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Robert Musil gives confidence to the no-self minority like me | Aeon Essays

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is a hosted research fellow in philosophy at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. She is also a literary critic, and the author of Uncertainty and Undecidability in Twentieth-Century Literature and Literary Theory (2022) and anthology editor of Literary Theories of Uncertainty (2023). Edited byNigel Warburton Listen to this essay 20 minute listen Idon’t feel like I have a self. Most people I encounter speak about their experience as if they have an internal centre of awareness – something inside doing the perceiving and feeling, a centre to their subjective experience. And most people seem to connect this intuitive sense of a singular self to who they were yesterday, last month, last year – to a continuously unfolding life-story stretching back to their earliest childhood memories. I’ve always struggled to relate to people with such seemingly full and wholesome selves and coherent life narratives. When I look inward, I find no locus of awareness. There doesn’t seem to be anyo

I don’t feel like I have a self. Most people I encounter speak about their experience as if they have an internal centre of awareness – something inside doing the perceiving and feeling, a centre to their subjective experience. And most people seem to connect this intuitive sense of a singular self to who they were yesterday, last month, last year – to a continuously unfolding life-story stretching back to their earliest childhood memories. I’ve always struggled to relate to people with such seemingly full and wholesome selves and coherent life narratives. When I look inward, I find no locus…

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