Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was the most influential philosopher of the modern era and one of the most influential of all time. His views on every topic that he considered, and on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics especially, set the stage for virtually all subsequent philosophical discussions. In addition, he is often credited with creating the rationale for modern political liberalism, with its commitment to the equal dignity of all human beings. Along the way, he spawned a view of the self that has been a major focus of criticism for a large family of twentieth century cultural theorists, including postmodernists, deconstructionists, feminists, postcolonialists, and ethnic-identity theorists.
Kant published his most important work toward the end of the eighteenth century. As the culmination of Enlightenment thought, he was the right person, at the right time, with the right message. Just as the rationalist and empiricist tendencies in European thought had played themselves out, though in an unsatisfying way that on the rationalist side led to dogmatism and on the empiricist to skepticism, Kant broke the impasse, seemingly synthesizing the best in both traditions. But his synthesis, rather than a compromise, was a bold new initiative, full of novel and suggestive ideas, one of which was that by restricting the scope of reason, he safeguarded faith. An area in which he took himself to have done this successfully is his theory of the self. Whether these various views of his actually were successful is debatable; that they were extremely influential is not.
Without question, Kant was an unusually deep thinker. His extraordinary influence has been due not only to his views but to his having driven the discussion in many central areas of philosophy to levels of profundity hitherto unknown. Ironically, his influence may have been augmented by puzzlement on the part of those who would interpret his views as to exactly what he meant. While it is hard to read Kant and not believe that he was up to something important, often it is equally hard to be sure what that something was. Nowhere is this truer than in his views of the self, which included his thoughts on the soul, his theory of the noumenal self, his remarks on personal identity over time, his thoughts on the role of self-conceptions in the unity of consciousness (which, borrowing from Leibniz, he called the transcendental unity of apperception), and, perhaps most importantly, his view, which he took to be a corollary of his ethical theory, that the self is a source of autonomous agency and meaning.
Kant maintained that in order for us to account for certain features of some judgments, in particular for the universality of so-called synthetic a priori judgments, such as the truths of geometry, we have to suppose that our knowledge of reality is limited to the realm of actual and possible experiences. He called this realm the phenomenal world. Not included in it are God, freedom, and immortality, the latter two of which directly implicate the self. In Kant’s view, the idea of each of these is meaningful, and even necessary for certain practical purposes, mainly having to do with morality. But, he claimed, we cannot know that any of these three ideas corresponds to anything real. He held that the notion of the noumenal self is useful as a regulative idea. That is, it is useful as an idea that we need to suppose is true for certain practical purposes, including giving us a motive to be moral. He argued that we are obligated to act morally and that it makes sense to act morally only if we will live forever. So, even though we cannot know that there is any reality to the regulative idea of such a self and cannot prove the immortality of the soul, we cannot act as if there were no reality to it. Hence, the immaterial substance survives in Kant’s view not as something that we can know to exist but as something that we need to assume exists.
Kant’s theory of the noumenal world, which is key to his project of making a secure place both for knowledge and for faith, has implications for his theory of the soul. The basic idea behind his theory of the noumenal world is that reality as it is in itself—the noumenal world—is radically different from reality as it is represented in our experience—the phenomenal world. The difference between these two worlds—or, alternatively, between these two visions of the one and only world—is due to how humans structure the objects of their experience in basic ways that do not reflect the intrinsic nature of objects as they are in themselves. In other words, the human mind does not merely receive simple ideas of sensation, as Locke had suggested, but, in the process of receiving them, structures them. Thus, the mind, in sensation, is not merely passive, a tabula rasa (blank tablet) on which experience writes, but active. Spatial and temporal relationships are a fundamental part of this human structuring of experience. The world as it exists in itself—the noumenal world—is neither spatially nor temporally extended, whereas the world of our experience—the phenomenal world—is both.
In one interpretation of Kant’s view, there is a phenomenal self that is experienced and a noumenal self that is never experienced. The latter lacks spatial and temporal extension. The phenomenal self is capable of being experienced either subjectively or objectively or both. It is extended temporally and perhaps also spatially. In another interpretation of what Kant meant, there is only one self that is capable of being considered either noumenally or phenomenally. In either of these interpretations of his view, the task of accounting for the phenomenal self is no different in principle from that of accounting for any other object or event that exists in space and time, such as planets or atoms. Thus, the phenomenal self is part of the subject matter of what today we would call the science of psychology. However, there is no knowing the noumenal self—or no knowing the self noumenally—since the noumenal self is outside of the framework of space and time. Even so, in Kant’s view, the noumenal self affects the way the phenomenal self is structured in experience.1
So far as personal identity itself is concerned, Kant noted, following Locke, that were our identities to reside in spiritual substances, we would have no way of knowing who was identical with whom—this because over any given span of time we would have no way of knowing whether a single immaterial substance or a series of such substances had been associated with a given human being.2 So, if personal identity were to depend on sameness of immaterial substance, then we would have no way of knowing empirically whether anyone in the present is the same as anyone who existed previously.
How then can personal identity over time be known? Locke thought that it could be known empirically if it consists in sameness of consciousness. Kant disagreed. He thought that someone’s consciousness might now be qualitatively exactly similar to that of someone else’s consciousness. Delusions of memory, which Locke acknowledged may occur, are an obvious case in point. Kant concluded that if personal identity is to be known, it cannot consist in sameness of consciousness. Rather, it must consist, at least in part, in some sort of physical continuity. Kant thus postulated a more objective criterion of personal identity than had Locke. In sum, whereas Locke and Kant both have a relational, rather than a substance, view of personal identity over time, for Locke the relations that matter are wholly psychological, while for Kant they are at least partly physical. In Kant’s view, the requirement that the self be partly physical applies only to the phenomenal self, or as he sometimes called it, the empirical self. It does not apply to the noumenal self, which exists beyond the reach of any possible experience.
In what is perhaps the most intriguing dimension of Kant’s reflections on the self, the so-called transcendental unity of apperception, he maintained that accompanying each experience is an “I think,” which is the logical subject of the experience. In his view, there can be no experience that is not the experience of a subject. To this extent he may seem to have been saying simply that thought requires a thinker, which is more or less the move that Descartes made in attempting to prove the existence of a substantial self. The difference, however, is that by thinker Kant does not mean a substantial self but something more intimately connected with experience. He tried to explain what this “something” is by saying that “in the synthetic original unity of apperception, I am conscious of myself, not as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself, but only that I am. This representation is a thought, not an intuition.”3 What Kant meant by these dark remarks is a matter of scholarly dispute.
To explain one thing that Kant may have meant by them, we are going to introduce the notion of an intentional object, which we will then use in our explanation of Kant’s view, even though Kant in this context did not himself employ the notion of an intentional object. The intentional object of a thought has to do with its aboutness. That is, even though every thought exists as an item in the world—a particular pattern of neural activity, perhaps—it is also about something. The technical name for the thing that a thought is about is its intentional object. So, for instance, if you were to think the thought that there is dog food in Fido’s bowl, the thought itself might be a pattern of neural activity in your brain, but the intentional object of the thought would not be that neural activity but that there is dog food in Fido’s bowl. Unlike the pattern of neural activity, the intentional object is not a real object in the world. That there is dog food in Fido’s bowl would remain the intentional object of your thought whether or not there actually is dog food in Fido’s bowl, whether or not Fido has a bowl, and even whether or not Fido exists. In other words, you can have a thought about something even if what you think is false, indeed even if the supposed object about which you have the thought does not exist. Yet, for your thought to even be a thought, it has to be about something, that is, it has to have an intentional object. In other words, a putative thought without an intentional object would not even be a thought.
