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

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THE IDEA OF THE SELF

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 European thinkers and writers have confronted the self since the time of
Descartes, Leibniz, and Locke. From an approach that is at once theoretical 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 supersede, and provides an open-ended and persuasive alternative to claims
that the modern self is typically egocentric or disengaged.
j e r rold seigel 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).



THE IDEA OF THE SELF
Thought and Experience in Western Europe since
the Seventeenth Century

JERROLD SEIGEL

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo
Cambridge University Press
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© Jerrold Seigel 2005
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Contents

Acknowledgments

page vii

part i introductory
1 Dimensions and contexts of selfhood
2 Between ancients and moderns

3
45

part ii british modernit y
3 Personal identity and modern selfhood: Locke

87

4 Self-centeredness and sociability: Mandeville and Hume

111

5 Adam Smith and modern self-fashioning

139

part iii societ y and self-knowled ge: france from
old reg im e to restoration
6 Sensationalism, reflection, and inner freedom: Condillac
and Diderot

171

7 Wholeness, withdrawal, and self-revelation: Rousseau

210

8 Reflectivity, sense-experience, and the perils of social life:
Maine de Biran and Constant

248

part iv the world and the self in german idealism
9 Autonomy, limitation, and the purposiveness of nature:
Kant

v

295

vi

Contents

10 Homology and Bildung: Herder, Humboldt, and Goethe

332

11 The ego and the world: Fichte, Novalis, and Schelling

361

12 Universal selfhood: Hegel

391

part v m odern visions and illusi ons
13 Dejection, insight, and self-making: Coleridge and Mill

427

14 From cultivated subjectivity to the culte du moi: polarities
of self-formation in nineteenth-century France

469

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

508

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

537

17 Being and transcendence: Heidegger

568

18 Deaths and transfigurations of the self: Foucault and
Derrida

603

19 Epilogue

651

Notes
Index

660
714


Acknowledgments

I am happy to thank a number of friends and colleagues who have offered
criticism and advice, skepticism and support, over the long period in which
I have worked on this book. Some years ago, when my ideas were still

incompletely 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 in
Intellectual and Cultural History read a version of Chapter 1. I learned much
from the discussion there, and particularly from comments by Richard
Wolin (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 think
about the question of temporality and the self ). Peter Gordon and Samuel
Moyn sent searching and illuminating observations and suggestions on that
occasion. Out of it too came an extended and very helpful correspondence
with Gerald N. Izenberg. Colleagues and students at New York University
heard 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 Helena
Rosenblatt. Sophia Rosenfeld’s sympathetic and critical response to the
eighteenth-century French chapters pointed the way to important revisions.
Jeffrey Freedman helpfully answered my queries about books and readers in
eighteenth-century Germany. I thank Allan Megill, Thomas Laqueur, and
Brigitte Bedos-Rezak for their readings of Chapter 1, and Steven Lukes for
a prolonged and illuminating discussion of both that chapter’s vocabulary
and its content. To Louis Sass I am grateful for his probing and thoughtful
engagement with a number of chapters, and for a series of enlightening
and much appreciated conversations. Only Anthony La Vopa read and
vii

viii

Acknowledgments

commented on the whole manuscript; to him my debt is very deep, since
practically 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 Remarque
Institute in the spring of 2001. At the Cambridge University Press I have
benefited multiply from Michael Watson’s interest and involvement, and
his efforts to expedite the publication process, and I thank Linda Randall
for her careful and attentive copy-editing. My family, and especially my
wife Jayn Rosenfeld (who also helped clarify the prose of several chapters),
have lovingly borne with the ups and downs of my long involvement with
this project. I could hardly have survived it without them.


