THE EGO (1)

There are many varieties of the human ego. It’s as multifarious as the beetle. There are egos that flourish in every walk of life, from prima donnas to dictatorial managers, big egos, small egos, even egos that work by self-effacement and weakness. All egos are self-regarding, self-promoting and in extreme cases narcissistic; they are all number one for themselves and all represent the fantastically effective self-preservation and self-advancement mechanisms that operate in all higher forms of life. But we are not concerned with the general run of egos here. What interests us here is a particular kind of ego: not the common or garden ego, but the rational or scientific ego. The scientific method is one of the most powerful intellectual tools ever invented by the human mind and we are not interested in discrediting it in any way. It is purely disinterested and objective. The scientific ego however is a different matter, because the alliance of the scientific method and an ego-agenda is generally an abuse of science for the personal self-aggrandizement of the individual ego in question and tends in the direction of totalitarianism. It is all the more pernicious as it is an abuse, for what are ultimately purely personal reasons, of the only remaining cultural authority left to human beings.

A Little History

The rational ego has been around for as long as people have used argument to account for the world and to convince others of their beliefs. But it is probably with the Ancient Greeks that it first came to historical prominence, probably with the Athenian Sophists. The famous dictum of Protagoras ‘man is the measure of all things’ by which he clearly meant ‘I am the measure of all things’ (this being self-evidently true, in his view, for everyone who uttered it) signalled the first clear understanding of the cultural role of the normative certainty of the rational ego. It signalled this dawning conviction: that the immediate awareness of the individual consciousness, allied to a logically persuasive descriptive discourse is the sole authority in the universe. The old authorities, the gods, demons, oracles, revelations, dreams and illuminations of traditional culture had begun to leave the stage to a single strident voice that was characterised by one thing alone: a compelling method for expressing invincible self-confidence and self-belief. Protagoras and his ilk seemed to have overlooked completely the fact that it was the objective phenomenon of language with its wealth of stored insight that constituted the essence of rational authority. Just as no ego can claim credit for the creation of language, so no ego is entitled to claim privileged insight into the nature of the world. But most rational egos from Protagoras to the present do so nonetheless.

Greek culture waned, the Roman Empire arose, inheriting much that was Greek, and the ancient ego played a prominent role in the accomplishments of Classical civilisation throughout the pre-Christian history of the western world; but the growing success of monotheism in the form of Christianity injected new life into the ego and puffed it up into its present incarnation as monstrous, self-adoring, self-advertising blister of rational certitude. Many scientific egos have clearly demonstrated their understanding of their indebtedness to the monotheistic God by their fervent wish to kill him off. Once the Renaissance had performed its vital task of separating the acquisition of knowledge from the mystifications of the Church, the ego began to understand itself in the manner that achieved its clearest articulation in the philosophy of Descartes. The famous ‘I think, therefore I am’ is the most lucid statement of the ego’s determination to make its own awareness and its own criteria of clarity and distinctness into an absolutely normative set of strictures that continue to structure human knowledge to this day. These strictures boil down to this one essential principle: what strikes the ego as self-evidently convincing, such that its opposite would be a contradiction is absolutely true. Of course, for Descartes, this principle was disguised by the unabashed dependence of his philosophy upon the monotheistic deity. For Descartes, reason was the only road to knowledge. Mathematical reasoning was the gold-standard of all human reasoning and therefore mathematics became the basis of all human knowledge. However, Descartes was aware that in order for human beings to claim that their knowledge was absolutely true, rather than being merely something that humans had to believe because of their particular constitution, the basis of reasoning had to be underpinned by – and rooted in – some external authority that guarantees the applicability of human reason to the world. This authority Descartes found in the monotheistic God. His God was not exactly the God of the monotheistic religions; He was still the providential Creator of the universe, but Descartes’ God was much more the repository of all mathematical truth than the colourful deity of Judaism. For Descartes, God was the guarantee that the universe was based upon mathematical principles and the guarantee that the human intellect – made in God’s image – could grasp these principles by the application of its God-given ability in maths. Thus, for Descartes, human reasoning was absolutely normative and could not be gainsaid simply because it was underwritten by the Creator of the universe, the monotheistic deity. God was the Creator of both the Laws of Nature and the Laws of Thought by which nature was to be understood. But he had given access to these two sets of laws to human beings in the form of the ‘natural light’ of reason, which, if adhered to in strictly deductive chains of inference, would yield the kind of insight into the working of the universe that hitherto had been the prerogative of God himself and only God. For Descartes, human reason was in fact a hotline to counsels of the divine mind. The third section of his Meditations ends with a hymn of praise to the God who has thus endowed human beings with this aspect of his own divinity.

