Which ‘key to all mythologies’ about the self? A note on where the illusions of transcendence come from and how to resist them

It is a striking feature of philosophical reflection on the self that it often ends up being revisionary of our commonsensical intuition that it is identical to a living human being with, intrinsically, physical and psychological properties. As is well known, Descartes identified the self with a mental entity, Hume denied the existence of such an entity and Kant reduced it to a transcendental ego – a mere condition of possibility for experience and thought. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein followed Kant – or, at any rate, the Kant made available to him through reading Schopenhauer – then, later, denied the existence of such an entity and proposed the no-reference view about at least some uses of ‘I’. Finally, Anscombe radicalised Wittgenstein’s views and claimed that no use of ‘I’ is ever referential. It must be acknowledged that, despite the oddity of these views, philosophers have always arrived at their respective positions on the nature of the self through rational reflection: being impressed with some allegedly special feature of the use of ‘I’ (either in speech or in thought), they have felt compelled to account for it by postulating a realm of superentities (or non-entities) which could explain such seeming peculiarities. Confronted with this tradition of revisionary accounts of the self, at least some contemporary theorists are now approaching the issue with a diagnostic eye, trying to identify the features that have led philosophers to embrace such positions, with the aim of offering a better understanding of them that could ‘give philosophy peace’. That is to say, that could make them compatible with the commonsensical view that selves are identical to living human beings and that ‘I’, either in speech or in thought, is a genuinely referential expression.