The myth of the isolated self (On relation as the ground of existence)

We have been told that the self is a bounded, autonomous unit. That standing alone is freedom, that needing anything is weakness, that the work of a life is to become sufficient unto yourself. This is a myth with a genealogy, built carefully out of Descartes' mind / body split, Locke's proprietor of himself, capitalism's daily practice of turning your relationships into investments and your attention into a resource to be optimized.

What if the isolated self was never free? What if it was always just confused, mistaking the wave for the ocean, acting from forces it cannot see toward ends it has not chosen?

In this episode I trace the myth of the isolated self from its philosophical roots to its ecological consequences, and I look for what becomes possible when we stop believing it. 

Drawing on Spinoza's immanence and conatus, Merleau-Ponty's flesh of the world, Haraway's sympoiesis, Kimmerer's grammar of animacy, Weil's attention as love, and guided by Ariadne's thread.

Find the visual diary and other comments plus references on the Substack post of this episode. 

- You can find Florencia's music & work at @florence_q

Find me on: 

• Substack
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• arootedimpact.com 

Transcript

 Welcome to Velvet Philosophy, a revolt against the flattened mind. An invitation back to the sensuous, the mystical, the rigorous, where the abstract becomes tangible and the intellectual turns visceral.

 This is a sanctuary for those who refuse to be domesticated by the world.

 Before I begin, if you have listened to the other episodes, you may have noticed that the music has changed. This is because my very talented friend Florencia composed this beautiful music that you just heard. So I wanted to take this time to thank her because I am so grateful. It's just so beautiful. I cannot believe she created, well, I actually can believe it because she's amazing.

But it's a beautiful composition and I am just so grateful and excited to use it. So yeah. Also, the artwork of the podcast has changed a little bit. The colors changed, the arrangement changed just a bit to match this new vibe. Okay, with that being said, let's begin today's inquiry.

What if the self was never separate to begin with?

Not what if we should try harder to connect? Not what if isolation is bad for our mental health, which it is, but that's not what I am asking. I'm asking something more fundamental, more philosophically strange and more revolutionary I think, than that. What if the isolated self, so the self as a bounded autonomous self-sufficient unit, the self that stands alone and calls the standing freedom.

What if that self is not a discovery but an invention? A story told so many times it calcified into fact. What if it was always a myth? I wanna talk about what I mean by myth here, because I'm not using it as a synonym for a, um, a story or something that is not real.

Because myths are not that. Myths are yes stories, but there are stories that culture needs to tell in order to make certain arrangements feel inevitable and natural, sometimes cosmically ordained. And myths do enormous work. They can shape what we desire, what we fear, what we think is possible, what we think we are.

So the myth of the isolated self has done more work than perhaps any other myth in the modern west because it has shaped our economies, our politics, our culture. The way that we heal, our architecture, our grief, our longing. I mean, just this relentless feeling that we are not quite enough on our own.

And simultaneously that asking for help is associated with weakness. It has shaped the way you probably narrate your own life to yourself right now. So today I wanna do two things. I want to unravel this myth philosophically, ecologically, and obviously mythically. And then I want to offer something else instead.

Not necessarily like a replacement for this myth, but perhaps just a different way of understanding it and understanding what you are. And I want to replace it with something that I find more beautiful and true and actually way more freeing than the original version of freedom that this myth has been selling us.

So let's begin. 

The story of the isolated itself has a genealogy. It was built slowly across several centuries out of very specific philosophical moves, specific economic pressures, and as always, it's our response to cultural anxiety and other historical movement. I usually like to start this conversation with Descartes and he really does deserve this place in this story.

You know, that famous quote, I think therefore I am. What's philosophically radical about that sentence? What made it feel like a foundation of philosophy? Even it's, it's kind of like before Descartes, after Descartes in so many things is what this is excluding. So it's excluding the body basically. It has created this cut that has separated and it's called the mind and body split. And that's split, and I talk about this endlessly in, in my writing and I've discussed this in my philosophy workshops and yeah, because I find it so interesting how this mind and body split in which Descartes is telling us that the only thing that he can trust, the only thing that is actually real is the doubting itself.

