The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 92 of 254
Multiplicity multiplies the mistake of reification
this is where I think talk of multiplicity repeats the error it is trying to correct. The problem with our intuitive sense of self is that it excessively ‘reifies’: it makes a singular thing out of it. Multiplicity does exactly the same, only at a lower level: making singular, unified things out of the parts which make up the self. This seems even more misleading than the reification of the whole self: at least ‘person’ in the ordinary, intuitive sense is singular in several important ways, such as having a single body and a single autobiography. If it really is a mistake to think of the self as a single entity, it just multiplies the mistake to think of ourselves as a collection of smaller, single selves. The multiplicity thesis seems most plausible when, on analysis, it is trivial. Nietzsche, for instance, wrote that the ‘subject is multiplicity’ and that ‘we always have only a semblance of unity’.15 But this ‘always’ takes the sting out of the thesis. What Nietzsche argues in The Will to Power is that nothing that enters consciousness is a unity. But if there are no unities, there is nothing to count, and it makes as little sense to talk about twenty personalities as it does to talk of one. It is like the difference between count nouns and non-count nouns. You can have one or two bottles of milk, but only some milk, not…