What does it actually mean to become yourself?
Is there a pure, authentic self buried somewhere beneath family expectations, culture, memory, relationships, obligation, history, and everything you’ve inherited?
Or do human beings become themselves through participation in relationships, traditions, communities, languages, and realities larger than themselves?
In Interlude LXXXVI of The Observable Unknown, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey brings the current arc on inheritance and human becoming toward its synthesis through the work of Martin Buber and Charles Taylor.
The central proposition is: We become ourselves through participation in realities larger than ourselves.
This episode questions one of the most familiar ideas in modern discussions of identity: that becoming authentic means removing external influence until some untouched inner self finally appears.
What if there is no completely untouched self?
What if identity isn’t something we merely discover beneath the world, but something that takes shape through our encounters with it?
Martin Buber: I-It, I-Thou, and the Self Created in Relationship
The episode begins with philosopher Martin Buber and his famous distinction between I-It and I-Thou relationships.
In an I-It relationship, another person or thing becomes something we can describe, classify, predict, measure, manage, or use.
That mode of relationship is necessary.
Doctors examine bodies.
Businesses evaluate performance.
Builders work with materials.
Daily life would be impossible without treating some parts of reality as objects of analysis.
But Buber describes another kind of encounter.
In the I-Thou relationship, another person is encountered not merely as an object inside our experience, but as a genuine presence.
And something surprising happens.
The encounter doesn’t only reveal the other person.
It changes the person doing the encountering.
You aren’t exactly the same self while deeply listening that you are while planning your reply.
You aren’t the same self in love that you are in calculation.
You aren’t the same self before another human being becomes fully real to you.
This leads to one of the episode’s central ideas:
You don’t become yourself by becoming untouched by what isn’t you. You become yourself through encounters with what isn’t you that make more of you possible.
Relationship doesn’t necessarily erase individuality.
Certain relationships can make dimensions of individuality possible that isolation never could.
Charles Taylor: Identity Is Dialogical
Dr. Rey then turns to philosopher Charles Taylor and the idea that human identity is fundamentally dialogical.
We don’t invent our entire language of meaning privately.
Words such as courage, loyalty, dignity, sacrifice, betrayal, justice, responsibility, and love already possess histories before we begin using them.
We enter conversations that started before we arrived.
Families have values.
Cultures have stories.
Communities possess standards.
Traditions contain arguments.
Languages carry distinctions that no single speaker invented.
We inherit these structures, then gradually begin answering them.
That doesn’t mean inheritance determines us.
You can reject the values of your family.
You can challenge a tradition.
You can outgrow a teacher.
You can revise the beliefs you were given.
But even rebellion begins somewhere.
As the episode puts it:
Even refusal has an ancestry.
To reject something, you first have to encounter it.
To revise an inheritance, you first need something substantial enough to revise.
To depart from a teacher, you need a position from which departure becomes possible.
Horizons of Significance
The episode also introduces Taylor’s idea of horizons of significance.
A choice becomes meaningful partly because it exists within a larger field of meaning.
Love matters because love refers to something larger than a momentary preference.
Courage matters because danger, responsibility, fear, and consequence give courage significance.
Loyalty means something because betrayal is possible.
Sacrifice matters because something exists that a person considers worthy of sacrifice.
The self doesn’t create every source of meaning from nothing.
It encounters meanings, inherits meanings, questions meanings, and sometimes contributes new ones.
This suggests a provocative question:
If everything means only whatever I personally decide it means, what remains for the self to answer to?
Nothing to inherit.
Nothing to challenge.
Nothing to serve.
Nothing to exceed.
Meaning becomes richer when the self participates in something larger than itself.
Inheritance and Human Becoming
Interlude LXXXVI: Becoming also serves as the synthesis of a larger sequence in The Observable Unknown.
The arc has explored:
Imitation.
Apprenticeship.
Memory.
Obligation.
Transmission.
Legacy.
And now, becoming.
The governing question has been:
What do we receive before we ever begin choosing?
