It is commonplace and quite
acceptable to speak of the self. However this expression is more appropriately
understood as a colloquial umbrella term that encompasses a range of concepts
that relate to self-reflective activity, for example, consciousness, ego, soul,
subject, person, or moral agent. It is interesting to note in the philosophical
literature how few authors and translators refer to the self, including
Descartes, who quite consistently writes of the cogito or "I"
rather than the "self." Yet it is precisely on the question of the
self that our deepest concerns about human nature turn; including the means of
investigating that nature and the question of hat moral powers constitute the
being that has such a nature. The last decade or so has witnessed an
unparalleled explosion of writing on the topic, often in concert with related
topics such as consciousness, social problems, clinical syndromes and the like.
Anita Craig is right in suggesting that the study of the self is at the center
of the special sciences, for how we take up that problem at once locates us on
a number of contested issues but also reveals our sense of where the solutions
to such issues may lie.

Anita Craig in this fascinating
book What is the Self? proceeds to tackle the difficult task of working
through different conceptions of the self from the neurosciences to the
considerations of the body. After these fascinating considerations, her inquiry
moves toward the more interesting problem of how the self obtains an enduring,
as well as stable and unifying characteristic in our lives. As an answer she
takes on what it might mean to be a "biographical self" and moves on
discussing the self as being inherently social and relational as well as
singular and personal.

Anita Craig in her intriguing investigation addresses
fundamental questions such as who or what we are by answering that we are
embodied, and thus part of the natural, physical/material world, but that we
are also primordially social beings, and thus, cast into a history, and a
meaningful, linguistic world that we share with others like and unlike
ourselves. Thus, her work exhibits a shift away from the study of "mind
and behavior", as psychology is usually depicted, and gets a closer focus
on the subject regarding the self as central to the study of people. As she
explicitly states, she "will argue that as living, biological systems, the
self goes all the way back to our genetic and evolutionary make-up in a manner
that requires a much broader focus than the study of "mind and behavior"
allows for" (p. 15).

Thus, her conception of the self has its roots in an
analysis of modern, Western philosophical anthropology, but through readings on
the works of Maurice Merleau Ponty, Paul Ricoueur and Emmanuel Levinas, she
argues for another image of our identities as "I-sayers", one
specifically shaped through our bodiliness, other-relatedness and
self-relatedness. After going through the work of Charles Taylor in his history
of the modern identity as it relates her analysis of metaphysical and
post-metaphysical sources of the self, she outlines her view on bodiliness,
specifically in view of work by evolutionary biologists such as Richard
Dawkins, cognitive scientists and philosophers such as Daniel Dennett and Andy
Clark and neural scientists such as Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux. She
meticulously draws on these diverse views on the self to propose her own
conception of the self as a way to draw together the bits about individual
human beings without ignoring important advances in our knowledge, or drawing
unnecessary boundaries around people, while still allowing sufficient scope in
a theory of the self for responsible and accountable actions.

The book is designed in five
chapters. In the introductory first chapter, she investigates the conditions
for the concrete historical person, that is to say, an embodied mortal being
with a certain moral and legal status and argues that in becoming, thinking and
talking about selves we do so in a historical viewpoint. That means, those who
become selves to themselves and others, do so from and within these histories
their body was born into. In this chapter, she introduces the self by showing
how the self figures, highlights events and ideas that seem to ask for a new
plot to the story about us, and draw attention to the role of truth in making a
viable self.

In Chapter 2 titled Certainties
and Doubts, she deals with these themes by showing how various
meta-theoretical standpoints such as Charles Taylor, influence thinking and
talking about science, social studies and people. She concludes this chapter
with a discussion on the unity of science, and the way in which culture and the
self figure in this debate.

Chapter 3 is titled as Oedipus
to Cyborg. In this chapter, she brings to the fore a certain cultural path
for self-formation, one that pre-figures expectations regarding what will count
as an adequate theory of the self. For this reason, she brings together
stories, gods, technology, science, philosophy, metaphysics and theorists from
different disciplines variously attempting to get hold of the complexity of a
life lived as an individual human being.

Chapter 4 is titled as Bodies as
Selves as she attempts to clarify the self’s natural constitution; its
development into a reference point for communication, and legal and moral
responsibility and accountability; and as a biography open to the vagaries of
existence. At the end of this chapter, she returns to the question of
appropriate theories for self-configuration.          Finally in the last
chapter titled Meaningful Things, she speculates about a psychology
focused on its subject and the additional discipline required to make sense of
what is in my synapses, rather that in yours, and part of my culture, rather
than yours. This last chapter heavily draws on the ideas presented in the
previous chapter. In the previous chapter, she forcefully points out that we
got to "bodies as selves" as the crucial point of departure in thinking
about what/who we are. In this chapter, she presents conceptual analysis as a
suitable discipline for understanding the meaningful things involved in living
as selves among other things and animals like and unlike us.

Anita Craig’s What is the Self?
provides a fresh and innovative analysis of the concept of the self as she
articulates the diverse conceptions of the self in a detailed and
comprehensible manner. Craig’s analysis of the concept of the self, besides its
being the best and the most interesting treatment of the subject, also serves
to bridge the gap between post-metaphysical and analytic traditions in
philosophy and contemporary theories in evolutionary biology, neural and
computational sciences. I believe, this book provides an extremely useful
framework for philosophers, cognitive scientists, psychologists and neural
scientists who are interested in doing some future work on the subject, which
is exactly what Anita Craig demands: "if I am right that it is because we
are unsure about what/who we are that we struggle with ethical issues, … and
similarly that we struggle politically with knowing what we are capable of and
how much we, unlike the angels, require laws and other institutions to curtail
our nasty inclinations, then scientists, scholars and thinkers of all stripes
had better get down to establishing both the causes of actions, and the meaning
things have for people" (p. 147).

Anita Craig’s book is a valuable
contribution to the current interdisciplinary discussions of the self. I recommend
this book for anyone who wants to have a broader understanding of the self and
how our selves are shaped in a social, historical and psychological point of
view.

© 2006 Kamuran
Godelek

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

Categories: Philosophical