What Is The Point Of Selflessness?
This morning, the new curate at our church preached a sermon on friendship. In his opinion, the essential ingredient is selflessness. Friendship, he said, cannot survive if people are just demanding what they want; they have to focus on each other’s needs. Which is fair enough – but I’m not sure that selflessness is the right way to achieve this. It really depends on what we mean by ‘selflessness’. One definition would be ‘lacking a self’. It is possible that very young babies, and the most profoundly autistic people (as opposed to those who are just rather Asperger-ish, like me) do not have a sense of themselves as separate entities from other people and from inanimate objects. We can’t be sure, because people in this situation aren’t often able to talk about how they think and feel. I do know one man who is both autistic and schizophrenic, but articulate enough to talk about having little sense of self. He says that he does not see himself as any more ‘a person’