mental facts are also perceived mental facts. What is termed the self is just the subject to which the perceived fact of drives which are private in nature are attributed. However properly speaking these drives are just equally things out there beyond one's control. There isn't anything beyond perception of drives. From a practical standpoint, this means that life is just about the harmonisation of drives. There is no distinction between what is self and not self because the objective of the self which reaches over the whole of the experience of drives, whether or not private or public, or in one's control or not, that is, whether "internal" or "external", is to harmonize such drives. The private or public nature of the drives, or whether they are within our "control", has no bearing on whether these relate to the self as phenomenologically conceived. There is no especial urgency to exercise the "internal" drives over the "external" drives as they react with each other. This is because there is (absent an internalised social construct of the self) no particular identity or thing for the drives to attach, internal or external. The construct of the individual concerns agency. Agency is the creation of objective responsibility over the mediation of the "internal" and "external" drives. This presupposes a theory of agency, that is, that one thing is a representative of another thing in a given context of a relationship between things. In a modern social context, one is a representative of one's "internal" drives across many attributive social contexts. This construct arose relationally and comparatively as one is placed in relationships that required the attribution of private drives to that person who has sole access to them. The comparison of drives across certain specific types of transactions and relationships gives rise to the attribution of those drives to an entity which is "me" (as defined by the other person) and "not me", as defined by myself. This correspondence of cross-definition, based on comparative privacy, and which allows for mutual communication, defines the self-understanding of the Self. However, this is not the original pre-social conception. The relationship with people is not the relationship of things or drives, and should not be conflated. The Self is therefore constructed out of the series and patterns of transactions to which the society puts the overall phenomenological economy of drives, within the framework of drives that are distinguished by privacy and control. The Self as social construct thereupon provides an organising principle to structure the drives. What is attributed to, and represented by the self, the capacities it adopts and what is accorded to it in society and in transactions, reinforce the self-understanding of the Self as an identity that is tied to the logic of those relationships, as a cognitive presumption. When that identity is identified with, it can itself become a source (not just a structure) of drives and forms an ontological just-so story about "me" and other. That is, what is called ego is a feedback loop between the identification of the self as object in the world and the private drives of the person. When the social object of the individual is thus created by such categorisation of drives, drives which may not be private or controlled may be attributed to that social object. For example, and individual may take on a representative capacity for collective drives, as when a director of a company acts on the behalf of a majority vote of the board of that company, or a President of a country signs an executive order. One may add the definition of control, which forms a justification of society's creation of self and the attribution of representative capacities to the self.