I’d add that if we’re talking society writ large, I’m not sure the problem is the disengaged self (whether by reason or by irony). Rather the far bigger problem is perhaps following instinct and emotion too often. (Looking at the current election cycle in particular)

(My thinking about both of these issues is that it provides a really nice way for Mormons to engage with recent feminist thought that develops both of these ideas in really intriguing and productive ways.)

Concerning inner self and eternal self, I think the Mormon history of the eternal self is much more open than people think. A lot of 20th century thought on the issue is pretty biased by B. H. Roberts. I used to call Roberts as the originator of a true tripartite soul along Cartesian lines. After reading him more carefully I think that’s wrong, but I think he did push a certain view of intelligence as our true self that’s closer to a Cartesian mind than what one sees in the 19th century. Brigham Young really comes pretty close to a contemporary physicalist theory of mind – albeit applied to spirits rather than bodies. He thinks the parts aren’t intelligent at all and that spirits can be destroyed. Then there’s Orson Pratt’s influential version which is this weird Stoic/atomistic take on his and his brother’s earlier more neoplatonic conception of spirits being made literally from God’s immaterial spirit substance. He takes it all down a more Leibnizean line.

With both Young and Pratt (and arguably many other figures) it’s almost impossible to tell whether there is a fixed essence for soul/mind. The main argument for such is that this life as a probationary state in the plan of salvation only makes sense if there’s something about individuals God can’t control. But that of course needn’t be something fixed to which we only need be true. It’d work just as well if there’s a nothingness inside our eternal nature that God also can’t control. This is more how Duns Scotus looks at God’s essence – which arguably gets picked up by Heidegger and to a degree existentialism in the 20th century. It also arguably is what Levinas does with other minds using God as absolutely other to move us to seeing other people as absolutely other yet with an ethical demand.

Now I’m biased in that I think this Heideggarian, Scotus, Levinas view is apt to be the correct one. However the opposing view that there’s simply objects with immutable properties frankly explains the religious evidence just as well.

To get back to your question, I find the term self to have many senses, some of which are unstable. I think we often use the term without being aware of the term as a tool. Ditto with similar terms like identity. What does identity even mean relative to us? Often (but not always) the discourse reduces to what persists through time. But that may well include stable parts and unstable parts. It’s just that I think we can’t really use the term just as what persists through time. It ends up being surprisingly like the question of authorship. An other notion that seems simple on its face and complex in its analysis.

If the self is what we are to be true to, it’s just not at all clear what we mean. I honestly would not want to be true today to my 9 year old self. Hopefully I’ve changed. It’s the significance of that change which makes the discussion so complex.

As you note, there’s a lot of naive conceptions of causality here that really need to be unpacked. (As an aside I think Ricouer’s work on narrative is very important here for understanding all this. I’d throw in as well his book Oneself as Another)

Mormons point to pre-mortality but honestly I just don’t think that does much in terms of the problem. For one the notion of spirit birth (and the question of whether there even is a spirit birth) means that just pushes the questions back a level. Because there’s nothing remotely like clarity on these issues – which surprises many people who assume the theology is more developed than it actually is – I don’t see how it solves much. Saying pre-mortality solves these issues, to my eyes, is on par with saying childhood and adolescence solve the issues.

Regarding free will and blameworthiness. In the analytic free will literature the debate over what freedom means or whether people have it really the question is when or whether people can be ascribed responsibility to acts. That is can we blame them or not. The typical argument against determinism for instance (and this is taken up by Blake Ostler in volume one of his theological works) is that if my choices are either due to what’s innate to me or is due to my environment then I deserve neither praise nor blame for any choice I make. Likewise if we throw in randomness you get the same issue. Most of those who pick libertarian free will do so because they think we ought hold people for blame or praise for their acts. (Blake explicitly makes that claim in his book regarding whether God could justifiably punish people) People who really don’t have an intuition or need to hold people accountable in that sense seem much more open to rejecting free will.

As such there’s really two ultimate sources for free will views. Either worry about blaming people or else just thinking that ontologically there’s no third alternative between randomness and free will.

Your comment “Often this authorship is wrapped up with questions of when someone is praiseworthy or blameworthy” isn’t entirely clear to me– can you expound on that? That sounds interesting. I also have no knowledge of Stoic physics, so I’ll have to poke around in there sometime.

I think we can conceive of telos in terms of agent intents. That’s where our use of terms like “aims,” “goals” and so forth are most commonly used. I’m leery of pushing those terms outside of their natural linguistic habitat though. I do think we can have a use of telos that’s broader and at least closer to the Aristotelian use if not exactly the same. That is the universe may tend towards certain structures as various forms of complexity and self-development develop. So, to give an analogy, the evolution of wings in biology is best seen in terms of efficient causation rather than final causation in Aristotle’s categories. By and large biology reject teleology even if it uses the language at times in a metaphoric sense. Yet at the same time wings evolve independently in many creatures (with some bug re-evolving wings after losing them). That suggests there’s a nature tendency to the development of wings in a broad set of environments. Personally following C. S. Peirce’s use, I have no problem calling that a teleology.