part i

Introductory



chap t e r 1

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 the
parts of our existence together, persists through changes, or opens the way
to becoming who we might or should be. From knowledge of what the self
truly is people have hoped to gain greater happiness, deeper fulfillment,
liberation from fetters or restraints, better relations with other people, or
ways to achieve power over them. Selfhood thus matters to us both as
individuals and as social creatures, shaping our personal existence and our
relations 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, while
those who offer answers to it often do so for expedient or self-interested
reasons: to support a political program, validate a religious belief or practice, foster or oppose some social policy, justify failings or pretensions, or
establish a claim to therapeutic power. The nature and meaning of the self
are subject to constant redefinition, as it is ever-again taken up on behalf of
some partisan aim or project. And yet the question does not lose its force
from being appropriated in these ways. Faced with outdated, self-interested,
malign, or inadequate answers to it, people have over and over responded
with a desire for better ones, if only to counter the effects of those that will
not 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 the
modern West, the locale in which individuality has been both most fervently celebrated and most ardently denounced. On the one hand, Europe
and 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


4

The Idea of the Self

and even of self-interest, of the search for originality and the artistic and
scientific cult of the sovereign and sometimes lonely genius. Yet much of
the history of modern thought and culture is a story of the ways people have
found to call all these claims for individual independence into question, to
transcend mere selves by fusing them with communities, nations, classes,
or cultures, or to humble them by trumpeting their radical dependency on
historical processes, cosmic forces, biological drives, fundamental ontologies, discursive regimes, or semiotic systems. More than any other world
culture, the modern West has made the debate about individuality and
selfhood a central question – perhaps the central question – of its collective
attempts at self-definition. Hence those who belong to this culture, or who
are moved to conceive themselves in relation to it – even if the relation be
one of rejection – have much reason to care about the self.
One testimony to this is the preeminent place given to questions about
selfhood 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.” In
these schemas the departure or escape from the modern condition, and
sometimes from the whole Western heritage that lay behind it, went along
with 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 first
drawn to the question of selfhood by a sense of concern (mainly skeptical)
about these notions, and I attempted to grapple with them in fragmentary ways through encounters with Claude L´evi-Strauss, Maurice MerleauPonty, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault, followed by a longer study of
an exemplary avant-garde artist who anticipated some of their views and
attitudes, Marcel Duchamp.1 The book that has finally emerged takes a far
broader perspective, but it bears the marks of this origin.
Many reasons might be adduced for calling the claims of individual selfhood into question. Justifiably or not, the modern Western focus on the self
has been linked to ills that range from social fragmentation and inequality

through imperialism to ecological destruction; to reject or displace it can be
a way to stand against the hazards it may let loose. But demoting the self can
serve quite different ends, and one of these, clearly exhibited by some of the
people just mentioned, has been to intend a mode of self-existence far more
powerful and unrestricted than the one it sets out to dismiss. Like Nietzsche
and Heidegger, Duchamp (joined by other figures of the artistic and literary
avant-garde), Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida all argued that the independence 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


Dimensions and contexts of selfhood

5

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 in
our autonomy,” Derrida’s invocation of a condition beyond finitude where
the promise of a wholly other existence is permanently maintained – all
exemplify such aspirations. As these instances suggest, attempts to locate or
promote such untrammeled modes of self-existence arise more often and
more characteristically out of the negation of the common-sense understanding of individuals as centers of action and consciousness than out of
their affirmation; the sense that human beings must be all in order to escape
being nothing has belonged more to those who have called the claims of
ordinary everyday selfhood into question than to those who have sought
some kind of fulfillment by way of it. This paradox, if it be one, lies at the
center of modern arguments about the self, making it an object of intense
contestation in our culture. The sense that some important and revealing

questions about selfhood and its history can be illuminated by focusing
on what is at stake in such disputes has been a major impulse behind the
present book. Achieving such illumination, I will argue, requires that we
start out from a general overview of the attributes that have been taken to
constitute 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 we
shall see), the basis of selfhood in Western culture has been sought primarily
along or within three dimensions, ones that are familiar and should be easily
recognizable to anyone. We will call them the bodily or material, the relational, and the reflective dimensions of the self. The first involves the
physical, corporeal existence of individuals, the things about our nature
that make us palpable creatures driven by needs, urges, and inclinations,
and that give us particular constitutions or temperaments, making us for
instance more or less energetic, lethargic, passionate, or apathetic. Our
selves on this level, including whatever consciousness we have of them, are
housed in our bodies, and are shaped by the body’s needs. The second,
relational, dimension arises from social and cultural interaction, the common connections and involvements that give us collective identities and
shared orientations and values, making us people able to use a specific language or idiom and marking us with its particular styles of description,
categorization, and expression. In this perspective our selves are what our
relations with society and with others shape or allow us to be. The third
dimension, that of reflectivity (some reasons for using this term, rather


