Presentation at: EXPLORING THE BOUNDARIES OF EXPERIENCE AND
SELF: CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENTIAL SECTION OF THE BRITISH
PSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY, 10th ANNUAL CONFERENCE. St. Anne's
College, Oxford, 15th to 17th September, 2006.
The rise and fall of the conscious self:
A history of western concepts of self and personal identity
John Barresi
Department of Psychology
Dalhousie University
Halifax, NS B3H 4J1
Canada
jbarrresi@dal.ca
http://jbarresi.psychology.dal.ca
Abstract
I will trace the history of western conceptions of soul and self from the ancient
Greeks to the present. The story line that I will present is based mainly on
material covered in two books by Ray Martin and myself: The Naturalization of
the Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge, 2000)
and The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal
Identity (Columbia University Press, 2006). The basic idea is that from Plato
through the church fathers to Descartes there was a rise in the notion of an
immaterial, immortal self that is a centre of consciousness and distinct from the
material body. Since the eighteenth century, this notion of a separate
encapsulated conscious self has increasingly come under attack: first, through
empirical approaches to consciousness and the material brain; then through
social and developmental approaches to the acquisition of self-concepts.
The theoretical notion of a unitary conscious self – one with boundaries between
self and world, including one’s body – is a notion with a history in western
thought. It began with Plato’s philosophy of an immortal rational soul or self, but
had its greatest impetus from Christianity. If it were not for belief in the general
resurrection by early Christians, the idea that humans could maintain personal
identity into an afterlife might not have become a central notion of western
philosophy. At the time Stoic materialism and Aristotelian teleological naturalism
were competing philosophical positions. However, the belief in the continuation of
persons, including their bodies, into an afterlife, put pressure on Western
Christian thinkers to come up with a viable notion of how this would be possible.
In the end, they abandoned early notions of the resurrection of material persons,
in favour of dualism of an immaterial soul and material body. While the simple,
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immaterial soul was viewed as unextended and naturally immortal, the body was
viewed as extended and divisible, with replaceable parts. Increasingly through
the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, the immaterial rational soul became the
focal concept of self, and bodily resurrection secondary.
By the time that Descartes developed his mechanical philosophy in the
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17 century, he was able to define the immaterial soul as equal to the conscious
mind, which he took to be the self. The body became part of the material world
that could be accounted for by his new mechanical philosophy, while the self as
mind and immaterial soul, was viewed as a simple center of consciousness
connected to the body and world, but not really a part of it. While Descartes’
interactive substance dualism quickly came under attack, his mechanical
philosophy and its epistemological foundation, nevertheless, set the agenda for
subsequent empirical studies of self by defining it as a conscious unity somehow
connected to the brain, but not simply understood as a functional activity of the
brain. The distinction between consciousness as the essential property of mind
and the basis of personal identity and self-continuity that is distinct, at least
functionally, from matter, including one’s body and brain, has persisted well into
the 20th century. But the original motivation for this concept of a non-material,
non-social, individualistic, encapsulated self had its roots in religion, not
philosophy or science.
The rise of individualism in the 18th and 19th century, combined with the
slow decay of religious influence on thinkers, led to a new ‘science’ of
consciousness that continued the focus on self as individual mind. Nevertheless,
this notion came under attack on several fronts. On the one hand, the idea of
personal identity based on consciousness, proposed at the end of the 17th
century by Locke, had difficulty dealing with discontinuities in consciousness and
the criterion of memory, leading to attacks by Butler, Hume, Reid and others on
the notion that personal or self identity could be constructed in this manner. The
self that is constructed by memory seemed more a fiction than a real entity.
Hume, in particular, claimed that there could be no simple continuous self that is
based on consciousness alone. William James, in some sense, culminated this
approach, when he suggested that the “thought is the thinker” and that personal
identity involved appropriation or taking ownership of thoughts previously owned
by other thoughts. Galen Strawson is a recent advocate of this kind of view.
While some empiricists focused on continuity of consciousness,
materialists like Priestley, increasingly shifted the focus to the body as the basis
of personal unity, and self as no more than a developmentally acquired concept.
