The Nature of Self

From the standpoint of natural science, the concept of Self as primordial to subjectivity offers a biological model for what constitutes humanity on Earth as Beings of nature or of historical culture thereto. Yet, the reality of Self is both psychic and somatic-either consciously objective or unconscious to its own objective necessities or contingent desires. Existence as a concrete fact or abstraction to the understanding, leads one to the observation that Being is something that may not exclusively be categorized one way or the other. In the Nature of Self, Jeffrey B. Holl examines what is changeable to the causality of our natures from phenomenal, empirical, phenomenological and existential horizons-exploring human experience from landscapes of what is identified as the field of actuality-constituted by teleological and historical cultural objects. In this way we are identifiable as a Self-more adept at becoming of our own natures-or liberally constrained within our identifications as signifiers of historical or emergent cultural development. The latitudes and longitudes where we realize the synthesis of life's purposes, are constituted both naturally and transcendentally, thus-positing a concretion of the Self as one of transcendental nature. The discourse of this age must either become a reality to enlightenment, or a deification of our existences that will become inexorably determinative of the controlled effects that are environmentally destructive to both society and nature. Herein, an argument is made for the authenticity of the nature-self-a determinative Self as subject, in reification of the naturalization of the ego-toward an articulation of a necessary ethical universality of genus, as a transmutable existent to the critical understanding of a self-conscious Being of Self. As a glimpse into the world of Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Marx, Husserl and Sartre, this piece is restorative to the philosophical project of what is expressive to the dimensions underscoring a purposive meaning for the twenty-first century and beyond-where the horizons of transcendental nature echo upon the landscapes of humanity's raison-d'tre.