Jean-Michel Terdjman

Jean-Michel Terdjman was born in Algiers (Algeria) in 1941. He now lives in the USA (California and Oregon).

He has always wondered about the nature of the individual self and of individual consciousness. Sri Aurobindo gave him the beginning of an answer: "The Illusion of the Ego."

Jean-Michel's search has taken many directions, including Spinoza (who never mentions the individual self in The Ethics) and the mystics of both East and West, whose main message is the loss of the sense of being an individual self.

Jean-Michel does not pretend to any mystical inspiration. His approach is to objectify the subjectivity of the thinking self, something that Descartes did not do in his own questioning. By so doing, Jean-Michel turns the sense of self inside out and is then in a position to reveal the process of the formation of the individual self --something again that Descartes, by taking for granted the sense of self as the absolute foundation of his philosophy, did not do.