Of course, such theological thinking did not last long. The ego has never been very good at sharing its limelight with any other authority and the Enlightenment finished the off what had been started by the Greeks and the thinkers of the Renaissance. By the eighteenth century, Descartes’ underwriter God had been found to be superfluous to requirements, and human reason was pronounced to be normative in and of itself, independently of any reliance on external factors. It was triumphantly announced that what formerly had been projected upon the heavens, as anthropomorphic divine agencies, was in fact the birthright of every rational human intellect: absolute knowledge was within the grasp of human beings as long as they observed the correct method of thought. The absolute authority of the monotheistic deity was thus taken over by the rational ego; and the latter enthroned itself where the monotheistic God had so far sat: on the throne of universe-comprehending and universe-controlling omniscience. The throne was admittedly a bit on the large side; but the ego was persuaded of its own ability to grow into it. Monotheism thus revealed itself for what it was: the end-game in the process of religious evolution, by which projections had been progressively withdrawn. Monotheism was the last cultural stage before the triumphant atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and indeed, the scientific atheism of these centuries cannot be understood without a grasp of the manner in which it grew out of the monotheism of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: only the absolute ego-God with his absolute power and control could provide a worthy competitor to the rational ego. It was for this reason that the parricidal lèse majesté that dethroned God and elevated the rational ego to its lonely height had to be performed.

Inevitably, of course, the rational ego had to camouflage its god-almightiness and no individual scientific ego was so conceited as to assert that it alone was the repository of all truth (though this secret belief was nurtured by some). There were no doubt many who wished to make such an assertion, but those who tried it on were discredited by their own appearance of madness. The overweening ambitions of the ego were thus disguised and the disguise adopted by his rational, scientific majesty the ego was the pronoun ‘we’. The rational ego hid behind its scientific method and the guardian of such a method became not the individual – as it had been in Descartes’ philosophy – but rather the scientific community, the scientific 'we'. It then became de rigueur to use the pronoun ‘we’ in any account of the victories accomplished by science and by the application of reason. No rational ego would ever announce, ‘I am within a hair of understanding all the essential processes of the universe’; nor would it ever dream of claiming, ‘I am close to discovering the key that will give me absolute control over all of reality’; but such immoderate fantasies were nevertheless entertained and even articulated to some extent in the language of community. Where the mad, cackling ‘I’ of the scientific ego was taken as the hallmark of power-crazed villains of the cinema-screen, the more diffuse ‘we’ became the camouflage of the ego, slipped into performing the ego’s task and got away with it. The ego got away with hiding behind the group-identity, claiming that ‘we’ would soon have all understanding of the world at our disposal; and ‘we’ would soon solve all the problems of the world thereby. But even the ego no doubt saw through its own subterfuge. There is no corporate ‘we’ in the business of understanding that functions as some sort of gigantic ego. The ‘we’ is no more than a disguise for the individual scientific egos that wished to claim absolute validity for their particular chains of reasoning. One still hears today what wonders ‘we’ are in the process of achieving and will soon achieve by means of science; but in all cases where one hears such talk, behind the ‘we’ squats the rational ego, anxious to assert its own godlike authority. The ‘we’ is a phantom and a fiction insofar as it is deemed to show the virtues of the rational ego. How could the ego submit itself to a committee? The things that emerge from the ‘we’ – language, mathematics, science – may well result from the combined efforts of a number of rational egos, but no rational ego can claim credit for them. The creations of human groups have something extra that is not the ego’s to command or control. In short, what ‘we’ create cannot be considered to emerge from the rational ego. But that is a story for another occasion.

