0521844177 cambridge university press the idea of the self thought and experience in western europe since the seventeenth century mar 2005

One testimony to this is the preeminent place given to questions aboutselfhood by those late twentieth-century writers to begin with in Francewho fostered the notion that modernity had g

What is the self? This question has preoccupied people in many times and places, but nowhere more than in the modern West, where it has spawned debates that still resound today Jerrold Seigel here provides

an original and penetrating narrative of how major Western pean thinkers and writers have confronted the self since the time of Descartes, Leibniz, and Locke From an approach that is at once theo- retical and contextual, he examines the way figures in Britain, France, and Germany have understood whether and how far individuals can achieve coherence and consistency in the face of the inner tensions and external pressures that threaten to divide or overwhelm them He makes clear that recent “post-modernist” accounts of the self belong firmly to the tradition of Western thinking they have sought to super- sede, and provides an open-ended and persuasive alternative to claims that the modern self is typically egocentric or disengaged.

Euro-j e r ro l d s e i g e l is William R Kenan, Jr., Professor of History

at New York University His previous books include Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930 (1986) and The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation and the Self in Modern Culture (1995).

T H E I D E A O F T H E S E L F

Thought and Experience in Western Europe since

the Seventeenth Century

J E R R O L D S E I G E L

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

First published in print format

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521844178

This publication is in copyright Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

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Acknowledgments pagevii

pa rt i i n t ro d u c to ry

pa rt i i b r i t i s h m o d e r n i t y

pa rt i i i s o c i e t y a n d s e l f - k n ow l e d g e : f r a n c e f ro m

o l d re g i m e to re s to r at i o n

6 Sensationalism, reflection, and inner freedom: Condillac

8 Reflectivity, sense-experience, and the perils of social life:

pa rt i v t h e wo r l d a n d t h e s e l f i n g e r m a n i d e a l i s m

9 Autonomy, limitation, and the purposiveness of nature:

v

10 Homology and Bildung: Herder, Humboldt, and Goethe 332

pa rt v m o d e r n v i s i o n s a n d i l lu s i o n s

14 From cultivated subjectivity to the culte du moi: polarities

15 Society and selfhood reconciled: Janet, Fouill´e, and Bergson 508

16 Will, reflection, and self-overcoming: Schopenhauer and

18 Deaths and transfigurations of the self: Foucault and

I am happy to thank a number of friends and colleagues who have offeredcriticism and advice, skepticism and support, over the long period in which

I have worked on this book Some years ago, when my ideas were stillincompletely formed, Lynn Hunt invited me to give a paper on this topic

to a conference in Berkeley, where I profited from her comments and those

of others present, notably Martin Jay Mark Lilla’s independent reading of

an earlier draft of that paper pushed me to a better understanding of what

my real subject was In 2001 members of the New York Area Seminar inIntellectual and Cultural History read a version of Chapter1 I learned muchfrom the discussion there, and particularly from comments by RichardWolin (who also read and commented on some of the later chapters),Martin Jay (again), Edward Berenson, Rochelle Gurstein, Martin Woesner,and Thomas Ort (to the last two I owe a particular debt for making me thinkabout the question of temporality and the self ) Peter Gordon and SamuelMoyn sent searching and illuminating observations and suggestions on thatoccasion Out of it too came an extended and very helpful correspondencewith Gerald N Izenberg Colleagues and students at New York Universityheard and read portions of the project in various courses and seminars,among whom I especially need to thank Tony Judt, Jennifer Homans,Michael Behrent, and Samara Heifetz for their reactions and suggestions

I profited from discussing Rousseau and Benjamin Constant with HelenaRosenblatt Sophia Rosenfeld’s sympathetic and critical response to theeighteenth-century French chapters pointed the way to important revisions.Jeffrey Freedman helpfully answered my queries about books and readers ineighteenth-century Germany I thank Allan Megill, Thomas Laqueur, andBrigitte Bedos-Rezak for their readings of Chapter1, and Steven Lukes for

a prolonged and illuminating discussion of both that chapter’s vocabularyand its content To Louis Sass I am grateful for his probing and thoughtfulengagement with a number of chapters, and for a series of enlighteningand much appreciated conversations Only Anthony La Vopa read and

vii

commented on the whole manuscript; to him my debt is very deep, sincepractically every chapter is better for his questions and suggestions.

I also thank Lester K Little, director of the American Academy in Rome,for appointing me as a Resident at the Academy in February and March

of 2000, and Tony Judt for making me a faculty fellow of the RemarqueInstitute in the spring of 2001 At the Cambridge University Press I havebenefited multiply from Michael Watson’s interest and involvement, andhis efforts to expedite the publication process, and I thank Linda Randallfor her careful and attentive copy-editing My family, and especially mywife Jayn Rosenfeld (who also helped clarify the prose of several chapters),have lovingly borne with the ups and downs of my long involvement withthis project I could hardly have survived it without them

Introductory

Dimensions and contexts of selfhood

Few ideas are both as weighty and as slippery as the notion of the self By

“self” we commonly mean the particular being any person is, whatever it

is about each of us that distinguishes you or me from others, draws theparts of our existence together, persists through changes, or opens the way

to becoming who we might or should be From knowledge of what the selftruly is people have hoped to gain greater happiness, deeper fulfillment,liberation from fetters or restraints, better relations with other people, orways to achieve power over them Selfhood thus matters to us both asindividuals and as social creatures, shaping our personal existence and ourrelations with those whose lives we somehow share

But what is this self whose understanding seems to promise so much?Many practically minded people hardly think the question worth posing,knowing well enough who they are for their purposes, thank you, whilethose who offer answers to it often do so for expedient or self-interestedreasons: to support a political program, validate a religious belief or prac-tice, foster or oppose some social policy, justify failings or pretensions, orestablish a claim to therapeutic power The nature and meaning of the selfare subject to constant redefinition, as it is ever-again taken up on behalf ofsome partisan aim or project And yet the question does not lose its forcefrom being appropriated in these ways Faced with outdated, self-interested,malign, or inadequate answers to it, people have over and over respondedwith a desire for better ones, if only to counter the effects of those that willnot do

Hence the nature and meaning of selfhood have been recurring questions,implicitly or explicitly, in practically every known human time and place.Nowhere has the debate been more full-blown or more intense than in themodern West, the locale in which individuality has been both most fer-vently celebrated and most ardently denounced On the one hand, Europeand America have been the scene of “the emancipation of the individual,”

of the politics of rights and “careers open to talent,” the celebration of self

3

and even of self-interest, of the search for originality and the artistic andscientific cult of the sovereign and sometimes lonely genius Yet much ofthe history of modern thought and culture is a story of the ways people havefound to call all these claims for individual independence into question, totranscend mere selves by fusing them with communities, nations, classes,

or cultures, or to humble them by trumpeting their radical dependency onhistorical processes, cosmic forces, biological drives, fundamental ontolo-gies, discursive regimes, or semiotic systems More than any other worldculture, the modern West has made the debate about individuality andselfhood a central question – perhaps the central question – of its collectiveattempts at self-definition Hence those who belong to this culture, or whoare moved to conceive themselves in relation to it – even if the relation beone of rejection – have much reason to care about the self

One testimony to this is the preeminent place given to questions aboutselfhood by those late twentieth-century writers (to begin with in France)who fostered the notion that modernity had given or was giving place

to a new condition, implicitly or explicitly styled as “post-modern.” Inthese schemas the departure or escape from the modern condition, andsometimes from the whole Western heritage that lay behind it, went alongwith attempts to proclaim or effect the end of the individual, the “death

of the author,” or the demise of the human self or subject I was firstdrawn to the question of selfhood by a sense of concern (mainly skeptical)about these notions, and I attempted to grapple with them in fragmen-tary ways through encounters with Claude L´evi-Strauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault, followed by a longer study of

an exemplary avant-garde artist who anticipated some of their views andattitudes, Marcel Duchamp.1The book that has finally emerged takes a farbroader perspective, but it bears the marks of this origin

