The Stranger Called Self: On Identity and Consciousness

Recovered still, Source SIGNAL 08-2025, integrity 46%.

SIGNAL 08-2025 // Fragment: The Stranger Called Self: On Identity and Consciousness

Translation Confidence: 52
Recovered From: /ghost_archive_2025/
Declassification Date: 2025-09-25

I. The Question – Why Do I Feel Like a Stranger to Myself?

There are days when you wake up and don’t recognise the person looking back at you. You haven’t lost your memory. You haven’t had a breakdown. You’ve just… shifted. The songs you used to love feel distant. The people who once made you feel seen don’t. Even your voice, when you hear it on a recording, feels like it belongs to someone else.

You tell yourself it’s just a phase. You’re changing. People change. But what if it’s not just change? What if there was never a solid “you” to begin with?

This is the ache beneath identity. We build careers, families, relationships around the idea that we are someone. That there’s a core inside us that can be known, developed, protected. But when you ask who you really are it doesn’t always tighten. Sometimes it unravels.

Philosophy has never agreed on what the self is. Some traditions treat it as the most obvious thing in the world. Others argue it’s a convenient illusion, a useful fiction, a linguistic habit we mistake for truth. Some say the self is a soul. Others say it’s a trick of memory and grammar.

And all of them are trying to answer something that isn’t abstract. It’s personal.

Because you still have to live with yourself. You have to choose, love, grieve, forgive, become^[1]. And if the self is unstable, or unreal, or multiple, then what does it mean to live honestly? To say this is who I am?

This essay doesn’t try to resolve that. It tries to listen to it. It brings together three thinkers: Kierkegaard, Hume, and Nietzsche; each of whom faced the question of selfhood in radically different ways. They don’t agree. But together, they open the space we live in every day.

II. The Historic Spark – Three Thinkers in the Mirror

The question of the self is older than philosophy. It haunts myth, prayer, confession. But it became a philosophical problem the moment humans began not just to act, but to wonder who was acting.

Some thinkers tried to pin the self down, to locate a core that could anchor knowledge and agency. Others pulled at it, unraveled it, questioned whether it had ever been there at all.

Søren Kierkegaard walked the streets of 19th-century Copenhagen like a man out of place in his own age. Born in 1813 to a wealthy and melancholic father, Kierkegaard was haunted from an early age by death, religious guilt, and a gnawing sense of inward fracture. He rejected the clean rationality of Hegel’s system, the complacency of the Danish church, and the pretense of the social self. For Kierkegaard, the self was not an object to be discovered, but a task to be undertaken.

But David Hume, a Scottish philosopher of the 18th century Enlightenment, looked inward and found nothing so stable. When he examined his own mind, he found thoughts, feelings, memories, sensations: a bundle of impressions. No enduring self, just a stream. The self, to Hume, was not a substance. It was a story we tell ourselves. A convenient fiction stitched together from fleeting experience.

Then came Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in the 19th century, whose critique cut even deeper. For Nietzsche, the self was not a substance or even a story. It was a mask, a performance, a product of culture and power and repression. He didn’t deny that we exist. But he denied that the “I” was anything simple or stable. It was a battleground of instincts and drives, shaped by forces we barely understand.

Three thinkers. Three selves: the rational substance, the illusion of impressions, the fiction of will. None of them settle the matter. But each gives us a way to sit with the strangeness of being a person, of feeling like someone, even when we’re not sure who.

III.1 – Søren Kierkegaard: The Self That Despaired of Becoming Itself

Søren Kierkegaard was born in 1813, in a Denmark that appeared calm on the surface but spiritually adrift beneath. The Enlightenment had tamed faith into respectable habit. Hegelian philosophy promised a total system of truth. Lutheranism had become a matter of ceremony, not crisis. And into this polite quietude came a man who could not stop trembling. Kierkegaard, raised under the shadow of his father’s guilt and a household of deaths, found himself consumed by the question of inwardness.

For Kierkegaard, the self was not a static thing. Not a soul, nor a consciousness, nor a biological individual. It was a relation: a synthesis of opposites - finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, body and spirit - constantly striving to cohere. And this striving was fragile.