By analogy, we want now to suggest, what is central to Kant’s doctrine of the transcendental unity of apperception is that in addition to each thought’s having an intentional object, it also has an intentional subject, that is, someone whose thought it is. Yet, just as a thought can exist without an actual object corresponding to its intentional object, a thought can exist without an actual subject corresponding to its intentional subject. In a nutshell, what Kant seems to be saying is that in order for thoughts to be thoughts, they have to be both unified and about something. Their intentional subject—what Kant calls the transcendental ego—is what unifies them. Their intentional object is what they are about. But neither what unifies them nor what they are about actually has to exist apart from the thought, or, as Kant might have put it, neither has to exist except as a “formal property” of the thought.
A puzzle about Kant’s view is that unifying is a causal process. So, to say, as we just have, that the self causes the unification of thoughts suggests that the self is something distinct from the thoughts. On the other hand, if Kant denies that it is distinct, his only alternative would seem to be to claim that the self consists merely in the fact that the thoughts are unified. But if the self were to consist merely in the fact that certain thoughts are unified, how could the self cause those thoughts to be unified? Some philosophers have supposed that what Kant was really saying is that there has to be an organizational principle in virtue of which thoughts are unified in order for them to constitute a coherent whole. Arguably such an organizational principle may be internal to the thoughts themselves. If that were so, it would be a necessary element of coherent thought, without being an extra element. It would not be a cause of the thoughts being unified, but neither would it consist merely in the fact that the thoughts are unified. It would be the organizational principle by virtue of which the thoughts are unified.4
Before Kant, some philosophers, such as Descartes, had tried to infer from the supposed fact that I am the subject of my thoughts the conclusion that I am a thinking substance. Other philosophers, such as Hume in his more skeptical moments, had suggested that thoughts might exist without a subject who thinks them. The former sort of philosopher often went on to infer (mistakenly) that since one cannot be sure that physical objects exist but can be sure that the self exists, then the self cannot be a physical object, in which case it must be a simple, noncomposite, immaterial substance and, hence, naturally immortal. A problem, from Kant’s point of view, with such inferences is that they attempt to infer from a premise that is merely “analytically” true a conclusion that, if it’s true at all, is “synthetically” true; that is, they attempt to infer from something like a definition some substantive truth about the world. He remarked that “it would indeed be surprising if what in other cases requires so much labor to determine … should be thus given me directly as if by revelation in the poorest of all representations.”5
Although this much of Kant’s view, while abstract and perhaps overly speculative, may seem clear enough, real problems arise as soon as one starts to ask more searching questions. One such question is, what is the connection of the noumenal self, or selves, with each of us? Part of what makes this such a difficult question is that when Kant says that in the act of experiencing, the human mind contributes spatial and temporal relations to a source of experience that is not itself extended spatially or temporally, he cannot mean literally that the human mind does that, for the human mind already is temporally and probably also spatially extended. In other words, the human mind cannot be the mental source of the structuring since it is part of the output or product of the structuring. What, then, is the mental source of the structuring? Presumably, the noumenal self, or noumenal selves. But what is this self like?
If the noumenal self is neither spatially nor temporally extended, it is difficult to understand what it might be like or to see how there could be many noumenal selves, say, one for each human being. What could the difference between different noumenal selves consist in? This problem is analogous to that which was faced by Christian philosophers, such as Aquinas, who wanted to say that there are many incorporeal angels even though matter is the principle of individuation. In such a view, it is difficult to see what could distinguish two nonmaterial angels. In Kant’s view, it is difficult to see what could distinguish two noumenal selves. The difficulty is not due to matter being the principle of individuation but to the fact that noumenal selves, assuming there are more than one, are neither spatially nor temporally extended.
A closely related problem is that, in Kant’s view, one of the ways in which the mind structures objects of experience when it thinks about them is by subsuming them under the category of quantity, that is, the category of one, more than one, and so on. In his view, this quantitative aspect of “reality” is like spatial and temporal relations in that it is not something that can be known to be a feature of things in themselves but only of things as they enter into human cognition, this time as objects of thought. But if we cannot know that the category of quantity even applies to things in themselves, then how could we possibly know that there is more than one noumenal self, or for that matter that there is more than one thing-in-itself? The answer, which Kant never acknowledged, has to be that we could not know this. Later philosophers did acknowledge this answer. Schopenhauer, for instance, retained Kant’s notion of the thing-in-itself but carefully used the singular, rather than the plural, when referring to it.6
A similar problem arises with the concept of causality. Kant says that things in themselves “produce” our experiences, but, in his view, we cannot validly apply the concept of causation to acquire knowledge of things in themselves. So, in saying that things in themselves “produce” experiences, if he is not contradicting himself, then either he is just reporting the results of his speculative reveries or he is understanding the notion of “produce” noncausally (but what then could “produce” possibly mean?). Problems such as these are partly what motivated the post-Kantian German idealists, beginning with Fichte and ending with Hegel, to jettison the noumenal world.
Despite such problems, among Kant’s contemporaries his distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal world sometimes had a wholesome effect. A case in point is Karl C. E. Schmid (1761–1812), who, in the second edition of his Empirical Psychology (1796), followed Kant in setting strict methodological limits to empirical psychology. Schmid relegated all questions about the substantiality, simplicity, or immutability of the soul, including any about its causal relationship to the body, beyond these limits, in a domain he called “dogmatic metaphysics.”7
In addition to Kant’s response to a tradition of thought about the self that began in Britain with Locke and Hume, there is another side to his thoughts about the self. This other side, which has to do with the self as a source of autonomous agency and meaning, is his response to a tradition that began in France. To understand the influence of this other tradition on Kant’s thinking, it will be helpful to briefly revisit an earlier tradition of romanticism.
French Romanticism
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was for Kant an object of dangerous fascination. A model of obsessively routine punctuality, Kant is said to have blinked just once, on the day that he came into possession of a copy of Rousseau’s Emile (1762). He became so absorbed in reading Emile that he forgot to take his daily walk. Later, Kant wrote that before reading Rousseau, he had “despised the common man who knows nothing.” After reading Rousseau: “This blind prejudice vanished: I learned to respect human nature.” But Kant’s respect did not erase his distrust of romantic enthusiasm: “I must read Rousseau until his beauty of expression no longer distracts me,” for “only then can I survey him with reason.”8 Nevertheless Kant’s fascination with Rousseau was such that in Kant’s purposefully austere study, otherwise undecorated, there was on the wall just one ornament: a portrait of Rousseau.
Rousseau was the greatest of the modern romantics. As much as Montaigne, he was an apostle of subjective feeling. Subsequent to Rousseau, especially in Germany, romanticism regathered its strength to erupt again, with unprecedented force and splendor both in poetry and in philosophy. However, before this would happen, there would be, in Kant’s metaphysics, an immersion in philosophical theory more complete, more penetrating, and more abstract than anything the world had previously known. And there would be, in Kant’s practical and moral philosophy, the most powerful expression of classical liberalism. Yet there is a tension at the heart of Kant’s celebration of liberalism that derives from the contrast between his emphasis on what all rational beings have in common and Rousseau’s emphasis on individuality. This tension would exercise a continuing influence on thought about the self throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
At the age of fifty-three, Rousseau, in his Confessions (written 1765–70), had turned to autobiographical reflection. Ten years later, during the last two years of his emotionally turbulent life, he began his Reveries of the Solitary Walker (written 1776–78) by returning to a theme that had been the central issue in his intellectual life—the clash between the innocent, morally pure individual in isolation from society and the inhuman, alienating, and corrupting influence of society:
Now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbor or friend, nor any company left me but my own.… I would have loved my fellow-men in spite of themselves. It was only by ceasing to be human that they could forfeit my affection…. But I, detached as I am from them and from the whole world, what am I? This must now be the object of my inquiry.9
Rousseau gave two heartfelt answers to this question.
