​Chapter 9. Self

Freedom is an act occurring through a being and not exhausted by its conditions. Through what? "The act occurs through a being" sets a being on the near side of the act, and every language we could write this in slips an I in front of the verb. I act. I strip the residue. The act seems to need someone it belongs to, and that someone looks like a self standing behind the doing, authoring it. We found own-being nowhere. The self cannot be the one place it was hiding. So the audit runs once more, on the hardest case: the one conducting the audit.

The self the tradition hands over is a core that persists under its states, the thing that has the experiences, atman. Put it through chapter one's test. We never meet the self apart from a state of it. Look for the seer behind the seeing and you find more seeing; look for the wanter under the want and you find the want. Hume said that already: when he entered most intimately into what he called himself he always stumbled on a perception, never caught himself without one. The self fails both criteria the way the heat of fire failed them. Unproduced it is not, since it thickens across a biography. Non-dependent it is not, since it is never given except leaning on a state. The search returns relations, the way it did for the walker and the seer. No self shows up.

Buddhism drew the conclusion first. Anatman: no self, only the five aggregates (form, feeling, perception, formation, and consciousness), a bundling that bundles no one. The self is the root of grasping, the error from which all clinging follows; see through it and the clinging has nothing left to hold. The finding we keep without reservation, as we kept Nagarjuna's: no self-substance, nowhere, not behind the seeing, not under the bundle. The reading we decline is the one we already declined for sunyata, that the vacancy means dissolution. The Buddhist finds no self and reads release. We find no self and read will.

There is a reason the search comes back empty, and it cuts deeper than the Buddhist drew it. The self is the act of searching for the self. Every move to catch the self is the self moving. So the self is the finding, and it never turns up among the things found, which is the plainest reason there is for an empty search.

This is what consciousness is, with the word read strictly. The act points at itself, and the pointing is another act, open to being pointed at in its turn, with nothing closing the series. The will takes its last gesture as an object, strips it, names it, and that taking is a fresh act, and a further taking can make an object of it, and so on without end. There is no top step, no final standpoint the rest is surveyed from, since any standpoint reached is one more act with another above it. Consciousness is this recursion of self-pointing that never lands on a thing. Read as a thing that recurses, it installs a nature, a recursion-engine humming under the acts. It is the trace of the self-search read backward, the bookkeeping for a series of acts, with no machine beneath it, the same convention allowed for "capacity" and "will." The recursion names why the self cannot be caught. The Black Flame names it self-closure, the acausal turning the self on itself.

The self turning on itself is the causa sui set at the opposite pole. There the self-relation closed into a loop, the answer that never varies, the sealed and steadiest residue. Here the self-relation never closes. The closing is capture. The open recursion is freedom, the will staying live because the search for it finds only more searching.

This is the shape the old trilemma could not list. Agrippa sorted every dependence three ways; the circle and the foundation folded into the one figure, the causa sui that grounds itself and seals. Each was a way of answering what holds a thing up: defer the answer forever, close the chain into a ring, or stop at a self-standing point. The open recursion answers nothing of the kind. It is the ring that turns and never closes, the self-relation that grounds nothing and asks no ground. The trilemma had no slot for it, since every term in it is a way of holding a ground or refusing one, and freedom neither holds one nor leans on one. It owes its operation to nothing, whatever occasioned its start, and a self-turning that seeks no floor was the one shape the grounding-frame could not register.

Set aside first what the self is not, because two candidates rush the vacancy and both are the old error coming back.

The first is the personality. Character, temperament, the remembered arc, the catalogue of what I have always been like. But this is residue, the deposit of acts settled into a track, and we already disqualified it. Freedom was the act against the grain of the settled pattern, the reasoning creature reasoning badly on purpose. If the self were the personality, the free act would be the self moving against itself, which makes freedom into self-destruction and explains nothing. The personality is what the free act cuts across.

The second candidate hides better. Grant that the self is not the personality. Then it is the one who strips the personality, the agent behind the disidentification. Campbell gave this candidate its strongest form. Against Kant, who set freedom behind a partition no experience can reach, he held it in the operation: the self rising above its own formed character in the act of moral effort, a lift the settled character did not contain. He put freedom in the same place we do, in the act that breaks the grain, with no floor posited beneath it. What he kept back is a self that does the rising, an agent named as the cause of its own effort. This sounds like what we want: a self defined by no content at all, only by its power to negate content. A power to negate is a standing feature, and we already refused standing features the name of freedom. We do not now hand the self a stripping-faculty because the self is the case we happen to care about.