At the beginning of the 18th century, Hazlitt, a student of Priestley, put forward a
sophisticated account of the development of self-concepts, while also opposing
the notion of real and simple personal identity through time. His view, defended
in part through fission examples involving the resurrection, has much in common
with Derek Parfit’s philosophy of personal identity developed in the late 20 th
century.
In the 19th century, partly in response to Darwin’s evolutionary theory, the
focus was increasingly on personality or self being based in biology not on a
rational self-conscious agent distinct from body. Nevertheless, throughout the
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century both types of view were current, with a lot of interest in dual personalities
and in altered states of consciousness. The net effect of dialogue over these
cases was the “discovery of the unconscious” and the development of a dynamic
psychology of personality of the sort found in Freud. Another important
development during this period was an increasing awareness of the role of social
life on self-consciousness. Beginning with Hegel’s discussion of how selfconsciousness arises in the relationship between the master and slave, and
continued in Marx’s social materialist philosophy, the social basis of selfawareness increasingly became a part of the developmental story of the origins
of self-conceptions. By the end of the century, in the work of James as well as in
the developmental psychology of James Mark Baldwin, we see the emergence of
a social psychology of self that has dominated much of psychology in the 20 th
century.
During the 20th century the notions of self and personal identity took
multiple theoretical paths in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and social
sciences. The self became fractionated not only between disciplines but also
within disciplines. The notion of a unitary self of any sort came increasingly in
doubt. During the first half of the century the search for the real self continued on
in existential and personality psychology as well as in analytic philosophy, but
during the second half of the century, post-structuralist and post-modernist views
joined forces with narrative approaches, developmental psychology,
neuroscience, and personal identity theory to increasingly shift the focus away
from the idea of a unitary, real self to multiple fictional or conceptual selves, and
from mental selves to embodied, social selves.
The implication of this history for the topic of the present conference is that
the notion of a unitary encapsulated, conscious self with a natural boundary
separating it from other selves and the world at large, including its own body, is a
constructed notion with a history. We are now in the process of dismantling this
notion and reconstructing this history. But it is unlikely that we will totally replace
the notion of the conscious self with the notion that self is a fiction. For practical
purposes, the self has become a necessary concept for social life and we cannot
do without it. Still, it will be interesting to see how our theoretical notions of self
evolve in the future, particularly with respect to the issue of the present
conference on the boundaries between selves and between self and the world.
The main difficulty for the future development of theories of self is that
there exist in the current literature numerous notions and theories of self that
appear mutually exclusive and cannot be resolved into a single central idea of
self. So perhaps the only solution that we can hope for is to develop a theoretical
taxonomy of self-notions that complement each other rather than conflict with
each other. The effort to form such a set of interdependent non-contradictory
notions of self may have begun with William James’s heroic effort to analyze self
in terms of the stream of conscious experience, where he made distinctions
between self as object and self as subject within the stream, with the self as
object being analyzed into several types: material self, social self, and spiritual
self, while the self as subject resolved itself into the individual unitary thought as
thinker, which appropriates previous thoughts in the stream of consciousness. In
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his analysis, James seemed to presuppose a functional unity to the stream, and
that the various categories in his analysis should be taken as conceptual or
functional rather than ontological categories. However, it seems that subsequent
thinkers who built upon aspects of James’s analysis, took the divisions he made
as ontological rather than conceptual or functional, and pursued one or another
of his selves as the dominant one. Thus, social psychologists from Mead to
Gergen have focused on the self as social, and as constituted in social relations.
By contrast, phenomenologists following Husserl have focused on the stream of
consciousness, and have analyzed how the self might be a logically necessary
notion to account for unity of the stream, or how the self gets constituted by
interconnected thoughts within the stream and appears as content within it.
However these two splintered directions that emerged out of James’s analysis,
are only two of the many theoretically independent traditions currently available,
and these two have also fragmented further in numerous directions.