One of these grew out of his reflection on a time in his youth when he met Madame de Warens and first tasted the freedom and bondage of satisfying his deepest desires. “She was twenty-eight,” he related, and “I was not yet seven-teen.” During those few years, “I was myself, completely myself, unmixed and unimpeded.” Only then, he continued, when “I lived only for her, and my whole life was in hers,” can I “genuinely claim to have lived.”
Loved by a gentle and indulgent woman, I did what I wanted, I was what I wanted, and by the use I made of my hours of leisure …, I succeeded in imparting to my still simple and naive soul the form which best suited it and which it has retained ever since…. I needed a female friend after my own heart, and I had one. I had longed for the country, and my wish was granted. I could not bear subjection, and I was perfectly free, or better than free because I was subject only to my own affections and did only what I wanted to do. All my hours were filled with loving cares and country pursuits. I wanted nothing except that such a sweet state should never cease.10
But it did cease. And when it ceased the dominant motif of Rousseau’s social world turned from love to cruelty.
More than forty years later, Rousseau discovered himself again, but this time he discovered a more spiritual self. It happened, over a period of several months, on the island of Saint-Pierre, to which Rousseau had fled following the stoning of his house by his neighbors in the village of Môtiers. There, the Protestant minister, Montmollin, who had earlier tried unsuccessfully to have Rousseau excommunicated, provoked Rousseau’s neighbors into hateful violence. Safe again, in a tranquil new setting, Rousseau rediscovered peace:
But if there is a state where the soul can find a resting place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely, but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of depravation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear, than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness, such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul.11
In his youth, Rousseau sought his identity not in abstract philosophical theories but in revelations born of the fulfillment of wild, passionate desires. In his maturity, he rediscovered his identity in the spiritual serenity of release from desire, a state born of total absorption in the present.
Rousseau brought to his experience an unshakeable faith both in God’s existence and in the immortality of his soul—in spite of his inclination to get his ideas from his experience rather than interpreting his experience in terms of ideas. As a philosophical backdrop for his faith, he seems to have presupposed that the soul is a Cartesian spiritual substance to which things happen without its thereby being changed in any way, other than its remembering what happened. Rousseau thought that remembering one’s life before bodily death is necessary if survival of bodily death is to have any value. He also insisted that humans are responsible for everything they do. The mind can free itself from both dependence on the past and sensation in the present. He thought that the inner certainty of the existence of such a self undergirds ethics, which in turn tends to support belief in God, the only completely free being in the universe.
Wherever Rousseau got such convictions, in the part of his thought that was most influential on Kant and the subsequent tradition, he wedded his convictions to his trust in subjectivity and distrust of cultural elaboration. In practice, this took the form of his regarding the frail voice of conscience in him as the word of God, a source of moral authority that overrode both Scripture and philosophical theory. Kant too would hear such a voice, but whereas for Rousseau it emanated from his inner self, in Kant it emanated from reason.
So far as theories of the self and personal identity, narrowly construed, are concerned, Rousseau influenced the tradition not in his thinking of the self metaphysically along Cartesian lines, but in his quasi-ethical conceptions—in particular, in his thinking of the self, first, as uniquely individual, second, as the innocent source of human benevolence and, third, as something that stands in a reciprocal relationship with a corrupting society. In Hobbes, man in a state of nature is a brute, motivated to enter into community with society, which is a civilizing influence, solely by considerations of self-preservation. Rousseau tamed Hobbes’s brute: “Savage man,” he wrote, “is at peace with nature, and the friend of all his fellow creatures.” However:
The case is quite different with man in the state of society, for whom first necessities have to be provided, and then superfluities; delicacies follow next, then immense wealth, then subjects, then slaves. He enjoys not a moment’s relaxation; and what is yet stranger, the less natural and pressing his wants, the more headstrong are his passions, and still worse, the more he has it in his power to gratify them; so that after a long course of prosperity, after having swallowed up treasures and ruined multitudes, the hero ends up by cutting every throat until he finds himself, at last, sole master of the world. Such is in miniature the moral picture, if not of human life, at least of the secret aspirations in the heart of every civilized man.12
Yet, Rousseau reasoned, all of us have been socialized, not just the man of wealth and privilege. So no matter how strenuously we try to recover our pristine innocence, it is gone. We are already the product of a reciprocal dialogue between individual and society.
The socialized self, already lurking furtively in the shadows of Montaigne’s essays, is in Rousseau’s writing brought into full view. This idea, stripped of its romantic nostalgia, was developed particularly by post-Kantian German philosophers so as to give birth to a conception of the self as a social entity, an idea that contrasted sharply with the atomistic, encapsulated, and possessive individualism of theories of the self from Descartes to the end of the eighteenth century. Yet, unlike Rousseau, the German romantics sought a socialized self that is edifying. But before these developments could unfold, Kant had to set the stage.
The ethical dimension of Kant’s view of the self marks the final transition from the ideology of premodern, aristocratic societies, in which the highest value is honor, to modern societies, in which values are more democratic. Making this transition required the collapse of social hierarchies, the traditional basis for honor. It also required a new articulation of the equal dignity of all human beings. Kant would be the source and spokesperson for this basic tenet of liberalism.
In Kant’s view of human nature, the inherent equality of every human person is paramount. Theoretically, in a society based on Kant’s notion of equality, the innate, inalienable dignity of every human person would be recognized. However, what Kant failed to take into account, and this is where Rousseau enters the picture, is that each human being is not just equal, but unique. That is, for each individual, there is a certain way of being human that is specifically his or her own way. In this romantic view, an important part of the point of life is to be true to oneself. In Kant’s distillation of pure reason, there is no place for the celebration of difference.
The inherently irresolvable tensions between these conflicting views of human nature is central to modern liberalism. According to many postmodern critics of Kant, an overemphasis on the equal dignity of all human beings obscured Kant’s recognition of the value in what distinguishes individuals and groups from one another. For some of those, like Kant, who see value in everyone, including the members of marginalized groups, it is what people—everyone—has in common that is important, not what distinguishes people from each other. But in the view of individuals and groups who have been overlooked and marginalized, this humanistic celebration of equality leaves what is distinctively valuable about them unacknowledged. If they were not different, they say, they would not have been marginalized in the first place. Kantians, of course, would not approve of any group’s being marginalized, but neither—as Kantians—would they celebrate any group’s differences. So, if the members of marginalized groups, and those sympathetic to their cause, do not themselves celebrate their differences, it seems that no one will. Hence, the politics of difference.
German and English Romanticism
In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant crafted his philosophy of self largely as a response to Hume. Even so, he agreed with Hume’s opposition to speculative metaphysics, which both men regarded as a pretension of reason. But whereas Hume opposed metaphysics on the grounds of a general skepticism that extended even to science and merely probable knowledge, Kant emphasized that knowledge in science is not only possible but includes, at its core, beliefs that are absolutely certain. He thus saw his own view as a way of transcending Humean skepticism and repositioning the knowledge enterprise on foundations too weak for speculative metaphysics but strong enough to support science.
