When we say we are not ourselves, what self are we measuring against — one we invented, or one we were given?
Someone apologizes at work for snapping in a meeting, and the apology takes a form nobody questions. Sorry. I'm not myself today. We say it is fine, and we mean it. I have said it and meant it.
Stop on it, though, and it is a peculiar thing to accept. Taken at face value it claims that the person in front of us — the one who did the snapping — is not the real occupant of that body, and that the real one is elsewhere, temporarily unavailable. We nod and go get coffee.
Stranger still, we say the opposite thing with equal confidence. Be yourself. Be true to yourself. That advice assumes the self is the one authority we can consult without checking it against anything else. The apology assumes it is a standard we can fall short of, and that both of us know it well enough to notice an absence.
They cannot both be simple. If I am the author of myself then I cannot fail to be myself, since whatever I do next is the next sentence in the book. And yet the excuse works, well enough to be the first thing we reach for, and the thing we most want to hear when someone we love has been cruel.
The advice has a source, and the source is funnier than its afterlife on graduation cards suggests. Polonius, a tiresome old courtier, is sending his son Laertes off to France and cannot stop talking:
> This above all: to thine own self be true, > And it must follow, as the night the day, > Thou canst not then be false to any man.[^polonius]
Four acts later the same young man is in the same castle, waiting to fight a duel with the man who killed his father, and Hamlet offers him an apology:
> Give me your pardon, sir: I've done you wrong; / But pardon't, as you are a gentleman. / This presence knows, / And you must needs have heard, how I am punish'd / With a sore distraction. What I have done, / That might your nature, honour and exception / Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness. / Was't Hamlet wrong'd Laertes? Never Hamlet: / If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away, / And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes, / Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.[^apology]
Laertes gets both sentences. His father tells him the self is the thing to stay faithful to; the prince tells him that a man taken away from himself is not the man who did the deed. Nobody in the scene finds the second claim absurd, which is what interests me. Hamlet is not asking for mercy because he was overwhelmed; he is making an argument about identity and expecting it to be recognized.
It was eventually recognized in law. In 1843 Daniel M'Naghten shot Edward Drummond, believing him to be the prime minister, Robert Peel, and was acquitted on grounds of insanity; the formula the judges then handed the House of Lords still shapes the insanity defence in the English-speaking world.[^mcnaghten] The rule is narrow, and turns on what a man knew rather than on who he really was. But the law needed some way to say that an act can fail to belong to the hands that performed it.
Here is the asymmetry I had never noticed. We only ever say it about a decline.
Nobody says he wasn't himself of a colleague who turned out to be unexpectedly generous, or of a friend who finally told the truth about something hard. Of those we say that's who he really is. The same event — a departure from how someone usually behaves — gets filed under revelation when it is good and under absence when it is bad.
This is not mere politeness, and it has been measured. In 2014 George Newman, Paul Bloom and Joshua Knobe gave people stories about individuals who changed, and found that morally positive changes were judged to reveal a person's true self while negative ones were judged to obscure it, with effects large enough to be hard to explain away.[^knobe] A registered replication in 2022, with 803 participants, found the same thing.[^replication] Reviewing the literature, Julian De Freitas and colleagues report that the belief in a good true self turns up in the United States, Colombia, Russia and Singapore, applies to strangers and enemies as readily as to friends, and is "evident even among misanthropes" — people who, asked directly, say that human beings are rotten.[^defreitas]
So we are all carrying a template of what a person is supposed to be, we apply it to people we dislike, and most of us cannot remember agreeing to it. Which is the question underneath the excuse: when we say we are not ourselves, what are we measuring against — something we invented, or something we were handed?
The most serious answer is that we invented it, and it has nearly three centuries of good philosophy behind it.
David Hume went looking for the self and could not find it. What he found, when he introspected, was traffic:
> I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.[^hume]
Daniel Dennett arrived somewhere similar from cognitive science: the self is real the way a centre of gravity is real, a useful abstraction rather than an object anyone could go and find. "A self is also an abstract object, a theorist's fiction," he wrote.[^dennett] Jean-Paul Sartre made the moral case. If there is no God there is no human blueprint, and so no essence for anyone to be faithful to or fall short of: "Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world — and defines himself afterwards."[^sartre]
This explains a great deal: why identity feels like a story rather than a fact, why the advice to be ourselves liberates rather than confines, why people change beyond recognition and keep their names. It even explains the research. If the true self is a social tool rather than a discovery, the fact that it always turns out to be good is exactly what we should expect, since we use the idea to praise, blame and excuse, and we build it out of the values we want enforced. Sartre would go further and call the apology bad faith, a way of disowning a free act by pretending an essence had been interrupted. He has a point, and an uncomfortable one, because the excuse is so useful to us.
Two things keep it from being the whole story. The first is that on this account the sentence ought to be nonsense, and it is not. It is one of the most natural sentences in the language, produced without hesitation by people who have never once thought about essences. Nor is it only an excuse. We use it in illness and in grief, over someone we love whose temper has changed, where nobody is being let off anything. We say it alone, about ourselves, with no one to say it to.
The second is the direction of the error. If the standard were assembled out of social approval it should track whatever our group currently rewards, and it does not bend that way for the misanthrope, who expects little of anybody and still locates the real person in the good. None of this proves anything. It does show that something is doing load-bearing work in ordinary speech that a self-authoring account has trouble paying for.
The idiom appears once in the Bible, and it appears in a pigsty.
A young man has taken his inheritance early, spent it and hired himself out to feed pigs in a famine. Then:
> And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father.[^lk15]
The Greek is as odd as the English: eis heauton de elthōn, having come into himself.[^greek] What strikes me is the content of it. Coming to himself is not an inward search and yields no insight about his personality. He remembers a house and a father, and he stands up. The self is recovered by turning around rather than by going further in.
