The Problem of the Unmet Self: Can a Life Be Lived Without Oneself?

A person can spend decades keeping her obligations, making her own choices, and describing what she has done with complete accuracy, and still be a stranger to the life she calls hers. I do not think this requires a hidden self she failed to find. The estrangement lies somewhere more ordinary: in how she stands toward the commitments she has lived through. My central case is a supervisor in a municipal care office who, in the morning, criticizes a neighboring district's practice of returning incomplete applications, and in the afternoon defends the same practice in her own office. She understands the reason against it perfectly well. She just does not let it reach her. Drawing on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Ricoeur, and Frankfurt, along with recent work on responsibility, I separate three ways a life can be someone's own: belonging to it, participating in it, and appropriating it. "First-personal standing" is my name for the step between having a reason and allowing it to bear on one's own commitments; "existential addressability" names a commitment's openness to that step. I do not claim these pick out a faculty that theories of reasons-responsiveness or practical identity have overlooked. They pick out a problem on which those theories bear without, by themselves, resolving it, and it is a problem about time. Twenty years on, the supervisor may have to answer for a past she cannot alter, without being free to call it either simply false or finally justified.