How do our expectations for what we can achieve shape our feelings about ourselves? How do the opinions of others, whether we know them well or not, form part of who we are? And are you defined by what’s in your bank account?

American philosopher and psychologist William James answers these questions and more in his account of the self in the Principles of Psychology. James, well-known along with his novelist brother Henry for a stream of consciousness approach to our psychological life, argues that the self is multilayered. From the most superficial (your material possessions) to the deepest (your values and feelings about yourself), the self has a variety of constituents that James separates into four distinct types. Undergirding the other three is what James calls the pure ego.

Enjoy reading James’s chapter, which has some whimsical—or cringe, depending—takes on yachts and land and sciousness (you’ll soon get what that is)!

As you read and watch the video (or listen—see audio file below), consider:

• to what extent is the social self determinative of who we are, especially when we consider that we have very many social selves?

• how do you understand what James means by the pure ego, or the I of the self (as opposed to the me)?

• do you think his account of the material self is so determined by his bourgeois landowning context that it’s worth rejecting, or do you just think his examples are reflections of his own social standing but we could equally replace them with others and have the idea be just as valid?

• what do you think of James’s formula for self-esteem?

• how should we hierarchically order our various selves, and what does it mean to do so?

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From 2023-2025, I was deep in the weeds writing my book, an academic monograph called Self-Relation: A Phenomenology of Ambiguity. I revised it in 2026 based on helpful anonymous peer reviews, and it’s set for publication in May 2027 (!). The basic idea is that the self is characterized by relating to itself, and this means that the self has a strange sort of identity relative to other things in the world. I draw on existential phenomenology, especially the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to make the argument. Along the way, I offer novel readings of key themes in phenomenology, including anxiety, self-objectification, freedom, bad faith, and responsibility, and argue that ambiguity is a better way of thinking about the self than either unity or multiplicity.

TBH the primary audience for the project is definitely academic, so there is a good amount of jargon and other scholarly shortcuts. However, I also did my best to make it engaging and accessible for those not already steeped in existential phenomenology. And I thought it might be fun to share an excerpt from it as part of the Identity and Selfhood course here on Substack, as a kind of pairing with last week’s lecture video on existential selfhood.

Here’s the table of contents:

Below is a portion of the Introduction.

Introduction

“We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers,” Nietzsche writes.[i] Sustained by a dynamic, teeming world, we exist initially and for the most part without explicit awareness of ourselves. At the same time, nothing is more familiar to us than we are. We are constantly in relation to ourselves. Selves, we might say in a riff on Heidegger, are the beings for whom our being is an issue. From the sheer reflexivity of conscious awareness, to the reflective stance we sometimes adopt, to the self-presentations we fashion or bear in different social contexts, selves are self-relating. This book is an attempt to give an account of this relational self.

Established patterns of thinking lead us to conceptually unmoor the self from its relations, and to think of it as an independent entity or individual. Some historians of ideas think this view of the self emerges only in certain times and places, such as the European Renaissance or Enlightenment.[ii] If that is the case, then we might envision overcoming this concept of the self by providing arguments against it that either usher in a new age of understanding the self differently, or that overcome the idea of the self altogether. Yet it may be that the patterns of thinking that lead us to conceive of the self as independent of its relations are not so easy to dismiss; they might be rooted in the structure of reflective thought. If reflection is thinking thematizing itself, then this act brings about a distinction between itself as subject of consciousness (the thematizer) and itself as object of consciousness (the thematized). From here we are a mere hop away from treating the latter as an underlying substance that bears the capacity to think as a property, although such a view may show up in very different ways in different time periods and geographical areas. When self-consciousness grasps itself in the act of reflection, it recognizes itself as having already been there; this leads us to think that there must have been some thing there all along, making experience possible. As Dieter Henrich puts it, self-consciousness has a tendency to move from reflecting to understanding itself as a being capable of reflection.[iii] And we tend to conceive of this being as a singular entity persisting over time, throughout the lifespan: not reducible to the body, but rather associated with the ‘mind’, whether thought of in terms of personality, commitments, an eternal soul, or whatever appears to reflective thought. In phenomenological terms, we might say that this conception of the self is furnished by what Husserl calls the natural attitude, or the tendency to take the world as mind-independent reality.