6

The Idea of the Self

than some others, will be given below), derives from the human capacity to
make both the world and our own existence objects of our active regard, to
turn a kind of mirror not only on phenomena in the world, including our

own bodies and our social relations, but on our consciousness too, putting
ourselves at a distance from our own being so as to examine, judge, and
sometimes regulate or revise it. On this level the self is an active agent of
its own realization, establishing order among its attitudes and beliefs, and
giving 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 are
what our attention to ourselves makes us be.
To be sure, such a schema is very rough, leaving many questions unaddressed. All three of the categories are broad enough that different and even
opposed ways of thinking can find, and have found, footing within them.
For example, bodily selfhood means one thing if one views the body in
terms of organs and needs, as Freud did, and another when it is seen as
the vehicle of genes and their imperatives, as some evolutionary biologists
do in our day. The body regarded as a kind of machine, in the way certain early modern materialists proposed, implies a mode of selfhood very
different from the one that appears when the body is taken as a restless
source of ever-changing desire and will, as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
(preceded by the Marquis de Sade) had it. Similarly, relational selfhood
means one thing when it is conceived in Marx’s terms of class division
and social conflict, and a different one when it is posited in the classical
anthropological way, as operating through a culture that somehow infuses
all the members of a population. It also makes an important difference
whether the relations through which personal formation takes place are
conceived as interpersonal, involving interaction between and among individuals, or rather as putting selves-in-formation directly up against society
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 in
Ren´e Descartes’s claim that the being that thinks its own existence must be
incorporeal and immortal, or they can be depicted as constantly struggling
to achieve authenticity inside an engulfing material world, as in Jean-Paul
Sartre’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 of

individual existence that it approaches the negation of material life altogether, 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


Dimensions and contexts of selfhood

7

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 common
features among the self-conceptions that arise along or within it. Bodily
selfhood usually gives an image of the self that is independent of time and
place, while relational selfhood, although it may claim to be applicable
everywhere, marks individuals with patterns from some particular social
or cultural matrix. Reflective selves, to the degree they are envisioned as
such, and not as formed by experience or driven by bodily need or instinct,
either innately possess or can acquire independence from physical and
social existence. The dimension or dimensions chosen and the ways they
are understood are central in determining the character and implications of
any given conception of the self. On such bases there arise selves generated
from within their own being or ones fabricated from outside, selves whose
main features are universal or specific to some time and place, selves that are
stable 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 they
may or may not be aware.
Underlying the many specific ways of picturing the self, there stands one
broad alternative whose presence and importance only comes to light once

the separability of the three dimensions is recognized. This is the difference between what we will call multi-dimensional and one-dimensional
accounts of the self. It may not always be immediately apparent under
which of these two descriptions a particular image or theory falls; we shall
see that one mode or delineation can mask the other, and certain thinkers
have shifted between them. But the persistence of the two options is a significant and little-recognized feature of the history of thinking about the
self, and it has a strong bearing on the phenomenon mentioned a moment
ago, the perhaps paradoxical conjunction between radically narrowing the
self ’s independence or autonomy and inflating it beyond limits. Neither
possibility receives much encouragement when selfhood is conceived as
multi-dimensional. If the self takes shape at the intersection of multiple
coordinates, each with a different vector, then it is bound to be subject to
competing pressures and tensions. The demands of the body strain against
the limits culture imposes on need or desire, while reflectivity may set itself
against both relational and material modes of self-existence. To acknowledge these strains and stresses is not the same as to deny that individuals
can attain to a measure of stable unity and integrity, however: one can
give close attention to them while still regarding some significant degree of