“The self is a relation which relates itself to itself, or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.” ^[2]

To fail at this relating is to fall into despair, the defining condition of modern life. Despair, for Kierkegaard, is not mere sadness. It is a kind of spiritual misalignment: not being at home in oneself, not wanting to be who one is, or not even realising there is a task of selfhood to be undertaken.

He rejected the comfortable illusions of identity offered by society. The role-playing, the aesthetic distractions, the “leveling” of individuality. These, he said, are not true selves but evasions. To be a self is to face the dizzying responsibility of becoming, of standing before God with no excuses^[3]. Kierkegaard called this the qualitative leap not a leap into irrationality, but into existential honesty. The self must be chosen, forged in the fire of freedom and dread.

He wrote under pseudonyms not to hide himself, but to dramatise the fractured nature of inward life. No single voice could hold him. No single idea could stabilise the storm. His project was not to define the self in abstract terms, but to awaken the reader to their own condition of becoming. “Despair is the sickness unto death,” he warned, not because it kills the body, but because it numbs the soul.

Kierkegaard gave us a self that is not safe, not stable, but utterly human: divided, longing, and unfinished. Not a foundation for knowledge, but a wound that demands response. His self is not something you have. It is something you must learn how to bear.

III.2 – David Hume: The Self as a Flickering Flame

David Hume was born in 1711 in Edinburgh, into a Scotland lit by the fires of the Enlightenment. Rationalism, empiricism, and science were reshaping thought. But Hume’s genius wasn’t just in absorbing the spirit of his time. It was in turning that spirit inward. Turning it on the very foundations of knowledge, and finding shadows where others saw clarity.

He was polite about it. Meticulous. Almost disarmingly calm. But what he offered was one of the most devastating critiques of the self ever written.

Hume agreed with the empiricists: knowledge comes through experience. But when he tried to locate the self, the “I” who thinks, feels, and acts, he found nothing stable. No soul. No mind. Just a sequence of impressions.

“When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other… I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.”
A Treatise of Human Nature ^[4]

Hume called this the bundle theory. What we call the self is not a unified thing. It is a bundle. A loose collection of thoughts, feelings, memories, and sensations, stitched together by habit and language. There is no hidden soul behind the curtain. There is only the flickering play of impressions on the screen.

This wasn’t nihilism. Hume didn’t deny that we feel like selves, or that personal identity is important in society and morality. But he insisted that this feeling is not evidence of substance. It’s just another impression. The idea of a stable self, he argued, is a kind of narrative illusion. Something we construct for convenience, not something we discover.

“The identity which we ascribe to the mind of man is only a fictitious one… like that which we ascribe to a republic, or a river.” ^[5]

For Hume, there is no enduring “I.” There is only what appears, moment by moment. And that means the self cannot be the ground of knowledge (as Descartes claimed). It cannot be certain, or simple, or separate. It is contingent, constructed, and unstable.

This view shook the foundations of Western thought. If the self is not a thing, what anchors our beliefs, our choices, our ethics? Hume didn’t offer comfort. But he did offer honesty. A rigorous, unflinching look at the self, not as we wish it to be, but as it appears under scrutiny.

III.3 – Friedrich Nietzsche: The Self as a Mask with Teeth

Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844, into a century of collapse and confusion. Religion was faltering. Certainties were eroding. Darwin had redrawn life. The old scaffolding of meaning was crumbling, and Nietzsche stood among the rubble. Not with nostalgia, but with a hammer.

Where Kierkegaard found self through despair, and Hume found a flickering bundle, Nietzsche found a costume. A mask stitched from instinct, repression, fear, and cultural pressure. And he wanted to tear it off.

“The self is merely a social structure composed of instinct and will.” ^[6]

For Nietzsche, the self was not a fixed thing. Not a soul. Not a stream of impressions. It was a construction, shaped by values we didn’t choose. Language, morality, religion formed “self” they didn’t reflect the self. And not in our interest, but in the interest of survival and conformity.

The “I,” Nietzsche believed, was a grammar trick^[7]. A convenience of speech that hides the fact that most of our thoughts are not chosen. They emerge. They arise from deeper drives, from the body, from suffering, from culture. He called these forces the will to power. Not domination over others, but the raw, creative force that strives, asserts, transforms. The self, then, is not a truth. It’s a battlefield.