Philosophers commonly question this naive attitude toward the self. Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch point out that “No tradition has ever claimed to discover an independent, fixed, or unitary self within the world of experience.”[iv] Rather, “all of the reflective traditions in human history—philosophy, science, psychoanalysis, religion, meditation—have challenged the naive sense of self.”[v] That is, despite immense geographical, cultural, and historical variations with respect to the sense of self, no philosopher ever really believed in a unitary self, upon careful consideration; this sense of self is rather the naive notion with which thinking furnishes us. We discover this naive notion in the act of reflection, but further reflection (reflection of the kind that the traditions above, in their manifold ways, foster) reveals its inadequacy. From Hume’s skepticism about the self to the Buddhist teaching of anatta to Fichte’s claim that the I is pure activity and therefore cannot be considered a singular thing, we find philosophers rejecting the notion of a singular self. It is a fiction to think that such a naive belief ever held sway in philosophy, though it is true that few have effectively overcome it.

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What does Kierkegaard, writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, mean by describing the self as a relation that relates to itself? Why does Heidegger insist on using the term Dasein rather than writing about subjectivity? What does Sartre’s claim that “existence precedes essence” mean for a theory of the self? This video investigates existentialist themes in these three thinkers’ approaches to the self and identity. I touch on self-relation (the topic of my upcoming book on existential phenomenology), nothingness, anxiety, and authenticity. The unifying theme throughout these thinkers’ approaches to the self is the idea that the self is both situated and free.

The readings this week are challenging, and I discuss them in chronological order—which means, in this case, from hardest to easiest. Feel free to reverse the order in your own reading, starting with Sartre, then moving on to Heidegger, and then reading Kierkegaard.

As you read and watch the video (or listen! see audio file below), consider:

• why does The Sickness Unto Death suggest that we despair because we are partially, but not entirely, self-created? How do you experience the tension between self-creation and being determined by surroundings in your own life?

• how does lived experience attest to the vertigo of freedom?

• why do existentialists deny human nature, and what’s at stake in saying there is still a human condition: namely, the condition of needing to take up our existence?

• how does the picture of anxiety here differ from the popular view today?

• and how does starting, as Heidegger does, from our practical engagements in the world shift the focus in studying the self relative to the more introspective approaches we’ve seen in other thinkers?

Please also see the syllabus, linked below, for suggested additional materials (I’ve done a few videos on different aspects of these thinkers’ work I’ve included in the suggestions in case you want to go deeper)!

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When people are looking for a work of philosophy that can provide solace and a space for reflection on personal challenges, there are a few books I recommend: Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, Boethius’s The Consolations of Philosophy, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker. The latter takes the form of a series of ten chapters, called “Walks,” in which Rousseau reflects on the challenges of old age and the isolation he experiences after his painful exile from his home in Geneva. Written in the two of years before his death in 1778, the book offers an engaging set of musings on philosophy in relation to everyday life. Even though Rousseau is giving major sadboy energy throughout, this book somehow always lifts my spirits, since my first time reading it as a heartbroken undergrad sitting under the dogwood trees on my campus in Connecticut. It’s a kind of fever dream for the lonely dreaming of finding salvation by floating, like Rousseau does, in a boat on the middle of a lake.

I’ve decided to pair Walks 1-3 of this book with Charles Taylor’s chapter on Rousseau in The Sources of the Self, highlighting how Rousseau’s practice of withdrawing into himself relates to the romantic idea of seeking an inner voice of nature untouched by society.

As you read the text and watch the video (or listen to it as an audio file—see below!), consider:

• How does Rousseau’s withdrawal into himself counteract and/or increase his isolation? Do you think this withdrawal is just a way of responding to his own particular sad circumstances by seeking comfort in solitude, or do you think it has broader applicability?