8

The Idea of the Self

consistency and self-directedness as a goal worth pursuing. Freud provides
perhaps the most notable example in the realm of theory (and Freud’s self
was three-dimensional, bodily in its deep origins, reflective through the
“secondary process” or “reality principle” that regulated conscious thought
and action, and relational through the super-ego’s internalization of models
and ideals), and John Stuart Mill’s account of his own life fits the description too, as do many novelistic portrayals, prominent among them Proust’s
autobiographical narrator and, despite the label, Robert Musil’s “man without 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 plan
for 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 on
yesterday or an hour ago can provide guidance now or tomorrow. But often
personal integration remains problematic or incomplete (as many of the
figures we will encounter below were painfully aware); it can be a lifetime
project for some, and even those who attain it may do so along a path
strewn with crises and failures, testimony to the troubles and vicissitudes
that balancing the diverse constituents of self-existence entails.
None of these barriers to actually achieving pure, homogeneous selfhood
stands 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 reflective
being. 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 on
the others, as Marx did when he pictured social relations as determining
both consciousness and perceived bodily needs. Others have proceeded
by way of more complex strategies, such as the different but related ones
that 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 the
only ones that can achieve unbroken homogeneity, and they therefore may
appeal especially to those who for some reason need or wish to conceive
individuals as essentially uniform beings, whether to prove their purely

Dimensions and contexts of selfhood

9

spiritual or purely material nature, to show that they are fully autonomous
or wholly determined by external powers or circumstances, or to make them
available 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 is
the capacity they often display to transfigure life, by envisioning a rapid
passage between – or sometimes a coexistence of – images that confine
human agency within rigid limits and ones that give the widest possible scope to it. It is just such metamorphoses that generate the pattern
remarked above, in which denials of the self ’s independence lodge together
with its radical exaltation. The same thinkers who imagine a self so deeply
infused with the conditions of its material nature or surroundings that it
possesses little or no capacity for going beyond them turn out to be those
who imagine one capable of constituting itself wholly by some kind of
profoundly liberating self-directedness. The Cartesian ego suddenly enters
into the truth of its own self-referential subjectivity just at the point when
its 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 the
inner foundation of its pure autonomy, and he later found a way to depict
the person formed wholly from outside, in a hermetic and rigidly controlled educational system, as the bearer of unalloyed freedom. Marx’s first
scenario for working-class revolution represented the proletariat as capable 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 selfactivity (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 previous
paragraph fit this pattern too, picturing the narrow and expanded forms of
the self as existing either simultaneously or in a pattern of succession that
promised the emergence of the second out of an inner transformation of
the first.3
Understanding these instances requires close attention to each case, but
one thing that makes possible such passages between a self that is narrowly
confined and one that is radically free is their common absence of ambiguity. To feel or believe that human beings do or should belong to one of two
unqualified and mutually exclusive states is a familiar and recurring feature


10

The Idea of the Self

of the relations we create or imagine for ourselves and others, for instance as
masters and slaves, civilized and barbarians, saved and damned, oppressed
and free. Putting one’s trust in such polarities constitutes one particular
way of viewing the world. Psychologically the continuity between states in
which the self is all and in which it is nothing appears in the rapid passage
from one to the other often exhibited by children, and by the mentally
troubled, both of whom may go quickly from feeling their environment
as an unalloyed extension of themselves to experiencing things around
them as unbearable or deeply threatening. Another way to say this is that
the two alternatives of no-self and all-self both posit dependence and independence as incompatible with each other. What images of self-existence as
fully 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 autonomy
and dependency commonly found in ordinary life represents the genuine