Many reasons might be adduced for calling the claims of individual hood into question Justifiably or not, the modern Western focus on the selfhas been linked to ills that range from social fragmentation and inequalitythrough imperialism to ecological destruction; to reject or displace it can be

self-a wself-ay to stself-and self-agself-ainst the hself-azself-ards it mself-ay let loose But demoting the self cself-anserve quite different ends, and one of these, clearly exhibited by some of thepeople just mentioned, has been to intend a mode of self-existence far morepowerful and unrestricted than the one it sets out to dismiss Like Nietzscheand Heidegger, Duchamp (joined by other figures of the artistic and literaryavant-garde), Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida all argued that the indepen-dence claimed for the self in the modern West is an illusion But they did

so on behalf of a vision of transcendent freedom that overwhelms the more

modest visions of personal integration and regulated autonomy projected

by the ideas and practices they sought to supersede Nietzsche’s ¨ Ubermensch,

Heidegger’s authentic Dasein, Duchamp’s yearning for an ecstatic “fourth

dimension,” Foucault’s project of “the permanent creation of ourselves inour autonomy,” Derrida’s invocation of a condition beyond finitude wherethe promise of a wholly other existence is permanently maintained – allexemplify such aspirations As these instances suggest, attempts to locate orpromote such untrammeled modes of self-existence arise more often andmore characteristically out of the negation of the common-sense under-standing of individuals as centers of action and consciousness than out oftheir affirmation; the sense that human beings must be all in order to escapebeing nothing has belonged more to those who have called the claims ofordinary everyday selfhood into question than to those who have soughtsome kind of fulfillment by way of it This paradox, if it be one, lies at thecenter of modern arguments about the self, making it an object of intensecontestation in our culture The sense that some important and revealingquestions about selfhood and its history can be illuminated by focusing

on what is at stake in such disputes has been a major impulse behind thepresent book Achieving such illumination, I will argue, requires that westart out from a general overview of the attributes that have been taken toconstitute the self, and the kinds of relations that exist or have been thought

to exist among them

Since the time of Descartes and Locke (and less explicitly before, as weshall see), the basis of selfhood in Western culture has been sought primarilyalong or within three dimensions, ones that are familiar and should be easilyrecognizable to anyone We will call them the bodily or material, the rela-tional, and the reflective dimensions of the self The first involves thephysical, corporeal existence of individuals, the things about our naturethat make us palpable creatures driven by needs, urges, and inclinations,and that give us particular constitutions or temperaments, making us forinstance more or less energetic, lethargic, passionate, or apathetic Ourselves on this level, including whatever consciousness we have of them, arehoused in our bodies, and are shaped by the body’s needs The second,relational, dimension arises from social and cultural interaction, the com-mon connections and involvements that give us collective identities andshared orientations and values, making us people able to use a specific lan-guage or idiom and marking us with its particular styles of description,categorization, and expression In this perspective our selves are what ourrelations with society and with others shape or allow us to be The thirddimension, that of reflectivity (some reasons for using this term, rather

than some others, will be given below), derives from the human capacity tomake both the world and our own existence objects of our active regard, toturn a kind of mirror not only on phenomena in the world, including ourown bodies and our social relations, but on our consciousness too, puttingourselves at a distance from our own being so as to examine, judge, andsometimes regulate or revise it On this level the self is an active agent ofits own realization, establishing order among its attitudes and beliefs, andgiving direction to its actions It appears to be – how far or how justifiably

is not in question now – in some way self-constituting or self-made: we arewhat our attention to ourselves makes us be

To be sure, such a schema is very rough, leaving many questions dressed All three of the categories are broad enough that different and evenopposed ways of thinking can find, and have found, footing within them.For example, bodily selfhood means one thing if one views the body interms of organs and needs, as Freud did, and another when it is seen asthe vehicle of genes and their imperatives, as some evolutionary biologists

unad-do in our day The body regarded as a kind of machine, in the way tain early modern materialists proposed, implies a mode of selfhood verydifferent from the one that appears when the body is taken as a restlesssource of ever-changing desire and will, as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche(preceded by the Marquis de Sade) had it Similarly, relational selfhoodmeans one thing when it is conceived in Marx’s terms of class divisionand social conflict, and a different one when it is posited in the classicalanthropological way, as operating through a culture that somehow infusesall the members of a population It also makes an important differencewhether the relations through which personal formation takes place areconceived as interpersonal, involving interaction between and among indi-viduals, or rather as putting selves-in-formation directly up against society

cer-or culture as an independent entity, what Emile Durkheim called “a being

sui generis,” that stands above all its members and imposes obligations on

them As for reflective selves, they can appear in disembodied guise, as inRen´e Descartes’s claim that the being that thinks its own existence must beincorporeal and immortal, or they can be depicted as constantly struggling

to achieve authenticity inside an engulfing material world, as in Jean-PaulSartre’s scenario of the “for-itself” forever bound up with an “in-itself.”Reflectivity can distance the self so fully from all the everyday features ofindividual existence that it approaches the negation of material life alto-

gether, as in what Paul Val´ery called the moi pure, or it can be regarded as the

principle of all life and the vehicle for reconciliation with it, as with Hegel’s

Geist Hegel reminds us that reflectivity can also be given a developmental

form, exhibited in a different way by some recent accounts of the self as

“narrative,” weaving a pattern of continuity out of the moments or stages

of its own evolving being.2

Despite these variations, each of the three dimensions fosters commonfeatures among the self-conceptions that arise along or within it Bodilyselfhood usually gives an image of the self that is independent of time andplace, while relational selfhood, although it may claim to be applicableeverywhere, marks individuals with patterns from some particular social

or cultural matrix Reflective selves, to the degree they are envisioned assuch, and not as formed by experience or driven by bodily need or instinct,either innately possess or can acquire independence from physical andsocial existence The dimension or dimensions chosen and the ways theyare understood are central in determining the character and implications ofany given conception of the self On such bases there arise selves generatedfrom within their own being or ones fabricated from outside, selves whosemain features are universal or specific to some time and place, selves that arestable or fluid, and selves that are more or less autonomous or dependent,self-governing or in thrall to some power or powers of whose existence theymay or may not be aware

Underlying the many specific ways of picturing the self, there stands onebroad alternative whose presence and importance only comes to light oncethe separability of the three dimensions is recognized This is the differ-ence between what we will call multi-dimensional and one-dimensionalaccounts of the self It may not always be immediately apparent underwhich of these two descriptions a particular image or theory falls; we shallsee that one mode or delineation can mask the other, and certain thinkershave shifted between them But the persistence of the two options is a sig-nificant and little-recognized feature of the history of thinking about theself, and it has a strong bearing on the phenomenon mentioned a momentago, the perhaps paradoxical conjunction between radically narrowing theself ’s independence or autonomy and inflating it beyond limits Neitherpossibility receives much encouragement when selfhood is conceived asmulti-dimensional If the self takes shape at the intersection of multiplecoordinates, each with a different vector, then it is bound to be subject tocompeting pressures and tensions The demands of the body strain againstthe limits culture imposes on need or desire, while reflectivity may set itselfagainst both relational and material modes of self-existence To acknowl-edge these strains and stresses is not the same as to deny that individualscan attain to a measure of stable unity and integrity, however: one cangive close attention to them while still regarding some significant degree of

consistency and self-directedness as a goal worth pursuing Freud providesperhaps the most notable example in the realm of theory (and Freud’s selfwas three-dimensional, bodily in its deep origins, reflective through the

“secondary process” or “reality principle” that regulated conscious thoughtand action, and relational through the super-ego’s internalization of modelsand ideals), and John Stuart Mill’s account of his own life fits the descrip-tion too, as do many novelistic portrayals, prominent among them Proust’sautobiographical narrator and, despite the label, Robert Musil’s “man with-out qualities.” There are good reasons for thinking such unity possible even

in the face of tensions that undermine it, as Hume among others insisted: if

we had no stable way of being the persons we are then we could neither planfor the future nor engage in social relations, since we would have little or

no reason to expect that the notions about ourselves or others we relied onyesterday or an hour ago can provide guidance now or tomorrow But oftenpersonal integration remains problematic or incomplete (as many of thefigures we will encounter below were painfully aware); it can be a lifetimeproject for some, and even those who attain it may do so along a pathstrewn with crises and failures, testimony to the troubles and vicissitudesthat balancing the diverse constituents of self-existence entails