• How does the idea that the self is misunderstood in society but peaceful in nature function in this text?

• In the Third Walk, Rousseau describes undertaking the isolated practice of meditation at age 40. This “strict self-examination” seems in some ways similar to Descartes, but in contrast, Rousseau is not aiming for certainty with this practice. He also recognizes that he can’t succeed in getting rid of all his assumptions and doubts. What is the upshot of Rousseau’s meditation?

• What are the roles of resignation and hope in this text?

• Why does Rousseau think that he should not be defined by his reputation?

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In this video, I explore what John Locke means by the identity of consciousness and how he defines the terms ‘person’ and ‘self.’ I also get into some of the criticisms Locke’s view has faced, which are also covered in the Atkins reading provided to course subscribers. It’s a bit more technical than the material I included in the main video lecture for this week, “British empiricist approaches to the self: Locke and Hume,” so that’s why it was what I chose to cut from the main video (which was already on the long side for the course!). So consider it an optional extra if you want to do a deeper dive with this week’s material.

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My first teaching job after completing my PhD was a one-year sabbatical replacement at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. I was replacing both the continental feminist philosopher in the department and the specialist in “modern philosophy” (which refers to 17th and 18th century philosophy, roughly from Descartes through Kant). One of the things that excited me most about this job is that I was teaching Philosophy and the Arts to a bunch of theatre kids—Muhlenberg has a top Theatre program. But what surprised me is that I equally enjoyed teaching Modern Philosophy, in no small part because it meant teaching Locke and Hume.

In fact, this video is longer than it’s meant to be (my lectures are usually 10-25 minutes) because I was having so much fun with this material. The full lecture ended up actually being 38 minutes, so I’m going to post the remaining material later in the week as a bonus.

What I find most interesting about these thinkers is that they are responding to a secular and increasingly scientific effort to understand the world through empirical observation, or observation by the senses. This is in contrast to approaches rooted in rationalism, such as Descartes’. And an empirical approach to the self means that we’ll have to go looking for answers about who we are in the material world around us, not by appealing to a speculative principle such as the soul.

Oh, and because I found that Locke gave me a chance to talk about Freaky Friday (the 2003 Lindsay Lohan version, specifically).

As you read the text and watch the video (or listen to it as an audio file—see below!), consider:

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What does it mean to introspect, and what do we find when we engage in this activity? Introspection, or looking within, might reveal to us thoughts, feelings, imaginings, desires, and more. Certainly, Descartes and Montaigne find those things when they investigate the landscape of their mental lives. However, Descartes asserts that none of those things are certain. The contents of our inner lives are open to doubt—and indeed, he does doubt them as part of his process of seeking indubitable knowledge in the Meditations. Montaigne would agree, but he’s much less concerned with certainty than Descartes. For Montaigne, self-study is more a matter of sensation than reason, and nothing is considered irrelevant to it. From our basic bodily functions to our reflections on the meaning of life, our identities are variegated and in flux.

This lecture video contrasts 1) Descartes’ method of discovering the self through a process of reason that whittles down experience to what cannot be doubted with 2) Montaigne’s method of discovering the self through a process of attending to sensations in their proliferation. I explain in the video why I consider these two philosophers out of chronological order, and why each of their views has an important role to play in the philosophy of selfhood.

As you watch the video (or listen to the audio—see below), consider:

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So I thought I’d share a log of the time I spent working this week. I’ve been tracking my time for the past few years and find it really helpful. Here’s a bit of background; feel free to skip ahead if you already know this stuff.

Typically, professors’ jobs fall into three buckets:

1. Teaching, usually somewhere between 2 and 5 classes per semester: this includes time spent in the classroom as well as preparing lectures, reading, grading, and meeting with students about their assignments

2. Research: for a philosophy professor like me, this mainly consists of writing articles and books, plus reading/taking notes on what I’m reading/staring into the distance thinking/talking with other scholars (so that I have ideas that I then write about in articles and books). Sometimes it includes archival research.

