Abstract

The elusive self! Let me first indicate how I understand these terms. For those who posit, as I do, a self that is more than its passing states, and which may not be reduced at all to observable phenomena, the problem arises at once of how such a self is to be described and identified. It cannot be identified in terms of any pattern of experience or of any relation to a physically identifiable body. How then can it be known at all? It is known, I maintain, solely in the way each one, in the first instance, knows himself to be the unique being he is.