The self or ego has always been a stumbling-block for Western philosophy because of its resistance to accommodation within its favored framework of substance-ontology. The idea that ‘the self’ is a thing (substance), and that whatever takes place in ‘my mind’ and ‘my thoughts’ is a matter of the activity of a thing of a certain sort (a ‘mind’-substance) is no more than a rather blatant sort of fiction – a somewhat desperate effort to apply the thing paradigm to a range of phenomena that it just doesn’t fit.

It feels uncomfortable to conceptualize people (persons) as things (substances) – oneself above all – because we resist the flat-out identification with our bodies. Aristotle already bears witness to this difficulty of accommodating the self or soul into a substance metaphysic. It is, he tells us, the ‘substantial form,’ the entelechy of the body. But the accommodation strategy raises more problem than it solves, because the self or soul is so profoundly unlike the other sorts of entelechy-examples that Aristotle is able to provide.

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However, from the angle of a process metaphysic the situation has a rather different look. We have difficulties apprehending what we are but little difficulty experiencing what we do. Our bodily and mental activities lie open to experiential apprehension. There is no problem with experiential access to the processes and patterns of process that characterize us personally – our doings and undergoing, either individually or patterned into talents, skills, capabilities, traits, dispositions, habits, inclinations, and tendencies to action and inaction are, after all, what characteristically define a person as the individual he is. What makes my experience mine is not some peculiar qualitative character that it exhibits as the property of an object, but simply its forming part of the overall ongoing process that defines and constitutes my life.

Once we conceptualize the core ‘self’ of a person as a unified manifold of actual and potential process – of action and capacities, tendencies, and dispositions to action (both physical and psychical) – then we have a concept of personhood that renders the self or ego experientially accessible, seeing that experiencing itself simply consists of such processes. On a process-oriented approach, the self or ego (the constituting core of a person as such, that is, as the particular person he is) is simply a megaprocess – a structured system of processes, a cohesive and (relatively) stable center of agency. The unity of person is a unity of experience – the integrative coalescence of all of our diverse micro-experience as part of one unified macro-process. (It is the same sort of unity of process that links each minute’s level into a single overall journey.) The crux of this approach is the shift in orientation from substance to process – from a unity of hardware, of physical machinery, to a unity of software, of programming or mode of functioning.

The above is a passage from an essay by Richard Rescher entitled The Promise of Process Philosophy which was published in this book.

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Art by Nathan Carter

Tags:process philosophypsychepsychologyRichard Rescherselfsoul