None of these barriers to actually achieving pure, homogeneous selfhoodstands in the way of conceiving or imagining it, however An image of such

a seamless existence arises as soon as one posits the self along a single one

of the three dimensions, whether that of bodily, relational, or reflectivebeing Some thinkers have postulated self-existence in a single dimension,

as Descartes did at the moment when he said “I think, therefore I am,”making the self ’s essential being arise out of its ability to reflect on its own

existence, or as Diderot did in D’Alembert’s Dream when he had one speaker

attribute both moral personality and social identity to bodily constitution.Some have attributed to one dimension the power of imposing itself onthe others, as Marx did when he pictured social relations as determiningboth consciousness and perceived bodily needs Others have proceeded

by way of more complex strategies, such as the different but related onesthat Nietzsche and Heidegger worked out in order to conceive selfhood

in lower and higher forms, the first (Nietzsche’s “the weak” or Heidegger’s

“das Man”) wholly formed from outside, and the second (Nietzsche’s “the strong” or Heidegger’s “authentic Dasein”) able to determine the conditions

of its being through its own self-referential agency Such selves are theonly ones that can achieve unbroken homogeneity, and they therefore mayappeal especially to those who for some reason need or wish to conceiveindividuals as essentially uniform beings, whether to prove their purely

spiritual or purely material nature, to show that they are fully autonomous

or wholly determined by external powers or circumstances, or to make themavailable for enlistment in causes that require an undifferentiated identity

or a no-questions-asked commitment and devotion

What is perhaps surprising about one-dimensional models of the self isthe capacity they often display to transfigure life, by envisioning a rapidpassage between – or sometimes a coexistence of – images that confinehuman agency within rigid limits and ones that give the widest possi-ble scope to it It is just such metamorphoses that generate the patternremarked above, in which denials of the self ’s independence lodge togetherwith its radical exaltation The same thinkers who imagine a self so deeplyinfused with the conditions of its material nature or surroundings that itpossesses little or no capacity for going beyond them turn out to be thosewho imagine one capable of constituting itself wholly by some kind ofprofoundly liberating self-directedness The Cartesian ego suddenly entersinto the truth of its own self-referential subjectivity just at the point whenits subjection to worldly confusion and uncertainty seems most complete.Fichte in his early works envisaged the ego as at once tightly hemmed in

by the limitations of objective existence and ceaselessly rediscovering theinner foundation of its pure autonomy, and he later found a way to depictthe person formed wholly from outside, in a hermetic and rigidly con-trolled educational system, as the bearer of unalloyed freedom Marx’s firstscenario for working-class revolution represented the proletariat as capa-ble of receiving the explosive truth of human freedom from the heights

of philosophical reflection and acting to realize it precisely by virtue of its

unconditional subjection to material chains, and in The German Ideology

he saw those same workers as passing from the state of complete loss of

self-activity (Selbstt¨atigkeit) to one of full, even limitless self-possession in the

moment of revolution (Some of his later writings made less radical claims,but these early images exhibit the original configuration of his thinking.)The Nietzschean and Heideggerian alternatives mentioned in the previousparagraph fit this pattern too, picturing the narrow and expanded forms ofthe self as existing either simultaneously or in a pattern of succession thatpromised the emergence of the second out of an inner transformation ofthe first.3

Understanding these instances requires close attention to each case, butone thing that makes possible such passages between a self that is narrowlyconfined and one that is radically free is their common absence of ambigu-ity To feel or believe that human beings do or should belong to one of twounqualified and mutually exclusive states is a familiar and recurring feature

of the relations we create or imagine for ourselves and others, for instance asmasters and slaves, civilized and barbarians, saved and damned, oppressedand free Putting one’s trust in such polarities constitutes one particularway of viewing the world Psychologically the continuity between states inwhich the self is all and in which it is nothing appears in the rapid passagefrom one to the other often exhibited by children, and by the mentallytroubled, both of whom may go quickly from feeling their environment

as an unalloyed extension of themselves to experiencing things aroundthem as unbearable or deeply threatening Another way to say this is thatthe two alternatives of no-self and all-self both posit dependence and inde-pendence as incompatible with each other What images of self-existence asfully under the sway of powers outside it have in common with pictures of

an ego that is unconditioned or absolute is denial that the mix of autonomyand dependency commonly found in ordinary life represents the genuine

or authentic condition of personal existence To treat partial limitations astotal is the other face of an attitude for which freedom must be absolute inorder to exist at all

In creating these alternatives as conditions of the self, the three sions do not all play the same role Where the self ’s freedom or autonomy is

dimen-at issue, the reflective dimension is the one thdimen-at is most likely to be exalted

or diminished The reason lies in the special kind of self-determination

it promises Reflectivity is not the only power that can work against thelimits of individual and social existence; culturally founded practices canoppose and contest biological necessities (as in monasticism or other asceticways of life), and physical or material needs may impel people to overthrowsocial constraints But taken in themselves such ways of gaining latitude forthe self institute limitations of their own, reenforcing other dependencies

By contrast, reflectivity can promise an unconditional kind of liberty andself-determination, because it seems able to take its distance successivelyfrom each and every determinate form of existence, and so be limited bynone Only reflectivity can claim to found the radical freedom of the self,and only its eradication can issue in a self that is totally absorbed into someset of external determinations

For this reason, what most often underlies any thinker’s or writer’sespousal of a one-dimensional or a multi-dimensional view of the self is thatperson’s way of setting reflectivity in relation to the other attributes Wherereflectivity’s relationship to the other dimensions is thought or felt in termsthat allow for positive coexistence or mutual support, so that it neitherconsumes them nor is consumed by them, the self will possess a limitedbut substantial independence from the material and relational conditions

that partly determine it Where the self is envisioned either in a way thatconceives its most basic or genuine form as generated by reflection alone, orthat pictures reflectivity as essentially subjected to one or both of the otherdimensions, the self faces the polar possibilities of total autonomy or thor-oughgoing constraint Selves do not need to be strictly one-dimensional inorder to exhibit these diametrical alternatives; it is enough that reflectiv-ity’s domination of or by them (sometimes one of them, if it is conceived

as decisive) is presented as basic to the self ’s essential being Few thinkersignore any dimension of the self altogether; what matters is the kind ofrelationship that is posited among them

One condition of thinking about the self especially prepares the passagefrom extreme narrowing or confinement to its opposite: those who theorizethe radical circumscription of the self must speak from outside the position

in which the theory seems to put them No theory can claim general validity

if it knows itself to be predetermined by conditions over which reason has nocontrol Marx could not (although he tried) confine his own thinking withinthe theory that made ideas merely the reflex of social conditions and classrelations Nietzsche’s diagnosis of his time as pervaded by a nihilism anddecadence that sickened and weakened the people around him was madefrom a position that was intellectually beyond (even though he himself wasnot existentially beyond) those conditions Heidegger described ordinaryhuman beings as robbed of any control over their own ideas and actions

by the anonymous and insidious power of das Man from the opposite

perspective of “authentic” existence Because human beings are reflectivecreatures, they can theorize the disappearance of their own reflectivity only

by directing it with special intensity on themselves and others In doing

so they display the persisting human power to stand back from our ownbeing in the very attention to the self and the world through which itsextinction is supposed to be demonstrated, emphatically exhibiting thecapacity to know and affect the conditions of their own constitution thattheir theorizing denies Since in doing so they set that capacity whollyapart from the conditions said to shape the self from outside, there alreadyglimmers in it the prospect of a self constituted wholly by its own self-referential agency, a prospect realized in the images of higher selfhoodmentioned above, and which we will examine in more detail below.Behind the multitude of alternative selves engendered by the many ways

in which the dimensions of selfhood have been conceived and put in relation

to each other, there lie questions about human biology, psychology, andsocial relations whose content and complexity far exceed our ability to dealwith them here We do need to say something about them all the same

