"The Self is the same self because that is what it is: what other self could it be? In our moments of awakening we are quite untheoretically aware of the identity of what wakes here and what woke then (from which experience, more theoretically, we may infer the possibility of transcending time). To wake up is to know ourselves, so far. By the same token it may well occur to us, in ratiocinative mood, that the Self in me is just the same as that in you; that only the One Self attends on parallel and successive states of mind and action, separating itself out as One in Many. What makes my self is no other than what makes yours, and the differences between us lie at the level of what that attends on, or how it is—as it were—refracted. That is indeed an inference that Averroistic interpreters of Aristotle (and non-dualist Vedantins) have preferred; there is one nous only, and that the divine mover. But at the level of particulars, the Self here and the Self over-there are differently reflected."
Open individualism

January 1, 1970

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Added on April 10, 2026
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Original Language: English

Sources

, "How Many Selves Make Me?" (1991)

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Open_individualism