Ironically, those German philosophers who followed immediately in Kant’s wake and were among his most ardent admirers reinstated the spirit of speculative metaphysics that both Hume and Kant had tried so hard to vanquish. These German romantics, as they were called, partly under the influence of Rousseau, celebrated subjectivity and the empirical self. They also left behind the Enlightenment preoccupation with science and put in its place a newfound appreciation of religion. In the world according to post-Kantian German romanticism, Reality, rather than a stream of impressions or even a structured phenomenal world, is nothing so much as a cosmic Self. Yet, in spite of themselves, these thinkers contributed to the scientific investigation of consciousness. They did this by eliminating some of the tensions in Kant’s two-worlds view and insisting on what they took to be the harmonious systematization of what remained. Unfortunately what remained was not always capable of being harmoniously systematized. Nevertheless, as a happy byproduct of their attempts to systematize it, they substituted for the extreme atomism of eighteenth-century British and French accounts of the self a heightened appreciation of its social dimensions.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), who was primarily a poet and playwright rather than a philosopher, conveyed the romanticism of Rousseau to the German-speaking world, in the process animating it with the spirit of Sturm und Drang (storm and stress). His Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), in which he expressed his philosophy of life, was so emotionally wrenching that its publication, in Germany, precipitated an epidemic of suicides. Central to Goethe’s message was his view that humans are hopelessly alone in an immense universe of opposing forces: life and death, light and dark, love and hate. Amid these forces, torn by the stresses of life, some humans may not find themselves at all. But those who do, find themselves only in their own activities, which, so far as value is concerned, are everything. There is no goal of life beyond the mere living of it, which through love and passion may lead to an expansive personal evolution.
Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), Goethe’s best friend, was also primarily a poet and playwright. Yet, as one of the first important thinkers to be profoundly influenced by Kant, in his person he bridged the gap between the Enlightenment (Kant) and romanticism (Goethe). To some extent he also bridged this gap in his views, which highlighted the romantic quest for a harmonious integration of the self. However, in Schiller, the motivations for this quest are less individualistic and introspective than they are social and historical. Like Rousseau, he stressed the idea that the rise of civilization had fragmented the individual. However, unlike Rousseau, he claimed that the main cause of this fragmentation was the extraordinary “increase of empirical knowledge, and the more exact modes of thought.” These, he claimed, had produced “sharper divisions between the sciences” and “a more rigorous separation of ranks and occupations.”13 Still, there might be a cure. In society as a whole, the cure would spring from art, particularly the contribution that “aesthetic education” could make to a happier, more humane social order. In individuals, the cure would consist in an inward freedom of the soul that enabled people to achieve wholeness and harmony in the midst of internal and external conflict.
Although Kant and his German followers would eventually have an enormous impact on philosophy in the English-speaking world, it would take time because of the density of Kant’s thought and the difficulty of translating it into English. However, some German philosophy would fairly quickly make its way into England. The conduit for this influence was Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), the leading intellectual of English romanticism. In his autobiographical work Biographia Literaria (1817), which would become standard reading at English-speaking universities throughout the nineteenth century, Coleridge desperately tried to maintain his belief in an immortal soul while also keeping up with advances in science, including the science of human nature. In struggling with the question of how the self, which is free, could possibly fit into a mechanically determined natural world, he remarked that in the mechanistic view of Hartley and Priestley, his words “may be as truly said to be written by” the universe as by himself, for “the whole universe co-operates to produce the minutest stroke of every letter, save only that I myself, and I alone, have nothing to do with it, but merely the causeless and effectless beholding of it when it is done.” But, he continued, it is too much even to call it “a beholding; for it is neither an act nor an effect; but an impossible creation of a something-nothing out of its very contrary! It is a mere quick-silver plating behind a looking-glass; and in this alone consists the poor worthless I!”14 Yet, this I, he insisted, in contradiction to this fatalistic picture, “is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.”15
In trying to explain this vital essence, Coleridge distinguished three levels of self-consciousness. The first is that of “those who exist to themselves only in moments”; the second that of “those who are conscious of a continuousness” but are unable to think about it. Both of these levels can be attributed to animals. The third level is that of “those who tho’ not conscious of the whole of their continuousness, are yet conscious of a continuousness, and make that the object of a reflex consciousness.” Coleridge said that “of this third Class the Species are infinite; and the first and lowest, as far as we know, is Man, or the human Soul.”16
In Coleridge’s only recently published Opus Maximum, he explains his main ideas on the origins of self-consciousness:
The first dawnings of a baby’s humanity will break forth in the Eye that connects the Mother’s face with the warmth of the mother’s bosom, the support of the mother’s Arms. A thousand tender kisses excite a finer life in its lips, and there first language is imitated from the mother’s smiles. Ere yet a conscious self exists, the love begins; and the first love is love of another. The Babe acknowledges a self in the Mother’s form years before it can recognize a self in its own.17
This observation by Coleridge, that the first understanding of a self comes not from immediate reflection on one’s own mind but on the personality exhibited in the loving face of the mother, is one of the earliest expressions of the view that self-consciousness follows the discovery of self in the other. In the 1890s, James Baldwin, the father of developmental psychology, would make this idea the cornerstone of his own theories.
Coleridge also considered how an infant, through emotional deprivation and attention to mere objects, rather than through interaction with its mother, might become an object to itself. With the loving mother there, the infant enters into an “I-thou” rather than an “I-it” relationship and comes to know itself as an “I-am.” Coleridge relates how his own three-year-old child awoke during the night, pleading to his mother, “Touch me, only touch me with your finger.” Why? the mother asked. “I am not here, touch me, Mother so that I may be here.”18 Subsequently, the child moves on from requiring the mother to affirm his own existence: “It becomes a person; it is and speaks of itself as “I,” and from that moment it has acquired what, in the following stages it may quarrel with, what it may loosen and deform, but can never eradicate—a sense of an alterity in itself, which no eye can see, neither his own nor others.”19
Having thus provided a remarkably modern explanation of the social origins of self-consciousness, Coleridge found the basis of human personality and self-consciousness in the powers of reason and will. These, he claimed, distinguish humans from beasts and, at personality’s highest level, bring us closest to God, or the infinite I Am, the ultimate source and ground of all self-consciousness and personality. In developing this theory, he followed in the footsteps of Kant and the German idealists but also provided a developmental account of pathologies of the self as well as of healthy development. According to this account, some, by becoming alienated from their higher selves through emotional deprivation early in life, are turned downward to an animal nature, while others, through love in the first instance and most importantly between infant and mother, are raised to their highest nature.
Absolute Idealism
Johann Fichte (1762–1814), a professor of philosophy first at Jena and then at Berlin, taught that the goal of philosophy is “the clarification of consciousness.” He denied the existence of the noumenal world and also resolved what he took to be a tension in Kant between the theoretical and the practical in favor of the latter, which for him was supreme. He hoped to show that the clarification of consciousness involves, at its core, acknowledging the supreme importance of the self. He distinguished the self from a substantial soul, which he vehemently rejected as “a bad invention.” Rather, the self is pure spiritual activity, free from divisions and limitations. In this activity, oppositions between subject and object, action and result, do not exist. However, one cannot know this activity directly, through introspection, but only through reflection and abstraction. The human will is free. Its freedom, he claimed, settles once and for all the question of whether there can be a science of psychology: there cannot. Instead, the mind can know itself by reflecting on itself and deducing the terms of its unity. It is, he thought, because the truth about the self—that it is free, unfettered, and purely active—is so difficult and unsettling that people are drawn to thinking of themselves as objects, whether spiritual or material. This idea would resonate in the next century in the thoughts of Heidegger and Sartre.