And the doubting is happening in the mind. So the only thing that matters then is the mind. The only thing that can be true, right? So what remains after Descartes strips everything away is a pure thinking subject that is transparent to itself, self-sufficient in its reason, and located nowhere in particular, kind of like this mind in a jar.

The self as an island of consciousness floating in a sea of uncertain matter. What had to be excluded. The body, like I said, but also other people, language, history, the earth. That's consequence of that split. And I know that Descartes was trying to solve an epistemological problem. The problem of how do we know anything with certainty in a world where our senses can deceive us?

And I have genuine sympathy for this inquiry. It's incredibly interesting. But the solution left this residue. It drew a line. This cut drew a line between the thinking self and everything else between subject and object, subject and world, between inner and outer, between mind and body. And that line has shaped so much.

It has become a sort of wall. And we have been living inside that wall for 400 years, mistaking it for the natural shape of things.

Locke then gave the isolated self its politics, the individual as a proprietor of himself, his body and his labor and his reasons. And I'm saying he, because that's the language he uses. Rights that precede community freedom as non interference. The social contract is an arrangement between preexisting already formed individuals who come together because it is useful.

And then capitalism gave these isolated self its daily practices, the market as the arena where sovereign individuals express their preferences, maximize their utility, compete for resources, and maximize growth basically.

The logic of the market organizes economic life. And it also colonizes the imagination because it teaches you to understand yourself as a unit of human capital. We even say that the concept is called human capital. So in that context, your relationships are investments. Your attention is a resource that needs to be mined, exploited, optimized.

Your body is a sort of machine that has to be maintained and again, optimized. Improved for performance. This then is the architecture of the myth, starting with this Cartesian epistemology. Lockian politics and capitalist practice. There are many other things at play, of course, but I think these three are very important for the Myth because these three movements are one long move that has been playing without interruption for centuries.

And the thing about a move such as this one. A paradigm shift such as this one, is that it has shaped our lives and we don't even realize it. At some point we stopped asking who created this? Who thought about this? And why this? Why is it this way? And what might a different version of this myth or a version of reality, or a version of how we relate to each other, or how we define who we are or freedom and all of the things that come from that myth could, could look like.

So that's what I wanna do today. I wanna ask those questions. I wanna make all of those questions visible again. Perhaps they're a little bit uncomfortable, um, perhaps not, but we can ask them and see where they take us. Before I go further into the philosophy, I wanna take a detour through myth because, and myth in the sense that we, when we think of myths, what we think about is, at least me, I think about the Greeks.

I know there's many other myths, but I always think about them. And of course I say this with the full awareness of the complexity of invoking the Greeks. The Greeks were interested in a problem that modern West forgot to keep asking the problem of relation as the ground of existence.

Think about Ariadne.

You probably know the story. The Minotaur in the Labyrinth. Thesuesu, the hero is sent in to kill this monster and Ariadne, daughter of Minos, half-sister of the Minotaur, gives Theseus a thread, a red thread, and this thread, he unspools behind him as he moves through the dark so that he can find his way back. So the standard reading of this myth centers Theseus, the hero, right, the individual, the one who enters the dark and kills the monster, the triumph of reason over instinct, civilization over chaos.

Basically, the defined self over its own unconscious depths. But I want to read it differently today. Who and what saved Theseus? Of course his strength was important and his sword and his heroic selfhood. But what about the thread? The thread that connected him across the dark to the outside? The thread that he holds while he is lost, the thread that is in the most literal sense, the condition of his return.

So without Ariadne's thread, Theseus doesn't emerge from the labyrinth. He would become another body in the dark.

Ariadne understood something that Theseus forgot the moment he sailed away and abandoned her. That the thread is not a crutch. It is not evidence of weakness. It is actually the very structure of being able to move through darkness at all. You can only go deep when something holds you. You can only be brave when you are held.

But the myth of the isolated self asks us to be Theseus without the thread. To enter the Labyrinth of our lives alone, trusting only our own reason, our own strength, our own inner compass. And when we get lost, which we do, and we will because it's the nature of labyrinths, we experience it as personal failure, as proof of our inadequacy.

But what if The problem is that we were handed the myth of the lone hero and never given the thread. There is another figure I want to invoke here, Penelope . While Odysseus is wandering the world on his famous lone journey, you know that Penelope's waiting, she's home. She's weaving and unweaving her loom.