We approach these matters first by giving attention to the vocabulary ofselfhood, and then by taking up some recurring issues in regard to therelations between its attributes We begin with the term reflectivity, bothbecause our use of it calls for some justification, and because certain generalfeatures of the wider vocabulary we use to talk and think about the self can

be approached through it

Reflectivity refers to the ingredient of intellectual self-awareness in selfhood,the contribution made to it by the mind One might label this aspect of theself “rationality” or “consciousness,” but neither term would serve our needsvery well As a particular mode or form of mental agency, reflectivity has

a bearing on the self ’s relations to itself and to the world that for instanceproblem-solving or the choice of means to achieve given ends does not Tohave a reflective relationship to the contents of experience or consciousness

is to take our impressions and ideas not as pointing directly to things

in the world, but as objects of concern in themselves When modulated

by reflection, our attention to these mental contents focuses less on whatthey seem to tell about things outside us, and more on what they indicateabout our own being, leading us to ask such questions as: What role do weourselves play in producing these contents, either as creatures with a certainintellectual or physical make-up or as ones who occupy a certain place orperspective in the world? If our ideas seem disordered or in contradictionwith each other, what does this signify? Should we seek to impose someform of coherence on them, or prefer some to others? On what grounds?These questions establish a “second-order” relationship to the contents ofexperience, allowing reflective beings to take a distance from the first, moreimmediate one Once begun, as others have noted, such doubling can always

be repeated, so that any stage of reflection can become the object of furtherquestioning Criticism of theories or beliefs often takes the form of show-ing their dependence on the limiting conditions within which they arise.4

Reflectivity appears in a different light, however, when we rememberthat the term has a close cousin which we spell reflexivity The two wordsare easily taken as synonyms, but just for this reason they hide the existence

of two quite opposed meanings, which the development of usage has made

it is difficult to assign to one term or the other A “reflex” is an automatic orinvoluntary action, an uncontrolled response to a stimulus In this sense,something is reflexive if it simply doubles or reenforces its origin; images

in a mirror are reflexive in this sense, even though we refer to them asreflections By contrast, the mental act of reflecting is usually considered

as intentional and purposive, not an unwilled response to a stimulus, but

in some way self-directed The terms thus indicate two distinct forms ofself-reference, one passive and one active The existence of two words (notjust in Englisha) suggests that language preserves some awareness of thisdistinction, but common usage does not clearly maintain it Here for thesake of clarity we shall reserve “reflexivity” for the passive kind of reflectionthat takes place in involuntary reflexes or in a mirror, and “reflectivity”for the more active attentiveness that establishes a new relationship, andsometimes a distance, between consciousness and its contents; but we need

to recognize that in many instances it is difficult to say which is at work.This is especially the case because, as we will consider later on, somethinglike reflectivity in the sense we are using it here often appears to go onbelow the level of conscious awareness When it does, reflection becomesespecially subject to being directed or infused by the inner urges or outerinfluences that help to set it in motion Psychologists sometimes point tothis phenomenon when they employ reflexivity to denote mental operationsthat give the psyche a heightened degree of activity, but over which somepersons may have little or no conscious control.5

A similar configuration, in which activity and passivity are difficult toseparate out from each other, is characteristic not just of reflectivity, but

of a much wider range of terms that constitute the vocabulary of selfhood

At least in Western European languages, the word self is a reflexive term,having a close link to the notion of sameness Language often expressesselfhood as a reflexive doubling, whether reflection is an aspect of it or

not Romance tongues employ the term “same” – mˆeme in French, stesso in Italian, mismo in Spanish – to form the compounds of selfhood, moi-mˆeme,

toi-mˆeme, soi-mˆeme, me stesso, se stesso, yo mismo, etc Some languages possess

no separate term for “self ” (Italian and French adopt “I” or “me,” using

l’io, je, or le moi) but in those that do, for instance English and German,

the words self and selbst can also convey simple sameness, as in the German

die Sache selbst, “the thing itself,” or the emphatic English coupling

“self-same.” Pronominal compounds with “self ” apply as well to non-human orinanimate things as to ourselves; to say that “the oak nourishes itself by itsroots” or “the car itself was not harmed in the accident” implies nothingabout the kind of existence attributed to trees or autos In all these instancesself-reference seems to consist in a doubling for emphasis that is reflexive,not reflective

a French, for example, does not possess two separate words corresponding to the English “reflectivity”

and “reflexivity,” but the same range of distinct meanings appears in both the verb r´efl´echir and the noun r´eflexion; r´eflexe, however, refers only to “a movement independent of the will.” See Dictionnaire

du franc¸ais contemporain (Paris, 1971), 978.

But language gives voice to reflectivity in the grammatical structure ofthe sentence, which assigns agency to the subject, thus designating thespeaker as active even in making reference to the natural ground of his orher existence The reflective self recognizes itself in this structure when itsays (to restate Descartes’s famous proposition) “I doubt myself, therefore

I exist as a reflective being.” Nietzsche argued that the whole history ofphilosophical thinking about the self and other entities as active agents wasshaped by the subject-object grammar of Indo-European languages, andindeed the German thinkers who did so much to make the question of the

self central to modern philosophy mostly left the term Selbst to the side,

in order to focus on das Ich or der Subjekt as indices of active agency (The great exception was Hegel, who, as we shall see, made das Selbst a central

category, drawing precisely on the duality in the term we have been taking

note of here Heidegger also regularly used das Selbst ; Nietzsche seldom

did.)

From these observations one might be tempted to argue either that guage encourages us to locate selfhood in close proximity to non-reflective,natural existence, or conversely that language “knows” the self as a reflectiveform of being The two possible conclusions are at odds, but they suggestthat linguistic practice locates passive and active forms of self-reference inclose proximity to each other Further evidence for this comes from theterm “subject,” a word often connected to the self ’s reflective dimension

lan-A subject in this sense is an active agent, a thinker of thoughts, doer ofdeeds, or bearer of properties, identifiable through its relations to its con-tents and qualities, yet remaining independent of them, so that it persists

as they change or fall away Sometimes, however, we use the term subject

as a synonym for its passive opposite, object, as in the subject of a study,

or of a painting This duality can be glimpsed in the history of the term

Etymologically subject comes from the Latin subjectum, meaning

some-thing that lies beneath, underpinning or giving support to some entity Inancient and medieval usage, it referred to any substance of which qualitiescould be predicated, so that many objects were “subjects.” This terminol-ogy was in accord with the ancient, especially Aristotelian notion that everyentity was what it was by virtue of a “form” that defined its substance; eachsuch form (for instance that of a tree or a house or a city) played the role

of an active principle, to which accidental properties could be attached.Only from around the seventeenth century did the term subject begin tohave special reference to conscious beings, especially humans (we shall seethat Descartes, who is often credited with much influence in this change

of meaning, still used the term in both senses) In politics, however, the

subject “lay beneath” some constituted authority, such as a king or prince,and was therefore at least in some degree passive That is why the French

Revolutionaries replaced sujet with citoyen.

We can discern this mix of activity and passivity in the way we posit

a subject of experience, whether sensible or mental Such subjects can bethought of as either passive or active, depending on whether they contain

a reflective dimension I may be the passive subject of pain or noise, as offatigue or in some instances frustration or anger David Hume in a famousplace described human consciousness in a way that made passivity a feature

of most or all mental states Looking inside himself, he said, he couldnever find any “self ” separate from the feelings, impressions, or ideas thatoccupied him at particular moments, so that the self was a kind of emptytheater, the passive container where various scenes succeed each other (Thiswas far from being Hume’s last word about the self, as we shall see.) Kantrejected such an account He argued, against Hume, that wherever there isexperience of any sort, beginning with sense impressions, an active subjectmust be at work In order for a succession of feelings or impressions tocount as experience, Kant maintained, it must belong to a subject forwhom they are all “mine,” and to characterize them in this way is an act

of judgment In the absence of a subject who makes this link, raw sensedata would not constitute experience, since nothing would connect onedatum to another.6Some more recent philosophers argue that even a passiveexperience is already “mine” in the sense that I experience it as happening

to me, and not to some other subject They too recognize, however, thatthere is a difference between such pre-reflective first-person experiencesand the kind of subjectivity that involves reflective judgment.7 The latterarises as soon as I connect one experience with another, today’s pain withthe memory of yesterday’s, vexation with fatigue, or both with my havingstared for hours at a computer screen At this moment I become an activesubject in Kant’s sense, possessed of a kind of experience in which judgmentmust play a role Such a transit from passive to active subjecthood is thepassage from involuntary reflex to reflection, from reflexivity to reflectivity.The terms self and subject both bear the signs of inhabiting this passage.The same is true of another term closely related to selfhood, namely iden-tity Like reflection and subject, identity has a passive and an active form.Literally it means sameness, just as selfhood does in many connections,and as a reflex image is the same or identical with what it mirrors Suchsimple identity is passive, like that of a stone or a piece of furniture Thequestion of what gives an identity to, say, a tree or a river whose elementsare constantly changing, is more complex, and the issues multiply as we

move to animals whose changes are more marked as they pass through thephases of their lives, and then to humans whose identity is not only naturalbut also cultural and social, often multiply so We shall see later that JohnLocke was among the first people to raise these questions explicitly Closer

to our own time, Erik Erikson argued that the problem of human tity becomes especially acute in adolescence, when individuals experiencepowerful bodily and mental transformations, making it difficult to achieve

iden-a stiden-able sense of continuity, both with themselves over time, iden-and betweenwhat any individual is for her or himself and what she or he is for others.These dilemmas constitute a crisis that some resolve relatively easily, whileothers may require the active reflectivity of therapeutic intervention.8

