A Trial of the Self

Nietzsche made a curious observation in a passage expressing his doubt as to the reality of the self. He noted that thoughts are rarely ever intentionally prompted, It is more often the thought that springs itself upon the thinker. Thinkers don't think thoughts; thoughts think thinkers.

If one reflects upon that stream flowing through one's consciousness, how many of the waves appear self-generating? One does not first intend awareness of perception and then categorize the perception. The perception presents itself. Even the more complex items of consciousness, the strands of linguistic thoughts often flow without any aid from the thinker. One sits in a waiting room, hears the sound of a woman scratching her arm, and is taken from thinking about dry skin to thinking about the American revolution. At the end of so many strands one wonders, "how did I get here?" How unruly are the contents of the mind! How often is a man's concentration broken by wandering thoughts? How easily does a train of thought become derailed! In all this, we are taken away from our "selves". In all of this victimization, we bare no responsibility. It was either a thought-object against our will or an unwilled thought-object that nevertheless took our field of consciousness over. How can there be a self that endures through the extent of one's life if there is not a unifier between a cross-section of one's consciousness? How can we proclaim the existence of a self when so much of what constitutes the purported self is involuntary and the self is fundamentally an agent (i.e., that which acts voluntarily)?

The unifier is the cohesiveness of the subjective experience. Every conscious moment contains a personal element. All of the contents of the mind, everything remembered of the reality previously experienced, and all the day-dreaming projections of the future, have the characteristic of being intuited in the same way. I can doubt the origins of a thought, but not that to be thought is the same--it is always something before me. Whether this "me" is a soul, self, mind, or body is a question for consequent investigation. At the moment of being thought, the quality of its being thought is the same.

How does one know there's something unifying one's life? One can never imagine a thought without thinking it, and thus stamps it with the characteristic of consciousness. The uniformity of consciousness is the evidence for a self.