And the usual read of this is that she is being patient and faithful. But I think there is something else in this practice. The undoing and the doing and the doing and the undoing. This creating and releasing, she understands that meaning is not this thing or object possessed, but a process, a participation, the fabric needs to be in motion, never complete, and at the same time never isolated from the hands that make it.

And the loom is such an interesting image because the Greeks knew about webs, the fates, the Moirai who spin, measure and cut the thread of every life.

Indra's Net in Vedic cosmology which the Greeks touched in different ways. A net of infinite jewels, each jewel reflecting every other. So that to understand any single jewel, you must understand its relation to the whole, like a spider web, like a mycelium. Before we even had the word for mycelium, we even knew what it was.

So relation is the ground relation as something or as the very condition of there being a self at all. This is what the myth knew before the philosophy forgot.

Now let's talk philosophy. Let's talk about Benedict de Spinoza in the 17th century in Amsterdam. He was excommunicated from his Jewish community at 23. The reasons are still disputed, but the ideas were clearly irrecoverable for any orthodoxy. And Spinoza is not easy to summarize without ruining him.

If you have read him before, if you're curious after this, I would encourage you to learn more. He is very important and interesting for all philosophy. I wanna talk about some of his concepts that are important to unravel the myth of the isolated self. The first thing to understand is the distinction he draws between immanence and transcendence.

Transcendence is a logic of something above: a God outside creation, a law outside life, an ideal outside the body. 

The politics of transcendence, Spinoza noticed, always work the same way. It tells you what things are, what they should be, and it organizes the world from outside the world, which means it organizes it from somewhere you can never actually stand. Immanence is the opposite move. There is no outside. The cause is inside the being not above it.

Reality is not produced by something external to itself, but it produces itself from within continuously as everything that exists. Spinoza calls this self causing ground Natura. Sometimes he writes, "Deus sive Natura" God or Nature using the terms interchangeably.

He's not talking about a God who made the universe, and then like steps back. He is talking about the immanent self-generating reality of which everything that exists is an expression of. Sort of like a wave is not separate from the ocean, it is the ocean in that configuration at that moment.

Everything, everybody, every thought, every relationship, every stone, every feeling you have ever had is a mode of this one reality. A particular way the whole takes temporary specific form. You are not a substance that then enters into relations. You are a mode, a singular intensification of something that has no outside.

 This is where Spinoza's ethics begin. And why it is so different from moral systems that descend from above. Because if you are a mode, then the question Spinoza asks about you is not who or what are you? He's not interested in definitions or in this essences fixed from the outside. He's asking, what can you do?

What is your power, your capacity, your range of action? And he calls this the conatus, the force of life inside each being, the striving by which everything that exists reached towards its own persistence, its own fuller expression. The plant bending towards the light, the body recoiling from the cold, and also the mind reaching for the idea that finally explains what it has been circling.

The conatus cannot survive alone. Spinoza is very clear on this. He talks about how a being increases its power when its encounters are joyful, when what it meets amplifies rather than diminishes what it is. 

And the encounters that produce the most durable, the most expansive joy are encounters with understanding, with knowing what moves you, what you belong to.

And the more adequate your ideas, the more you can act and the more you can act the freer you are. Here is what that means for the isolated self. In Spinoza's framework, the person who believes themselves to be self-sufficient, bounded, separate, are operating from what he calls inadequate ideas.

And that is not freedom. They're actually confused. Specifically, they are confusing a fragment of reality for the whole of it. They are mistaking the wave for the ocean. And a confused being is a being whose actions are driven by forces they cannot see. Towards ends they have not chosen. The isolated self is definitely not a condition for freedom. It is actually the condition of a very particular kind of captivity.

The conatus is tied to desire. Desire for Spinoza is always linked to an idea. We reach towards what we have some image or understanding of, which means that what we desire tells us something about what we think and what we think shapes what we are capable of wanting. Ideas and desires are not separate operations.

The desire moves with the idea and the idea is colored by the desire. The question Spinoza asks, which ideas and desires expand and which diminish you?: Encounters that produce joy, that increase your capacity to act, to understand and to be present are encounters that potentialize your being. And encounters that produce this specific kind of contraction that he calls sadness is a closing down of your power, the shrinking of what you can do and perceive and feel. That diminishes you. 