Finally, the term “person” bears a parallel range of meanings As merelythe singular of “people” it denotes any individual among others, whethershe or he bears any particular qualities or not Often, however, the word

echoes with some of its ancient sources, the Greek prosopon meaning the mask worn by characters in a play, taken into Latin as persona, literally

animating the mask “by sound,” and referring by extension to the occupant

of a particular social position or status Modern usage makes personhood

or personality sometimes a dignity conveyed by social recognition, andsometimes a quality deriving from individual talents or gifts The first senseassociates personhood with what Max Weber called status or social honor;the second has one of its roots in the Christian notion of God as composed

of three “persons.”9 Both senses raise personhood above mere existence,limiting it to those Hegel described as becoming “really somebody” throughachievement and recognition

That all these terms – self, subject, identity, person – alternately orsimultaneously bear passive and active forms is a sign that our manner ofbeing ourselves, of persisting as who we are, involves both the ways in whichour selfhood is a matter of natural sameness, and the ways in which it mustencompass the differences within ourselves that being human unavoidablyoccasions and contains The terms constitute a vocabulary of selfhood,

a linguistic register from which we single out one or another depending

on the context in which we employ the idea of the self, or the particularpurpose we ask it to serve Each is capable of calling up more than one ofthe self ’s dimensions For these reasons the terms, however clearly it may

be possible to distinguish them from each other (as we have just done),are permeable and sometimes merge into each other We shall see in whatfollows that many writers shifted from one to another, as for instance Lockedid between personal identity and self, Fichte between ego and self, or Kantand Hegel between subject and self, sometimes attempting to preserve adistinction between the terms and sometimes not Questions about the self

are not about whether some one term best names what is essential to it, butabout the ways people seek and find to establish operative and meaningfulrelations between the various constituents of their lives Concern about theself is concern about how we put the diverse parts of our personal beingtogether into some kind of whole.

This way of approaching the question of selfhood is meant as a cal hermeneutic, that is, as an aid to understanding and interpreting thelegacy of thinking about the self; its testing ground is the thinkers, ideas,experiences, and visions we will encounter below It thus claims to have acertain analytic and descriptive utility, irrespective of how one values anyparticular theory But any reader who has come this far will likely know

histori-or suspect that the writer of these pages has certain preferences in regard

to conceptions of the self, and namely one in favor of multi-dimensionalaccounts over one-dimensional ones I hope and claim that these prefer-ences do not exclude some degree of sympathy with the views I favor less.One-dimensional approaches can be justified on the grounds that onlythey give sufficient weight to some important value that is put in jeopardy

by multi-dimensionality: thus one might argue that only purely tive views recognize the nature and conditions of human freedom, thatonly strongly relational ones acknowledge the insufficiency of individualsoutside of social and communal ties, or that only the bodily dimensionmaintains our contact with the deepest needs of our nature and preservesour continuity with other forms of life All the same, I think good argu-ments can be offered on behalf of a view that makes reflectivity an essentialelement of selfhood, while insisting that it cannot stand apart from biol-ogy or social existence, that it exists in a relationship of interdependencewith them Readers should be advised that at this point our discussionshifts from being a consideration on the ways selfhood has been conceivedhistorically to a more theoretical meditation on the relations between reflec-tivity and the other dimensions of the self Its aim is to acknowledge, toclarify, and in part to justify the position from which the present book iswritten In it I draw on philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, andhistorians

reflec-One reason why human selves must be reflective is precisely that they aresimultaneously corporeal and relational Since they are both they can never

be wholly one or the other; they must be able to take a certain distance fromeach, which is just the capacity that reflectivity brings Reflectivity allowshumans to address and in some degree deal with the tensions or conflictsbetween what biology demands and what social and cultural existenceimposes or allows Beings who are both animal and cultural must also

be reflective, otherwise they would be unable to mediate between the rivalmaterial and external claims that press upon them The capacity to objectifyand in part determine our own relation to the competing conditions of ourexistence is a prerequisite for surviving the complexity of being human,even in what are sometimes called “simple” societies.

Such an argument shares some ground with one Christine Korsgaardmakes on behalf of regarding human beings as possessed of some kind ofindependent moral agency, a capacity to determine our own wills reflec-tively, in the way Kant posits as the necessary ground of morality and free-dom Recognizing that the body contains a variety of systems and drives,all pressing us in different directions, Korsgaard argues that only if weassume that these urges do not move us automatically, but act as motivesbetween which we can judge and choose on the basis of reasons, can weunderstand how it is possible to mediate between them Without reflection,creatures driven in as many different directions as we are could not governthemselves sufficiently even to bring about their own survival.10 Perhapsone might extrapolate from Korsgaard’s view and suggest that reflectivitybecomes a necessity once an organism reaches a certain level of complexity

In evolutionary terms, reflectivity has come to be part of the make-up ofhuman beings as we know them because only through it can they managethe competing demands nature and social life place on them sufficiently tosurvive.11

What kind of reflectivity does such a mode of existence require? Manyreflective judgments are conscious and explicit, and some philosophers haveargued that, at least with regard to beliefs, we need to be clearly aware ofthe contents of our minds in order to recognize inconsistencies and resolvethem But it is a fairly common observation that, as one recent writer puts

it, much of the work of keeping our world in order sufficiently to be able toact in it and on ourselves goes on “below the threshold of consciousness”;

we make order out of “the constant flow of perceptual experience” withhardly more conscious monitoring than we have of our respiration or otherbodily functions Indeed we assume that this basic mental housekeeping hasalready taken place when we engage in more complex deliberation and self-criticism, since these operations assume a certain disposition for coherence

in the self to which they are directed.12 We shall see later on that even sofirm a rationalist as Kant recognized that an unconscious but productiveand creative mental life operated in many human activities, although herefused to class it with the reason that liberates the will from material desiresand urges A less rigid dualist might conclude that reflectivity, or somethingvery much like it, takes place in us unawares, and that conscious reflection

is the more developed form of an attentiveness that sometimes operates on apre-reflective level Here perhaps we glimpse within ourselves a continuumbetween reflexivity as an automatic response and reflectivity as a consciousendeavor.

