If it is true that we as individuals are actually the sum of what has gone before us, i.e., the historical context within which we find ourselves (living at a particular time, in a particular place, from within a particular family) – or as my narrator Taylor Thatcher suggests:
“It was Galen McMoody who first made me realize that I was just another casualty of history…of histories. A hammered pin-ball in an endless play of historical levers, plungers, flashing lights, and tolling bells; all chance, played out by others – other people, in other places and times, over other events, other Gods.”
What, then, becomes of the idea of the ‘autonomous self’? Not to mention the ‘soul’, or any other rendering of the homunculus dictating our sense of self to our…selves? Perhaps, here is where the philosopher John Locke missed…we may be ‘blank slates’ but some folks made that slate somewhere, sometime.