And here is the ethical consequence. You cannot potentialize yourself at the expense of others. The interdependence is not aspirational, it is ontological. It is already the structure of what exists. So any act that diminishes another, that treats another as a resource to be used rather than a being whose conatus is as real as yours, moves against the immanent structure of reality itself.

The relational is where the ethical lives. The question of how to live well for Spinoza is the question of which encounters, which ideas and forms of understanding allow each being to reach its full expression, and how doing so is always already entangled with the flourishing of everything it is in relation with.

The beauty of Spinoza's ethics is that there is only the immanent logic of a reality in which every being either moves toward adequate understanding of what it is, or continues to suffer the consequences of inadequate ideas, the most expensive of which is the idea that it was alone.

 Spinoza is thinking at the level of metaphysics, the nature of being itself, and if we're gonna talk about that, I wanna talk about the body because philosophy that doesn't land in the body. Can stay in as an idea and never become understanding. So if you have listened to my podcasts, of course, I'm gonna talk about Merleau-Ponty again.

Merleau-Ponty was a 20th century French phenomenologist and he was interested in the question, what is it actually like to be a body in a world? Not what is it like to have a body? What is it like to be a body?

That difference is important. Remember Descartes when he said, I think therefore I am. He positions the self as something that has a body. The way you have a car. The body is an instrument, a vehicle for the real self, which is the mind. it's actually backwards. That's the, it's the other way around.

You are not a mind that has a body. You are a body that thinks. Perception and meaning all of these happens in and through the flesh. And flesh, and this is a concept that Merleau-Ponty uses and it's so strange and so wonderful. Flesh is not a barrier between you and the world. Flesh is what makes contact possible.

When your hand touches a surface, you feel the surface and you feel yourself feeling it simultaneously. The touching and the touched are not cleanly separable. The hand that reaches out into the world is also the hand that receives the world reaching back. Isn't that poetic. Merleau-Ponty calls this, the chiasm, the crossing, the intertwining of body and world such that where I end and where the world begins is not this clean line, it's permeable.

It is living and breathing. A permeable zone of contact. My body is made of the same stuff as the world, so it is porous to it. It breathes it, it metabolizes it. It is altered by every touch, every sound that moves through it. I know this is poetic and I, I agree. But it's also biology because you breathe right now, air that has passed through other lungs, other trees, other oceans.

The atoms in your body have been stars. The mitochondria in your cells where once separated organisms that entered into a relationship so intimate with you, that it becomes indistinguishable from self. So you are already at cellular level a collaboration. The isolated self requires a body that stops at its own skin, but the body doesn't stop at its own skin.

It can't. The skin is a meeting place. Donna Haraway gave us a a word: sympoiesis. Making together. As opposed to autopoiesis: self making. The prevailing scientific model of life for most of the 20th century was autopoietic. Living systems are self-organizing, self-producing, self-maintaining, self making, et cetera, et cetera. The self is the unit of life. Even biology organized itself around the isolated organism.

But Haraway drawing on the biologist, Beth Dempster says, wait, look at coral reefs. Look at forests. Look at the holobiont the human organism as a community of bacteria, fungi of viral sequences woven into our DNA. Look at the mycelium, which has no center, no edge. There is no outside and outside in any conventional self, but it is undeniably alive, undeniably intelligent.

These systems are not self making. They are together making, they exist only in and as their relations. There is no coral reef that precedes its relation with the algae, the fish, the temperature, the chemistry of the water. There is no forest that exists independently of the mycorrhizal networks through which trees share nutrients and send signals.

There is no human organism that exists independently of the trillions of other organisms that live in and on and through it. We are not. Haraway says, individuals who enter into relationships, we are constituted through our relationships. We are holobionts by composite beings, always, already multiple.

And here is where Robin Wall Kimmerer comes in. She talks about what it means to be a species among species rather than a species above them. Kimmerer's language, the language of the Potawatomi, like many other indigenous languages, is grammatically structured around animacy.

I find it so weird that in English, I have to say "it". Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about this, how there is no pronoun equivalent to "it" in her language. It is referred to with a pronoun equivalent to "what- is -alive". The grammar itself then refuses the subject object split.

