It was often assumed that one was required to look outside of the self—to nature and to God—to learn the right way to live. Modern people, however, have a “buffered self,” a self that is bounded and self-contained. Because there is no transcendent, supernatural order outside of me, it is I who determine what I am and who I will be.110 I do not need to look at anything outside myself in order to know how to live. Today the self is “master of the meanings of things for it”; indeed, now “we stake our claim as legislators of meaning.”
