In my PhD thesis I focus on developing a distinct account of the achieved self, where selfhood is something to be created or fashioned. Slogan: Becoming over being.
I reject both Wittgensteinian and Nietzschean, positive and negative accounts of the self: i.e. that there is a self or soul, separate from the body (especially that ancient doctrine of the so-called immortality of the soul); or that there is no-self or no-soul, only the body.
I rather prefer Nietzsche’s emphasis on the “mortal soul”, “soul as subjective
multiplicity”, and “soul as social structure of the drives and affects” (Beyond Good and Evil, 1.12).
[Nietzsche’s reading of the biblical text was much closer, than other philosopher’s readings. The immortality of soul is foreign and extra-biblical. It’s teaching is clearly the mortality of the living human being (Hebrew, nephesh, see. Genesis, 2.17; 3.4).]
In providing this account I take my cue from Cavell’s The Claim of Reason (esp. part IV). I read Emerson’s perfectionism back into Nietzsche’s call: “one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, 5). The chaos in our stories, from which we are reborn, as a self.
Philosophy’s attempt is to get us, reaching out to the readers, to recreate ourselves.
fragments of philosophy 