Now this is meant to be a bit of history. But we have to ask, what has become of the rational ego today? The mad claims of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries concerning complete certainty and final understanding have perhaps waned; and along with them have waned the madder claims concerning complete control. The supreme authoritativeness of the scientific method and purely rational criteria of understanding and decision-making have been called into question, as people have begun to see and feel the consequences of the unbridled rational intellect allied to a determination to control. The current sad state of the natural environment is the direct effect of the arrogance of the scientific ego; and people have rightly concluded that some other authority, some moral authority is needed to mitigate the ego’s crazy destruction of the planet that brought us forth and still nurtures us. But has the rational ego gone away or become less arrogant? It does not seem that it has. So this bit of history has to end on a cautionary note: unless the value-free ambition to dominate the world by purely mathematical calculations and mechanical means is restrained by some comprehension of the ethical constraints on human life on the Earth, our precious ‘we’ faces extinction. Unless the rational ego begins to understand that its rationality is merely one aspect of the total functioning of the human psyche, unless it understands that it needs supplementing by a more instinctive understanding of our place within the web of life, we, as creatures are likely to pronounce our own death-sentence. This may be a good thing, from the point of view of the non-human population of the world, but not if we take them with us. But perhaps something can be done about it, perhaps some less mendacious use of the pronoun ‘we’ can be developed that will show up the self-adoring god-almightiness of the rational ego for what it is: a delusion. We are creative, certainly, but there is no way in which the creativity of the ‘we’ can be claimed by the rational ego.

The Origins of the Ego’s Delusions.

The essence of the ego is a set of instincts sculpted by evolution and fostering our success as a species. These instincts have two main purposes: 1) the immediate satisfaction of human desire for food, sex and power and 2) the discovery of practical methods by means of which competitors are outwitted and desire-satisfaction obtained. As far as the rational ego is concerned, the desire element can be reduced to the wish for power alone; and the practical element boils down to the application of the scientific method to nature. Every living creature on the planet has evolved by the kind of arms-race that is not explained by mere ‘survival’, but rather by the need of all living systems to maximise their sphere of influence. Mere survival is defensive; power-hunger is offensive. The human ego thus evolved as a means of attack upon the rest of the biosphere, the aim of which was the biblical one of ‘domination’. The ego saw itself as empowered to dominate first by the Creator of the universe and then thereafter by its own internal dynamics alone. What is the nature of these internal dynamics?

The manner in which the ego developed is lost in the mists of history; but we can nevertheless speculate that it was the perfect combination of tool-use, social-living and language that gave the ego the most favourable conditions for its development. No doubt the dawning sense of self, facilitated by the swelling neo-cortex helped things along; but let us be in no doubt: the sense of self is not the same as the ego. The ego is not identical with the sense of self. Though quite distinct, the two are disastrously confused in our culture. The ego evolved for the achievement of control and the means of this control was the group of cognitive capacities that involved the sharp human eye for repetitive patterns (the basis of our abstracting ‘inductive logic’), the ability to decompose the objects of perception into parts (the basis of our famous powers of analysis) and the linguistic ability to name the objects of perception and their parts.

Patently, such formidable accoutrements were of enormous benefit and the world-beating edge they gave to humans is clearly seen in the development of our exploitation of the natural environment. But we need to look a little closer at these abilities and find how they function at the heart of the rational ego. This has to be done because the rational ego is in essence a result of several confusions, and dangerous ones at that.

