The Self in Space and Time
(from The Self and the Dramas of History by Reinhold Niebuhr)


There can be no question, of course, that the self is an object among other objects in space and time. It has its dated existence at some particular time and in some particular location. The conditions of time and space, of age and environment determine its character to a large degree.

But the self also rises indubitably out of the situation of time and place. As Hocking observes, it is in time but it also has time within it. By its memory and foresight it transcends the given moment and is therefore transtemporal in one dimension of its being. It is also spaceless in one dimension. The self-consciousness of the self proceeds in a particular organism. But the self is, in one dimension, non-spatial. Its imagination is free to rove over the boundaries of time and space to which it is bound. But it is more important to note that self-consciousness is ultimately non-spatial. This is a great embarrassment to any rational conception which must insist on the coherence of the various entities with which it deals. The nonnaturalistic philosophers of Greece sought to eliminate this scandal by interpreting the self as "reason" and assuming reason to be the "form" of the spatial world. There was a plausible reason for this procedure. The self undoubtedly possesses a rational faculty; and the rational faculty measures the structures of the spatial world. The power of mathematics to unlock nature’s secrets filled the mind with wonder from Aristotle to Leonardo da Vinci. This coherence between a non-spatial mind with the forms of space therefore seemed to offer a clue for the solution of the seeming absurdity of a non-spatial entity. The mind is non-spatial, but it is congruent to the dimensions of space. It furnished the forms for spatial objects. That was why mathematical calculations could solve so many problems of spatial relations.

Actually this answer is no real solution for the problem of the self which is more complex than mind and has a more integral and discrete existence. The principles of reason are universal; and idealists of all the ages have sought to swallow up the self in these rational universalities. But the integral self is a highly particular entity which resists these efforts. Yet they have been accepted from Greek rationalism through the whole modern idealistic tradition. Hegel involved himself in all kinds of absurdities in his effort to prove that the real self was not the particular self but a self of universal mind. Kant’s "Ego of transcendental Apperception" is obviously no ego at all but merely the universal principles of rational procedure. Fichte combined romantic with rationalistic influence to project something that obviously had some of the inner vitality of a true self rather than pure mind, but he produced an even more absurd idea when he supposed that this finite self was capable by its own will to create itself in absolute validity.

The fact is that there is no escape from the "rational absurdity" of the real self because it is at once in time and beyond time. It is spatial and yet non-spatial. And there is no sharp distinction between its spatial and non-spatial dimensions. Yet this double fact, which outrages the sense of rational coherence, is a fact of daily experience. The philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have eliminated the absurdity of the self which is in time and yet beyond time and space by reducing self to mind and identifying mind with form and thus establishing it as congruent to space and time. Modern psychology lists no such simple way out of the dilemma. It is committed to the study of the empirical self as the object of its study. If any part of that object seems to elude it, the inquiry becomes embarrassing, for only an object in space and time can be the subject of scientific study according to its own presuppositions.

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