This thing we identify with . . .

Simone Weil once said “Appearance has the completeness of reality, but only as appearance.  As anything other than appearance it is error.”

The freedom of the self is simply an illusion of being the master of its own house. It is in the symbolic order where there is autonomy.  Although this concept of the ego seems so natural, it has only recently been constructed.  It is through a “dialectical process” that the illusion of immutability and the illusion of a self can be subverted.  It is an illusion to think of the self as being stable and enduring; these are the truths that I have come upon over years of wondering a searching.  I have also found Martin Heidegger’s notion of the origin of selfhood, as he says “it is through the anxiety which the true authentic self comes into existence.”

Lacan has a paradigm for the relation of subject to the other that suggests that one is supposed to know how to “be” for others—and we know how to exploit this situation in a way that benefits the desire which drives us.  I postulate that the sense of self is illusory in the face of what Weil calls necessity and gravity.  One may satisfy the formal conditions of knowing, so long as she speaks of knowing, or play the part of one who knows how to be a cognizant and competent person. We can create a self as the one who knows.  For Lacan, this kind of acting can put one in the position of presumed mastery. Meanwhile, it is not in the real that the subject which we create exists, but in the symbolic order.  The subject is a representation of some self-created inner state like this which exists for us as illusory.  It would be convenient, inner-psychically, to produce a personhood which is stable, but existentially this is impractical, because we are in so many ways expected to change and be flexible.