All animals practise induction to a greater or lesser extent. Without some inductive ability to remember regularity, they would be unable to function in their environment. But such inductions are instinctive and pre-linguistic and given to breaking down when the environmental conditions change. The horseshoe crab that evolved before the birds and laid its eggs on the beach to avoid marine predators can almost be seen as a failure of induction on the evolutionary scale: the poor creature had not reckoned on the aerial predators, and still has done nothing about them. The famous case of the chicken given by Russell is a fairer example of animal induction: the farmyard pet that became used to dashing across the farmyard to be fed on hearing the tin of grain rattled failed to factor in the family lunch and ended up getting its neck wrung as a direct result of its inductive habits.

But if all animals practise induction, no species does it with the thoroughness and the comprehensiveness of the human animal. The human ability to detect similarities and differences in the environment gave to the ego a powerful engine of thought and control capable of the minutest analytical decompositions and the most detailed synthetic generalisations. It was clearly of great benefit to human beings to be able to analyse the elements of their environment into nice and nasty bits, helpful and harmful bits, tasty and toxic bits and so on; it was clearly of much greater benefit for them to be able to name these bits, to make general statements about them and to share these generalisations with the rest of their kind. But these abilities, once detached from their immediate purpose of survival, attached themselves to an omnivorous curiosity about the whole world independently of any considerations of survival; and thus the scientific ego with its urge to understand all and to control all was born. It was in this process of detachment that the confusions of the ego began to take root; and it is these confusions that are still with us today in the form of the overweening ambitions of the rational, scientific ego. It seems self-evident to the rational ego that what is effective for manipulating the environment is necessarily effective in the total understanding of reality. But in this, the ego all too often behaves like a child with a shiny new toy that is a little too sophisticated for its intelligence. Rational discourse is a stupendous creation of nature (not of the ego nor of the ‘we’); but the ego is naively convinced that its exciting complexities give it the occult ability to capture the essence of reality. A little reflection should convince anyone that this is a rash extrapolation to say the least.

The Rational Ego and its Origins

At the risk of appearing to commit some of the grosser errors committed by the reductionist fervour of the rational ego, some attempt must be made here to relate fundamental aspects of the scientific ego to evolutionary adaptations in order to show that they are far from being the absolute access to final knowledge of the cosmos that they have been cracked up to be by the rational ego. The chief purpose of these connections will be to show not only that the ego labours under many confusions, but also that the abandonment of these confusions (while retaining the benefits of rationality) can only be a positive step.
The first feature of the ego to be mentioned is its connection with the reductive mania of the thing-ideology which claims that the ultimate reality is the three-dimensional physical object. The ego, in accordance with its evolutionary past, is devoted to the decomposition of the elements of its environment into parts, and to the naming of those parts, as a precursor to controlling them. This urge to decomposition gave us the reductive method of science and the wild goose chase that is the hunt for the ‘ultimate particles’ of the universe. It was thought, in accordance with the discriminating, decomposing, reducing habits of the ego, that since the way to real understanding is by means of decomposition, there must be some point at which this decomposition stops and ultimate particles are revealed. This search for the ultimate components of whatever was being considered, provided the essential methodology of science, but it also shaped decisively the view that the human intellect began to take of itself once the theological way of viewing reality began to wane. Since the universe contained only three-dimensional things or collections of three-dimensional things, then logically, the human being, the human intellect, the human ego must ultimately be a three-dimensional thing or a collection of three-dimensional things. This subject-object confusion was the direct result of the thing obsession and it could only be maintained by means of a brain-splitting bit of self-delusion. The universe is merely a collection of things, but the scientific observer was considered to be somehow outside of the realm of things. Thus arose the distinction between subject and object. It is one of the rational ego's grossest misapprehensions to believe that there is an absolute though incomprehensible distinction between subject and object, whereas there is none. But the ego’s distinction arose from a misguided notion of objects (derived from induction) and from the realisation that it could not itself be one of those objects. Yet even today, it has not grasped that it cannot keep the dogma of the three-dimensional object and at the same time hang on to the subject. Only a complete reassessment of its own cognitive limitations will permit the ego to progress scientifically to a better understanding of itself.