Like Hume before him and John Stuart Mill after, Fichte, by analyzing consciousness, hoped to achieve a “science of all sciences” and the “absolute” basis of all knowledge. He also hoped to show how speculative and practical reason are not disparate faculties, as they had been for Kant, but two interrelated activities of a self-posited subject of consciousness. But how, in Fichte’s view, does this subject of consciousness arise? His answer is that it posits itself: “The I is what it itself posits, and it is nothing else but this.” In explaining what he meant, Fichte shifted from talk of the I to talk of the concept of the I, and from talk of thought to talk of action: “The concept of the I arises through my own act of self- positing, by virtue of the fact that I act in a way that reverts back upon myself.”20
Fichte elaborated that in thinking about an object—a wall, for instance—“the freely thinking subject, forgets about itself and pays no attention to its own free activity”; in thinking, one “disappears into the object.”21 However, in acting, including in the act of thinking, there is an aspect of consciousness that always at least involves self-awareness and self-positing.22 That is, although one may in thinking about the wall mentally “disappear into the object,” in acting with regard to it, there is a self-posited I distinct from the wall. In other words, just as Kant had claimed that accompanying every thought is an “I think,” Fichte claimed that accompanying every action is an “I think.” However, whereas in Kant, the “I think” is a logical presupposition of thought but not something that necessarily involves self-awareness, in Fichte, the “I think” does involve self-awareness. What is confusing, though, is that in Fichte, the self-awareness seems to be the product of a retrospective positing; what comes after seems to determine the nature of what came before.23 How exactly this happens is a mystery that Fichte does little to explain. What is not mysterious, though, and seems a genuine advance, is that Fichte turned a spotlight onto the self-referential dimension of self-awareness, which he regarded as a developmental phenomenon. This aspect of his thought, together with Kant’s earlier ruminations on the transcendental unity of apperception, originated the kind of phenomenology that would later come into fruition in Husserl.
There is another aspect of Fichte’s thought that would also bear fruit later. In his basic scheme, he distinguished fundamentally between “I” and “not-I.” I is the self-posited, the creative source of everything. It does not have a nature. Not-I is the world. It does have a nature. However, part of what the world contains is an objective self, which is different from the original I in having a nature, which is itself determined through subjective choice. In freely choosing, he said, we determine our own natures as rational beings: “A free being must exist before it is determined—it must have an existence independent of its determinacy.”24 Essence comes later. Everyone creates his own essence through acting freely. Thus, our existence as subjects precedes our self-determination as objective selves in the world. In other words, existence precedes essence.
In his later work, Fichte defined God as infinite moral will which becomes conscious of itself in individuals. He declared that the knowledge and love of God, which requires the knowledge and love of self, is the goal of human life. In Fichte’s view, God is everything and undivided. The world, which is illusory and merely seems to consist of separate objects, is produced by thought. What we call human knowledge is thus a distorted picture of infinite, undivided, pure activity. The point of human life, in the context of time, is to see through the distortions and realize complete spiritual freedom.
F. W. J. von Schelling (1775–1854) was, at age fifteen, admitted to the theological seminary in Tübingen, where he became captivated by the philosophies of Kant, Fichte, and Spinoza. At age nineteen, he began writing philosophy, the core of which was his account of the Absolute, which he took to be not only an eternal, timeless ego but the real ego of each individual human. Schelling maintained that the Absolute can be apprehended only in a direct, intellectual, as opposed to sensory, intuition. Later, he decided that Fichte had erred in giving an inadequate account of nature, which Schelling claimed exhibits active development toward spirit. He saw precursors of this spirit in such natural phenomena as light, gravity, magnetism, and electricity, but especially in organisms that unconsciously unify their parts into a harmonious whole. Schelling’s objective became to integrate this new developmental view of nature into what was basically Fichte’s philosophy. Schelling believed that this required a bridge between nature and spirit. He found the bridge he was looking for in artistic creation, in which the natural, which is unconscious, and the spiritual, which is conscious, become one. He then tried to show that in all beings, not just in artistic creation, the Absolute expresses itself as the unity of the subjective and the objective. Subsequently, he retired into relative inactivity until his wife’s death, in 1809, provoked a religious turn in his thought. This led him to write a book on immortality, according to which God, in becoming self-conscious, projects ideas of himself, thereby creating the world.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), who was Fichte’s successor at the University of Berlin, claimed that the point of philosophy is to discover the place of reason in the world. That place, he thought, is not only central but constitutive: “the rational is the real.” Hegel reified reason as the Absolute, which he said was dynamic, developing over time. He called the development of the Absolute the dialectical process. In his view of this process, reason itself is not eternal but “historical.” By its being historical, he meant that its manifestations at many levels of culture and social life evolve over time. He thereby gave new meaning and relevance to human history. With the notable exceptions of G. B. Vico (1668–1744), J. G. Herder (1744–1803), and Kant, other modern philosophers writing before Hegel had tended to neglect history.
Hegel’s stress on the two themes of reason and history is what is most distinctive and original in his philosophy. Much of the rest is derivative, especially from Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, the latter of whom complained that Hegel had become famous by stealing his ideas (Schelling and the poet Hölderlin were Hegel’s college roommates at Tübingen). Whatever the truth in this accusation, in Hegel’s view the Absolute or world-spirit, is embedded in the progressive evolution of human life and culture, stages of which are its unfolding as it moves toward its goal of complete self-realization. In each stage, he elaborated, there are certain facts of human psychology (habit, appetite, judgment) that reveal the progress of subjective spirit; there are certain laws, social arrangements, and political institutions (the family, civil society, the state) that reveal the progress of objective spirit; and art, religion, and philosophy reveal the progress of absolute spirit. According to Hegel, in the development of the Absolute, movement from one stage to another involves intense struggle. Thus, what began in post-Kantian idealism as an all but static metaphysics of the Absolute became in Hegel a dynamic philosophy of human culture.
For present purposes, the most important and also most novel aspect of Hegel’s view is his emphasis on the social aspect of reality. This emphasis shows up at the higher levels of world history, and at these levels even acquires an ominous tone, for instance, in his elevating the universal and social over the individual with the remark that in his own time, the “mere individual aspect has become, as it should be, a matter of indifference.”25 But Hegel’s emphasis on the social also shows up in other ways, such as in his insistence that because an embryo lacks social relationships it is not yet human, and in his analysis of lower-level phenomena of consciousness.
One of the most innovative and consequential of Hegel’s analyses of the relations between the individual and the social is his famous account, in Phenomenology of Spirit, of the master-slave relationship.26 In this account, he bypasses the traditional problem of solipsism by simply taking it for granted that others exist and are known. He argues that self-consciousness realizes itself only through the recognition of others, that self and other develop interactively, and that while interpersonal harmony is possible, it must be preceded by a period of domination and struggle. Specifically, Hegel claimed that self-consciousness arises in an individual not through an act of introspection and not in isolation from others but by means of a dynamic process of reciprocal relationships in which each recognizes the other as a self-conscious being, becomes aware of that recognition of himself in the other, and ultimately becomes dependent on the other for his self-consciousness. In other words, if there were just two individuals, A and B, involved in an interaction, then A would become self-conscious by recognizing not only that B is self-conscious but also that B recognizes that A is self-conscious, and the same would be true of B. According to Hegel, this would happen even if A were B’s master and B were A’s slave. In such a situation, Hegel thought, the master, so far as his attempt to become self-conscious is concerned, would wind up becoming the slave of his slave.
In Hegel’s account of this process, these developments occur in the context of a “life-and-death struggle,” presumably in a state of nature like the one Hobbes described, in which each individual strives to self-assert his or her own independence by negating dependence on the other. Yet in this struggle, the “winners” ultimately must realize that they cannot kill the losers since their getting the losers to recognize them as independent self-conscious beings is the whole point of their own activity.
Hegel’s analysis of the master-slave relationship is more complicated and phenomenologically subtle than our brief sketch of it. And commentators disagree on exactly what Hegel had in mind. For present purposes, what matters are not so much these subtleties but noticing that the social dimension of his analysis is in sharp contrast to the approach taken by Enlightenment thinkers, such as Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke, and even by many of the romantics, such as Rousseau. Descartes, for instance, in addition to having no respect for history, found no role in his philosophy for the social (unless the individual’s relationship to God counts as social!). He explained how knowledge is possible by considering the individual in isolation not only from other people but even from the material world, to which the individual has only indirect access though the medium of his private subjectivity. Hobbes, even in his political thought, characterized humans in a state of nature as being presocial, where, he said, the life of each is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Individuals in a state of nature are willing to enter into genuine social relations with others only from considerations of self-interest. Even Rousseau, for all his romanticism, celebrated the purity of the individual in isolation from corrupting social influences.
