Exoself

An exoself is defined by two quantities, few endosocial attachments and many exosocial connections, which makes it a description of a network position rather than of a character. The counterpart is the endoself, and Marsh is explicit that neither is a category anyone fully occupies, since either extreme would end life, so both name tendencies that respond to environment. What follows from the position is more interesting than the position. An exoself is not a subject facing objects, which is why Marsh reads Hegel's account of the self as a description of an endoself rather than a universal one. An endoself is an object incapable of balanced interaction, and Hegel's other as the antithesis of the self is subject-object recognition, a structure she says does not apply outside endoreality. The most consequential claim concerns persistence. The endoself is mortal and will cease to exist when its reflection ceases, since it existed only in the reflection. The exoself is immortal and will always exist as a part of every self it interacted with, because the interactions themselves persist in the time and space where they occurred. That is why an exoself does not experience mortality as an existential threat while an endoself lives in permanent existential dread. Marsh also offers the distinction as a replacement for moral judgement. Rather than deciding which acts are good or bad subjectively, she separates the actions of an endoself from those of an exoself by whether they create order or chaos.

Relational and dialogical accounts of the self, from George Herbert Mead's social self to Hubert Hermans' dialogical self, hold that selves are constituted through relations with others, and Buddhist anatta denies a substantial self altogether. Network research measures exactly the two quantities Marsh's definition uses, tie density inside a group against reach outside it, and Ronald Burt's structural holes literature studies people positioned across many weakly connected clusters. What is unusual in Marsh's version is the ontological claim attached. Mead's social self is constituted by relations and still ends with the person, whereas an exoself persists because its constituent interactions do, which converts a relational theory of identity into a claim about survival.