An other kind of teleology we can perhaps discuss is what I discussed relative to Hebrew conceptions of truth at my blog. I’ve mentioned that before. This is roughly akin to Aristotle’s use of essence with a few differences. It’s more or less the idea that things as they present themselves to a person tend towards what those things are. So the essence of a road to Salt Lake City is that the road actually goes to Salt Lake City. With objects with a certain temporal nature that means they tend in the future to a certain behavior. So humans die. Thus there’s a telos of humans to death. Trees grow, so a pinecone properly planted tends to grow. This is very much with Aristotle’s use although we have to be careful.

With regards to God, the question in a Mormon context is how much freedom God gives the world. That ends up getting into the various ways Mormons grapple with biological science – especially evolution. We want human life to be special in some sense and directed in some sense by God. To my eyes the most fruitful way to think of this is that evolution and self-emerging complexity are just innate aspects of the universe given the laws of physics it follows. God can intervene in various ways to bring about environments that make humans likely. This isn’t traditional divine creation, especially not of the more anti-evolutionary Evangelical sort. (And of course Mormons have had strong flirtations with such views over time) It’s more akin to lightly directed breeding programs ala how we’ve domesticated so many animals and crops affecting their evolution. Heck, I wouldn’t exclude outright genetic modification to bring things about at times.

If we combine that view of God with biology with that semi-Aristotilean sense of teleology then we can say God has a teleology for various types of life.

My problem with the Rousseau/Kant view is that I’m dubious there’s some inner self to which we’re true. You could I suppose point to the material spirit body, but that just pushes the question back a level. This is why the more existential form in figures like Sartre or Kierkegaard is interesting. They tend to reject that there’s any inner self to which we’re true. Well Kierkegaard is trickier here because in some ways he keeps a thing-in-itself logic – Keith Lane over at BYU Hawaii has an interesting book on that.

What they all share though is the idea that to be free is to have a form of self-authorship. Which seems true as far as it goes. The question is what this authorship means. It’s there we’ll get different requirements depending upon who we’re talking about. Often this authorship is wrapped up with questions of when someone is praiseworthy or blameworthy. That’s the drive behind libertarian free will.

As to Stoicism, I’ve personally found it a fascinating group. The part of its ethics I like is the recognition there are things we have no control over. It seems inherently valuable to not get worked up over things we can’t control. So in terms of my personal philosophy of life there are aspects of the Stoic view of emotions I’m extremely sympathetic to. The parts I dislike is the tendency of Stoics to accept society as it is given. You see that especially in the Roman Stoics who aren’t exactly agitators for change over things like slavery. Even Epictetus who was a slave and whom you’d think would be concerned about that seems far too passive. That danger of passivity is a huge problem in Stoicism.

I also like Stoic physics and I’ve enjoyed studying their relation to contemporary science. Finally I think that Orson Pratt’s theology, as nutty as it is, ends up just being Stoic cosmology only with Priestly atoms rather than the more field theory that Stoics adopt. So the Stoic theory of “fire” as a fluid through the whole universe actually ends up being quite similar to the idea of a single quantum mechanical field for the whole universe.

While I ultimately find Stoicism problematic, I’ve long found them the most interesting of all the ancient philosophies.

Tell me more about your draw to Stoicism, I’m curious.

However the danger, even without nominalism, is treating everything as instrumental. I think you bring that part out really well. The question ends up being when is instrumentalist use wrong? I confess that it’s here I turn to Heidegger’s transformation of Aristotle. That is when we are using things in an instrumentalist way and they break down (for whatever reason) we see them as more than a tool. It’s in that encountering things as more than a tool that we can have an authentic encounter with them.

In the existentialism of people like Sartre this might be seeing a waiter as more than someone bringing my mean, but something autonomous.

The break with creation ex nihilo in a fashion then is the break with instrumentalism in an even more radical fashion. This always brings me to Levinas and his break with Heidegger. Heidegger (at least the Levinas version) thinks everything ultimately in terms of the person themselves. The for-the-sake is always of dasein. For non-philosophers reading – basically all tools, practices and meaning are in terms of their function for me the existing person who encounters them. Levinas takes it further. Behind every face is an endless depth that is a soul. The same relation we have with God comes to define how we know other minds.

To turn it all about, the question of instrumentalism comes up against the ethical demand as I encounter other people and realize they are more than my aims. I can’t understand them in terms of myself.

I’ve always loved Stoicism, but the great problem of it was always thinking of yourself as part of a machine. That’s what we should be doing. It has no room for parts that are more than their place in the machine. I think, as you noted, that Stoicism has its rebirth every few generations because there is a drive to accept that place in the machine whether the machine is God, society or earth itself in some mystic sense. But that’s always unsatisfying and Stoicism never is good about when we should be disrupting the machine.