Hegel is at the other end of the spectrum. In almost every aspect of his thought, he emphasized the social, but nowhere more consequentially than in his account of self-consciousness. Subsequent theorists influenced by German idealism, including not only philosophers but also many of the earliest and most influential psychologists, followed him in regarding the self as essentially social. As we shall see, whether the self is regarded as individual or social may profoundly affect how reasonable it is to hope for some sort of theoretical convergence among the many accounts of the self that would proliferate in the twentieth century.
The basic idea of those philosophers in the tradition of German idealism who pushed a conception of the self as dynamic and social is that what we take as the real world is pervaded by activity, or “spirit.” Fichte, in his pre-Schelling writings, emphasized conscious human activity, both in self-knowledge and free action. In Schelling, nature is the source of the dynamic activity of spirit, which comes to” know itself’” in human self-consciousness and human freedom, which together are the acme of nature’s spiritual activity. Hegel develops this idea in his theory of how spirit comes to know its own activities in nature, culture, and human consciousness. In his view, not only is Absolute Spirit God, but, in the upper limits of our consciousness, we are God as well. In explaining these ideas, Hegel gave a dynamic account of the development of the human mind from unconsciousness, to consciousness, to self-consciousness. He expressed this theory in terms of the development both of history and the individual. Yet, because his main focus was on history, his psychological theory of individual development is thin. The slave metaphor, although it concerns only one phase of the growth of mind, the part dealing with self-consciousness, is the most interesting part of his analysis, and the most influential, not only because it brought in the social but because of its reliance on the idea of reciprocity.
Reactions to German Idealism
Hegel had many admirers, among them Marx, as well as many critics and detractors. Of these critics, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) are most worth mentioning. Whereas Hegel stressed the primacy of reason, objectivity, and rationality, Schopenhauer substituted will for reason, Kierkegaard subjectivity for objectivity, and Nietzsche irrationality for rationality.
In his most important work, The World as Will and Idea (1818), Schopenhauer accepted Kant’s distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds and his claim that the existence and nature of the phenomenal world depends on its being experienced.27 But, in contrast to Kant, he claimed that through intuition the noumenal world can be known. Its nature is will, a nonrational, blind, ceaselessly desiring, meaningless striving after existence. He argued that this will is what each human being is essentially—one’s true nature. The phenomenal properties of humans—their intellects, preferences, and even their bodies—are objectifications of will. Since will is amoral, humans, at bottom, are horrible creatures. A key purpose of civilization is to break and tame them. Except for art, humans have few sources of pleasure. In sharp contrast to Hegel, Schopenhauer claimed that human history, far from being a progressive manifestation of spirit, is without purpose and essentially pointless.
Schopenhauer was among the first Western philosophers to have access to translations of Hindu and Buddhist scripture, by which he was profoundly affected. He claimed that while humans tend to see themselves as independent, self-sufficient beings, on the noumenal level there is neither unity nor plurality. The subject, which is the knower, rather than lying within the forms of space, time, and quantity, is presupposed by these very forms, which is why the subject is neither one nor many. When humans know something, it is this noumenal subject that knows, but this subject is never itself known.
Schopenhauer wrote a dialogue to express these ideas.28 Ostensibly devoted to the immortality of the soul, the real issue under discussion is not so much whether people survive their bodily deaths—that is, preserve their individuality—as what matters in human survival. Philalethes, who represents Schopenhauer, argues that personal identity, or, as he puts it, the preservation of individuality, does not matter—that is, that even from an egoist point of view, the preservation of individuality is not all that important. His antagonist, Thrasymachos, holds to the commonsensical view that the preservation of individuality is what matters primarily.
Philalethes assumes that people do not survive their bodily deaths as the individuals they were while alive. But, he argues, nothing of great value has been lost since a person’s individuality is not his or her “true and inmost being,” but only its “outward manifestation.” “Your real being,” he says, is eternal and unbounded. “So when death comes, on the one hand you are annihilated as an individual; on the other, you are and remain everything. Your life is in time, and the immortal part of you in eternity.”
Thrasymachos is not impressed by this view. So, to convince him, Philalethes asks him to consider how he would feel if someone were to guarantee him that after his death he shall “remain an individual,” but only on condition that he “first spend three months of complete unconsciousness.” Thrasymachos replies that this would be fine. Philalethes continues: “But remember, if people are completely unconscious, they take no account of time. So, when you are dead, it’s all the same to you whether three months pass in the world of consciousness, or ten thousand years.” Thrasymachos agrees. Then, Philalethes says, “If by chance, after those ten thousand years have gone by, no one ever thinks of awaking you,” that would be no cause for concern either: if “you knew that the mysterious power which keeps you in your present state of life had never once ceased in those ten thousand years to bring forth other phenomena like yourself, and to endow them with life, it would fully console you.” No, Thrasymachos replies. You must think, then, Philalethes continues, “that your individuality is such a delightful thing” that “you can’t imagine anything better.” That’s right, Thrasymachos answers, my individuality is “my very self. To me it is the most important thing in the world…. I want to exist, I, I. That’s the main thing. I don’t care about an existence which has to be proved to be mine, before I can believe it.”
In reply, Philalethes wheels out his heavy artillery: Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will:
When you say I, I, I want to exist, it is not you alone that says this. Everything says it, absolutely everything that has the faintest trace of consciousness. It follows, then, that this desire of yours is just the part of you that is not individual—the part that is common to all things without distinction. It is the cry, not of the individual, but of existence itself; it is the intrinsic element in everything that exists, nay, it is the cause of anything existing at all. This desire craves for, and so is satisfied with, nothing less than existence in general—not any definite individual existence. No! that is not its aim. It seems to be so only because this desire—this Will—attains consciousness only in the individual, and therefore looks as though it were concerned with nothing but the individual. There lies the illusion—an illusion, it is true, in which the individual is held fast: but, if he reflects, he can break the fetters and set himself free. It is only indirectly I say, that the individual has this violent craving for existence. It is the Will to Live which is the real and direct aspirant—alike and identical in all things.
But people, mired in illusion, see the Will only in themselves. Hence,
individuality is not a form of perfection, but rather of limitation; and so to be freed from it is not loss but gain. Trouble yourself no more about the matter. Once thoroughly recognize what you are, what your existence really is, namely, the universal will to live, and the whole question will seem to you childish, and most ridiculous!
Thrasymachos answers that rather than his own desire for individual survival seeming to him to be childish, it is Philalethes who seems to be “childish” and “ridiculous—like all philosophers!” At this point, the dialogue ends.
But Schopenhauer continues: If our individual selves are at bottom an illusion, how can people overcome their egoistic concerns? Up to a point, he says, by developing the human capacity for sympathy and thereby becoming more virtuous. But what is really needed to overcome our self-centeredness is not mere sympathy but a “transition from virtue to asceticism,” in which the individual ceases to feel any concern for earthly things. In this “state of voluntary renunciation,” individuals experience “resignation, true indifference, and perfect will-lessness,” which lead to a “denial of the will to live.” Only then, when humans have become “saints,” are they released from insatiable Will.
The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, regarded by many as the founder of existentialism, is famous for his rejection of abstract philosophy, particularly Hegel’s theories, on the grounds that life cannot be represented adequately within a conceptual system. The core of human existence is passion, which implies that human existence is not primarily thinking, but living. Most important, passion involves living in a condition of extreme inwardness in which a person embraces all of the contradictions in his or her being. The speculative or objective thinker may also embrace all views, but he or she lives none of them. The existing or subjective thinker strives to realize or live out a single idea. Like Kant and Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard believed that humans are both in- and outside of time and hence that time and timelessness are two contradictory sides of human existence. The human project is to embrace both sides of this contradiction not as abstractions but as concrete, lived reality.
