This book is a collection of essays based on lectures delivered at the Academy of Ideas Academy in July 2017. The Academy that year was devoted to an exploration of the rise and the fall of the self. As organisers of the event, Angus Kennedy, Josie Appleton, Tim Black, and I were particularly interested in exploring the peculiar ways in which selfhood is problematised in contemporary society—for example, on the one hand, there is our increasing obsession with the fixed corporeality of selfhood (biology, sex, colour, and so on) which, on the other hand, sits beside a rather hollowed out, and increasingly abstract, form of universal selfhood (the cosmopolitan self who is a citizen of the world but with nowhere to call home). We began by considering a more or less classical, Enlightenment-liberal, notion of the self which emerges historically through the location of human subjectivity in some variant of individual freedom or autonomy: freedom or autonomy is taken to be the condition for individuals to undertake projects, often in collaboration with other individuals, in the pursuit of common interests. By contrast, formulations of the self that we can begin to uncover in much contemporary social and political discussion seem to begin from a disavowal of the self as a subject or agent in the world in favour of a self that is conceptualised in terms of more rigid categories of identity: what I am, it seems, has become more important than what I might make of myself.
The trajectory we have sought to uncover is a movement from self to selfie: from a model of an autonomous agent, the author of their own being, to a model of a more heteronomous individual whose existence is realised through continuous external validation; the self really only exists as a selfie, and its existence becomes more determinate the more likes it receives. To the extent that this trajectory from self to selfie is real, we are concerned that the ground of the existence of the individual is moving from a pursuit of agency to a condition of objectivity; from the pursuit of truth and knowledge to a one-sided acceptance of the facts of being. Where once the alienation of the self from its possibilities was a condition to be overcome, now those erstwhile alienated conditions of selfhood are embraced and celebrated.
A problem for any attempt to study the self is the difficulty one encounters in attempting to capture the subject itself: the answer to the question ‘what is the self?’ is always elusive. The self, as Frank Furedi suggests in Chap. 2, ‘is always in the process of changing, mutating, and developing new dimensions of itself.’ It ‘does not, and cannot, stay still.’ This fact of the self, that it is in a state of constant flux, explains why some of the most significant attempts to conceptualise what it is that forms the essence of being human often have an intangible character. Marx’s famous definition of the essence of man in the Theses on Feuerbach, for example, that ‘the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual’ but rather the ‘ensemble of social relations’ (1845 [2002], §6) suggests that the essence of what it is to be a human being must be sought somewhere outside the boundaries of the individual: somewhere in the relationships through which society is produced and reproduced. However, this essential character of man must also find its expression in the individual men and women who are, essentially, humanity. The construction of the self as an individual in society and the possibility for that self to realise itself are differently conditioned by the organisation of society in different historical moments. ‘The abstract individual,’ notes Marx, ‘belongs in reality to a particular social form’ (1845 [2002], §7). This historically situated character of the individual self is the foundation of our attempt to make sense of the peculiarities of the self, and in particular, the unique form taken by the problematisation of selfhood in the contemporary period.
The problem of pinning down the nature of the self is not, however, merely historical. The restless nature of the self, whereby its definition must be sought and yet its boundaries are (never quite) discovered somewhere outside of itself, is true in any one period just as much as it is true across different historical moments. Neither biological nor spiritual nor temporal definitions of the self ever quite get at its essence. This is the truth in Sartre’s paradoxical assertion: ‘We have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is’ (1943 [1996]: 58). To other selves, the individual exists as a particular being: observable, embodied, biologically bounded, sexed, and gendered, with a particular skin colour and determinable way of being in the world. This is, of course, who one is to others, and it may also form an important aspect of who one is to oneself. Yet Sartre’s point is that we are these more or less fixed and determined, factical aspects of ourselves, only in the sense of not being them. For we are also so much more. We are subjects of our own lives and experiences. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel notes, ‘to yourself, more intimately, you appear as “I”, the mental subject of your experiences, thoughts, feelings, memories and emotions’ (2009: 33). The opacity of my inner subjectivity to others is one aspect of Sartre’s paradoxical assertion. A further and important aspect is the extent to which I am constantly and necessarily going beyond the limits of my facticity: I am constantly and unstoppably in a process of becoming. I am what I am not (my objective, given, factical, self) because it is what I outwardly am, and yet I am so much more than this; and I am not (yet) what I am (my subjectively determined and determining, experiencing, conscious, becoming, self) because this aspect of my selfhood remains always and forever in the realm of possibility.