The second source of confusion arose from the naming of things. Since things were named and since everything that was named was a thing, it was tacitly assumed by the rational ego that every name designated a thing, by which was meant not simply individual objects, but also classes of things. The individual object and the class to which it belonged became indistinguishable. Even advanced understanding of the nature of abstraction did not prevent this particular piece of nonsense. It was assumed, from everyday experience, that every ‘thing’ thus identified was separate, self-identical and could not simultaneously be something else; and since individual things were only instantiations or repetitions of the essential properties of classes of thing, it was also assumed from the same source that every name could be used in discourse as designating a self-identical object. Things were considered to be representatives of certain universal classes. Thus was born the fundamental law of logic, the law of non-contradiction or the law of identity. It was assumed that since names designated things and since things (as individual objects or as classes) were stable, definable entities, such names could be used in strictly logical equations almost as integers are used in arithmetic. The name thus appeared to the ego as a kind of magic spell, conferring the power of control upon the namer.

The thing-ideology and the obsession with repetition of certain patterns (also regarded as things) led to the Democritean or Laplacian delusion that the universe was simply a finite collection of things moving according to immutable laws. Within this universe, that had more to do with human nature than with the world, however, the essential phenomenology was that of repetition: classes of identical things were repetitions of a basic design, and classes of events were no more than repetitions of certain patterns of movement. It was this complex of beliefs, liberated from any notions that an ultimate lawgiver set the basic designs, that led to the crackpot, nightmarish vision of the Comte de Laplace, according to which everything would soon be known and knowledge of all future events would be a simple matter of calculation. It also led to the nightmarish vision of Nietzsche, the so-called ‘Eternal Return of the Same’ according to which nothing happened in the universe except vast cycles of repetition within which each ego was condemned not only to live its present life an infinite number of times but also to accept the conclusion that it had already lived the same life an infinite number of times already. To cut a long story short, the combination of the two confusions mentioned above led to the ideology of scientism on the one hand. This was the ideology devoted to the mapping of every separate thing in the universe and the identification of principles according to which such things operated, with a view to controlling them all. On the other hand, it led to the complete alienation of the modern ego from its world because in a universe composed of only three-dimensional things, the ego could not help but feel its position as anomalous. The rational ego still occupies this anomalous position in its own universe and moreover sticks to it fanatically without thinking for a moment that it might be mistaken. The methods it uses to understand the world are not applicable to itself and thus the very name ‘ego’ denotes something that, on the ego’s own criteria for a thing’s existence, does not exist. This state of affairs should really suggest to the ego that something is wrong with its whole approach; but the ego is impervious to such thoughts.

The feeling of its own anomalousness had two effects on the ego: on the one hand it made the ego see itself as a fragment, a kind of atom, analogous with the other atoms of the physical universe, but an atom cut off by its apparent immateriality from any intrinsic connection with them, unaccountably blown about by the winds of necessity and chance, without origins, without future, intrinsically alienated and lost, an empty, absurd identity wandering in a trackless waste of material particles, to which it had no possible relation. On the other hand, the ego, as the very essence of the instinct for self-preservation, even though alienated, yearned to protect itself in the only way that seemed possible: by the achievement of control. The ego might be a lonely anomalous, absurd soul-atom within the universe of physical atoms, but at least it could rule intellectually over those inferior, mindless material beings the things, control them and bend them to its will. Thus was born the ideology of scientific determinism and with it the ambitions of the scientific ego with respect to prediction and manipulation of natural processes. We humans could have held our mechanistic assumptions heuristically; but we didn’t: with a confusion of words and things, a confusion of epistemology and ontology quite characteristic of us, we regarded our sentences as capturing the essence of ‘the way the world is’, almost as taking the place of the world, rather than as mere descriptions of our experiences.

