Lost in the Cosmos

macho-boy-man, feminine-doll-girl, etc.—and also, as George Mead said, upon how one perceives others’ perceptions of oneself.
    (e) The standard American-Jeffersonian high-school-commencement Republican-and-Democratic-platform self. The self is an individual entity created by God and endowed with certain inalienable rights and the freedom to pursue happiness and fulfill its potential. It achieves itself through work, participation in society, family, the marketplace, the political process, cultural activities, sports, the sciences, and the arts. It follows that in a free and affluent society the self should succeed more often than not in fulfilling itself. Happiness can be pursued and to a degree caught.
    (f) The diverted self. In a free and affluent society, the self is free to divert itself endlessly from itself. It works in order to enjoy the diversions that the fruit of one’s labor can purchase. The pursuit of happiness becomes the pursuit of diversion, and in this society the possibilities of diversion are endless and as readily available as eight hours of television a day: TV, sports, travel, drugs, games, newspapers, magazines, Vegas.
    (g) The lost self. With the passing of the cosmological myths and the fading of Christianity as a guarantor of the identity of the self, the self becomes dislocated, Jefferson or no Jefferson, is both cut loose and imprisoned by its own freedom, yet imprisoned by a curious and paradoxical bondage like a Chinese handcuff, so that the very attempts to free itself, e.g., by ever more refined techniques for the pursuit of happiness, only tighten the bondage and distance the self ever farther from the very world it wishes to inhabit as its homeland. The rational Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness embarked upon in the American Revolution translates into the flaky euphoria of the late twentieth century. Every advance in an objective understanding of the Cosmos and in its technological control further distances the self from the Cosmos precisely in the degree of the advance—so that in the end the self becomes a space-bound ghost which roams the very Cosmos it understands perfectly.
    (h) The scientific and artistic self. Or that self which is so totally absorbed in the pursuit of art or science as to be selfless. The modern caricature is the “absentminded professor” or the demonic possessed artist, which is to say that as a self he is “absent” from the usual concerns of the self about itself in the world. E.g., Karl von Frisch and his bees, Schubert in a beer hall writing lieder on the tablecloth, Picasso in a restaurant modeling animals from bread.
    (i) The illusory self. Or the conviction that one’s sense of oneself is a psychological or cultural illusion and that with the advance of science, e.g., behaviorism, Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, the self will disappear.
    (j) The autonomous self. The self sees itself as a sovereign and individual consciousness, liberated by education from the traditional bonds of religion, by democracy from the strictures of class, by technology from the drudgery of poverty, and by self-knowledge from the tyranny of the unconscious—and therefore free to pursue its own destiny without God.
    (k) The totalitarian self. The self sees itself as a creature of the state, fascist or communist, and understands its need to be specified by the needs of the state.
    ( CHECK ONE )

    If you can answer Questions (1) through (5) and did not check (6g), you probably do not need to take the Twenty-Question Quiz.
    Twenty-Question Multiple-Choice Self-Help Quiz
    to test your knowledge of the peculiar status of the self, your self and other selves, in the Cosmos, and your knowledge of what to do with your self in these, the last years of the twentieth century

(1) The Amnesic Self:
    Why the Self Wants to Get Rid of Itself

    IN ALL SOAP OPERAS and in many films and novels, a leading character will sooner or later develop amnesia. He will not necessarily develop pneumonia or cancer or schizophrenia, but inevitably he will be overtaken by amnesia. He (or she) finds himself in a strange place, having forgotten his old place, his family, friends, business. He begins a new life in a new place with a new girlfriend, new job. After a while in his new life he begins to receive clues about his old life. A stranger stops him in the street and calls him by a strange name. The best exploitation of the pleasures of amnesia occurred in Hitchcock’s Spellbound where Gregory