Jerrold Seigel is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History at New York
University, and the author of several well-regarded books on cultural,
intellectual and art history, particularly of France in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries .  [See for instance Bohemian
Paris: Culture, Politics and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) and The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation and the Self
in Modern Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).]  In The Idea of the Self, he takes on a
larger canvass — to say the least — and fills it with an astonishing range of
reference, structured by an original ‘historical hermeneutic’ (Seigel, p. 17).

The construction of that hermeneutic is the first of three large
ambitions, and occupies Part I of the book. The second ambition, which forms the
book’s core, Parts II to IV, is to explain some major accounts of selfhood in
their temporal and local contexts: Britain, France and Germany since the
seventeenth century. The third, taken up in Part V, is to deflate post-modern
attempts at a radical overcoming of the self, as represented particularly by
Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, by showing that they have deep historical
roots. I shall say something about all three, weighted according to my own
interests.

In Part I, a long introductory chapter, ‘Dimensions and Contexts of
Selfhood’, sets out Seigel’s hermeneutic. Seigel begins by describing a
taxonomy that distinguishes ideas of the self according to their appeal to one
or more dimensions of selfhood: ideas of the self are bodily, relational, and/or
reflective. The bodily dimension ‘involves the physical, corporeal existence of
individuals’ (p.5), and sees selves as shaped and driven by physical structures
and dispositions. It includes, for instance, both Freud’s understanding of the
self in terms of bodily organs and needs, and evolutionary understandings of
individuals as vehicles for, and expressions of, genes. The relational
dimension sees selves as ‘what our relations with society and with others shape
or allow us to be’ (Ibid.), and therefore focuses on culture, language and
other public features of the world. It includes, for instance, both Marxian
class identity and the anthropological idea of culture as public meaning.  [ See for instance
Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture’
in The Interpretation of Cultures:
Selected Essays (London: Fontana Press, 1993), pp. 3-30.] The third, reflective dimension ‘derives from
the human capacity to make both the world and our own existence objects of our
active regard’ (p. 6), and is particularly important for Seigel.

Reflectivity is distinguished from reflexivity — passive doubling, as
in a mirror — as active and purposeful attention to the first-order contents
of the self. We might think of Harry Frankfurt’s idea of second-order desires
(what I want my wants to be, as when I wish I didn’t want a cigarette) as an
example of this reflective attention to oneself [ Harry
Frankfurt, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’ in The Importance of What We Care About
(Cambridge: CUP, 1988), pp. 11-25].
Like the other two dimensions of selfhood, the reflective dimension includes a
great many different ideas of the self, and we may begin to worry that it has
too many implications to be a useful taxon: at one point or another, Seigel
relates reflectivity to consciousness, autonomy, critical judgment, cultural
innovation, rational planning, and self-fashioning, to give an incomplete list.
The answer to this worry might be that this range of significance shows that reflectivity
is a vital part of our thinking about the self, even if it is therefore
difficult to pin down.

Some historical ideas of the self have been one-dimensional — they
focus only on the bodily or
relational or reflective dimension,
and tend to see the self and its freedom as all-or-nothing: total dependence or
total self-creation. Seigel’s initial example of this tendency is the Marxian
transformation of the completely class-determined pre-revolutionary self into
the completely free post-revolutionary one ( pp. 9-10). His sympathy, however, is explicitly with
multidimensional ideas of the self; his interpretive attention is focused on
the ways in which the relations between, especially, the reflective and other
dimensions of the self are handled by particular thinkers.

Finally, ideas of the self are produced in particular times and places,
and Seigel’s method is ‘individual, but also contextual’ (p.34). He intends to
explain some individuals’ theories of the self partly as responses to ‘the
social and cultural conditions where their formation took place’ (Ibid),
distinguished broadly into British, French and German contexts. However,
context is ‘important, but not regnant’ (Ibid): Seigel follows Mark Bevir in
insisting that authors produce not merely infinitely-reinterpretable texts, but works, animated by a particular individual’s use of language [Mark Bevir, The Logic of the
History of Ideas (Cambridge: CUP, 1999)]. He therefore attempts to steer between idealist and radically
contextualist readings of history. The second chapter of Part I, ‘Between
Ancients and Moderns’, justifies Seigel’s distinction of the modern period
(since the seventeenth century) from earlier periods in the understanding of
the self. He rejects, however, both the idea that there is a unique modern self, rather than selves, and the idea
that modernity involves a total break from earlier thought. Something changed when teleological and
microcosmic pre-modern ideas were unsettled by the Copernican and scientific
revolutions, but not everything.

