On Being Me

The author is professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University. In this personal book, he gives an account of what it means to him to be human and engage with the deepest questions of life and identity. The chapter titles are suggestive, leading into corresponding musings such as being glad I was born, wanting to go on, fearing the end, regretting what might have been, making things happen and wanting to be loved. His is a reflective 'examined life' using sophisticated language and largely concerned with what Jeffery Martin would call the narrative self, a unique, persisting perspective articulated in language. He sees time as an illusion explaining that he is the same being at different moments. He has an interesting discussion of the relationship between deciding and describing in terms of making plans for the future. One limitation is evident in his assertion that there can be no experience of mental images from previous lives – the author is clearly unfamiliar with the work done at the University of Virginia. He might also have benefited from some insights from systems theory with its self-referential loops and some treatment of the relationship between the tacit and the explicit as explained by Sir Michael Polanyi. Each reader will find a different mapping onto their own experience, but it is a stimulating journey.