or authentic condition of personal existence. To treat partial limitations as
total is the other face of an attitude for which freedom must be absolute in
order to exist at all.
In creating these alternatives as conditions of the self, the three dimensions do not all play the same role. Where the self ’s freedom or autonomy is
at issue, the reflective dimension is the one that 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 the
limits of individual and social existence; culturally founded practices can
oppose and contest biological necessities (as in monasticism or other ascetic
ways of life), and physical or material needs may impel people to overthrow
social constraints. But taken in themselves such ways of gaining latitude for
the self institute limitations of their own, reenforcing other dependencies.
By contrast, reflectivity can promise an unconditional kind of liberty and
self-determination, because it seems able to take its distance successively
from each and every determinate form of existence, and so be limited by
none. 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 some
set of external determinations.
For this reason, what most often underlies any thinker’s or writer’s
espousal of a one-dimensional or a multi-dimensional view of the self is that
person’s way of setting reflectivity in relation to the other attributes. Where
reflectivity’s relationship to the other dimensions is thought or felt in terms
that allow for positive coexistence or mutual support, so that it neither
consumes them nor is consumed by them, the self will possess a limited
but substantial independence from the material and relational conditions


Dimensions and contexts of selfhood

11

that partly determine it. Where the self is envisioned either in a way that
conceives its most basic or genuine form as generated by reflection alone, or
that pictures reflectivity as essentially subjected to one or both of the other
dimensions, the self faces the polar possibilities of total autonomy or thoroughgoing constraint. Selves do not need to be strictly one-dimensional in
order to exhibit these diametrical alternatives; it is enough that reflectivity’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 thinkers
ignore any dimension of the self altogether; what matters is the kind of
relationship that is posited among them.
One condition of thinking about the self especially prepares the passage
from extreme narrowing or confinement to its opposite: those who theorize
the 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 no
control. Marx could not (although he tried) confine his own thinking within
the theory that made ideas merely the reflex of social conditions and class
relations. Nietzsche’s diagnosis of his time as pervaded by a nihilism and
decadence that sickened and weakened the people around him was made
from a position that was intellectually beyond (even though he himself was
not existentially beyond) those conditions. Heidegger described ordinary
human 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 reflective
creatures, 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 own
being in the very attention to the self and the world through which its
extinction is supposed to be demonstrated, emphatically exhibiting the
capacity to know and affect the conditions of their own constitution that
their theorizing denies. Since in doing so they set that capacity wholly

apart from the conditions said to shape the self from outside, there already
glimmers in it the prospect of a self constituted wholly by its own selfreferential agency, a prospect realized in the images of higher selfhood
mentioned 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, and
social relations whose content and complexity far exceed our ability to deal
with them here. We do need to say something about them all the same.


12

The Idea of the Self

We approach these matters first by giving attention to the vocabulary of
selfhood, and then by taking up some recurring issues in regard to the
relations between its attributes. We begin with the term reflectivity, both
because our use of it calls for some justification, and because certain general
features 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 the
self “rationality” or “consciousness,” but neither term would serve our needs
very 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 instance
problem-solving or the choice of means to achieve given ends does not. To
have 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 what

they seem to tell about things outside us, and more on what they indicate
about our own being, leading us to ask such questions as: What role do we
ourselves play in producing these contents, either as creatures with a certain
intellectual or physical make-up or as ones who occupy a certain place or
perspective in the world? If our ideas seem disordered or in contradiction
with each other, what does this signify? Should we seek to impose some
form of coherence on them, or prefer some to others? On what grounds?
These questions establish a “second-order” relationship to the contents of
experience, allowing reflective beings to take a distance from the first, more
immediate one. Once begun, as others have noted, such doubling can always
be repeated, so that any stage of reflection can become the object of further
questioning. Criticism of theories or beliefs often takes the form of showing their dependence on the limiting conditions within which they arise.4
Reflectivity appears in a different light, however, when we remember
that the term has a close cousin which we spell reflexivity. The two words
are 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 or
involuntary 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 as
reflections. By contrast, the mental act of reflecting is usually considered
as intentional and purposive, not an unwilled response to a stimulus, but