If such gradations exist, then they may point toward a more generalcontinuity between reflectivity and the other dimensions of the self Somewriters, both classic and recent, assume the existence of strong barriers tosuch connectedness, but others offer reasons for affirming it If the body

is considered merely in terms of brute need and unthinking desire, it canhardly appear as a source of reflective consciousness Descartes believedthat animals, having only bodies and not souls, were like machines, andincapable of thought Kant rejected Descartes’s claim to have shown thatthe being that thinks must be immaterial and immortal, but he considered

it impossible to attribute a capacity for coherent and unified experience tomaterial creatures subject to causal determination inside a shifting world

of sense-perception; it was for this reason that he ascribed the capacitiesnecessary for coherent selfhood to a “transcendental subject,” an intangibleentity that reason had to posit in order to account for the human ability

to make sense of the world Thinkers with very different agendas havepersisted in opposing bodily existence to the capacity for independentreflection Nietzsche, for instance, sought to relegate the idea of a coherentself to the realm of illusion by making the body the real source of will andconsciousness, asserting that what we misconstrue as judgment and choice

is actually the operation of drives and affects More recently behavioristsand genetic biologists have evolved their own way of reducing mental life

to a superficial expression of material processes

But a different, positive or contributory, relation between bodily tence and reflective self-awareness has been suggested by other thinkers,who offer reasons for regarding the body as providing the basic orientationtoward the world that we develop in our mental life Such a view shouldnot be confused with the simpler and more common recognition thatknowledge depends on sense-perception, which made even Kant insist thatsensory intuition is the basis of whatever objective understanding we canacquire, while leaving the dualism of material and intellectual worlds intact.Quite different was the perspective developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty,who (drawing on the work of Edmund Husserl) saw the body’s ability tomove inside the world as the foundation of knowledge and understanding;for him the mobile body was no mere object, but “that by which thereare objects,” the source of our awareness of things It is by projecting ouras-yet unconscious intentions on to objects that we make them significant

exis-for us; hence it is the body’s movement among the things around it thatfirst allows us to “have a world,” a set of surroundings that appears to us

as meaningful, and it is through bodily interaction with this world that wefirst come to know ourselves as well.13

Some philosophers have objected to Merleau-Ponty’s claims about thebody, arguing that corporeal agency cannot bring about the states of aware-ness he describes unless people already possess some degree of conceptualcognizance of their own position in a world of objects, and of interac-tions as structured by cause-and-effect relations: without such an implicitnotional armature the world could not come to appear to us as it does.Indeed Merleau-Ponty in his later writings made a similar critique of theearly work where he developed these ideas, concluding that he had tac-itly presupposed a thinking ego inside the body’s pre-reflective activity Butrecent philosophers and developmental psychologists, some of them drawntogether to study the relations between “the body and the self,” have comepartly to his defense, arguing that consciousness and self-consciousness havetheir beginnings in a kind of embryonic subjectivity that does not requireconceptual thinking This bud or germ of later mental life resides in whatNaomi Eilan calls “perspectival awareness,” an implicit sense, apparentlypossessed by infants, of having an ongoing relation with objects in the worldfrom a point of view that persists over time and through changes in bodilyposition Such awareness is not yet “the capacity for detached reflection

on oneself ” that develops along with language and conceptual thinking,but it is enough to suggest a kind of ladder or continuum between bodilyinteraction with the world and developed reflectivity Children, as otherpsychologists have indicated, first begin to have an awareness of them-selves and others as selves, in the sense of beings with a separate mentallife (extended in time and different from those around them), near theage of four; but, in contrast with what earlier psychologists (for instanceFreudians) believed, even infants appear to have a sense of their own sep-aration from the others and objects they encounter in the world almostfrom the beginning of life In humans, bodily existence carries with it akind of embryonic self-awareness that contributes to the fully developedreflectivity that emerges through language and intellectual maturation.14

Perhaps the most promising attempt to bridge the gap between bodilyexistence and reflective intentionality has been made in recent studies ofthe brain Gerald Edelman, along with other neurologists, has begun tosuggest how it is that the brain can be both a material object and a source

of intentionality with the capacity to transcend its own physicality Rather

than being in some way programmed or “wired” for certain kinds of ing from the start, each brain takes on important features of its structurethrough the operations it performs as individuals grow out of infancy Theneural pathways along which mental operations proceed acquire their pat-terns of connection not just through experience but also through reflection,which fosters the development of particular sets of synaptic connectionsbetween cells located in the manifold layers of the brain’s gray matter Aspeople acquire new cognitive tools from language and culture, the matur-ing brain makes them part of its physical structure, so that there takes place

think-“a continual revision and reorganization of perception and memory.” Inplace of an older mechanical model of brain functioning, Edelman and hiscolleagues envisage a brain whose developing architecture is imprinted withindividual experience and reflection as it evolves over time As Oliver Sackssummarizes this new neurology: “The nervous system adapts, is tailored,evolves, so that experience, will, sensibility, moral sense, and all that onecould call personality or soul becomes engraved in the nervous system Theresult is that one’s brain is one’s own.”15

These accounts of the developmental interplay between the reflectiveand bodily dimensions of the self already raise questions about how reflec-tivity stands in regard to selfhood’s relational dimension This nexus toohas often been regarded in negative terms, giving language and culture thepower to set strict limits to what people are able to think, or deeming con-sciousness to be so fully constituted by social and cultural relations thatmental life becomes a kind of precipitate of collective existence, losing itsindependence Marxism provides one example of such a view, exemplified

in its founder’s famous assertion that “consciousness is conscious existence”:since “the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions deter-mining their production,” it follows that the content of any individual’smind depends on his or her place in “the social relations of production.”Durkheim made rational thinking highly dependent on social existence in

a different way, arguing that people owe their ability to employ abstract andgeneral logic to society, since individual existence is too fluid and change-able to provide a basis for stable categories Some anthropologists havefollowed this line of thinking, inserting forms of consciousness so tightlyinto cultural matrices that individuals can neither stand outside the mentalhabits of their group nor fully comprehend those of another According

to them, only Western notions of selfhood regard reflectivity as a icant component of it.16 Michel Foucault’s denial that reflection can beindependent of the conditions where it develops asserts that consciousness

signif-arises inside “epistem´es” or “discursive practices” that prefigure the fieldwhere awareness and knowledge arise; subjectivity takes on the form ofthe contexts of domination and power relations where it comes into being,

so that it can never provide any alternative to them And Jacques Derrida(like Foucault drawing on Nietzsche, but on a different side) has laboredintently to show that subjectivity is an illusion fostered by language, whosefluid and unstable structures forever frustrate the desire for stable personalexistence and meaning that it instills in its users

Such views would offer powerful support for attempts to fold or absorbthe reflective dimension into the relational one But there are strong reasonsfor seeing things in a different way The very fact that human beings are able

to understand themselves as determined by their cultural and social relations(as also by their bodies) can hardly be accounted for without recognizingreflectivity as in some degree independent of such determination Animalsare also shaped by their environment and their organic structure, but they

do not understand themselves as being so conditioned, whereas humanbeings do.17 As we argued above, an inescapable contradiction lurks inevery attempt to portray thinking as wholly absorbed into or dominated bysome set of social relations: the subject that posits an abolition of reflectivedistance simultaneously locates itself at just such a remove from the account

it gives Otherwise it could not claim general validity for its conclusions.The claim that subjectivity can be wholly formed by or absorbed intosocial and cultural relations is also unsustainable because it fails to recog-nize the complexity and intricacy of human culture and language Onlybeings possessed of judgment and reflective consciousness could be capable

of learning languages or navigating inside cultures in the first place Theprocess whereby individuals acquire the skills, attitudes, expectations, andvalues of a particular milieu is complex and extended; it involves question-ing, confusion, mistakes, corrections, thwarted desires, and a long progres-sion toward grasping, bit by bit, the expectations held by grown-ups forwhat children should become, the meanings that are attached to activities,signs, and objects, and the limits within which desires may be fulfilled andinclinations followed Perhaps the process is longer and more complex inmore spatially extended and socially differentiated societies than in morecompact and homogeneous ones, but there is no human culture in whicheach individual does not have to go through it for him or herself As MartinHollis has argued, social and cultural experience has a character much likewhat Kant observed in regard to nature: it does not make sense of itself,

it only comes to have sense in the mind that perceives it Cultural systemsare not spontaneously given to us as ordered spaces where action can be

coherently undertaken and understood, we must each come to know thesystem by way of the mindful interactions in which we are caught up Togain social knowledge a person must act – to use Kant’s language – not just

as a pupil but also as a judge, applying forms of conceptual understandingthat make sense out of what must sometimes appear as a fluid and unstablemass of perceptions and experiences As Hollis puts it:

The social analogue of reflective consciousness is intelligent agency We identify the positions and roles of the social world by acting intelligently within them Intelligence depends on continuity of the self, by analogy with the unity of the self required to weave phenomena into physical objects For meaningful social phenomena, the apperception is that of a social agent 18

Restated slightly, social action and social learning are mutually dent, and both require that we be able to combine the often puzzlingand discontinuous phenomena of the social world into stable, intelligibleobjects of understanding Only beings capable of developing reflective judg-ment can find their way along the interacting threads of meaning culturesspin (the metaphor is from Clifford Geertz) to support and contain theirmembers

depen-One way in which cultures acknowledge the autonomous subjectivity ofindividuals is by structuring social life around sets of prohibitions or taboos.Such rules always assume the possibility that individuals are capable oftransgressing them; as Marcel Mauss observed, the very existence of taboos is

a recognition that they can be violated Such instances as incest prohibitions,sacred spaces to which all or some members of a group are denied admission,forbidden foods or activities, all acknowledge that cultural rules have inview individuals whose ability to follow them lies close to their power tobreak them Within this power there lies also the potential to evolve otherrules and limits The point has been given a clear general formulation byMerleau-Ponty:

The human dialectic manifests itself first of all by the social and cultural

structures that it brings into existence and within which it confines itself But the objects it employs for practical purposes and as bearers of cultural meaning (ses objets d’usages et ses objects culturels) would not be what they are if the activity that brings them forth did not also point in the direction of being able to negate or go beyond them.

