The myth of subjective self essence

From Chapter 13 of Philosophy in the Flesh:

"What is philosophically important about this study is that there is no single, unified notion of our inner lives. There is not one Subject-Self distinction, but many. They are all metaphorical and cannot be reduced to any consistent literal conception of Subject and Self. Indeed, there is no consistency across the distinctions. Yet, the multifarious notions of Subject and Self are far from arbitrary. On the contrary, they express apparently universal experiences of an 'inner life, and the metaphors for conceptualizing our inner lives are grounded in other apparently universal experiences. These metaphors appear to be unavoidable, to arise naturally from common experience. Moreover, each such metaphor conceptualizes the Subject as being personlike, with an existence independent of the Self. The Self, in this range of cases, can be either a person, an object, or a location."

Therein one of the metaphors we use is the true self, that we have a subjective essence. This is a particular instance of the more general metaphor of essences we inherited from the Platonic worldview. This sort of foundationalism has been transcended and replaced in postmetaphysics, yet we still unconsciously accept it via these ingrained cultural metaphors below our conscious awareness.

Note this one of Stein's hallmarks of metamodernism:

"To be anti-essentialist, not believing in 'ultimate essences' such as matter, consciousness, goodness, evil, masculinity, femininity or the like–but rather that all these things are contextual and interpretations made from relations and comparisons" (190)

I'd add it is also recontextualized by embodied metaphor theory.

This 'true' subjective self still retains a privileged position in AQALingus, as does its relative partner the cognitive self (line) as the organizer of all other aspects of our relative being. And all of which is grounded (i.e., spiritualized) by the True Self with direct apprehension of ultimate reality. Essence much?