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This chapter develops an analytical framework within which conceptions of self can be identified and classified. A conception about self supplies an answer to the question “What am I?” Until very recently, virtually all western discussion about the self explored three conceptions: the Cartesian, the Humean or Reductionist, and the Strawsonian or Materialist views. This chapter demonstrates that these three are far from exhaustive, and indeed identify eleven broad conceptions of self, grounding the classification in an orthogonal pair of distinctions: between adjectival and collective modes of exemplification, and between considerations about individuation and considerations about ownership. Thus, as well as the three views just mentioned, Indian theory discusses Ownership, Pure Consciousness and Phenomenal views, three types of (Buddhist) No Place view, the Tornado view and the Flame view.

In addition to and connected with its fresh metaphysics and philosophy of religion, the British Idealist school put forward a radically new kind of moral theory; one which might be called the idealist ethic of social self-realization. Rapidly gaining popularity, its re-construal of the moral problem came to be the dominant mode of thought in ethics for twenty years, and a major force for twenty more after that. This chapter examines that system of ethics, through detailed consideration of the theories of Bradley, Green, and Edward Caird. Particular attention is paid to the concepts of self-realization, the common good, ‘My Station and its Duties’, and the social conception of the self. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the various textbooks and manuals which popularized this conception of ethics.

This chapter traces the cultural-historical origins of the autobiographical self by contrasting autobiographical writings in ancient and modern times, in East and West. It argues that autobiography is inevitably conditioned by the cultural conception of self that transforms across historical eras. Through analyzing the structure, content, and function of autobiographical writings against their cultural and historical backdrops, the chapter pursues the idea that the autobiographical self gains cultural stance unique to a time and space in the history of human civilization.

This chapter investigates how neoliberal globalization is not just an economic concept or an economic condition; rather, it brings with it shifts in the spheres of culture psychology and identity. It specifically analyzes how personality and assessment tests and cross-cultural workshops on identity and difference that are primarily developed from Euro-American psychology are utilized in the Indian information technology and call center industry. The cross-cultural framework developed primarily by Western psychologists provided the most important tools, concepts, and vocabularies to understand “culture” in cultural sensitivity workshops and extended training seminars held for offshore companies, such as in India. These workshops promoted highly reified ideas about culture in which Indian work culture was viewed as inefficient, hierarchical, feudal, and indirect, whereas European culture was framed as egalitarian, professional, assertive, and non-hierarchical. This chapter reveals how neoliberal psychological discourses of self, identity, and happiness are becoming a mainstay of Indian culture and society.

We can begin to unravel the enigma of heteronymy if we note that a rather similar puzzle arises in the context of dreaming. I may certainly figure within my own dream, and there is therefore a conceptual distinction between the dreaming subject and the subject-within-a-dream. But is it possible for me to have a dream such that, within the dream, I am a subject other than the subject I am? The puzzle is to know what makes it the case that in the dream I am X and not JG: on what grounds should we answer the question ‘Which one is me?’ J. J. Valberg’s proposal is to call attention to what he calls a ‘positional use’ of the first person, distinct from its mundane use as an indexical, and a corresponding positional conception of self. Using ‘I’ positionally, I am the one to whom all this is presented, the one to whom every phenomenal property is directed, or, as Valberg puts it, the one who is ‘at the centre’ of the manifold of presentation which he calls the experiential horizon. The positional conception of self is one which Pessoa quite explicitly puts at the heart of his philosophy. With the positional conception of self to hand, a solution to the enigma of heteronymy is available.