Post No. 8: A Person or a Self?

Are you a person or a self? This may sound like an inane question but it actually has interesting implications.

My name is Martin. This reminds me of a scene from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Juliet bemoans the fact that Romeo is from a different clan, the Montague’s.  She is distraught because they can’t be together because of a name. In the scene she becomes aware that all our names are simply constructs of the mind and remarks:

“Tis but thy name that is my enemy;

Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.

What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,

Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part

What's in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet”

All our names, our very vocabulary, come from the societies in which we live.

Virtually all societies confer personhood to each new human birth. The infant comes as a stranger but is immediately welcomed as a person and soon after or perhaps even before is given a name.  Sometimes societies change who they consider a person.  During slavery in the US, each slave was assigned as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of determining congressional representation. Currently there is disagreement about exactly when and whether personhood begins before birth.  I describe all of this simply to illustrate that it is society that designates each of us as a person. It actually is similar to the way a society is able to designate monetary value to a currency.  We had nothing to do with it. We came into a society that existed well before we were born.  Our current society has evolved over the ages.  We started out as small clans.  Through tool use, specialization of labor and trade, our societal groups expanded until we see the current arrangement of society into nation states.  How these states are organized and governed has changed dramatically in the last few centuries. Even ethics are a product of one's CURRENT society. Past societies have had the significantly different ethics.   I strongly believe that Democracy and free trade capitalism is the best approach.  But not all countries agree.  How nation states interact with one another is an ongoing challenge despite progress made in past decades   Hopefully, as persons in society each of us helps to make a positive contribution in one way or another during our lifetimes.

OK, we are persons in a society with a name. Yet as Juliet bemoans, it is all but a construct of society and she yearns to be able to simply enjoy Romeo as he is.  So, we are definitely persons but are we a self? It sure feels that way. It seems that the self I am now is somehow unaltered since I was ten even though there are obvious changes in my appearance, experiences, and circumstances. How can this self, that we intuitively feel to be so unchanging, not have some kind of permanent essence? Is this the place where we would find a kind of spiritual essence? I have subtly and lightly touched on this topic in previous posts and I will continue to avoid it in this post. Perhaps I will have the courage to take it on in some future post. Stay tuned.