The intention of this book is to explore the problematisation of the self in contemporary society using the necessarily changing dynamic of selfhood as the foundation for our investigation. The way we approach this often intangible object is through a comparison between the models of selfhood which seem to underpin discussions of the self today with the models of selfhood which emerged in an earlier age, and which seemed to be relatively more optimistic about the human condition. The lectures from which the chapters in this book are drawn are diverse in their exploration of different accounts of selfhood from different historical moments and perspectives. The contributors do not necessarily agree in their diagnosis of the problem, but they share a sense that there is a new problematic of the self in contemporary society which is worthy of exploration.
We have organised the book into two parts from which certain core themes and questions emerge. The chapters in Part I trace the emergence of ideals of selfhood in different historical periods, including classically liberal accounts of the self and its possibilities as seen in philosophy, economics, law, and politics. These reach a high point in late-Enlightenment accounts of the self: ideas of the primacy of individual reason, self-determination, natural rights, freedom, and autonomy.1 The chapters in Part II then examine more contemporary examples of what can be understood as the decline or eclipse of the self in a reaction that expresses new forms of determinism, whether they lay claim to a need to be true to a supposedly authentic self or through the determinations, even self-imposed, of class, race, gender, and identity.
In Chap. 2, Frank Furedi traces the emergence of self-consciousness to the Renaissance, and to Luther’s distinction between the inner and external life of the individual. The space that was opened up, as external authority was weakened, created the possibility for the self to become self-authorising. However, this self-authorising self necessarily existed on shaky foundations, precisely given the weakening of external authority. This meant that the emergence of selfhood in this period established the self, from the moment of its possibility, as a problem. For Furedi, the transformative dynamic of selfhood is positively driven by the capacity for imaginative self-determination ‘which engages the individual in a project of testing the boundaries of necessity’ in order to ‘create a space in which we can determine for ourselves certain dimensions of our lives’ (Chap. 2). Jamie Whyte, in Chap. 3, gives a superficially less problematic account of the self as the individual, which underpins classically liberal models of free-market capitalism: the self as selfish individual. Here, the pursuit of self-interest is fundamental to the human condition, and for Whyte, it is free-market individualism which best harnesses that selfish drive in positive terms: ‘That is why,’ he claims, ‘people who live in capitalist countries are freer and richer than people living in countries that reject selfish individualism.’ This model of the self as a rationally self-interested agent is something I pick up in Chap. 5 in discussing John Stuart Mill’s individual as conceived in On Liberty as the apotheosis of the Enlightenment-liberal model of the self. I argue that this self is far more socially engaged than the more classically liberal free-market account suggests, and in its social engagement, this self is also far more robust than contemporary models of the self are wont to allow. For Angus Kennedy, in Chap. 4, the tension between the social and the individual is but one of the antithetical tensions in which the Enlightenment self is located: including nature and society, authenticity and autonomy, individual freedom and self-government in society. The challenge of the Enlightenment subject to create the world in its own image, and of the liberal individual to seek truth as the foundation of its being in the world, establishes a project of the self which is at the same time an impossible attempt to authorise itself as a self in the absence of external structures of authority and determination.
Resolution to this crisis of authority of the individual self has at different times been attempted by various forms of external authority, but such attempted resolutions may be more transient than they often appear. In Chap. 6, Jon Holbrook considers the transforming model of selfhood underpinning the ideal of the liberal ‘rule of law’: the legal subject. However, the notion that rule of law is fundamental is, as he suggests, to mistake what was in reality the role of law for a particular period in the middle of the twentieth century, for the entire structure of law throughout the history of liberal democracy. Holbrook believes that where once law could assume a more or less stable consensus between individuals within which it enabled personal autonomy to flourish, there has been ever since an expanding juridification of relations between individuals whose autonomy can no longer be assumed; the rule of law has been replaced with the rule by law; individual latitude hemmed in by contract.
The capacity for the self to exist beyond the boundaries and determinations of itself is, on the one hand, the foundation for the dynamic and creative potential that we as individual human beings represent. On the other hand, it explains the fact of our alienation: our dislocation from ourselves as potential selves; our disconnection from the world we inhabit as our world; our tendency to experience our freedom as unsettling, and our facticity as a...