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.4
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.” 5
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 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.
Gelderen, A History of the English Reflexive Pronouns (1998) points
out that the English expression ‘self’ itself is a modest term. In everyday, it
is not even quite a
word, but something that makes an ordinary object pronoun into a
reflexive one: ‘her’ into ‘herself’, and ‘it’ into ‘itself’. The reflexive
pronoun is used when the object of an action or attitude is the same as the
subject of that action or attitude. ‘I respect myself for achieving that’,
describes me not only as the respecter but the respected. Self is
also used as a prefix for names of activities and attitudes, identifying the
special case where the object is the same as the agent: such as, self-love,
self-hatred, self-promotion, self-knowledge.7
However the phrase ‘the self’ often means more than this. In psychology
it is often used for that set of attributes that a person attaches to himself
or herself - the attributes that the person finds it difficult or impossible to
imagine himself or herself without. The term ‘identity’ is also used in this
sense. Typically, our gender is a part of our self or our identity; yet our
profession or nationality may or may not be. Just because I do that job
it does not tell you who the real me is. In philosophy, the self is the
agent, the knower and the ultimate locus of personal identity. This self, is
the identity which is at the bottom of every action, and involved in every bit
of knowledge. ‘Subjectivity, self, me, I,’ are words consistently employed in
language. Yet do these words convey their intended meaning. Or are such words
and their associated concepts part of an overarching semantic paradox which we
knowingly employ?
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