Everyone is someone else around different people; we're always playing a game around others. Who we are at work, with family, with friends, with strangers are all different versions of ourselves, all different identities or “masks” that conceal our true nature. And there is nothing wrong with that; Gustav Jung, who named all these social masks the persona, saw it as an essential part of human nature and a necessary part of our social existence.
So that’s how we are with other people, but then in solitude we can be who we truly are, and be free of our persona, right? I think about Schopenhauer’s words: “A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.”
But no, it is not so easy. With just solitude we’re not there yet, because even in solitude we’re still not free of ourselves.
Everyone makes a caricature of others, it’s inevitable since one can never really know another. However, it becomes problematic when one also makes a caricature of himself – something we are all victim of.
Just as we have shaped slightly different identities for ourselves in every social group, we shape an identity for when we’re alone, based on our relation to external things e.g. our job, our favorite music, fashion, opinions, values etc. and we express this in generic words such as “musical”, “rational”, “sporty” and so on. We thus create something like a package that contains everything we think characterizes us, something about which we can say “that there is me”. It gives us a sense of significance, of uniqueness – something we all long for, today more than ever.
But who we think we are, our self-concept, our self-imposed identity, is as incomplete as our social masks, it’s a projection, of varying faithfulness, of who we really are. The problematic thing about it: it holds us captive. We are never free of ourselves as long as we have a self-concept; it restricts us to only that which affirms it and stops us from growing as a person. It creates an internal struggle whenever we deviate from it, by pressuring us to deny a part of who we really are, and to instead act in accord with it. The package of our self-concept suddenly becomes more like a cage placed around our authentic self that stops it from freely evolving.
The persona has concealed the true self too much, so much we even lose touch with who we really are. Who we think we are, that self-imposed identity, has become more real than what it used to represent. It becomes a simulacrum, while it simultaneously keeps dictating our lives.
So then, not just in solitude as Schuopenhauster said, but after a hard confrontation with our self-concept, we can truly be free. A man can be himself so long as he has eliminated his self-imposed restrictions. Being yourself is having accepted to being no one.
What do we find when we have destroyed that caricature of ourselves? Nothing, that is the whole point. If we did find something, we failed, since by expressing ourselves in concepts and language, we are already making a caricature of ourselves, we are already constructing a cage.
The self is not a thing, not something we can pinpoint, it’s not something that exists in the empirical sense. The self is what is authentic about you – your thoughts, beliefs, values, likes and dislikes etc. – and that may change from day to day. The self, as a whole, is unknowable, it’s pure chaos, and it’s therefore impossible to fully conceptualize, let alone categorize it. We should need an infinite amount of words and nuance to truly express one's true self and, to take Wittgenstein out of context, ”whereof one cannot speak, one must be silent”. We should stop trying to pinpoint our self by imposing a fixed identity on ourselves that suppresses our authenticity.
But can we really do that? Can we just reject our identity and accept being a walking void? No, I don’t think so. Though we can (and in my opinion should) stop characterizing ourselves by generic words, and admit we’re indescribably nuanced, we will ultimately always be characterizing ourselves by our relation to things external to ourselves. It’s our natural tendency (maybe a bewitchment by our intelligence?) to create order in chaos, to structure the world, which includes us, to something understandable and practical.
The important thing is that that structure is not untouchable. We have to realise that every characterisation of ourselves is doomed to be imperfect, to be a caricature, and the best way to cope with that is to admit that who we are to ourselves is something fluid. Our authentic self is inexpressible, so the best is to give our self-concept space to constantly change. We should never stop reflecting on ourselves, because when we reflect we can break those cages. When we look deeper inside, we only find that our self-concept is wrong. Introspection is breaking through these self-concepts, it’s updating them so that they don’t hold us captive. Introspection is a never ending project, a process of constantly finding new interests, new likes and dislikes, new desires, new styles and so on, and thus constantly getting a better and better understanding of our incredibly multifaceted core self. Only that way, we can strip our self-concept of its authority over our actions, opinions and in fact over our life as whole and can we at last be free.