The answer isn’t that inheritance controls our future.
Nor does freedom require escaping every inheritance we possess.
The episode proposes something more demanding:
What carries us becomes part of what we must eventually learn to carry consciously.
Once you can see an inherited pattern, your relationship to it changes.
You can preserve it.
Question it.
Revise it.
Refuse it.
Pass it forward differently.
The inheritance may still matter, but you’re no longer participating in exactly the same way.
Becoming Through Participation
A central word in this episode is participation.
Human beings become themselves through participation in realities larger than themselves:
Families.
Friendships.
Communities.
Disciplines.
Traditions.
Promises.
Books.
Language.
Work.
Causes.
Love.
The dead.
The unborn.
This doesn’t require the destruction of individuality.
It may be one of the conditions through which individuality becomes visible.
A violin doesn’t become less distinct because it participates in music.
A word doesn’t lose meaning because it belongs to a language.
Belonging and individuality aren’t necessarily opposites.
Sometimes belonging gives individuality somewhere to appear.
This leads to another central proposition:
The self that needs nothing beyond itself has nothing beyond itself through which to become itself.
Absolute independence can sound powerful.
But human beings require contact.
Resistance.
Recognition.
Responsibility.
Something worthy of answering.
Relational Topology of Consciousness
Dr. Rey connects these ideas to his Relational Topology of Consciousness.
The framework treats consciousness and identity as developing through relational systems involving people, memory, culture, language, meaning, and time.
Relationships don’t all affect us in the same way.
Some expand us.
Some diminish us.
Some teach curiosity.
Some teach fear.
Some offer language for experiences we couldn’t previously name.
Others impose identities that eventually need to be questioned.
The mature task may not be escaping influence altogether.
It may be learning which influences deserve our continued participation.
That distinction has practical consequences.
There are people around whom you become defensive.
People around whom you become generous.
Work that makes you smaller.
Work that calls forward capacities you didn’t know you possessed.
Traditions that constrain.
Traditions that help make an unnamed experience intelligible.
Different relationships make different versions of the self easier to inhabit.
That gives another dimension to one of Dr. Rey’s recurring principles:
Different states make different decisions.
And different relationships can make different selves available.
Between Inheritance and Authorship
The episode ultimately locates becoming between two extremes.
We aren’t entirely self-created.
But neither are we merely whatever happened to us.
We live between inheritance and authorship.
Between belonging and distinction.
Between what shaped us and what we now choose to shape.
The question that has followed this arc has been:
What am I carrying, and what is carrying me?
Becoming adds another:
What will I now participate in carrying forward?
Maybe maturity doesn’t mean finally standing alone.
Maybe it means becoming capable of entering relationship without disappearing inside it.
Inheriting without obeying blindly.
Belonging without surrendering authorship.
Contributing without needing to possess what comes next.
And participating in something larger without becoming smaller yourself.
That is the meaning of Becoming.
Not finding a self untouched by the world.
Becoming a self capable of meeting the world.
INTERLUDE LXXXVI: Becoming is for listeners interested in Martin Buber, Charles Taylor, I-Thou relationships, I-It relationships, dialogical identity, horizons of significance, philosophy of identity, relational selfhood, authenticity, belonging, human development, personal identity, meaning, inheritance, family patterns, cultural identity, relational consciousness, self-discovery, self-development, community, tradition, existential philosophy, Narrative Architecture, Relational Topology of Consciousness, and the psychology and philosophy of becoming oneself.
We become ourselves through realities larger than ourselves.
And perhaps the deepest question isn’t simply:
Who am I?
It is:
What relationships, commitments, traditions, and realities am I participating in that make this version of me possible?
The Observable Unknown is a podcast exploring consciousness at the intersection of neuroscience, culture, and lived experience. It is written and hosted by Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of drjuancarlosrey.com and crowscupboard.com, an interdisciplinary scholar whose work bridges neuroscience, philosophy, and the interior dimensions of human experience.
