”Wherever you are you are right now having the experience of being
somewhere: here. Sometime: now. Someone: you” (Kolak, 1999). Being located
somewhere and its bearing on the sense of self identity is the main theme of
Benson’s Cultural Psychology of Self. He suggests that self is a
locative system with both evolutionary and cultural antecedents. He relies on
the idea that body’s very structure shapes our conceptual systems in important
ways and that one of these influences in the creation of centredness
constitutive of self as being a primary means for navigating human worlds. The
understanding of the identity of self as a woven narrative is a central claim
of cultural psychology of selfhood.

The
book consists of two main parts. In Part I, Benson explores the idea that
having a sense of self requires being in place by heavily drawing upon the
works in psychology, neurology, philosophy, history and aesthetics. He clearly
acknowledges the function of the brain in constituting a person’s world and
positioning oneself in that world. The idea of self as a narrative structure
functions to place oneself as a moral agent in and across personal time. He
then goes on to explore how these narratives constitute and place the
autobiographical self in time by citing works by Jerome Bruner, Julian Jaynes
and Rom Harre. In the last essay of the first part Benson sets out the
underlining idea of the rest of the book, which is that emotions are
intricately related to how a person acts in her physical or social worlds. By
citing the recent work by Antonio Damasio he concludes that “ways of feeling,
particularly in relation to their commonly understood appropriateness in social,
moral and aesthetic situations, vary distinctively across time and place, as
constituents of self, feelings select, guide and energize individual and social
actions” (p. 115).

After
developing a concept of selfhood as a locative system which has an intricately
interconnected systems of navigation evolved through various levels of being,
from the non-conscious processes of biological homeostasis to the highest forms
of moral, intellectual and artistic-aesthetic consciousness, Benson, then
proceeds to explore how we locate ourselves among other people, and
particularly with the ideas of choice, responsibility and related feelings.
First three essays of Part II are devoted to exploring the aspects of moral
responsibility centering on relocation and dislocation of self. The underlying
locative theme of moral responsibility is being placed in a particular culture
in childhood.

The
essays on the second part of the book are built upon the significance of
location for an understanding of the import of dislocation and relocation. In
this part of the book Benson tries to establish a relation between self and
cultural psychology through several moral and aesthetic themes. The themes he
mainly considers are childhood, responsibility and acquiring powers to place oneself
as a moral agent, pitilessness and compassion, suffering and guilt, visual art
and the location of self, connections between national and personal identity,
and a critical examination of psychologies of maturity. Trauma and aesthetic
experiences have the general fact of relocation in common while they differ in
constituting personal and social identities. Personal and social identities,
argues Benson are built upon moral identities which simultaneously constitute
social worlds and ways of locating and navigating within these worlds. He cites
stories of Holocaust as examples of dislocation of self and consequently
destruction of self identity. After examining pain and torture as examples of
diminishing self identity he goes on to examine aesthetic experience as an
example of the expansion of self. As it is shown in Turrell’s work, there is a
sense of self as always being “a work in progress” in a way that is strikingly
similar to the artistic work in progress. He goes one step further and
establishes analogical and symbolic relations between individual and national
identities as they both being “works in progress” and being originated by
artistic creationism.

This
is an intriguing book on cultural aspects of self as it relates to moral and
aesthetic experiences. The whole book is built upon two main ideas: one is that
self is a locative system and the second is that emotions are self’s
pathfinders. Since emotions function at the core of what makes us behave most
humanely or inhumanely, they play a central role in establishing personal and
consequently national self identities. Who I am is what I am able to do and how
I feel all the time. What is more important for this unity is the person’s
sense of self rather than particular nature of moral beliefs.

I
recommend this book for anyone who wants to have a broader understanding of
self and how our selves are shaped in a cultural-historical psychological point
of view.

© 2002 Kamuran Godelek

Kamuran Godelek, Ph.D.,
Mersin University, School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Philosophy, Ciftlik
Koyu, Mersin, Turkey.

Categories: Philosophical