3. Service, both to the college and to the scholarly and public communities: this includes serving on college committees (I’m chair of the Faculty Library Advisory Committee this year), mentoring students, participating in department meetings, peer review (reading other scholars’ journal submissions and providing anonymized feedback), and participating in local events

Add to this things that don’t quite fall neatly into one of these buckets, such as email and what I call professional development—attending conferences, connecting with other scholars online (including the dreaded promotion of one’s own work), etc.—and most of us have more than enough on our plates.

In addition, like an increasing number of academics, I have chosen to add a pretty big additional bucket (or helping to my plate—sorry to the English profs for the mixed metaphors):

4. Public-facing work: a strange academic term for things like writing op-eds, doing podcasts, posting educational threads or videos on social media platforms, etc. My public-facing work at this time consists of 1) , the podcast I’ve hosted since 2020, and 2) Substack video lectures (formerly YouTube, though i still sometimes post there)

I really love doing this kind of work, and have wanted to do so in some form or another since I started my Ph.D. in 2011. But, I’ll be honest, it’s hard to manage given the other demands of my job. Here’s how I spent my time working this week:

No single week is quite representative, so a few notes on this one:

• While I value self-discipline and really love my job, I’m not trying to girlboss my nose to the grindstone, and I worked more and later this week than I would have liked. Things have been unmanageable since we switched Overthink from a biweekly to a weekly schedule last August, so I’ve been trying to figure out what I can clear from my plate because I’ve been pretty overwhelmed lately

• I did all my research for this week’s podcast recording prior to this week, but usually more time would be devoted to that. I also didn’t have as much time to write or read this week as I would have liked, largely because it was an essay-grading week

• My service this week primarily consisting of meeting with advisees in advance of fall registration (I also met with many last week). Usually, it’s more academic committee-related

• I’m posting this Friday morning, so the afternoon schedule is projected :)

And a few notes about my schedule in general:

• I am really lucky to have a relatively light teaching load of 2/2 (2 classes per semester) because I teach at a small liberal arts college that highly values faculty research. Prior to getting this job in 2020, I taught a 3/3 load for four years while also being on the job market. The time that freed up when I started my current job in 2020 is the time I’ve reallocated to my podcast and video work.

• I go to campus 2-3 times a week and work from home the other days. I live 45 minutes away from campus, so my commute is on the long side. I usually listen to a draft of Overthink on one of those rides, and then public radio, other podcasts (I’ve been loving ’s ICYMI podcast and Hard Fork lately), or talk on the phone for my other commutes

• When I’m working, I’m usually really working, so that I can then be really not working when I’m done for the day. The positive is that I’m not really scrolling or engaging in other distractions while I’m working; the negative is that I barely check my phone during the day so loved ones sometimes complain that I can be hard to reach (I can also be bad about responding to email, not something I’m proud of). Gaining this focus has been a hard-won process, and ’s book 4,000 Weeks is basically what kicked me into gear

If you have any questions, feel free to ask, and if you’ve figured out how to make it all work and not be overwhelmed, please share your tips!

When you think about the self, you likely associate it with something inside yourself. Perhaps it’s some core that subsists beyond the fluctuations of your body and its appearance in different contexts, or some felt sense of being alive, or an inner moral compass or capacity to reason. In this video, I follow philosopher Charles Taylor in tracing the origins of inwardness through Plato and Augustine’s accounts of reason and the soul, and put his account in dialogue with the Katha Upanishad, which introduces an idea of the atman as beyond the senses or even reason.

As you watch the video (or listen to the audio if you prefer—see below) and read the texts, consider the following:

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• why the question of identity is an important one in philosophy

• how capitalism and social media drive us toward an interest in the self

• what you can expect to learn in this course

• why I’m interested in this topic both personally and professionally

All materials for the course will be available here on Substack; for an immediate overview of the syllabus and the weekly schedule, see the reading list here.

The course will run with a weekly release of a video or occasional other material. For this course, I’m additionally offering the lectures in audio form in case you’d prefer to listen instead of watch, or if you’d like to watch, and then listen at a later date, or some variation of this! The audio version will be at the bottom of the posts.

