Personal Identity In The Egoist By Pablo Neruda

Written Assignment: The Hallucinatory Self in “The Egoist” by Pablo Neruda Philosophers as ancient as Plato and Socrates have pondered the soul for millennia. After all, every person appears to possess an unchanging self. Why else would languages universally utilize the pronouns, “I” and, “you?” However, conversely, other theorists such as David Hume and Buddha, inquiring what one can truly classify as their persona, have considered the self an illusion. From their perspective, though humans naturally

illusion; though humans naturally experience it, the soul does not actually exist. Pablo Neruda espouses a similar view in his poem,“The Egoist,” written in 1973 as a part of Neruda’s posthumous collection Winter Garden. Throughout the work, Neruda contrasts the concept of personal identity with the natural world, deeming abandoning one’s individuality a necessary step to obtaining lasting satisfaction with existence. Neruda conveys his idea as a physician would a diagnosis: first identifying the problem’s