In order to survey the current diversity, if only with a brief sampling, it
helps to ask three basic questions about the self: What is the self? Where is the
self? When is the self? Each of these questions currently generates diverse
answers. For: What is the self? Some theorists still hold onto the notion that the
self is an immaterial substance; others take more modern views: that it is the
whole material organism, or the brain, or a function of the brain, or the stream of
consciousness, or a momentary thought in the stream, or a kind of content in the
stream, or that there are multiple social selves depending on content in the
stream, or that multiple selves are determined by the thoughts of other
individuals about a person, or that self is a fictional entity – a linguistic
construction. For: Where is the self? Theorists focus on the organism, or brain, or
in social arrangements that produce multiple selves, or self might include all that
an individual human being can think about or relate to in the universe, or that the
self is nowhere, either because it is immaterial or because it is a fiction. For:
When is the self? In addition to pre-modern notions of immortality and
reincarnation or resurrection, we have modern notions of the life-history of the
human being, or the period when the human is conscious of itself as a self, or the
links in memory of self, or a moment of self reflection, or the story that a person
creates to describe itself, or the time during which the brain is active, or only
when the brain is active in certain ways. Three dimensional personal identity
theorists believe that the whole person or self exists in the moment, but
continues through time, while four-dimensional theorists claim that only person
parts exist in the moment, and the self is smeared across time. Although many of
these answers are incompatible with each other it seems possible that some of
them could be integrated together in a manner that would provide an internally
consistent notion of self – perhaps not as a simple unity as thinkers had hoped
for in the past, but one that gives theoretical unity to aspects of self phenomena.
Dan Zahavi’s and Albert Newen’s talks yesterday give examples of how this
theoretical unity may be possible where several notions of self are linked
together in a dynamic system that changes in functional properties through
human development, without implying that any one notion of self identifies an
ontologically ‘true’ self to the exclusion of others. We may just have to live with
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the understanding that there is no such simple unified soul or self – that such a
simple unified self, always was, and only now can be recognized to be, a
theoretical fiction, and that any unity of self that exists, if it does exist, must be a
complex dynamic unity of functional elements, not a simple unity of a central allpowerful simple self.
Stepping back and looking at Western theorizing about the self and
personal identity as a whole and what it means, an important part of what it
means that theory took the course that it did is that in the West, from the earliest
beginnings of theory until fairly recently, thinkers have been preoccupied with
elevating the self—the “I”—to an exalted status. The soul was created
importantly for this purpose, and when the soul ceased to be useful, the unified
self was called in to fill the void. Seemingly very different notions, but essentially
the same game: to show that the self—the I—is a demigod of sorts, reigning
unopposed over its domain, the human person. From a selfish point of view,
much of what matters most to humankind was linked to this demigod: one’s
essence, free will, consciousness, personal survival, the defeat of death. What
the history of theory thus shows is that there has been a persistent effort, from
beginning to end, to make this case—to show that a unified self is a secure
repository of many of humankind’s most glorious conceits and aspirations. And
what history also shows is that in the face of continuing scientific development,
the case for many of these conceits and aspirations cannot be made.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, science undermined the
soul. The self was recruited to take its place, including providing unity and
direction to the human person, as well as being the vehicle for persistence both
during life and after bodily death. In effect, science took the I, as soul, out of
heaven and in the guise of a unified self brought it down to earth. Like the soul,
the self was to be the source of unity, power, freedom, control, and persistence.
But the fly in the ointment was analysis. So, soon enough what had been one—
the I—became many. What had been real became fiction. And what had been a
source of explanations became itself in need of explanation. Analysis has been
the self’s undoing.
As a fragmented, explained, and illusory phenomenon, the self could no
longer retain its elevated status. And it is hard to see how it might ever again
regain that status. It is as if all of Western civilization has been on a prolonged
ego trip that reality has finally forced it to abandon. If this interpretation is right,
then what happens next may be a new phenomenon in history, a kind of dark
night of the “soul”: not necessarily a bad thing, but a different thing.
So, what does it all mean? The story of Western theorizing about the self
and personal identity is not only, but centrally, the story of humankind’s attempt
to elevate itself above the rest of the natural world, and it is the story of how that
attempt has failed. It is another illustration, as if another were needed, of how
pride goeth before the fall.
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