Writing the Self

Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of the Self

Peter Heehs

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441153449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Named an Outstanding Academic Title of the Year for 2013 by Choice. The self has a history. In the West, the idea of the soul entered Christianity with the Church Fathers, notably Augustine. During the Renaissance the idea of the individual attained preeminence, as in the works of Montaigne. In the 17th century, philosophers such as Descartes formulated notions of self-hood that did not require a divine foundation; in the next century, Hume grew skeptical of the self's very existence. Ideas of the self have changed markedly since the Romantic period and most scholars today regard it as at best a mental construct. First-person genres such as diaries and memoirs have provided an outlet for self-expression. Protestant diaries replaced the Catholic confessional, but secular diaries such as Pepys's may reveal yet more about the self. After Richardson, novels competed with diaries and memoirs as vehicles of self-expression, though memoirs survived and continue to thrive, while the diary has found a new incarnation in the personal blog. Writing the Self narrates the intertwined histories of the self and of self-expression through first-person literature.

1

The Self and History

I know that I exist; the question is, what is this “I” that I know?

– René Descartes

All of us feel we are different than everybody else. We see the world through our own eyes, hear it with our own ears, touch it with our own hands. We have our own thoughts and feelings that we can share with other people but that no one experiences exactly as we do. We decide to do one thing and not another, take credit for our successes and feel the sting of our failures. The multitude of thoughts, feelings, sense impressions, impulses, and actions that make up our day-to-day lives seem to belong to a single someone. We feel that we were this someone in the past and will remain the same someone in the future. We have changed, of course, and will continue to change, but there is something that seems constant through it all. We call this our “I,” our personal identity, our self.

Nothing could be more intimate to us than this self. It is not just close to us, it is all we are. We do not have to look for it. It is right here. Or so it seems. But perhaps it’s not so simple. For if we try to grasp our self, it is always just out of reach. We see, hear, and touch particular things, but can’t see who is seeing, hear who is hearing, touch who is touching. We have what seem to be our own thoughts and feelings, but don’t know where they come from and can’t always make them go away. We decide to do something but can’t say what pushed us to action and don’t always do what we decide to do. Our self, which to our immediate perception is the surest of all things, is at the same time the hardest to pin down.

Despite its elusiveness, the self is something we take for granted and we have a pretty good idea of what we mean when we speak about it. We assume most adults have similar ideas, though when we talk to people from different cultures, or who were brought up in different circumstances, or belong to the other gender, or are considerably older or younger, we are sometimes surprised to find how odd their ideas of selfhood are. And when we read about people who dwell in distant lands or who lived in the distant past, we have reason to wonder whether our idea of the self is the only one possible.

To avoid possible confusion it will be good to make a distinction between the instinctive sense of self that humans have always had and the concept of self that is a product of thought and reflection. The sociologist Marcel Mauss had something like this in mind when he wrote that “there was never a human being who lacked the sense not just of the body but also of a combined mental and physical individuality,” but that this sense was not the same as “the idea or concept that humans of various periods have created out of it.”1 According to Mauss, the concept developed over time, eventually becoming the conscious self with which we are familiar. The rudimentary sense of self of our earliest human ancestors survives in us in the feeling that we possess a particular body, are focal points of particular sense-impressions and initiators of particular actions. Zoologists tell us that some of these traits are present in primates and cetaceans, developmental psychologists say that they emerge in children at an early age, but neither dolphins nor babies have a developed idea of self and it is highly unlikely that prehistoric humans did. Historians and social scientists differ as to when this idea emerged in Europe, but most believe it did not assume its current form before the sixteenth century.

Many people will find it strange to speak of a history of the self or even the history of the concept of the self. This is because our ideas about the subject are colored by the belief that there is something eternal and immutable in us that is our essential self. Many religions have a version of this belief: Hinduism speaks of the atman, Christianity of the soul. Even people who reject the doctrines of these and other religions are influenced by the idea of an essential inner substance, which has left its traces in our languages and cultural practices. Think of words like “soulful,” “selfish,” and “substantial.” Whether the soul (or atman or self) actually exists is a question this book does not go into. It is a work of history, not philosophy or theology. But even if the soul or atman is eternal, the terms “soul” and “atman” have histories. Neither is present in the earliest texts of the religion in question; both underwent considerable development across the centuries. Believers are entitled to think that there is an immortal essence that is correctly described by certain passages of certain texts (the Upanishads, the Bible, Plotinus’s Enneads, etc.). Historians are obliged to point out that both believers and non-believers have had different ideas on the subject at different times. It follows – at least for the non-dogmatic – that no particular idea can be considered final.

When we look at what people have written about the self in different historical periods, we see that the prevailing ideas have changed dramatically over the years. Beliefs that were current in prehistoric cultures are all but inconceivable today; beliefs that many of us hold today would have been thought madness a century or two ago.

