Many me

Today I heard a quote from Sri Aurobindo. He said, essentially, that each of us has multiple selves. I was aware of this. For decades, my experience has been that the different aspects of a personality are many and the idea of a subjective identity is a construction. I always saw the principles of construction as ideological, serving the logic of passports, individual responsibility and jurisdiction, but also of guilt and atonement, the idea of a soul in the Christian context, etc.

My reaction was always to resist this construct of individuality. Aurobindo now says that precisely when a person feels they have many aspects, many "I"s within them, the task of sorting them out becomes difficult. Some people live their lives and have found a way to somehow reconcile the contradictions. Others have so many "I"s within them that ordering them is difficult. How is this ordering supposed to happen?

What's new for me is the idea that the many selves can be organized around something larger and different. A greater consciousness. For many, that might be a divine consciousness. For Deleuze, perhaps Immanence. No longer oneself as I have 5 years of philosophy studies to overcome here. And 20 years of art theory, which focuses on the individual.