Merleau-Ponty (who underlined these phrases for reasons that might haveled me to stress them if he had not) means that the same powers that allowhuman beings to learn to use tools, or speak languages, or practice rule-governed activities like making pictures or writing histories, are also theones that send them in search of new uses for those tools, or new forms

of speech and thought, new painting styles, or new ways to interpret thepast The same powers that people employ in establishing and building upsocial and cultural forms also seek and find expression in reimagining orrevising them.19

Language is an important instance of the kind of learning that bothHollis and Merleau-Ponty have in mind, and some recent research abouthow children acquire it supports them As children develop competence inspeaking the idiom used around them, they sometimes make “mistakes”that are actually attempts to resolve inconsistencies in the language; laterthey give up their emendations and accept logical ambiguities that havebeen sanctioned by convention Observations of French children indicatethat at around age three they are comfortable with the standard usage that

takes une voiture to mean both “a car” and “one car.” By age five, however,

they become aware that the one phrase may not distinguish the two notions

clearly enough; they then begin to reserve une voiture for “a car,” and invent the phrase une de voiture to mean “one car.” A year or so later they give up

their new coinage and accept, definitively, the standard practice In passingthrough these stages, the young speakers first try to correct a logical anomaly

in the language they are being taught, then decide (how consciously remainsunclear) to accept it rather than persist in a “correction” that places themoutside the community of speakers they are trying to join In the processthey display a human capacity we may not understand very well, but which,

in Howard Gardner’s terms, in the very moment of learning what culturehas to teach us “stimulates us to go beyond our initial success, to alter ourrepresentations and create new knowledge.”20 A similar point was made

at the end of the nineteenth century by the unjustifiably neglected Frenchlinguist Michel Br´eal If language is rightly recognized as “the educator ofthe human race,” he maintained, the reason lies less in the constitutingpower of its forms of thought and expression than in its incompleteness,the gaps and inconsistencies that every language-user must learn to fill inand resolve for him or herself.21

It remains true that language and culture provide individuals with ceptual resources without which reflective consciousness and self-awarenesswould not reach the levels human beings commonly achieve, and CliffordGeertz may well be right that human intelligence as we know it has devel-oped along with culture, indeed that we should recognize culture as a pre-requisite for its development, providing the context without which certaincapacities of the brain might never have evolved But in Darwinian termssuch evolutionary changes must have appeared as independent mutations

con-in con-individual bracon-ins, providcon-ing culture with the human resources required

for its development at the same time that intellectual growth received itsreward for evolutionary suitability to more complex forms and settings.Between culture and individual human intelligence the flows operate inboth directions, not merely in one To paraphrase Martin Heidegger, theform of consciousness that distinguishes human beings from other creatures

is the mark of the possibility humans possess always to be other than theyare It is just this quality of independence from fixed forms that culturesrecognize when they attempt to set strict limits to what their membersare allowed to think and do, particularly in those cases where, as MarcelGauchet has observed, cultural authorities enforce a radical narrowing ofindividual subjective powers in the present by attributing jurisdiction overvalues and beliefs to divine beings or to founders and heroes who lived in

a mythologized past Such attempts belie their own claims to know andrespect human limits, tacitly paying tribute to humanity’s innate powers

of reflection and cultural innovation The relational dimension of selfhoodcannot be the sole source of the reflective one.22

This conclusion departs particularly from the views of many ogists, who regard the notion of an individual and subjectively groundedselfhood as peculiarly Western and modern, and having little or no appli-cability to more traditional cultures and situations It is surely true thatnon-Western and pre-modern cultures have valued individuality less thanEuropeans and Americans in the relatively recent past, often setting up bar-riers to its development, so that critics of individualism and defenders ofcommunitarian life have often looked to them for inspiration But just as wehave argued that reflectivity takes place sometimes on a less-than-consciouslevel, so is there reason to believe that some sense of individual independencefrom cultural formation must be present even in contexts where anthro-pologists have offered reasons to deny it Thus Clifford Geertz presents theself of classical Balinese culture as a theatrical construct, wholly absorbed

anthropol-by the way it performs in public, and devoid of any separate “interior”dimension In place of the inner shame that Westerners who are unable tofulfill some set of social imperatives may feel, he notes that the Balinese

experience something they call lek, and which he renders as “stage fright,”

associated not with inwardness but with successfully playing a role.23 Buthow can such a feeling be present if those who report it have no experi-ence of the gap between the public selves they are asked to be and someprivate sense of their own persons that retains a degree of separation fromit? In Hindu cultures of South Asia, individuals are called on to transform

their merely personal, self-related feelings (bhava) into depersonalized and shared emotional states or moods (rasa), for which models and vehicles are

provided by certain cultural forms such as the traditional musical patterns

called raga People who achieve this transformation testify to their

constitu-tion by communal values in the very shape they give to their inner life But,

as a recent writer has pointed out, “there are plentiful traces of recognition

in Hindu performances that arriving at a certain feeling is unpredictableand involves planning and effort.” If this is so, then here too reflection onhow to achieve what cultural norms demand of individuals must be part

of learning to exemplify them.24

In pre-modern European societies as well, people have sometimes beenportrayed as without any awareness of a separate, private self, because such aconsciousness is supposed to be excluded by the deeply felt sense of embed-dedness in a social and cultural matrix recognized as prior to individualityand regulative of it But Natalie Z Davis has discerned quite a differentexperience in sixteenth-century French villagers, even though their livesrevolved almost wholly in the compass of their local and familial relations.Young men who did not want to take up the occupation their parents chosefor them spoke about the conflict they felt between the expected line of

work and their naturel, their innate character Young women, both in the

popular classes and higher up the social scale, were well aware that complexfamily strategies of connection and alliance through marriage depended

on their willingness to accept a proposed partner, and the tension aged them to feel their individual agency as a power whose support wasrequired in order for collective strategies to work Davis concludes that

encour-“embeddedness did not preclude self-discovery, but rather prompted it –common experience may feed the sense of one’s own distinctive history.”25

Here, as in the other examples just given, some level of reflective selfhoodshould be discerned despite the absence of modern ways to acknowledge

or support it

But none of this should be allowed to suggest that the reflective sion can constitute selfhood independently of the other two That it canand does, making it the only true basis of self-existence, has been the view ofphilosophers already mentioned, such as Descartes and Fichte The notionwas flirted with by the French poet and essayist Paul Val´ery at a certain

dimen-moment in his career, when he pictured the moi pure as able to exist only

by negating all the contents that come to it from the world outside, andJean-Paul Sartre gave it wide currency in his time as the authentic man-ner of being of the “for-itself.” A number of recent writers have arguedpowerfully against such ideas, among them Dieter Henrich (whose viewshave been supported and developed by Manfred Frank and other members

of the “Heidelberg School”) and Sydney Shoemaker, who in separate and

unconnected writings have used similar arguments that cut the groundfrom under claims that it is reflection that provides access to the deep oressential self or subject Henrich, reviving a view whose first expression heattributes to Fichte (but which we shall see below was already put forward

by some critics of Locke), finds a basic incoherence in the notion that there

is a self that can first come to know itself through conscious reflection: inorder to recognize itself in the mirror it holds up, it must first know who

it is Otherwise, how could it say that the object it subjects to scrutiny

is indeed itself ? “Anyone who sets reflection into motion must himselfalready be both the knower and the known,” possessing in advance theknowledge that certain features of his experience belong to himself that

he then assigns to reflection In other words, the subject that makes itself

an object of reflection must already possess some other, pre-reflective form

of self-knowledge; reflection may bring its self-awareness to a higher level,but it does not establish a different, let alone more fundamental, mode ofself-existence.26