“Man is spirit,” Kierkegaard proclaimed, and “spirit is the self.” And what is the self? He answered, “A relation that relates itself to itself.”29 Which means? In part, that the self is the passionate embracing of both sides of man’s contradictory nature; that is, “the self is freedom.” In other words, “the self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that relates itself to itself.” But “to become oneself is to become concrete.” This involves “an infinite moving-away from itself in the infinitizing of the self, and an infinite coming-back to itself in the finitizing process.”30 Kierkegaard claimed that the objective thinker, such as Hegel, does not fully exist because he ignores this task. Instead, in roaming indifferently from idea to idea, he considers ideas in relation to one another but not in relation to himself. The subjective thinker, on the other hand, such as Socrates, always aware of the either/or of ethical choice, joins idea and existence.
Ethical choice always proceeds from a subjective, individual point of view, which is the only one available to humans. Modern rationalists, Kierkegaard claimed, in expressing themselves as if from an absolute point of view, have forgotten this elemental fact. They have thereby confused a self-forgetful excursion into philosophical imagination with real transcendence. Authentic existence requires real transcendence. This requires attention to the details of one’s own life, to the “how” of each lived moment. In sum, the subjective thinker, infinitely interested not in pure thought but in his or her own existence, elevates reality above possibility.
Friedrich Nietzsche, German classicist, philologist, philosopher, and critic of culture, had his greatest immediate influence not on philosophy proper but on culture and depth psychology (eventually, of course, he had a profound influence on philosophy). In a passage that for both its immodesty and its secularism could not have been written by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche asked, “Why do I know more things than other people? Why, in fact, am I so clever? I have never pondered over questions that are not questions. I have never squandered my strength. Of actual religious difficulties, for instance, I have no experience.”31 He asked, “Who among philosophers was a psychologist at all before me?” He answered that no one was. “Out of my writings,” he continued, “there speaks a psychologist who has not his equal.”32 There are many today who would agree.
A difference between the psychological style of Kierkegaard and that of Nietzsche is that whereas Kierkegaard plumbed the depths of the ego through a penetrating self-examination that sought truth through subjectivity, Nietzsche was perennially suspect of subjectivity and sought the truth of his being not in personal self-examination but in an impersonal and historical analysis of subjectivity. “Direct self-observation,” he wrote, “is not nearly sufficient for us to know ourselves.” Instead, “we require history, for the past continues to flow within us in a hundred waves; we ourselves are, indeed, nothing but that which at every moment we experience of this continued flowing.” Nietzsche continued, “It may even be said that here too, when we desire to descend into the river of what seems to be our own most intimate and personal being, there applies the dictum of Heraclitus: we cannot step into the same river twice.”33 But even going to history—any form of self-examination—can be misleading. The danger, he said, “of the direct questioning of the subject about the subject and of all self- reflection of the spirit lies in this, that it could be useful and important for one’s activity to interpret oneself falsely.”34
Neitzsche is famous for having proclaimed that the rise of Enlightenment secularism meant that “God is dead.” He is virtually unknown for having uncovered, in his personal reflections, the perhaps deeper truth that the self is dead. He did this by unmasking the notions of substance and subject. “The concept of substance,” he said, “is a consequence of the concept of the subject: not the reverse! If we relinquish the soul, ‘the subject,’ the precondition for ‘substance’ in general disappears. One acquires degrees of being, one loses that which has being.”35 The subject, he said, is but a “term for our belief in a unity underlying all the different impulses of the highest feeling of reality.” But, he claimed, there is no such unity, only “the fiction that many similar states in us are the effect of one substratum: but it is we who first created the ‘similarity’ of these states; our adjusting them and making them similar is the fact, not their similarity, which ought rather to be denied.”36 There is neither subject nor object, he concluded. Both are fictions.
Moreover, he claimed, the subject is a useless fiction. Souls or spirits, even were we to suppose that they exist, could not reasonably be thought to be the cause of anything. The reason for this is that an immaterial soul has no interior structure on the basis of which we could understand its causal power: “there is no ground whatever for ascribing to spirit the properties of organization and systematization. The nervous system has a much more extensive domain; the world of consciousness is added to it.”37 There is no point in postulating a cause if we cannot understand how it could possibly bring about its supposed effect. We can understand how the nervous system could bring about certain effects. We cannot understand how spirit or soul or consciousness could bring about any effect.
To the objection, but what then explains unity of consciousness, Nietzsche answered, what unity of consciousness? “Everything that enters consciousness as ‘unity,’” he said, “is already tremendously complex.” Rather than unity of consciousness, we have “only a semblance of Unity.”38 To explain this semblance, rather than a single subject, we could do as well by postulating “a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general.” We do not have any reason to believe that in there is a dominant subject overseeing this multiplicity. “The subject is multiplicity.”39 Philosophers have bought into the fiction of self, he continued, by supposing that if there is thinking, there must be something that thinks. But the idea that “when there is thought there has to be something ‘that thinks’ is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed.”40 By following Descartes’s line of reasoning, he announced, “one does not come upon something absolutely certain but only upon the fact of a very strong belief.”
Intellectual culture, Neitzsche claimed, has made several “tremendous blunders.” These include: an “absurd overestimation of consciousness,” in which it has been transformed “into a unity, an entity: ‘spirit,’ ‘soul,’ something that feels, thinks, wills”; spirit has been postulated “as cause, especially wherever purposiveness, system, co-ordination appear”; “consciousness” has been regarded as “the highest achievable form,” a “supreme kind of being, as ‘God’”; “will” has been “introduced wherever there are effects”; “the ‘real world’” has been regarded as “a spiritual world, as accessible through the facts of consciousness”; and “knowledge” has been regarded “as uniquely the faculty of consciousness.”41 And the “consequences” of these blunders—the mistaken ideas that they have spawned? They are the ideas that “every advance lies in an advance in becoming conscious; every regression in becoming unconscious”; that “one approaches reality, ‘real being,’ through dialectic; that one distances oneself from it through the instincts, senses, mechanism”; that “all good must proceed from spirituality, must be a fact of consciousness; that any advance toward the better can only be an advance in becoming conscious.”42
Nietzsche concluded that we have been victimized by our language, that is, by
our bad habit … of taking a mnemonic, an abbreviative formula, to be an entity, finally as a cause, e.g., to say of lightning “it flashes.” Or the little word “I.” To make a kind of perspective in seeing the cause of seeing: that was what happened in the invention of the “subject,” the “I”!43
In other words, we have imposed our thoughts and concepts on a reality that we have falsely assumed is similarly structured: “‘Subject,’ ‘object,’ ‘attribute’—these distinctions are fabricated and are now imposed as a schematism upon all the apparent facts. The fundamental false observation is that I believe it is I who do something, suffer something, ‘have’ something, ‘have’ a quality.”44
Nietzsche, in this latter period of his life, held that life neither possesses nor lacks intrinsic value. Yet evaluations are always being made. These, he claimed, must be symptomatic of the condition of the evaluator. In the West, most basic cultural values of philosophy, religion, and morality are expressions of an ascetic ideal that came into being when suffering became endowed with ultimate significance. Traditional philosophy, he said, gave birth to this ideal by valuing the soul over the body, the intellect over the senses, duty over desire, reality over appearance, and what is timeless over the temporal. Christianity added to this an emphasis on personal immortality, by means of which each individual’s life and death acquire cosmic significance. Common to both traditions was the powerful assumption that existence requires explanation. Both denigrated experience in favor of some other, “true” world. Both, he claimed, may be read as symptoms of decline, that is, of life in distress. He characterized the age in which he lived as an age of passive nihilism, that is, one not yet aware that its religious and philosophical absolutes had been rendered groundless. With the growing awareness that the metaphysical and theological foundations for traditional morality had collapsed, there would come a pervasive sense of purposelessness and meaninglessness, that is, the triumph of nihilism. Since most people would not be able to accept this result, they would seek a surrogate god, such as the nation-state, with which to invest life with meaning.