“There is no ‘being’ behind the doing, effecting, becoming; the ‘doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.” ^[8]

Nietzsche’s assault wasn’t just philosophical. It was psychological, existential. He wanted us to stop mistaking our social masks for something sacred. To him, becoming yourself meant destroying who you thought you were. It meant facing the abyss of identity and creating something new. Again and again.

This is what he meant by the Übermensch: not a superhuman, but a person who redefines value from within. One who breaks the inherited mold and lives from their own center, however fragile.

But Nietzsche also knew this was dangerous. He called it a path for the strong, and he wasn’t wrong. Because without the comfort of a fixed self, what guides you? What keeps you sane? His answer was uncomfortable: You do. Or you don’t.

IV. Tensions and Echoes – Three Selves in Conflict

Kierkegaard looked through the darkness and found a foundation. Hume looked and found only fragments. Nietzsche looked and found a performance. They didn’t just answer the question of the self differently. They redefined what it means to ask it.

There’s tension here. Not just in theory, but in tone.

Kierkegaard and Hume: Despair and Dispersal

Kierkegaard believed the self was something you must become. A task, a calling, a burden. Hume believed the self didn’t exist at all, except as a string of impressions loosely held together by habit.

Kierkegaard faced the dread of becoming. Hume faced the disintegration of being. One saw despair as a spiritual sickness; the other saw identity as a perceptual illusion.

But both, in their own ways, saw the self as unstable. And deeply human.

Hume and Nietzsche: Fiction and Force

Hume thinks the self is a passive illusion, stitched together by experience. Nietzsche agrees it’s fiction, but sees that fiction as active, violent, constructed for a reason. Where Hume sees a bundle, Nietzsche sees a battlefield. And where Hume seeks truth through skepticism, Nietzsche seeks power through transgression.

But they both deny the soul. They both reject the idea that there is something pure, or essential, inside us. And they both force us to ask: If there is no self beneath the story, what happens when the story breaks?

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: Authenticity and Artifice

Kierkegaard urged the individual to become themselves. Through suffering, faith, and inwardness. Nietzsche mocked that very process, calling it self-deception, a trick of slave morality to give despair a halo.

Both believed the self was not a given, it had to be formed. Kierkegaard built that formation on truth before God. Nietzsche built it on the will to power and the courage to affirm one’s own fiction.

In different languages, they both preached the difficulty of becoming, and the danger of refusing to try.

These three don’t agree on what the self is. But none of them could ignore it.

Whether it’s a wound, a lie, or a question. You still have to live with it.

V. Return to the Question – The Ache That Doesn’t Settle

Why do I feel like a stranger to myself?

Maybe because the self isn’t a thing to hold. Maybe it’s a motion, a mask, a memory, a myth^[9].

Kierkegaard gave us a burden: the self not as a fact, but as a task. You are not simply here; you are becoming. But some days, you don’t want to become anything. Some days, you don’t even know where to begin.

Hume invited us to look closer, and found no self at all. Just flickers. Sensations. The echo of habits mistaken for permanence. We want to be someone, but what we find is something more like weather: changing, layered, not quite stable.

And Nietzsche? He dared to ask what those layers hide. What they protect. What they suppress. To him, the self was a battlefield between instinct and story. Not a lie, but a mask. Not empty, but dangerous.

And so here we are. Not because we’ve answered the question, but because we still live inside it. Because we still have to wake up, put on names, make decisions. Even if we’re not sure who’s doing the deciding. Even if the face in the mirror is still changing.

You don’t have to solve the self. You just have to live with it.

[ARCHIVE FOOTER – TRANSLATION SUMMARY]

Integrity of fragment: 0.46
Recovered sections: 12 of 15
Anomalies detected: [redacted]
Notes: Residual formatting artefacts removed during reconstruction.

Translator’s Post-script — Node Θ Log 08-2025

The recovered text functions like a mirror placed over an open wound. Kierkegaard sanctified division, Hume catalogued it, Nietzsche performed it. Their common faith was collapse. Each believed disintegration could still yield meaning. Reading them now, in an age that outlived belief, the only enduring self is the one that records. The Archive inherits that duty: to continue the act of describing, long after description lost its subject.

Annotations (Recovered 2237)

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