The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 123 of 254
The systematic elusiveness of I
We do not observe the self in the same way that we observe the yellowness of a tulip, the smell of coffee or the thought that I really must book my train. The self is what is having those thoughts and perceptions – it is not itself a perception. And when you introspect, you might argue, you are always aware that there is a self having thoughts and perceptions. If not, there could be no awareness at all. To put it another way, what Gilbert Ryle calls the ‘systematic elusiveness of “I”’7 is simply a result of the impossibility of being both subject and object at the same time. The ‘I’ cannot catch itself for the same kind of reason that a hunter cannot be its own prey. It would be like trying to eat your own face, or look directly into your own eyes (without the aid of a reflection, of course). In that sense, ‘I’ is elusive in the same way that ‘now’ is. As soon as you have tried to refer to the present moment, it has passed. Likewise, when you try to observe your own self, to become fully self-conscious, that very act changes the nature of the experience you are trying to observe.