Self and Identity

Abstract

The nature of the self has been a topic of concern in both Indian and Western traditions. “Know thyself” has been an important exhortation for men in the West for ages. The nature of the Self (the Ātman) was one of the central topics of the philosophy of the early Upanisads, and has remained important throughout the history of Indian thought. The roots of the philosophical and psychological views of the self may be traced to religious and spiritual concerns in both India and the West. In the Western tradition, for instance, the Judeo-Christian concept of the soul was an ancestor of the contemporary formulations of the self. Descartes, we may recall, conceived of the self as a thinking substance. Being a devout Christian, it seemed inevitable to him to conceive of the soul as immortal because unless the soul continued to exist till the Day of Judgment, God would not be able to pay every man his dues. In the Indian tradition, the immortality of the Ātman seems to have been a corollary to the Law of Karma (at least in some, if not all varieties of its fomulation) in that the assumption of the moral nature of the cosmos does not seem to be justified without also assuming that all of us would be born again to enjoy the fruits of good deeds that are not reaped by the time death comes.