Who Was Before Me, or Myself? On the Three Questions Hidden in "Before," the Self Without an Earlier Self, and the Beginning That Is Not a Before

Abstract

The chicken-and-egg paradox appears to ask which of two beings came first, but its grammar conceals two different relations: the developmental relation of one subject to its own earlier phase, and the reproductive relation between numerically distinct subjects. This essay develops that distinction through the concepts of traversal and derivation and then turns the paradox toward the first person. “What was before me?” is shown to contain three questions: what preceded me genealogically, whether an earlier self preceded the self I am, and how the subject itself began. Ancestry yields convergence rather than a single complete source; personal continuity yields earlier phases but no earlier self; and the question of origin cannot be answered merely by extending the subject’s own inheritance backward. The philosophical argument stops at that limit. Under the doctrinal reading adopted by the essay, the human case is then understood through the immediate creation of the rational soul, while body and soul remain one human nature. The result is a distinction between having antecedents, having earlier phases, and having an earlier self: the first two are real; the third is not.