The True Self

Joshua Knobe goes in search of it. He uses the example of Mark Pierpont – an ex-gay devotee – to make a broader point:

People’s ordinary understanding of the true self appears to involve a kind of value judgment, a judgment about what sorts of lives are really worth living. So people will tend to arrive at different judgments regarding the nature of Pierpont’s self depending on whether they think that a homosexual lifestyle truly is a valuable one.

Noah Millman's two cents:

I would wager anything that, from Mark Pierpont’s perspective, the “real” him is the one in conflict. That’s what makes his situation tragic. The desires don’t come from the devil and the repression doesn’t come from society. They both come from him.

Will Wilkinson goes in another direction:

Our broadly political commitments reverberate even in our judgments about the metaphysics of the self. The authentic self is the ideologically-validated self. This may help explain the widespread tendency to see those with whom we fundamentally disagree as victims of "false consciousness". We cannot help but suspect that they are in the grip of some kind of illusion, while we are clear-eyed and at home in the world as it is. Our ideological opposites are not only at war with truth, but alienated from their true selves.