SelfIncoming LinksMarch 10th, 2021We killed God, we killed the Self, we killed Narrative. Unmoored from that transcendental algebra, we swim in a brackish sea of Weird Fishes, slimy and confusing and infinitely fascinating.March 24th, 2021We have left it ambiguous as to whether there is such a thing as the Real Self, or the Higher Self (Transpersonal Self, Greater Self, Deeper Self, Inner Self, Self with a big S, and so on), or whether there is such a thing as the soul. In a way this is not a particularly important issue. There is plenty of work to be done, as we saw in the previous chapter, regardless of how we may wish to answer this question. But at the same time it would be cowardly not to admit that there is a real question here, even though it may be difficult to answer. *March 7th, 2021Such virtues are not developed within particular "weird fishes." The virtues that I enact specifically as a woodworker or a web app developer are then supposed to be integrated into higher level virtues. What entity can carry these virtues? The Self.📙 To Show and to TellI have long held the personal essay to be one of the last bastions of the orthodoxy of the unitary Self: those of us who are drawn to practicing this form tend to believe in our possessing a core reality or self, and we would cling to this conviction even if critical theory disproved it beyond doubt.What is the nature of the individual Self in today’s consumer culture? Are our thoughts even our own, or are we merely channeling messages from the mass media, which function as a kind of exoskeleton?