It refuses the possibility of the world as mere matter, as background, as resource, even the word resource. I ha, I'm so wary of it. The grammar makes you say at the level of syntax that you are speaking with the living world, not about inert stuff, like it happens when you say "it".

And this is a different epistemology, a different way of knowing that has produced over thousands of years an ethics of reciprocity, of giving back, of responsibility, of what Kimmerer calls the honorable harvest. Never take more than you need. Take only what is given. Leave enough for the community of life to continue.

This is an ethics that emerges from a felt sense of kinship, from actually knowing yourself as kin to the rest of existence.

The isolated self cannot have this ethics an isolated self can only have interests. Can only manage resources. Cannot enter into reciprocity with what it does not recognize as real or as a life or as a subject.

And maybe you're asking this question if the self is not isolated. We're actually constituted by our relations. If we are modes rather than substances. If we are holobionts rather than individuals, then what happens to say freedom or autonomy.

The freedom promised by the myth of the isolated self was always a fiction because the self that was supposed to be free, the Cartesian ego, the lockian proprietor, the sovereign individual of neoliberal capitalism, that self was already shaped by forces it didn't choose. By language it didn't invent by desires that were colonized before it knew what desire even was. By a body that was formed by everything that touched it. By a history of everyone who came before.

The myth of the isolated self does not give us freedom. It can give the feeling of freedom, the feeling of being self-caused and self-sufficient, self-determining while concealing all the ways that we are made, moved, shaped, and limited by forces we cannot see.

 Freedom is, not the absence of relation. That is the myth. That is what we have been told. Freedom is being separate and autonomous and individual and self, self, self, self. But freedom is the ability to be in relation.

Freedom in this sense requires something that the myth of the isolated self cannot provide, and that is capacity for genuine encounter. You can only truly encounter what you recognize as real. You can only truly meet what you do not reduce to an extension of yourself. The isolated self cannot truly encounter anyone because it is always using the other to confirm its own separateness, its own primacy.

Genuine relation, the kind that makes you more yourself requires a self that is porous, that can be changed, that does not need to defend its edges because it trusts that it will not be dissolved.

Simone Weil philosopher, mystic, activist. A brilliant mind of the 20th century, wrote about attention as the highest form of love. Attention, the capacity to truly see what is in front of you, to let it be real to you, to not project your own needs and fears onto it, but to actually perceive it.

Most of what we call attention is actually just projection. We think we are seeing the world, but we are mostly seeing ourselves reflected back. We are mostly running our habitual patterns of interpretation, recognition of what is actually there. genuine attention is rare and costly.

It requires that the self steps back enough to let the world come forward, to let the other actually arrive. And this she says, is an act of love and it is what makes contact possible. With genuine attention, we are never fully alone.

When I think about this, I think about my dogs. I live with two dogs, Nala and Bagira, who are my daily teachers in this, because dogs are relentless practitioners of presence. They do not project, they do not need to manage. They just show up completely to what is actually here, to the quality of the moment, to the exact texture of the moment.

And in doing so, they call me back to what is actually here too. The forest does this as well. If you let it. the mycelium beneath your feet is processing information. Right now. The trees around you are signaling to each other in chemical language, in electrical impulses. You are not observing this from outside.

You are inside it. You are, whether you know it or not, part of what the forest is doing. This is what I like to think about as I walk through the forest.

Because to know this is to have a different experience of what it means to be alive. Different, more porous, more attended to more woven into something that does not depend on your performance or your productivity or these autonomous self-sufficiency in order to hold you. This is what the mystics called the union.

The discovery that the self was never as separate as it is believed, that it was always held, always woven in, always at some level, known.

And now I want to share something practical because I said at the beginning that I wanted to offer not just a critique, but an alternative. And this is an alternative that can be lived. So what does it actually mean to live as a self that knows itself as relational, not in the abstract, in the daily?

What does it mean? The first practice I want to name is the attention that Simone Weil is talking about. The practice of actually looking, of listening, of letting what is in front of you be real. Donna Haraway has the term response-ability, separated with a hyphen. Response-Ability, the noticing where you are projecting and choosing in, and instead perceive.

It is a practice. It is absolutely a practice, and it is the beginning of genuine relation. And you can start this practice. You can practice today, with a conversation. Notice when you are waiting to speak rather than listening.

