A Point of View 2

look upon the ‘cadaver tombs’ such as can be found in Wells Cathedral to see that this could be a subtextual meaning in these emblematic works of arts. Who knows, were we simply to vapourise at the point of death, the notion of an afterlife may have had less of a hold on people). Whilst alive, what I am, an individual with an identity – rests upon my being a conscious, subjective entity capable of thinking, feeling and willing, and aware of myself as such; however we construe this. In my workaday life, when not engaged in rarefied discussions about metaphysics, I assume that much the same can be said about others as well. That is to say, I ordinarily take it for granted that the faculty for being aware of oneself as a conscious subjective entity is universal, albeit one that individuals exercise in different ways; with more or less frequency or intensity, for example. What will obviously be unique to each individual is, as it were, the content of this awareness: Apart from the unique unfolding of experiences every second of the day, this content includes the myriad facts that feed into one’s overall identity, what has been designated the ‘me’ component of a conscious subjective entity (as opposed to the ‘I’ component – the subject in this act of ‘internal perception’. This might be termed the ‘subject/faculty’ meaning of ‘I’, which differs from the ‘identity’ meaning of ‘I’ deployed when one says, for example, ‘I am an accountant’. In the latter usage, the fact stated is incorporated into the ‘me’). Now the reader may protest that I have surreptitiously introduced analogy into this account in the form of a homonunculus that sits inside one’s head, observing what goes on. Amongst other things, there

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