Like countless people in the developing world, urban middle class Malaysians are now thoroughly inducted to the twin pillars of modernity: utilitarianism and pragmatism. For most people, life is a life-long pursuit of personal happiness, and anything useful towards this end has both truth and economic value.

The hidden primal assumption in both utilitarianism and pragmatism is the Self, the "I". In the daily speech of men and women everywhere, no word occurs with greater frequency than the single-letter word "I".

This trend can be said to have begun officially and theoretically with the Founder of Modern Philosophy Rene Descartes when he declared, "I think, therefore I am." Theoretically at least, this "I", this individual spark of self-consciousness, has been assumed as the unspoken major premise for all arts and sciences.

This self-addressing "I" is the primary subject of knowledge, moral actions, and aesthetic enjoyment. Immanuel Kant's core questions have reverberated through the last two centuries. "What can I know?" "How shall I live?" "What can I hope for?"

Kant was the unofficial champion of the European Enlightenment. His brand of rationalism has now gone out of fashion, I am afraid. In this Hollywood-driven age of wearing one's heart on one's sleeve, the question has turned into "How do I feel?"

The heart and the head may be in endless conflicts, but the unity of this mysterious "I" is still presumed as the pre-condition of speech and thought, and in fact, of being and existence no less.

Our wants and beliefs

In everyone's self-consciousness, This "I" in both its subjective and objective senses is the most important entity in the universe. Nay, it is the centre of the universe! Nave youths in their struggle for mature and personal identity will insist, "I want to be myself", as if you can want to be anybody else, strictly and ontologically speaking.

The issue is a little more complex than that of course.

Naturally, we are identified by others by our wanting and our beliefs. He is a conservative. She is a feminist. They are die-hard opposition supporters. We are moderates. Holding these labels help others to predict our possible behaviour and response in any situation.

But these are name tags that classify a group of "I" sharing certain aspirations and beliefs. They highlight a certain aspects of this unique and individual "I" while repressing other parts of the personal identity of the "I".

We are all social animals, and we tend to be very sensitive to how others think of us. We crave respect and affection. Labels signifying our beliefs working as name tags offer a quick way of broadcasting a certain bit of our "I". The danger is reductionism by others, who immediately assume that they know us thoroughly with the help of those tags.

The "I" of mine tends to get very irked by these labels. I am thinking of TS Eliot's immortal lines in his poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock .

"For I have known the eyes already, known them all.

The eyes that fix you with a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall

Then how should I begin

To spit our all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

"And how should I presume?"

Labels are as valid as name calling in politics. They do not kill your "I" outright, but fix your "I" like a living specimen of butterfly is pinned to a board on the wall, wriggling and incapable of metamorphosis.

Eliot's invocation of the imagery of a butterfly is interesting. It reminds me of another instance where the butterfly is also employed to reflect on the unreality of being and existence.

Zuang Tze was an eminent philosopher in China flourishing there a couple of millennia ago. In my estimation, he far surpassed Confucius in his achievement. One night he dreamt that he was a butterfly, enjoying the freedom of flight and the glory of its own beauty. When he woke up, he was confused.

Entirely anthropomorphic

He asked himself this question, "Am I a man waking up from a dream in which I had become a butterfly, or am I a man in the dream of a butterfly?" It is a pity that Zuang Tze had not met Socrates, or they would have a lot to wonder about between them!

The imagery of the butterfly has always fascinated us. Many other insects go through a similar process of metamorphosis, but only the butterfly emerged from its worm-like existence in the cocoon to become the exquisite creature that has wings with divinely coloured patterns.

Our fascination with the butterfly is therefore entirely anthropomorphic. The butterfly couldn't care less whether it is beautiful to humans or not; it is bent merely on survival. The idea of the butterfly and its life story evocates in us a perennial human ideal, of life and the growth of a Self as a journey from barbarity to civilisation, from ignorance to wisdom, from decay to rebirth, and in short, of the "I" as an ascending entity.

In fact, that is what the "I" is. It is not something static, tangible, transfixed, and definite, as if it can be pinned down by a label. It is constantly in a flux, and all you are is always in the present. The past exists only in the memory and the future is yet to be. The "stream of consciousness" is just another metaphor, for there is no stream in the business of being "me". All you and I can say about the "I", is that "I am", and that "Being is becoming".

To say the "I am me" is not even correct, strictly speaking. By the time you take those seconds to complete the sentence, the "I" in your sentence is no more, vanished for ever. A few more brain cells of the old "I" would have perished. A few more cells in the other organs of that "I" would have been born. That "I" - the real "I" that you wish to talk about - always desists linguistic articulation.

The "inner" life of this my "I" as an evolving growing living process climbing an imaginary ascending moral or aesthetic ladder is a common and seemingly universal ideal. In the distant roots of the Western civilisation, it probably began with the Greco-Judaic sources. It formed the long and distinguished historical course of the Western humanist traditions that reached another crest during the time of the Enlightenment.

A sobering process

Unfortunately, the Enlightenment has been under siege from all sides for some time. As Nietzsche had predicted, Europe and the world were plunged into an abyss of nihilism and scepticism in the 20th century. In the life of individuals, the Self traversing through time has not always ascended the moral and aesthetic ladder. More often than not, the reverse is the case.

Another prophet of doom, Franz Kafka found artistic platform in the novel. In his story Metamorphosis , a man woke up to find himself turned into a giant cockroach. He went about his daily mundane business without raising an eye brown from those around him.

That seems to be the nature of things in the human condition in the modern era. Despite all the good intention of aspiring towards the good, the true, and the beautiful exemplified by th butterfly, individual lives in the collective life of humankinds always stand the risk of evolving into that of the scavenging, filthy, ugly, repulsive cockroach without anybody raising an eyebrow.

Ageing is a sobering process. When all has been said and done, when the utilitarian and pragmatic impulses have been more than fulfilled, when all the different modes of the "I" have been lived with little satisfaction, there is nothing ahead but a gaping void.

The need for some kind of conclusive closure is strong. One wants to decide whether one has been a butterfly or a cockroach. The answer is probably "neither" or "a bit of both". We have all gazed at the stars in the heavens sometimes, and we have at times done silly things like teaching the bear to dance.

The answers that we seek will then still elude us. It will elude us forever because as long as we live, we are an incomplete unfinished project. In the traditional connotation of dramatic terms, human lives are condemned to be more tragic than comical. There we are born, crying and screaming as if to protest our debut as a human being, and then on the death bed, we shall shed tears, unwilling to have this pitiable lifespan terminated against our wish. In between, and in Eliot's words, "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."

Then the questions will "linger and malinger" still, echoing through the empty halls of memory. "Who am I?" "Why am I here?" "Where am I going?"

To be continued