Parts II to IV put this hermeneutic into practice. The chapters here
have an overall trajectory, as repeated ideas are transformed through their
reception by thinkers in new contexts. For the most part, however, these are
elegant, largely self-contained essays on a wide range of thinkers — from
Locke, Mandeville and Hume, to Rousseau, to Kant, Herder, Goethe and Hegel,
amongst others — in their various local contexts, and respecting their
individual complexities and internal tensions. I lack both the space and the
expertise to do justice to all of this in detail, but I want to suggest some of
its flavor by a comparison with Seigel’s most obvious competitor, the other big
book on his subject: Charles Taylor’s Sources
of the Self[(C ambridge:
CUP, 1989)]. Seigel mentions
Taylor, in passing, in several places, usually to disagree with a particular
interpretation; his overall judgment is that Taylor ‘provides a narrow and
distorted image of modern thinking about the self, the other face of his
nostalgia for the lost Aristotelian Cosmos’ (p. 43). Both The Idea of the Self and Sources
of the Self are projects of recovery: Taylor’s book is an ‘attempt to
uncover buried goods through rearticulation — and thereby to make these
sources again empower, to bring the air back again into the half-collapsed
lungs of the spirit’ (Taylor, p. 520); what buried these sources, for him, is
the modern self, which he pictures as an atomic, unsituated user of
instrumental reason. Seigel’s book is partly an attempt to recover the detail,
tensions and complexity of history, and of the self, from this and other grand
narratives. Seigel disagrees with Taylor over several particular points — the
interpretation of Locke, for instance — but this is, I think, the central
difference between them: Seigel is a historian against Hegelian philosophical
history. He offers a corrective to Taylor’s, and others’, overschematization of
the self and our changing understandings of it.

Part V takes Seigel’s history into the late twentieth century, and
builds up to a critique of Foucault and Derrida. Post-modern accounts of the
self, Seigel argues, are versions of a long-standing one-dimensional error; and
like other such ideas, they see the self either as wholly dependent (especially
on social and cultural structures) or as wholly unlimited. In Chapter 18,
Seigel maps Foucault and Derrida’s careers as structured by this opposition
between subjection and transcendence, and argues that they ‘together represent
two versions of one possible outcome of the long Western meditation on the
self’ ( Seigel, p. 649).

Finally, in a too-short Epilogue, Seigel cautiously approaches a fourth,
buried ambition: to say something not only about the history of thinking about
the self, but also about what the self is.
His remarks are tentative and ‘propaedeutic’ (p. 653), but he makes two
intriguing claims. First, that the history he has described, and in particular
the one-dimensional error he diagnoses in Foucault, Derrida and their
influences, show the necessity of multi-dimensional understandings of the self.
The bodily, relational and reflective dimensions should be seen as in tension
with, but also as nourishing one another. Second, that neither scientific nor
humanistic approaches to the self are independently adequate.

I have considered three large ambitions of this large book: Seigel
describes a historical hermeneutic, puts it to use, and derives critical
consequences from his history. I have also noted a fourth, constructive
ambition, which we might wish more developed. In line with my own interests, I
have concentrated particularly on the first ambition, but this should not be
taken to suggest that I think the others less successful. I am aware that this
sketch is inadequate to Seigel’s book, whose breadth of reference I have merely
indicated with a few examples. In its scope, depth, richness and occasional
brilliance, it is an astonishing achievement; in its insistence on the
historical and structural complexity of ideas of the self, it is a necessary
corrective to overschematic histories. It deserves — and will likely get —
the closest attention.

© 2006 Samuel Clark

Sam Clark, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of
Glasgow, UK.

Categories: Philosophical