Hermeneutics
Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) sought the philosophical foundations of what came to be known as the “human sciences” (Geisteswissenschaften), which included history, philosophy, religion, psychology, art, literature, law, politics, and economics. He opposed the idea that the methodology of the human sciences should approximate as closely as possible to that of the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften). “Nature we explain,” he wrote, “psychic life we understand.” In inner experience, unlike in nature, the elements “are given as a whole.” Initially, there “is the experienced unity.” Only afterward does one distinguish the elements of this unity. Dilthey claimed that this fact “brings about a very great difference between the methods through which we study psychic life, history, and society, and those through which the knowledge of nature is achieved.”45
In place of the positivist ideal of trying to make historical studies scientific, Dilthey tried to establish historical studies, and more generally the humanities, as interpretative disciplines whose subject matter is the human mind. However, it is the human mind not as it is revealed subjectively, in immediate experience, or as it is analyzed in psychological theory, but as it manifests or “objectifies” itself in action, particularly as expressed historically, in language, literature, and institutions.
What the human spirit is can only be revealed through historical consciousness of that which the mind has lived through and brought forth. It is this historical consciousness of mind which alone can make it possible to arrive gradually at a scientific and systematic knowledge of man…. What man is only history can say…. The rejection of historical inquiry is tantamount to forswearing knowledge of man himself—it is the regression of knowledge back to a merely genial and fragmentary subjectivity.46
Dilthey claimed that an interpretive or hermeneutic methodology is the only avenue to reconstructing the internal cognitive processes that motivate and give meaning to human actions.
But that meaning can never be fully grasped. For one thing, history is constantly being rewritten as new events unfold and new interpretations are constructed. For another, the “fluidity” of human life ensures that it will never be captured in a mere account. “It is,” Dilthey wrote, “as if lines have to be drawn in a continually flowing stream, figures drawn which hold fast.” But “between this reality of life and the scientific intellect there appears to be no possibility of comprehension, for the concept sunders what is to be unified in the flow of life.” One cannot represent truths about human behavior “scientifically,” as “universally and eternally valid, independent of the mind which propounds” them. Rather, “the flow of life is at all points unique, every wave in it arises and passes.”47 Thus, he thought, there is no such thing, even in principle, as a completed science of human beings. Rather, an understanding of humans, to whatever extent it occurs, will be the product of increasingly adequate interpretive traditions and can never be complete. Historical consciousness, by undermining confidence in absolute principles, sets people free to understand and appreciate the diverse possibilities of human experience.
Dilthey’s most important contribution was his attempt to demonstrate the primacy of interpretation to the project of understanding humans. In this attempt he used hermeneutics, which previously had been important only to biblical interpretation. From his own immersion in the issues of interpretation, he urged the idea that interdependent coherences of feeling and meaning are constitutive of the life-world of human culture. He rejected the idea that consciousness resides in separate egos from which the social world is excluded. Rather, reflective self-experience has been extracted from its dynamic role in social meanings and so cannot be a starting point or basis for knowing.
Absolute Idealism at the End of the Century
Hegel gets most of the credit for pushing the philosophy and psychology of the self in a social direction. So far as philosophy is concerned, at the end of the nineteenth century the leading light in the United States was Josiah Royce (1855–1916) and in England, F. H. Bradley (1846–1924). Royce, who was an absolute idealist in the tradition of Hegel, stressed the unity of human thought with the external world. His idealism also extended to religion, the basis of which he conceived to be human loyalty. Yet he also had strong empirical inclinations. In his study on self-consciousness, he claimed that his goal, rather than abstract metaphysics, was to provide an explanation for variations in consciousness that may be found empirically, especially in abnormal psychology. In his view, abnormalities of self-consciousness typically are “maladies of social consciousness,” that is, have to do with a patient’s views of his relations with others.48
In The World and the Individual (1901–13), Royce described, in words strongly reminiscent of Hazlitt but almost certainly inspired by Hegel, what he took to be a fundamental fact at the root of the social origin of self-consciousness: “Were no difference observed between the contents which constitute the observed presence of my neighbor, and the contents which constitute my own life in the same moment, then my sense of my neighbor’s presence, and my idea of myself, would blend in my consciousness, and there would be so far neither Alter nor Ego observed.”49 In other words, he claimed that people would never have conceived of themselves were it not for reflecting on the relationship between self and other. As he put it elsewhere:
Self-conscious functions are all of them, in their finite, human and primary aspect, social functions, due to habits of social intercourse. They involve the presentation of some contrast between Ego and non-Ego. This psychological contrast is primarily that between the subject’s own conscious act, idea, intent, or other experience, and an experience which is regarded by him as representing the state of another’s mind.50
Although self-consciousness begins only in social relations to others, Royce argued that it eventually comes to include other aspects of the physical world. “By means of habits gradually acquired, this contrast [between self and other] early comes to be extended to include that between one’s inner states and the represented realities that make up the physical world.”
The English philosopher F. H. Bradley, who was also an absolute idealist in the tradition of Hegel, considered mind to be the basis of the universe. In his most ambitious work, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (1893), he claimed that personal identity is conventional, that it is best regarded as a matter of degree, and that how we think of it should be determined pragmatically, in ways that permit us to think of it differently for different purposes. He even used a fission example to criticize Locke’s simple memory view of personal identity:
If the self remembers because and according as it is now, might not another self be made of a quality the same and hence possessing the same past in present recollection? And if one could be made thus, why not also two or three? These might be made distinct at the present time, through their differing quality, and again through outward relations, and yet be like enough for each to remember the same past, and so, of course to be the same.51
Bradley concluded from this example “that a self is not thought to be the same because of bare memory, but only so when that memory is considered not to be deceptive.” He claimed that it follows that:
Identity must depend in the end upon past experience, and not solely upon mere present thinking. And continuity in some degree, and in some unintelligible sense, is by the popular view required for personal identity. He who is risen from the dead may really be the same, though we can say nothing intelligible of his ambiguous eclipse or his phase of half-existence. But a man wholly like the first, but created fresh after the same lapse of time, we might feel was too much to be one, if not quite enough to be two. Thus it is evident that, for personal identity, some continuity is requisite, but how much no one seems to know.52
He concluded: “If we are not satisfied with vague phrases and meaningless generalities, we soon discover that the best way is not to ask questions.”
But what if we do persist in asking questions? Then, Bradley said, we will be left with this result:
Personal identity is mainly a matter of degree. The question has a meaning if confined to certain aspects of the self, though even here it can be made definite in each case only by the arbitrary selection of points of view. And in each case there will be a limit fixed in the end by no clear principle. But in what the general sameness of one self consists is a problem insoluble because it is meaningless. This question, I repeat it, is sheer nonsense until we have got some clear idea as to what the self is to stand for. If you ask me whether a man is identical in this or that respect, and for one purpose or another purpose, then, if we do not understand one another, we are on the road to an understanding. In my opinion, even then we shall reach our end only by more or less of convention and arrangement. But to seek an answer in general to the question asked at large is to pursue a chimera.53
In these remarks, Bradley anticipated views that would come to the fore toward the end of the twentieth century. According to these more recent ideas, while personal identity is not a matter of degree, the relations of physical and psychological continuity on which personal identity supervenes are matters of degree, and these relations all but exhaust what matters, or at least what should matter, to people in their egoistic concern for their own survivals.