By taking the arguments that underpin mechanistic assumptions too seriously, the ego has become in the modern world very largely a pathological structure cut off from its universe – to which it has no relation – and obsessed only by the things that it believes constitute this universe’s essential nature. The objectivising intellect of the rational ego has no time for the complex dynamics of the subject that it views with the greatest of suspicion. The subject is, however, the elephant in the room, as far as the scientific ego and its ideologies are concerned; and the ego, recognising that the subject is beyond its powers of comprehension or control, ignores it or feigns contempt. It does this for very good reasons given the ambitions of the ego: if it took the subject seriously it would have to begin taking seriously the universal subject, i.e. God and the rational ego is still spooked by the idea of such overwhelming competition.
The ego’s prime ambition is to control any world it imagines; and this desire to control is driven by the most potent of motivators: fear. The modern ego is caught in a loop from which it cannot escape because of its intellectual habits: on the one hand it is wedded to the thing-ideology and can see the world in no other terms; on the other hand it feels alienated by that conception of reality and seeks solace and protection. This protection can only be achieved, however, with the means available to it, namely further analysis in terms of things, further mechanisms and further mechanical control – all of which further alienate the ego. This mechanical control enhances the ego’s feeling of difference from the world; and the cycle begins again on a tighter twist of the spiral. This process, that is progressively fragmenting the populations of the west into individual soul-atoms, is at the heart of the much lamented disease of ‘egoism’ and the regrettable phenomenon of ‘selfishness’ in the modern western world. We can only hope that the ever-tightening spiral of logic will lead to the rational ego’s disappearance up its own fundamental orifice.

These two fundamental aspects of modern intellectual life, fragmentation and mechanistic control, feed the modern alienated ego like a powerful drug. The modern ego is completely intoxicated by and completely addicted to fragmentation and control. The only way to break out of the latest loop is through a change in intellectual habits. This, it seems likely, can only come about through crisis. Whatever the nature of the crisis – and there is no point in speculating how it will look, though it will conceivably arise from the vice of egoism – the result has to be a burgeoning realisation on the part of the majority of human beings that as human beings they are in fact at home in the universe as a whole, integrated into its essential reality and not anomalous beings shivering on the outside. This notion of being ‘at home in the universe’ is central to the biology of complexity found in the writings of people such as Stuart Kauffman, for whom the reductive Darwinian picture of evolution, by chance mutations of DNA and selective amplification of advantageous mutations, has to be supplemented by a holistic theory that derives from the creative dynamics of whole complex natural systems. In Kauffman’s account of the origin of species, it is the dynamics of the biosphere itself and then, sub-divided, of all the subsystems in the biosphere that produce the changes in forms of life. It is not merely the amplification of the accidental effects of mutation on molecules of genetic material; it is rather the very emergent property of complexity within the biosphere as a whole that drives the process of evolution. Kauffman’s universe is a creative whole. If this is the case, then the ego with its self-obsessed concentration on the perspective of number one is already a pathological structure. It is, however, this lonely selfishness of the western ego that makes western man ‘homeless’, ‘alienated’ and neurotic. If, by contrast, the human being is in reality inextricably woven into the warp and woof of the creative web of life, then almost certainly the ego is an illusion, not to say a delusion and all the fears and distortions of the ego are concomitantly delusory.

David Bohm’s View of the Ego

The notion of the undivided totality or wholeness of man and the world is at the core of the writings of David Bohm, who as a physicist was profoundly preoccupied with the inseparability of subject and object in quantum physics. For Bohm, the delusory quality of the ego is beyond question, as are the faultiness of the thing-ideology and the philosophy of alienation. He writes: “man needs a general over-all philosophical view, which orients him in the chaos of shifting and unstable appearances that present themselves, when he focuses only on what is momentary and narrow. And I believe that my work in physics gives at least some elements of such a philosophy. For I am beginning to see that even in the apparently lifeless world of so-called “inert” matter, each thing, each particle (e.g., electron, proton, etc.) is not what it at first seems to be, i.e., a separate point in space, indifferent in its inner being to all the others, remaining always and only what it is, and interacting only externally with all the others.

