Unity of the Self

It is a relatively uncontentious thesis that consciousness is, at least experienced as, a simple and unified thing. I want to argue that the embodied self has a unity, as well. This unity is not a factual unity but an ideal unity, that is, to be more fully a self one must be more fully a union.

The self is composed of a variety of aspects. The physical, the mental, and the social are the three we have been focusing on. These three aspects should each form a unity in themselves, and should be united with each other to form a self. We do better or worse as each of these and all of these together form a more unified whole.

For the physical aspect to be unified requires merely maintenance of bodily order. The bodily processes which maintain our physical life need to continue to work together and thereby succeed in maintaining our bodily presence. When the body breaks down, our ability to be as we have otherwise constituted ourselves breaks down. We can no longer fulfill the roles which we have taken on, because our bodies no longer enable us to perform the necessary tasks.

For the mental aspect of our lives to be unified requires that our beliefs hold together. I understand this broadly to require not only our explicit claims, but also those claims which we implicitly show ourselves to believe by how we act. Some beliefs we will state, other beliefs we will act on the basis of, and to be a unified self, these two sorts of beliefs need to avoid conflict. Our emotions and our beliefs also need to fit together. Now, just as we are rarely perfectly healthy, I doubt any mere mortal has ever attained perfect unity of mental life, either. Nevertheless, at the other extreme, that of breakdown, we would lose the ability to make sense of our own actions. The better we unify our mental lives, the more we will be able to regulate our own behavior, the more we will do what we say we want to do. Mental unity is not the only constrain on what we should claim, of course, or, to the extent that it is, we must notice that our perceptions and beliefs about rationality are among the constraints. Sometimes, it will be clear that we should not drop a claim simply because we have not found ourselves acting by it, but should seek means of altering our behavior, of training our desires and habits to track what we claim is true.

For the social aspect of our lives to be unified involves the roles we take up, the groups we find ourselves in, the responsibilities we accept, and the images we project of ourselves fitting together. We should not have roles which must conflict, or different groups we are in which pit us against ourselves, or sets of responsibilities which exclude their mutual fulfillment. The images we give of ourselves should not conflict, although they may provide quite different pictures of ourselves. Further, our images of ourselves should not conflict with the roles and responsibilities we have accepted. The groups we are part of should aid, rather than hinder, the roles and responsibilities we are to fulfill.

For all three of these to be unified with each other requires that our beliefs, desires, and actions should fit our roles, images, and group memberships, and that both of these should fit with what our bodies enable us to do and to be. Our group memberships and roles are constrained by what our bodies can do and the beliefs we hold. The beliefs we can hold are constrained by our bodily context and social milieu, our bodily capacities are affected by the groups we participate in, the roles we perform, and our beliefs and desires. Even where different aspects of ourselves are compatible, differences may nuance the manner in which we fulfill a role or think about a topic or care for our bodies.

We can seek to approximate a perfect unity of the self, but approximation is as good as we can hope for in this life. Further, in light of eternity, some elements of self may become less important, able to wait for the perfection to come. It is useful to keep in mind that much of these efforts at unification depend on contingent factors: sickness, intellectual acumen, social intelligence, not to mention the contingencies of the physical, intellectual, and social world one finds oneself in, can all hinder or help one in forming a unity of oneself. Thus, the ethics which this presents is not that one ought to be unified, but that one ought to be working in that direction in a manner appropriate to it.