Tags / 7 quotes from 1 source
#self-creation
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Wise people fashion themselves
Batchelor points to a very famous passage in the Dhammapada (verse 80), in which the Buddha says: ‘Well-makers lead the water (wherever they like); fletchers bend the arrow; carpenters bend a log of wood; wise people fashion themselves.’2 ‘In that usage,’ says Batchelor, ‘attā…
Identity formed through actions
Your identity, your sense of being a person is formed through your actions, and that is only possible because there is not a fixed self. There is no unchanging essence or substance to which those attributes are then attached at all.’
Passive and active character
perhaps the most important limitations of character scepticism arise from a failure to distinguish between two senses of character, what I’ll call passive and active. Passive character is the set of dispositions we just happen to have as a result of our genes, upbringing and…
Consistency of character must be cultivated
This does not mean there is no value in trying to cultivate a generous personality: indeed, there may be even more. The evidence is that unless you try to cultivate traits, whether you display them will depend more on circumstances than on you. So consistency in character is…
Do we create our own identity?
If character has to be built in important ways, could one go further and say that identity itself is not just given, but is something we in some way create ourselves, by our actions? One of the most persistent recent advocates of this view is the philosopher Christine Korsgaard.
We are what we do
‘We are responsible for our actions not because they are our products but because they are us, because we are what we do.’9 However, her view is not an excessively romantic one. Self-creation is not heroic but necessary. ‘Every human being must make himself into someone in…
Husserl: the ego constitutes itself in a history
Husserl wrote: ‘The ego constitutes himself for himself in, so to speak, the unity of a history,’ and ‘Since, by his own active generating, the Ego constitutes himself as identical substrate of Ego properties, he constitutes himself also as a “fixed and abiding” personal Ego.’