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In Winter 2022, I wrote the below piece and pitched it to a couple of outlets. It didn’t get picked up, and then I forgot about it but touched on the key idea on Overthink and the monogamy episode of Amanda Montell’s Magical Overthinkers podcast. Plus, I worried that it got dated pretty quickly—The Bachelor felt like a bit of a dinosaur relative to the other shows that have gotten more zeitgeisty since. That’s changed in the past couple of weeks with the Taylor Frankie Paul discourse, which I haven’t quite caught up on, and which is therefore also unrelated to the below.

Untimely or no, the piece below gets at some of my ideas on non-monogamy through the lens of The Bachelor franchise, and thought I could finally give it a home here as part of the Intimate Relationships course additional content!

This post pairs well with the lecture videos on Justin Clardy and Luke Brunning.

Why doesn’t The Bachelor embrace polyamory? (2022)

ABC’s long-running Bachelor franchise seems positively old-school in the TV landscape of Love Island and Too Hot to Handle. Every episode of the show hews to romantic clichés, from horse-riding dates on idyllic beaches to petal-strewn proposals. Plus, by depicting leads’ heroic quest for finding “the one” amid dozens of attractive prospects, the show upholds the ultimate ideal of a monogamous happily-ever-after.

Of course, the Bachelor’s ideals have always been far from its realities. In its twenty years on air so far, just five of its thirty-five leads have married their final picks. That the show feeds a lie to viewers and contestants alike is no secret to its fans. But even as few of the contestants’ “journeys” will end with the dream they peddle, many viewers are happy to enjoy the show with a tongue-in-cheek suspension of disbelief.

The Bachelor franchise faces a rising threat from within, however: for all its emphasis on monogamous marriage, its leads are starting to recognize that it’s actually a show about polyamory. In the After the Final Rose special celebrating Bachelorette Michelle Young’s engagement to winner Nayte Olukoya in December 2021, Michelle talked with runner-up Brandon Jones about how she had genuinely fallen in love with both him and Nayte. Falling in love with two people is “just not something I ever thought was possible,” Michelle said—until the show. Brandon agreed, stating that it’s “very possible.” The audience nodded along, as if this admission weren’t vehemently opposed to the show’s most essential narrative: that finding love means finding the one.

The current season of The Bachelor promises to be even more incendiary on the score of polyamory than the last, as the show’s teasers feature new Bachelor Clayton telling not two, but three women he loves them. Indeed, as ABC struggles to make Clayton interesting, they continually tease footage of his admitting to falling in love with three women (though this actually already has a precedent, in Peter Weber’s season). At the same time, the ABC tagline for this season boasts, “Midwesterner Clayton Echard is a throwback romantic looking for a partner, a great love and a best friend.” What kind of ‘throwback romantic’ envisions dating thirty women on a reality dating show at one time as his ideal meet-cute? Through statements like these, ABC doubles down on its increasingly hollow narrative of good, old-fashioned American love. But it’s time for us to call the Bachelor what it is: the death knell of Americans’ consumption of monogamy.

In fact, nearly all of the franchise’s leads in recent years have admitted to falling in love with more than one contestant. While leads had long reserved the l-word for the winner, Ben Higgins broke precedent in 2016 by telling his top two that he loved them both. And, once Ben admitted to loving more than one person, the vast majority of leads followed suit. This is telling, even as the show compensates by presenting dating around as a means to a monogamous end. You might love more than one person, but only one is right for you. Yet viewers may be starting to wonder: why? Is there a kernel of polyamorous utopia hidden in the dystopian reality TV hellscape of Bachelor Nation?