Shoemaker’s target is different, namely the notion that self-knowledge

is a form of perception, on the model of the way we come to know things

in the world Philosophers who employ this model have sometimes cluded from it that our claims to self-knowledge are deeply suspect, since theknowledge of ourselves we seem to have by way of immediate consciousness

con-or introspection does not fit the model of knowledge derived from tion It includes neither the indicators that would clearly differentiate ourown self from others (how can introspection by itself tell me that the con-sciousness I attribute to myself is not yours as well?), nor the matters of factthat distinguish one’s self from objects that are not selves, since nothing in

percep-my immediate awareness of percep-myself gives me intelligence about how otherthings are not like me Shoemaker suggests that this absence of “identifi-cation information,” which moves some thinkers to a Humean denial thatconsciousness can provide us with a valid idea of the self, on the groundsthat we cannot perceive it in the ordinary sense, is also responsible for theopposite view, the Cartesian claim that the self must be incorporeal andimmaterial, because our awareness of it does not provide the kind of datathat we have about physical entities Both alternatives dissolve, however, if

we abandon the “perceptual model,” and recognize that self-knowledge isbased on something else, an immediate acquaintance such as we have offeelings or sensations (I do not perceive pain in the way I perceive a door,

I simply have it), in contrast with the way we gain knowledge of objects.Here Shoemaker’s argument joins up with Henrich’s, since both concludethat we must somehow know in advance that the self one perceives is one’s

own in order to be able to say that some particular feature belongs to it.

“On pain of infinite regress, it must be allowed that somewhere along theline I have some self-knowledge that is not gotten by observing some-thing to be true of myself.” Shoemaker’s position is more inclusive andperhaps more broadly significant than Henrich’s, however, since it leads us

to question both purely reflective and purely material conceptions of theself.27

It is important to make clear that the perspectives achieved by Henrichand Shoemaker generate no reasons to doubt that selves possess consciousawareness of their own existence: it is through this consciousness that theyknow themselves But such consciousness is first of all pre-reflective; it

is a direct awareness by the self of its own states or acts A number ofwriters have sought to clarify the nature of this elemental self-awareness,recently and perceptively Dan Zahavi, who argues that, although free of anyelement of reflectivity, pre-reflective consciousness is not merely static orundifferentiated Elaborating on observations by Edmund Husserl, Zahavimaintains that such awareness encompasses the presence of the body, both

as the source of feelings and perceptions, and as what provides them withthe perspective of a particular place (making objects appear in partial andchanging ways), and that in addition such consciousness is extended intime, imparting a temporal character to basic self-presence It thereforeprovides the pre-reflective self with occasions and a kind of impetus towardreflection on its own existence (assuming that it has the capacity to engage init), so that reflectivity is not merely something super-added to the self ’s basicmode of existence, but responds to ineluctable features of it By developingand extending Henrich’s and Shoemaker’s arguments in this way, Zahaviconfirms that they lead not to any denial of the importance of reflectivity as

an element in the constitution of a developed self It plays its role, however,

in relation to the basic self-awareness that arises first out of bodily existence,and later in connection with the self ’s experience of the world.28

That the self ’s awareness of itself remains an important feature of existence, while never able to serve as the basis for a reflective constitution

self-of the self, is also the conclusion reached by Thomas Nagel in a justlycelebrated book Nagel argues that a defensible notion of selfhood mustcomprehend both the nature of first-person selfhood, the “I” that we knowfrom “inside,” and whatever we can know about third-person selfhood,the “someone” considered from “outside.” We can learn important thingsabout ourselves from introspection, but we have no reason to privilegethis knowledge over what appears when we consider our selfhood as aninstance of common existence The notion of a self in the first person can

be analytically separated from the general concept of selfhood that we applyequally to all human beings, but our ability to perform this intellectualoperation does not accord the “I” priority over the “one.”

The concept of “someone” is not a generalization of “I.” Neither can exist without the other, and neither is prior to the other To possess the concept of a subject

of consciousness an individual must be able in certain circumstances to identify himself and the states he is in without [any reference to] external observation But these identifications must correspond by and large to those that can be made on the basis of external observation, both by others and by the individual himself 29

Reflection on our own consciousness and the powers it can develop mayprovide us with an important stimulus toward evolving a concept of self-hood, but such reflection by itself cannot tell us what the self is Like theidea of gold we possess in everyday life, which identifies the metal aboutwhich we acquire knowledge through chemical analysis and experiment,but without providing that knowledge itself, the idea of the self invites

“objective completion” by way of some additional mode of understanding.What a self actually is depends not just on the concept we have of it, butalso on “the way things are in the world It is the mistake of thinkingthat my concept of myself alone can reveal the objective conditions of myidentity that leads to the giddy sense that personal identity is totally inde-pendent of everything else.”30Although Nagel does not put it this way, the

“everything else,” “the way things are in the world” to which reflective consciousness must remain connected, consists of the bodily and relationaldimensions of the self

self-Nagel notes further that our ability to reflect on the conditions of ourown existence may extend very far, allowing us to take an ever-greater dis-tance from our own being By bringing categories of analysis to bear notjust on our particularity but on the successive social or historical perspec-tives from which we understand it, we may even achieve a kind of “viewfrom nowhere,” a perspective able to transcend every particular social orpersonal location But such awareness never succeeds in making us inde-pendent of the conditions and circumstances where our individuality takesshape What reflective independence creates instead is a split, sometimesperplexing and painful, between our actual being, with its persisting lim-itations, and our expanded consciousness Louis Sass paints this split inmore somber tones: “Each new perspective on oneself brings, along withthe legitimate insights it may offer, new and perhaps even more tortuouspossibilities of ignorance, self-alienation and self-deception.”31Reflectivitybears not just benefits, but sobering risks and dangers

That reflectivity cannot constitute the self on its own is one reason whyits manifestations in actual life are seldom independent of bodily needs orsocial ties However deeply it may be rooted in the power of consciousness

to disengage itself from all its objects, reflection often draws energy frombodily passions and urges, or from an individual’s relations with others,operating “ideologically” in the service of desire or interest Even whencalled upon (in the terms developed by a recent historian) to “navigate”between alternative complexes of thought and feeling, it does not do so

in a disinterested way, but in one oriented or at least inflected by somesocially prescribed or instinctually driven goal.32Michael Beddow, writingabout self-formation in German novels, uses the term “unaccommodatedsubjectivity” to refer to the inner pressures and impulses that hold a per-son apart from existing life, or prod her to become something she is notyet Such unaccommodated subjectivity is not reflectivity in a pure state,but reflective consciousness infused with contents absorbed from physicalneeds or collective life It may take a variety of forms, sometimes speak-ing on behalf of some singular goal or value, sometimes successively orsimultaneously on behalf of a range of them, in accord with the variety ofidentities or loyalties that a single person may absorb from a complex social

or cultural situation This second case is that of the “thick” self MichaelWalzer has described as appropriate to modern pluralistic societies, able

to view its own acts and beliefs, often critically, from a variety of points

of view, and thus inwardly participating in the democratic openness tocompeting and sometimes irreconcilable claims that highly differentiatedsocieties need to maintain if they are not to become despotic Such a com-plex self can be a healthy mode of individual existence if its multiplicitydoes not degenerate into debilitating fragmentation, just as the more single-minded (in Walzer’s terms “thin”) alternative can be a sound one if it avoidsobsessiveness or fanaticism.33That each also has a pathological form, how-ever, reminds us that when reflectivity falls out of balance with the otherdimensions of the self it may become self-destructive Certain diseases

of the mind may even be regarded as maladies of excessive or insufficientreflectivity Louis Sass has persuasively characterized schizophrenia in termsrelated to the first, and other recent psychiatrists have seen the disassociationthat produces multiple personality disorder as persisting by virtue of thesecond.34

When people speak, as they often do, about “finding themselves” orbeing loyal to their “true self” or “deep self,” it is seldom to pure reflectiveinwardness that they refer, but to some desired or imagined mix of theself ’s attributes For some, finding their “true self” may mean achieving