"Rather each entity is continually being formed from the infinite background and falls back into the background, to be regenerated again and again (as long as it continues to exist). Thus each thing has its roots in the totality and falls back into the totality. Yet it still remains a thing having a certain degree of independent being. And this is possible because each thing contains in itself, its own special image of the totality (cosmos) out of which it formed itself, and into which it is always dissolving (and re-forming). The apparent separateness of things as we see them immediately is that each thing has a certain degree of relative indifference to the others. But this indifference does not belong to it alone. For it is the cosmos itself which determines this indifference and which also determines the limits of this indifference.

“If the above is true of the most elementary and inert kinds of things, it is much more true for the more organized things, such as living beings, man and his consciousness and society. Each man draws his being from the totality and his effects fall back into the totality. His separateness, loneliness and indifference to the others are only relative, and determined by his relation to the totality (in this case, society). Change this relation and you bring out the deeper essential relations between man and man.” (The Essential David Bohm, Ed. Lee Nichol, Routledge 2003 p. 202)

For Bohm, The essence of the ego is its confusion. The essence of the ego’s confusion is to think of itself, on the one hand, as a kind of object, comparable to other objects in being stable, enduring and capable of initiating effects, and at the same time as a mysterious subject in which the world of objects is reflected as a perpetually shifting, changing pattern. The inchoately understood difference between an object and an ego is that the ego initiates its effects in some ill-understood manner that gives them the appearance of being voluntary rather than mechanical. The ego is, however, quite able to pronounce its effects as mechanical after all, since as object it is part of the nexus of the physical world and as such governed by the laws of physics.

Nevertheless, having announced its objective, mechanical nature, the ego then abstracts itself from this nexus, by using two different words to designate itself, calling itself in those circumstances where it is determined not ‘I’, but ‘me’ and in those circumstances where it is initiating action and insight, not ‘me’, but ‘I’. So it splits itself into two parts, one of which is a determined object among objects and the other of which is an undetermined, property-less, anomalous observer. This split-off portion it calls ‘I’ and this ‘I’ has quite a different identity from the ‘me’. Where ‘me’ designates a passive object of observation, ‘I’ designates an active subject of action (including the action of observing). The ego equivocates in this identification of ‘I’ with ‘me’ and manages to talk about the undetermined ‘I’ as if it were talking about the determined ‘me’ so it manages to talk as if the ‘I’ were a mere thing, and a determined thing at that, while maintaining a mental reservation to the effect that the particular ‘I’ that is doing the talking is undetermined. This equivocation is mostly unconscious in those that practise it, but it is at the heart of all scientific conceptions of so-called ‘knowledge’ and a fortiori at the heart of all so-called ‘scientific’ knowledge of consciousness, of the self. The tensions in this ‘I-me’ duality had already been worked out by Kant and Schopenhauer, long before the scientific ego became the widespread phenomenon it is today; but the duality continues to generate confusion nonetheless.

In point of fact, psychology notwithstanding, there is no such thing as the possibility of scientific knowledge of the true subject, of consciousness which is not the ego, but the self. The only knowledge that is possible is of those structures through which the self achieves presence in the world. The ego can thus be understood because it is a determined, mechanical structure, dependent upon memory, upon the repetition of memories. The self cannot be so understood. Where no understanding of the confusion of ego and self exists, no possibility exists either of any real understanding of the connection between the individual, the individual’s insight, society and the development of culture. As long as the confused ego rules in the world of science, every scientific conclusion and every action based upon such a conclusion will be a perpetuation of the confusion and the results will be a continuation of the disastrous policies that have half wrecked our world.