The Bachelor franchise consecrates monogamy while practicing polyamory. Even as its rituals serve to hide its more subversive dimensions, the show furnishes the conditions for falling in love with more than one person in a socially acceptable way. When Bachelor Colton Underwood was ridiculed for telling more than one woman he was falling for them, former Bachelorette Kaitlyn Bristowe defended him on Twitter, saying, “Have you ever been in a situation where you had the opportunity to exhaust 4 different relationships…? When it’s the ‘format,’ it’s possible.” Bachelors and Bachelorettes are encouraged to open their hearts up to every contestant fully, to see if there’s a “connection” there. They’re given the time and resources to focus on developing these relationships away from the harried pace of everyday life. Under such greenhouse conditions, is it any wonder that feelings for multiple people would blossom?

One might argue that the Bachelor franchise shows only that polyamory is possible under such artificial circumstances. But even if you strip away the romantic boat rides, adrenaline-pumping bungee jumps, and candlelit dinners, the core of the show’s format is really just the freedom and time to date more than one person at a time without ridicule. How does a show about the romantic ideals of monogamous love end up so consistently contradicting them? By letting people explore multiple loves at the same time.

There’s an obvious asymmetry here, of course: under more real-world polyamorous conditions, the contestants would likely also have the freedom to date other people. Instead, contestants are cloistered in a mansion with no phone access, and coming on the show with even the vaguest preexisting relationship is a major Bachelor taboo (though it happens…kind of a lot?). But, if lead after lead is honest in saying they’ve fallen in love with more than one contestant, might not a reasonable next step be to let them stay in love with more than one contestant?

Those who practice polyamory know how possible it is to love more than one person at a time. The assumption that romantic love must be tied to a single life partner dates from the time when monogamy was a form of paternity assurance among the middle and upper classes—a way of making sure that assets and property would stay within the family line by being passed down to legitimate children. Inseparable from the history of patriarchy, monogamy was enforced primarily for women, and was also a key tool of settler colonialism. With the growing movement of polyamory and other forms of consensual non-monogamy, more Americans are starting to recognize that our society already accepts loving multiple people—namely, friends and family members—so why not extend this to romantic partners, as well? What’s more, many monogamists also know that it’s possible to love more than one person at the same time, but have to keep mum because their partners would consider it cheating.

Of course, the Venn diagram of Bachelor nation and the polyamorous community is likely small, since the franchise appeals to many Christians and conservatives. These demographics are often heavily invested in monogamous marriage as the basis for perpetuating heterosexual nuclear family structures. But this is precisely what I find so fascinating about the franchise. If this ultimate conservatively appealing depiction of romantic love routinely shows people in love with more than one person, then I can at least hope that an increasing acceptance of multiple loves might be on the horizon.

I sometimes wonder how Bachelor leads understand being in love with multiple contestants. Do they simply think they’re ‘torn’ between two people, but that one of them must be the one? If so, do they ever wonder whether one could have been two? In my ideal world, Michelle would have ridden off into the sunset with both Nayte and Brandon. But imagining a happily-ever-polyamorous-after for Michelle and her two Bachelor loves—let alone Clayton and his three—isn’t easy. Nayte’s difficulties accepting Michelle’s dates with the other contestants don’t instill confidence that he’d be down for Michelle to continue dating others outside the confines of the “format.” Jealousy is a frequent challenge for newly polyamorous people, and one that many find insurmountable. Plus, polyamory is still surprisingly taboo. As Michelle said in After the Final Rose, “you see people get ridiculed for falling in love with two people.” Even if Nayte and Michelle had been open to her continuing to date Brandon, her family, friends, and fans likely wouldn’t be. Further, from tax breaks to hospital visiting rights, couples receive countless material benefits from being monogamously partnered.

While I recognize that my protests at the TV to “just date both of them!” are naïve, I wonder whether mainstream TV’s accidental recognition of multiple loves might be a launching point for more widespread acceptance of polyamory. If Clayton and Michelle can fall in love with more than one, why not accept that many people build viable lives with multiple partners? The show is good at leading people to fall in love but bad at helping them stay in love. An engagement that begins on the same day as a devastating break-up can’t be the best recipe for a happy marriage. Why not embrace multiple loves and forget the narrative of the one that, as we know from The Bachelor’s track record, ends in disillusioned heartbreak for so many?