Humanities 499
History of the Self

Description

One does not need to look very hard to find a host of antecedents for this modern idea of the self. Elements of the West's foundational emphasis on the individual can be detected in classical Greece and Rome, in Hellenistic-era Epicureanism and Stoicism, and in the moral thought arising out of Biblical monotheism, particularly as expressed in the theology of the Protestant Reformation. But none of these amounted to anything approaching what we mean by modern individualism, because they saw the individual as inherently constrained in various ways, and particularly by belief in the existence of an objective moral order. Although nearly all influential Western thinkers before the dawn of modernity had conceded the signal importance of the individual, none employed the term "individualism" to express that belief. 

Today that is changed. Arguably, the dominant American tradition in our own day would appear to be one of endorsing the highest possible degree of individual liberty and self-development in political, religious, social, and economic affairs. American history records the defeat or erosion of most competing ideas. If anything, the language of individual rights, and the tendency to regard individual men and women as self-contained, contract-making, utility-maximizing, and values-creating actors, who accept only those duties and obligations they elect to accept, has grown steadily more powerful and pervasive in the latter part of the twentieth century. The recourse to individual rights, whether expressed as legal rights, voting rights, expressive rights, reproductive rights, sexual rights, membership rights, or consumer rights, has become the near-invincible trump card in most debates regarding public policy, and it is only in the rarest instances that this trump has been effectively challenged. The fundamental commitment to what Walt Whitman called the "solitary self" has never been stronger. 

In the age of modernity and postmodernity, then, the self has become the chief source of moral value. But "self" is not the same as "soul." It is a psychological term, largely stripped of metaphysical implications. The "self" is understood as the seat of personal identity, source of mental cohesiveness and psychological integrity–the vanishing point, as it were, where all lines of psychological energy converge in the life of a "healthy" and "integrated" individual. The "soul" maintains a link to the transcendent realm, and is suggestive of an imperishable essence distinct from the bodily state. But the "self" is immanent, secular, worldly, transitory, adaptive, pragmatic. "Soul" is a word that rarely crosses the lips of modern thinkers, unless they employ it in a deliberately rhetorical or fanciful way, as do the neo-Jungian advocates of "soul-making," or the authors of books proclaiming the "lost soul" of this or that wayward entity. "Souls" are judged by the God of faith; "selves" by the God of health. 

There is are complications inherent in such a strictly psychological approach to the self. For one thing, the self appears to be inherently unstable. One of the most powerful themes of postmodernism is its contention that the modern self cannot bear the weight placed upon it by fragmented modern life, and that in fact, the multiplicity of our world requires us to operate on the basis of multiple selves. Just as in atomic physics, where the unsplittable entity (the a-tomos) turned out to have an unnumbered multitude of particles and subparticles in its makeup, so too, the self has proved to be a complicated and vulnerable entity, as vulnerable as the idea of truth itself. Rene Descartes inaugurated modernity with the assertion that the "I" is the most fundamental building block in our apprehension of reality, the still point in a moving world. Now it appears that the self, far from being foundational, is the most protean and variable thing of all. In the postmodern view, the search for "individual integrity" and "authenticity" is outmoded. The postmodern self is not a unitary thing, but an ever-shifting ensemble of social roles–a disorderly venue in which the healthy ego functions less as a commander-in-chief than as a skilled air-traffic controller. 

How are we to respond to this description? Ought we celebrate it, deplore it, or treat it neutrally? Whatever one's answer, it seems clear that the modernist ideal of the individual has been rendered far more confused and unsteady than ever before. The strange and unpredictable history of this ideal, along with some speculation about its future, will be the subject of our course. 

Required Texts

• Walter Anderson, The Future of the Self: Inventing the Postmodern Person (Putnam) 
• Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford) 
• David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise (Simon and Schuster) 
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Poems (Everyman Paper Classics) 
• John Dewey, Individualism Old and New (Prometheus) 
• Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac (Penguin USA) 
• Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (Norton) 
• Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (Chicago) 
• David Riesman, et al., The Lonely Crowd (Yale) 
• Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Harvard) 
• Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Touchstone) 

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