Dimensions and contexts of selfhood

13

in some way self-directed. The terms thus indicate two distinct forms of
self-reference, one passive and one active. The existence of two words (not

just in Englisha ) suggests that language preserves some awareness of this
distinction, but common usage does not clearly maintain it. Here for the
sake of clarity we shall reserve “reflexivity” for the passive kind of reflection
that takes place in involuntary reflexes or in a mirror, and “reflectivity”
for the more active attentiveness that establishes a new relationship, and
sometimes 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, something
like reflectivity in the sense we are using it here often appears to go on
below the level of conscious awareness. When it does, reflection becomes
especially subject to being directed or infused by the inner urges or outer
influences that help to set it in motion. Psychologists sometimes point to
this phenomenon when they employ reflexivity to denote mental operations
that give the psyche a heightened degree of activity, but over which some
persons may have little or no conscious control.5
A similar configuration, in which activity and passivity are difficult to
separate 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 expresses
selfhood 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 “selfsame.” Pronominal compounds with “self ” apply as well to non-human or
inanimate things as to ourselves; to say that “the oak nourishes itself by its
roots” or “the car itself was not harmed in the accident” implies nothing

about the kind of existence attributed to trees or autos. In all these instances
self-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.


14

The Idea of the Self

But language gives voice to reflectivity in the grammatical structure of
the sentence, which assigns agency to the subject, thus designating the
speaker as active even in making reference to the natural ground of his or
her existence. The reflective self recognizes itself in this structure when it
says (to restate Descartes’s famous proposition) “I doubt myself, therefore
I exist as a reflective being.” Nietzsche argued that the whole history of
philosophical thinking about the self and other entities as active agents was
shaped by the subject-object grammar of Indo-European languages, and
indeed 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 language encourages us to locate selfhood in close proximity to non-reflective,
natural existence, or conversely that language “knows” the self as a reflective
form of being. The two possible conclusions are at odds, but they suggest
that linguistic practice locates passive and active forms of self-reference in
close proximity to each other. Further evidence for this comes from the
term “subject,” a word often connected to the self ’s reflective dimension.
A subject in this sense is an active agent, a thinker of thoughts, doer of
deeds, or bearer of properties, identifiable through its relations to its contents 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 something that lies beneath, underpinning or giving support to some entity. In
ancient and medieval usage, it referred to any substance of which qualities
could be predicated, so that many objects were “subjects.” This terminology was in accord with the ancient, especially Aristotelian notion that every
entity was what it was by virtue of a “form” that defined its substance; each
such 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 to
have special reference to conscious beings, especially humans (we shall see
that Descartes, who is often credited with much influence in this change
of meaning, still used the term in both senses). In politics, however, the


Dimensions and contexts of selfhood

15

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 be
thought 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 of
fatigue or in some instances frustration or anger. David Hume in a famous
place described human consciousness in a way that made passivity a feature
of most or all mental states. Looking inside himself, he said, he could
never find any “self ” separate from the feelings, impressions, or ideas that
occupied him at particular moments, so that the self was a kind of empty
theater, the passive container where various scenes succeed each other. (This
was far from being Hume’s last word about the self, as we shall see.) Kant
rejected such an account. He argued, against Hume, that wherever there is
experience of any sort, beginning with sense impressions, an active subject
must be at work. In order for a succession of feelings or impressions to
count as experience, Kant maintained, it must belong to a subject for
whom 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 sense
data would not constitute experience, since nothing would connect one
datum to another.6 Some more recent philosophers argue that even a passive
experience is already “mine” in the sense that I experience it as happening
to me, and not to some other subject. They too recognize, however, that
there is a difference between such pre-reflective first-person experiences
and the kind of subjectivity that involves reflective judgment.7 The latter
arises as soon as I connect one experience with another, today’s pain with
the memory of yesterday’s, vexation with fatigue, or both with my having
stared for hours at a computer screen. At this moment I become an active
subject in Kant’s sense, possessed of a kind of experience in which judgment
must play a role. Such a transit from passive to active subjecthood is the
passage 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 identity. 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. Such
simple identity is passive, like that of a stone or a piece of furniture. The
question of what gives an identity to, say, a tree or a river whose elements
are constantly changing, is more complex, and the issues multiply as we