Identity: Paul and the Self

"They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ!—assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness."

In Philosophy, transcendental arguments seek to elucidate the conditions for the possibility of some fundamental phenomenon. For example, Edmund Husserl engaged in transcendental phenomenology and his aim was to elucidate the conditions for the possibility of conscious experience. At one point he writes of the experience of listening to music; he observed that for humans to experience music as we do there must be a kind of remembrance of the note just passed as well as an expectation of the note immediately to come. Without such remembrance and expectation there would be no continuity to the sounds, they would be merely successive disconnected sounds and would not be music at all. And yet, neither our remembrance or expectation can be remembrance or expectation as typically conceived for the conscious activity of either remembrance or expectation would prevent the full experience of the present note or sound. Husserl therefore proposed retention and protention as the conditions for the possibility of the experience of music. Retention is the conscious mind's ability to let a note of music linger in the mind as successive notes are played and protention is the ability of the conscious mind to prepare itself for the successive note based on the experience of the present one.

The above cited passage from Ephesians prompts a transcendental question in my mind, "What are the conditions for the possibility of Paul commanding the believer 'put off your old self... and put on the new self'?" One may argue that Paul is simply using metaphor to describe the moral transformation that takes place in the person who believes in Christ. I believe it possible to understand Paul's words as metaphor, but I am lead by this passage to understand that Paul is referring to a profound existential or physical/metaphysical reality. Paul speaks of the old self as being "corrupt" while referring to the new self as "created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness." The old self seems to be of a fundamentally different nature than the new self. I do not think it is adequate to understand Paul's words as merely metaphor, he seems to be speaking of a literal and deep transformation of the person as such.

We ask then, "What are the conditions for the possibility of a self being commanded to put off themselves and put a new self on?" It is first noticed that Paul's command is directed at the self or at selves. He assumes that his listeners are selves, persons, or moral agents with the capacity of self-reflection and understanding themselves as individuals. Paul addresses selves and in so doing assumes a conscious core to the individual, a zero-point of orientation, and a subjectivity with an identity which persists through time. Paul tells the selves (his listeners) to "put off your old self." What is a self but a self? Paul seems to be telling his listeners to put themselves off, to rid themselves of themselves. How is this possible? How can a self put itself off? I think of a shirt trying to take itself off of itself. Our conceptual imagery is brought to a halt. We enter paradox. We cannot conceive of what Paul means, and yet we still feel his command can be obeyed.

Paul continues by commanding the self (the self which is no longer a self because it has taken off itself) to put on a new self. With this second command Paul assumes that there is something continuous between the person who has taken off their old self and the person who is now expected to put on a new self. What is the continuity? Our intuition tells us that it is the self which gives the person continuity through time, but here this cannot be the case for Paul has already commanded the the self be put off. In addition, it is a NEW self which Paul commands the no-self (because of the old self being put off) to put on. If a person puts on a new self (especially after having put off their old self) is the person the same person? Our sense is that the self is the most basic thing to a person's identity and if the self is lost the person is lost. Paul does not take this sentiment into account. Paul assumes a person with an identity of some type to be continuous through this entire process of putting off the old self and putting on the new self.

If it is not the self which makes a person most fundamentally themselves then what is it? What makes me, me? Evidently I am not myself and yet I am. I feel that I am nothing over and above myself and yet there must be something which I am that is over and above myself. Maybe our concept of the self needs to be more fluid or more expansive?