So the self is neither the residue that gets stripped nor a core standing behind. What is left is the stripping. Not a thing that strips. The self is the act of disidentification, and will is the name that act carries from inside. From outside, naturelessness shows as the absence of a settled answer, the response the residue did not lay down. From inside, that same absence is will: what you are in the moment you have nothing. The I is not what stays found when the search reaches a core, because the search reaches none. The I is what stays able to strip every core the search turns up. Will is before personality, and personality is the residue will leaves behind and then takes for its source.

And the objection comes home on that last clause. "Stays able" is a capacity, a capacity is a svabhava — so the self just relocated into the act is own-being after all, hiding in the verb where it could no longer hide in the noun. The reply is that no ability sits in the being between the acts of stripping. We read "able" backward off the strippings that happened and write it into the present. The capacity is the conventional truth, the grammar of a pattern, with no faculty beneath it. Strictly there is no power of negation and no self that keeps one in reserve. There is stripping, and again stripping, and "the one who can strip" is the name tallied afterward. The formula holds only as a convention.

This turns over the order we assume. We take the person to come first and the deeds to follow from it. Reverse it, the way we reversed nature and behavior. The acts come first; they settle; the settled deposit is the "person"; and the person, once laid down, issues more acts by inertia and gets credited as their author. Nietzsche put the grammar on trial: no doer behind the deed, the doer added to the deed afterward, a fiction doubled in by habit and language. Lichtenberg said we should say "it thinks" the way we say "it lightnings," and quit slipping an I under the verb where none was given. We will go on saying "I will," because the language has no other gear, but it is the noun tallied after the fact, the same convenience we allowed for "capacity." Strictly: the stripping happens, and I is what gets written in the ledger once it is done.

Now the objection waiting since the word self first appeared. With no nature, what makes one self this self and not another? A nature at least individuates. Lily is human, Lily is this temperament, and the bundle of properties marks her off; strip all of it and selves should blur into a single empty will wearing many faces.

Schopenhauer took that picture for the truth. The will is the thing-in-itself, one and undivided; individuation belongs only to the appearance, to space and time, the principium individuationis, a veil drawn over a unity. Lift the veil and one Will stands under every face. And being one, with nothing in it to set this striving off from that, it has to be blind — a will with no inner articulation carries no aim, knows nothing, answers to no one, only surges. The blindness is the cost of putting all individuation in the bundle and leaving the will featureless. Concede that essence is the only individuator and the will left over comes out sightless. From there the rest is forced: compassion, from recognizing the one will in the other through the torn veil, and resignation, the denial of the will-to-live, as the only door out. It is the Buddhist exit reached from the far end and the same word at the close: let go.

Essential individuation is the weak kind. Two beings of the same nature are indistinguishable without accidents; sameness of essence pushes toward merger and tells two things apart only by what happens to cling to them. Individuation by act runs the other way. A signature is not this person's because of what the hand is, it is because of how the hand moves, and no second hand repeats the movement. The handwriting individuates with no essence beneath it, and does that harder, for an essence can be shared across a kind and a gesture cannot.

If the self is the act, and the act does not persist (we set the act before time, with only its residue laid down as before and after), then what holds me the same self from yesterday to today? Not a substance; there is none. Not memory; memory is residue, the very thing that gets stripped. Not the body; the body is the carrier, the nearest residue. Something grips the self as this self without saying what it is, holds it as one across the gap no nature reaches. That something is the name, and we will get to it later. Here it is enough to mark the hole and name its shape: identity after nature is the name held.

Return to the question. Who is free? No one, if by who we mean a self-substance standing behind the act. Nothing is back there. And the act is still someone's, his, readable as his once it is done, the deviation that breaks the pattern and is recognizably the break this will made and no other. The self does not author freedom; the self is freedom's name from inside.

This is the spark the tradition kept reaching for and kept mislocating, calling it a soul, a divine essence, a fragment of god lodged in the creature, always a thing, a nature, one more own-being to be refined or saved. It is natureless, which is why nothing in the world produced it and nothing can hold it. What a being has least, it is. The will is the divine because it is no-thing.