Your 'self'' is little more than an oasis of solace

Where the Modern Day Idea of the ‘Self’ Came From? 

The notion of self we have had for centuries of Enlightenment thinking is now of advanced years.
Yet even if this Enlightened sense of self is becoming senescent, the assault on our subjectivity may not be as depressing as on first appearance. If we accept Michel Foucault’s (1984) genesis of the modern ‘self’ we may acquire a healthy acceptance of just how recent this constitution of our selves has been:

The idea of self came with the French revolution and the consolidation of Christianity as a religion of salvation and confession of self, in which the notions of equality and liberty are broadened. At that historic moment, a particular social being was gradually produced a self which was the bearer of certain rights and responsibilities and whose existence required a sort of interior that assume the responsibility for the person’s acts and is open to normalization programmes.

Here Foucault sees the acceding of power and sovereignty to the subject and a conferral of the system of right as a designation to eliminate that fact of domination. He discerns a subjective will borne out of such Enlightenment thinking, which wants to gain control of reality and matter for the purpose of satisfying our anthropomorphic desires. Such a view holds that power play in Modernism has produced a citizen with rights and obligations. A subject who has biases and is the origin of moral actions and ethical responsibility. In short, an individual. 

Following on from this notion on the forming of a modern day subject there is Foucault’s further view that the identity of the democratic subject is always in process; producing itself in response to and being produced by the contingent antagonisms and alliances that constitute the social.

So although various discourse limits are imposed on us, it is in our critique of such discourses that we experiment with the possibility of going beyond them. Indeed Foucault (1984) advocates, that we become architects of ourselves: “The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same 
time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with
the possibility of going beyond them.”  

For doubters, and I am sure there are many, the idea of self is not a notion you free yourself from easily. So let us further investigate the notion of self in the following way. What do we mean when we say we understand something? What are we saying, that there is a real me; an essence that is essentially me somewhere inside my head .Yet where did this real me come from. How did it originate? For the pursuit of this someone inside us, could go on to infinity. 

Performer: Like in Ibsen’s, Peer Gynt...the continually peeling of the onion? 6

Souffleur: (The Whisperer) The quest for the essential self...

Performer:...is proved to be but an illusion. For as Ibsen’s protagonist, Peer, found the centre cannot hold, because the self...

Souffleur: …that proper little button on the vest of the world... 

Performer:…is no more than... 

Souffleur:…an oasis of solace.

It isn’t hard to see why we hold such ideas of self. We sense how valuable it is to us, it undergirds all the principles of our moral systems. Without this sense of self we would have no moral responsibility; no sense of blame or virtue; no sense of right or wrong; in short, without a sense of self we would scarcely have a culture to begin with. Indeed if human thought were shown to be wholly deterministic then the entire concept of moral blame would have to be rethought. Yet laws are not cast in stone, they are fungible.

Peter P. Cheevers