The second practice is reciprocity.. If you are constituted by your relations, then you are always in debt. And I know we are obsessed with a language that is framed within economics in a very particular type of economics.

But think about debt from a different perspective. Think of depth as, for example, how you received your body from an evolutionary lineage from billions of years ago. You received the air that you're breathing right now from photosynthetic organisms that have been working since before animals existed.

You are the beneficiary of an incomprehensible gift. Reciprocity means the practice of giving back to the people who are here, to the place where you live and to the future that will come after you. And it means making your daily choices in the knowledge that they ripple, that you are not closed system, that what you do matters beyond yourself, because again, you are porous. That separation is a lie.

The third practice is what I think of as allowing yourself to be held. This is the hardest one for many of us. It is the hardest one for me. Because the myth of the isolated self has made us ashamed of our need, has made us think that need is weakness or failure. But the thread of Ariadne, remember, that is not weakness.

It is a condition of being able to go anywhere at all. To allow yourself to be held by other people, by your community, by the land, by something larger than your own will is not giving up your freedom. It is to actually have it, because freedom that rests on the pretense of not needing anything is terrifyingly brittle, it shatters the moment the pretense is punctured. The pretense is always eventually punctured. In contrast, the self that can be held, that knows how to receive and to be known, that self can go very far because it's not spending all of its energy, maintaining the illusion of the own self-sufficiency. It is free to actually move.

And finally, and this is my favorite, and I always, always talk about this. I want to invite you to let wonder and curiosity be an epistemology to let yourself be genuinely astonished by what you are. What you encounter. By interactions, by the fact that you are a collection of all of these different things and beings, that you are a node in a mycorrhizal network of relations extending back billions of years, that the mitochondria in your cells were once other organisms.

That the very language you are using to think these thoughts was given to you by other people. That every interaction is an opportunity to know yourself and to know others in extension because again, the self is porous. This is extraordinary. And wonder and curiosity. It is not naive. I do not like that.

I don't like when people think that that is a naive approach to life. I think it is actually one of the most philosophically rigorous responses available to us because it requires that we actually perceive what is there, rather than just being used to it or, or managing it, or worse reducing it and exploiting it.

Spinoza would say that this wonder and this curiosity is called amor intellectualis, this intellectual love of the whole, and that that is the highest freedom because it is the highest joy, because it is the most adequate idea. I believe him.

So let's bring the threats together. Let me hold the end of all these and see what it makes. 

The myth of the isolated self is a story, a very powerful one, and one with consequences for how we relate to each other. To the earth, to the creatures we share it, with to the future we are making. It is a story that has produced extraordinary suffering. The suffering of people who feel they are failing at an impossible standard of self-sufficiency.

The suffering of ecosystems treated as resources rather than kin. The suffering of communities severed from the reciprocal bonds that make flourishing possible. The myth of the isolated self is a daily practice, a way of waking up and moving through the world and interpreting what happens to you and why. A way of building cities without corridors between them in the literal and metaphorical sense. Of designing economies that treat the capacity for reciprocity as inefficiency. Of a central argument that you already have everything you need inside yourself, which sounds like abundance, but can function like amputation. And because it is a story, it's a story we can stop telling.

We are threads in a web that the fates are still spinning, that Penelope is still weaving and a weaving that Ariadne holds even in the dark. We are in the deepest sense already in relation. Right now as you listen to this. As your body breathes and your cells metabolize and the electrical patterns of your thinking move through the flesh that is continuous with the world you, are in relation.

You have always been in relation. The question I'm still sitting with, and I'll give it to you unresolved because I think it belongs there. As an open question, 

what will you do differently? Tomorrow if you actually believed you were a mode, not a substance. If you woke up knowing that your conatus, your striving, your reaching toward a livable life is already entangled with the striving of everything, every being, around you as the structure of what is.

The thread is in your hand. It was always in your hand. Now, follow it.

This has been Velvet Philosophy. I am Ximena, and I will meet you in the next episode.

 And if this episode stirred something in you, this is the same philosophical ground that underpins my work inside Rooted Impact, a 13 week philosophy school where we explore thinking through community, practice, ecology, and embodied inquiry. You can find the link to join the waitlist in the description of this episode.