Augustine went further in than almost anyone, and came out the other side holding a question. Near the end of his long examination of his own memory he stops and says to God: "thou, in whose sight I am become an enigma to myself; this itself is my weakness."[^augustine] That is the report of a man who searched the basement thoroughly. There was no floor.
Genesis does not begin with a self. It begins with a likeness — God makes humanity "in our image, after our likeness" — so from the first page the standard for being a human being is a resemblance to somebody else.[^genesis] On that account being ourselves and being like God were never rivals, and we cannot locate the template by introspection because it was never stored there. The contrast we have been circling, between an identity received from outside and one forged from within, is Keller's, and we learned it from him.[^keller]
It also makes sense of a saying of Jesus that sounds, in English, like self-erasure. "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it." The next verse asks what a man would give in exchange for his soul. English uses two words there, life and soul; the Greek uses one, psychē, three times across the two verses.[^psyche] With the single word restored, he is not telling us to dispose of ourselves. He is saying where the self is kept, and that holding it ourselves, tightly, is the one arrangement certain to lose it.
Then comes the claim that answers the sentence we began with. Paul sets two men side by side, the first Adam and the last, and says that as we have borne the image of the earthy, we "shall also bear the image of the heavenly."[^cor] Elsewhere, that we are being conformed to the image of the Son.[^romans] What we shall be has not yet appeared, but "we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is."[^john] Set beside our two sentences this is a third thing. It agrees with the apology that we are not ourselves. It disagrees about where the original is kept. The self we keep failing to be is neither behind us in a lost authentic core nor ahead of us as a draft we are writing; it is a person, already alive, in whose likeness we were made and into whose likeness we are being remade. He is the one man of whom the excuse was never true, in the wilderness or the garden or on the cross, and coming to ourselves turns out to mean what it meant in the pigsty: getting up and going to the Father.[^keller2]
The last book of the Bible keeps a strange detail about this. The promise to the one who endures is a white stone, "and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it."[^rev] Even at the end the name is not chosen. It is handed over.
The apology at the desk is truer than we mean it. We are not ourselves — not yet, none of us, and not only on the bad afternoons. What we took for a polite fiction is a fairly exact description of the situation, and the remarkable thing is not that we say it but that it can be answered: the likeness we were made in has a face, and he has not given up on the original.
[^polonius]: Hamlet, Act 1, scene 3, lines 555–557, spoken by Polonius to his son Laertes — Folger Shakespeare Library. [^apology]: Hamlet, Act 5, scene 2, lines 226–239 — Shakespeare Navigators. Verse line breaks are marked with slashes here. [^mcnaghten]: M'Naghten's Case (1843) 10 Cl. & F. 200. The judges' answer to the House of Lords held that a defence required proof that "at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong" — M'Naghten rules. The rule turns on knowledge of the act and not on any theory of a true self; the parallel drawn here is ours. [^knobe]: George E. Newman, Paul Bloom and Joshua Knobe, "Value Judgments and the True Self," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 40/2 (2014): 203–216, doi:10.1177/0146167213508791. [^replication]: Registered Report replication of Newman, Bloom and Knobe (2014), Studies 1 and 2, N = 803; both findings supported, with a smaller effect for Study 1 than in the original — PMC12187398. [^defreitas]: Julian De Freitas, Mina Cikara, Igor Grossmann and Rebecca Schlegel, "Origins of the Belief in Good True Selves," Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2017), doi:10.1016/j.tics.2017.05.009; full text. The authors report the belief as "observed in independent and several interdependent cultures that vary in affluence," applying to ingroup and outgroup alike, and "evident even among misanthropes." [^hume]: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature 1.4.6.4 (SBN 252–3), "Of personal identity" — davidhume.org. [^dennett]: Daniel C. Dennett, "The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity," in F. Kessel, P. Cole and D. Johnson, eds., Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1992) — full text. Cited as a witness for its account of the self as an abstraction; the naturalism it serves is not our position. [^sartre]: Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), trans. Philip Mairet — Jean-Paul Sartre Internet Archive, where the first principle is given as "Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself." Presented here as the strongest rival account rather than as ours. [^lk15]: Luke 15:17–18 (KJV). [^greek]: Luke 15:17, εἰς ἑαυτὸν δὲ ἐλθὼν — heauton, Strong's 1438, with elthōn, Strong's 2064, "having come"; literally "having come into himself" — Luke 15:17 Greek text analysis. [^augustine]: Augustine, Confessions X.33.50, trans. Albert C. Outler — Christian Classics Ethereal Library. The Latin, mihi quaestio factus sum, is often rendered "I have become a question to myself." [^keller]: A debt, not a quotation: the contrast between an identity received from outside and one forged from within, and the argument that the modern version proves unstable, is Timothy Keller's — see his sermon "Identity" (Gospel in Life), summarised here in our own words. The gospel-to-the-heart move this piece is built on is his throughout. [^genesis]: Genesis 1:26–27 (KJV). [^psyche]: Matthew 16:25–26 (KJV). ψυχή (psychē), Strong's 5590, stands behind "life" twice in verse 25 and "soul" in verse 26 — Matthew 16:25 word study; Matthew 16:26 Greek. Reading the saying as Jesus' answer to the question of how we find ourselves is a debt to Keller's sermon "How To Find Your Self". [^cor]: 1 Corinthians 15:45–49 (KJV). [^romans]: Romans 8:29 (KJV). [^john]: 1 John 3:2 (KJV). [^keller2]: A debt: reading "when he came to himself" as the anatomy of repentance, with the son's rehearsed speech as one more scheme for paying his own way, follows Keller's sermon "He Came to Himself" (Gospel in Life), summarised in our own words. [^rev]: Revelation 2:17 (KJV).