One of the main components of the modern idea of the self is interiority or inwardness, the feeling that there is a personal inner space that we alone have access to. All of us distinguish between things that happen inside – thoughts, feelings, impulses – and things that happen outside us in the world. It is all but impossible for us to imagine a sane adult who lacked this sense. But many scholars think that people in antiquity – the men and women of the Homeric age, for example – did not have inner lives.2 Historians of the self differ as to when the inner sense, as we understand it today, finally emerged, but it certainly was present in Augustine of Hippo (354–430 ce), whose works are filled with admonitions like “Do not go abroad. Return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth.”3 If Augustine had jumped into a time machine and gone back a millennium and a half to give this advice to the warriors before Troy, they would have stared at him in blank incomprehension. If on the other hand he had gone forward to 1581 and happened upon a copy of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, he would have been happy to read: “Everyone looks in front of him; as for me, I look inside of me.” “This guy has the right idea,” Augustine would have thought, although he would have been puzzled by the next sentence: “I have no business but with myself.”4 For Augustine, to be concerned with one’s separate self was to turn away from God, the light of truth and creator of the soul. If he had gone forward another century or so in the hope that people had got things right, he would have been disappointed if he came upon this passage in John’s Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding: “methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without.”5 For Augustine the inner realms were expansive halls, not closets fitted out with peepholes. “It’s getting worse and worse,” he would have thought, “I hope that people a couple of centuries ahead will have returned to their senses.” But if he had landed in 1890 and picked up a copy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, he would have been flabbergasted to read: “All instincts which are not discharged outwardly turn inwards ­– this is what I call the internalization of man: with it there now evolves in man what will later be called his ‘soul.’ ”6 No one could have blamed him if after reading this Augustine had jumped back into his time machine and gone back to the fifth century as fast as he could.

It is clear from this story that geniuses of different periods have held vastly different views about the nature of the self. But they did not arrive at their views entirely on their own. It was a cumulative process. Montaigne, Locke, and Nietzsche were aware of their predecessors’ beliefs, incorporating them into their own or reacting against them. Yet the process was not linear, a predictable movement in a single direction. Nietzsche’s body-based self was, in a way, an attempt to recover the spontaneous physicality of the Homeric age; but there was no way a nineteenth century European could get back to the days before the reflective mind. Nietzsche despised the Christian doctrines that Augustine helped to codify and looked down on the Enlightenment mentality that Locke helped to create, but he owed more to Christianity and the Enlightenment than he would have liked to admit.

The cumulative nature of the development of the idea of the self is what makes it possible to speak of its having a history. It also helps explain why in writing about this history I confine myself mostly to Western sources. Until recently, the histories of the idea of the self in the West and East have had little to do with one another. Augustine was influenced by Manichaeism, an Eastern religion, but his conception of the self was a synthesis of Neoplatonic and Christian ideas. Locke knew nothing about Asian ways of thought; he drew on – and reacted against – Christian doctrine, Cartesian rationality, and other trends that were current when he wrote. Nietzsche had a few vague notions about Buddhism but he was a master of the Western tradition from Homer to Schopenhauer. In tracing the lines of the history of the self, I take advantage of the cumulative experience of the West to bring coherence to the story.

There is one great problem with this approach. The modern Western idea of selfhood is not typical of ideas prevalent in other parts of the world. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in 1974: “The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic centre of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action, organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.”7 People living in traditional cultures in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Australasia – virtually everywhere except Europe and North America – don’t see the self like this. It would take dozens of pages to give even a summary account of the major differences between the modern Western and traditional non-Western views of selfhood; it is enough for the moment to say that people in traditional cultures give much more importance to social cohesiveness, much less to individual autonomy. In this respect, modern Westerners differ not only from traditional people in the present, but also from people in all known cultures before the European Renaissance. In recognition of these differences, I discuss a number of Asian thinkers and writers in Chapters 2, 3 and 12, and deal with the special case of the Japanese poetic diary in the last section of the present chapter. But I give most of my attention to the development of the Western idea of the self from the sixteenth century to the present.

Giving a Name to the Self: Terminology and Disciplines

The long history of the idea of the self is reflected in the terminology used in writing and speaking about it. For centuries, the word soul or its equivalent in other languages was the term of choice. The Greek psyche originally meant “breath,” “life,” “spirit” but later was applied to the soul or immaterial part of ourselves as distinguished from the body. The Latin anima, originally “breath,” “passion,” “living being,” underwent a similar development. These two words dominated discussions of the subject in Europe until the seventeenth century, when new ways of thinking spawned a host of new terms or new uses of older terms: mind, self, consciousness, person, identity, personal identity. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, philosophers introduced new words in their increasingly technical discussions: subject, subjectivity, ego. All twelve of these terms are still in use in English. In what follows, I will use self as my normal word but refer to the others when the context requires it.

The changes in the terminology used to discuss the self reflect changes in the disciplines that have concerned themselves with the question. At first, it was priests and other religious specialists who laid down the correct views about the human soul and its relationship with the superhuman. The rise of philosophical enquiry made it possible for creative minds to formulate conceptions that were less constrained by theological dogmas. The result has been a gradual abandonment of the idea of a freestanding essential soul, created by God, separate from the body, and able to survive bodily death, and the development of approaches that held that the self was in some measure constructed by social or psychological processes. The rise of psychology and the social sciences during the nineteenth century brought such constructivist theories to the forefront. This shift was accelerated during the twentieth century by the rise of physiological approaches, in which the construction of the self is viewed as a biological process.

Over the centuries the focus of those studying the self has moved from intangible essences such as the soul toward positive entities such as society, the body, and the brain. But the older ways of thinking are still alive. I will therefore make use of the writings of theologians and philosophers along with those of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and physical scientists as I trace the development of the idea of the self in history. But my main source materials will be literary: diaries, memoirs, and other first-person documents in which gifted individuals gave expression to themselves and to their ideas about the self....

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1  The Self and History
• 2  The Soul from Animism to Monotheism
• 3  Exercising the Soul and Mind
• 4  Self-Examination
• 5  Reasons of the Mind and Heart
• 6  The Soul Dethroned
• 7  Rousseau and Romanticism
• 8  Revolution and Reaction
• 9  Idealism and Irrationalism
• 10  The Individual and the Crowd
• 11  Doubting the Soul and Discovering of the Body
• 12  Evolution and Affirmation
• 13  The Search for Authenticity
• 14  The Death of the Subject
• 15  Long Live the Self
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index