The world of the scientific ego is the world of confusion, par excellence despite the marvels of technology. These marvels continue, despite the confusions that are inherent in the philosophical underpinnings of the science that gives rise to them. There will be no solution to this confusion until the self has understood that it is not the ego, that the ego is a delusion created by a combination of animal passions and mechanically activated memories. The neo-cortex with its immense power of representation excites the mammalian cortex to activate its ancient fight or flight reactions with an increasing tendency to the former because the ego is not inclined to back down in any situation. The self can achieve a consciousness that is beyond these brain mechanisms and understand itself as a process that merely makes use of them. This is possible because whereas it is clearly the brain that generates the ego, for the self, the brain is no more than an object of experience. The self, along with the experiences vouchsafed by the body, perceives its memories as the grooves in a record and experiences the ‘playback’ of memories as an objective process. That is perfectly understandable. The confusion arises 1) when the ego – in ignorance of the self – assumes that it is an object identical with its memories, that the ‘I’ is the same as the ‘me’ or 2) when it acts as if it were an object distinct from these, for when it does this, it becomes incomprehensible to itself. The reality of this confusion is that the ego, as the brain’s co-ordinator of all the separate memories of the accumulated experience of the body, assumes the role of the self, or mistakes itself for the self. The self is not the ego; the self is simply the immediate state of the universe, the universe’s self-contemplation, so to speak, from the particular point of view of the body concerned.

The ego, by contrast, is essentially a contingent memory structure; it is not the indeterminate immediacy of the self. It is a structure wholly constituted by the individual past of the body. The ego is to that extent already dead and gone. It is a walking corpse, it is the living dead. It is the past repeating and perpetuating itself. It is the mistaking of the past for the present. It is the obsessive repetition of the past. It is the loathing and dread of death, because of its connection with the instinct for survival. It is the desire to halt time. It is the ultimate delusion of consciousness. It craves a kind of immortality which, were it to achieve it, would be the very worst of nightmares: Nietzsche’s Eternal Return of the Same.

The ego’s fear of its own disappearance is ultimately the origin of most of its activity. The ego identifies itself obsessively with the memories of the body’s actions and yearns for these to be eternal, insofar as they were pleasurable. Thus it defends with animal ferocity those memories that seem particularly to bolster and to constitute its uniqueness and to constitute the pleasure of its existence. It repulses with equal ferocity those memories that have caused it pain. It tends to reinforce the precious memories, by strengthening the traces they have made, and to suppress the painful memories by main force. Thus the memories become self-confirming ‘theories’, pet ideas, personal ‘discoveries’, ‘beliefs’, ‘inventions’ and so on. The ego identifies itself with these memories and clings with great emotional intensity to the value of their repetition.

The self, on the other hand, surveys all of these memories as the history of an ephemeral body, as past, unrepeatable states of the universe, and is incapable of identifying itself with any of them. Where the ego is the body’s enjoyment by repetition of the pleasures of the past and the determination to avoid past pains, the self is the self-enjoyment of the universe in the timeless present of its co-ordinated flow. This is why the emotions of the ego are distinct from the emotions of the self. This is why the emotions of the ego lead to fight or flight reactions that are generally destructive, whereas the emotions of the self are the reverse: they are contemplative and constructive. The ego’s emotions are an animal’s attempt to prevent an extinction that is inevitable. The self’s emotions are the direct experience of the wonder of the universe’s intelligent, indeterminate self-creation and perpetual innovation.

The ego’s confusion is essentially due to the failure of the individual concerned to discover the self and to the persistent confusion of the self with the body, with the ego. The ego’s emotions arise from the ancient self-protective, limbic mechanisms of the body, encoded within the brain’s mammalian cortex. The self’s emotions are of quite a different order they do not arise from the brain but are intimately connected with the intrinsic creativity of nature. The creative dynamics of the self are the true birthright of every human being. They represent the only means of release from the idiocies of the ego.
But that, too, is another story.