Sources of the Modern Self

Concepts of the Self in Modern Philosophy and Cultural Theory

The Autonomous Self of the Enlightenment

1“I think; therefore, I am.”

--Rene Descartes

The Autonomous Self of the Enlightenment

You are unique; you are free; be your own man; you can do whatever you want if you work hard enough; be true to yourself and your own beliefs; be real; think before you act. 

          Chances are, you have heard many of the above formulations--at least in one form or another.  All of them reflect and re-quire fundamental assumptions about how to define a "self."  In many ways, they are so familiar because they speak to notions

of selfhood that seem natural, incontroverti-ble, fundamentally true.  Indeed, we could say that they don’t speak to a self—they are the self.  To possess a "self" involves the possession of these qualities and abili-ties: The self is individual, capable of think-ing, free, possesses the capacity for self-control, and remains capable of making choices beyond the influences of society and history.

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The Oath of the Horatii, 1784 Jacques Louis David.

            Moreover, these notions inform the very assumptions behind education—why would you attend school at this moment--read these words--or generally work hard in school if you didn’t to a great degree subscribe to many of the above state-ments?  Your very participation in an edu-cational institution presumes on a variety of levels that you live as free individuals, capable of using your minds to transform your lives for the better.  More broadly, the above ideas are, in fact, assumptions of selfhood built into the very fabric of the U.S. Constitution, to founding notions of U.S. citizenship, and to the broader mod-ern ideals of Western democracy.  All of these terms in fact emerge from a tradition of thinking deeply embedded in a Western paradigm of subjectivity known in philo-sophical terms as the Autonomous Self, a notion of self that, to a great extent, has its roots in an historical period known as The Enlightenment. 

            Generally speaking, most history books locate The Enlightenment within the 200 years beginning with the life of philoso-pher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) to the French Revolution of 1789. The period saw the discovery (or recovery) of the  “tru-isms” of the Autonomous Self—that we are fundamentally free in action, totally indi-vidual, and free thinking agents (that is, en-

tities that act in the world). The point here is that while the Autonomous Self often ap-pears to be an invisibly presumed founda-tion of how we think of the self—it simply is what the self IS— the Autonomous Self is in fact a product of a certain historical period.  To think of the self in any other way may feel offensive, if not downright alien: "What? Well, duh--of course we are free-thinking individuals!"  And indeed, you are free to feel that way—many would agree with you (though perhaps to greater and lesser degrees). The Autonomous Self is the self that is presumed in our most fun-damental institutions and practices—our legal and educational systems, the world of business and the marketplace, the pro-

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Francis Bacon (156-1626)

fessional world, and our social lives all gen-erally presume, as an unspoken norm, the participation of individuals who are just that: Free individuals, in control of their own lives and actions, capable of inde-pendent, rational and free thought. 

            Yet this vision of the self did not al-ways exist.  To make things more compli-cated, Enlightenment thinkers often pre-sented the Autonomous Self as the “Natu-ral State of Man”—implicitly suggesting, of course, that any other vision of the self was and would forever be artificial, unnatu-ral, an unethical violation of the natural order.  According to Enlightenment thought, the Autonomous Self was not a theory of the self, not a belief, not one vi-sion of the self among others.  Rather, and this is key, for Enlightenment thinkers, the Autonomous Self is the essence of what it means to be human, the defining aspect of our nature. For Enlightenment thinkers, then, to theorize the Autonomous Self was not to conceive a philosophy of the human.  Instead, Enlightenment thinkers sought to return “Man” from the artificiality of belief itself, back to his rightfully natural state. The vision of the Autonomous Self was the vision of truth, free from any dis-torted perception of reality. According to this general view, previous to the Enlighten-ment, Man’s naturally free place in the

scheme of things had been distorted by the corrupted interests and beliefs of a sys-tem that dictated that some humans were better than others—an unfortunate situa-tion that resulted in oppressive monarchies and a terrible class structure, along with the general devaluation of individual hu-man life.  For many, the Enlightenment no-tion of the Autonomous Self provided a profoundly necessary critique fundamental to the liberation of Man from class-based oppression.  The notion of an Autonomous Self serves as the foundation for the emer-gence of a modern democratic civilization. 

Yet, you may pick up on the ironic con-tradiction here (we could say deconstruc-tion): The need to philosophize the Autono-mous Self as Man’s Natural State previous to philosophy only underscores that the Autonomous Self might not be particularly natural.   The ironies are also present, as many have pointed out, in the Enlighten-ment’s general tendency to overlook the “Natural” rights of anyone who happened not to be white or, in fact, a "Man.”  That is, while the Autonomous Self is often pre-sented as the Natural State of the Human Individual, many philosophers see it as the Constructed Product of a certain historical period that also privileged certain “Men” over others (like women, non-white peo-

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ple, and any Man who didn’t own a hefty tract of real estate).

            The point here is not to badmouth the Autonomous Self as merely wrong, out-dated, sexist, racist, and contradicted. In fact, while the Autonomous Self emerges from an oppressive history, the concepts and language of autonomous selfhood have also driven the various cultural move-ments mobilized to challenge oppression. Moreover, there is genuine value to the idea of an autonomous self. I like to be free and have choices.  And I like to be an individual.  I wear red pants.  I have the

free-dom to wear red pants; I have the reflec-tive, rational capacity to make the choice to wear red pants, and this choice reflects my individuality, despite my social or his-torical moment (what if others in my social/historical moment find red pants somehow inappropriate or immoral?).  We rehearse notions of the Autonomous Self in every-day life—every time we make claims about our uniqueness, our capacity for rational judgment, and even our commitment to the value of freedom, we owe a deep alle-giance to a history of selfhood that goes

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The Death of Socrates, 1787 (Below) Jacques Louis David’s painting exemplifies the Enlightenment era’s preoccupation with a classical ideal: The stoic commitment to reason and truth, even the face of death.

back at least 400 years. (I say “at least 400 years” because the Enlightenment thinkers themselves were building off a history rooted in the Classic Philosophy of Ancient Greece and Rome.)  The concept of the Autonomous Self is the basis of our de-mocracy, the idea that every citizen has the freedom and rational capacity to vote and choose a government.  Indeed, the word “Autonomous” (combing “auto” meaning “self” and “nomous” meaning “law or order”) literally means “Self-Law” or “Self Ordering.”  The Autonomous Self is a self that has the intellectual ability and freedom to create and live under her or his own laws.

            This is, certainly, a very optimistic--very Humanist--notion of the self, and very liberating.  Because humans have the ca-pacity to use reason, they have the capac-ity to make their own choices about how to live; the Autonomous Self does not need to be ruled over by a monarch or some privileged aristocracy because hu-mans, as rational beings, have the ability to rule themselves.  No wonder this idea of self led to so many revolutions against rather oppressive monarchs in the 18th century—both the American Revolution and the French Revolution were waged in the name of liberating autonomous selves from the oppression of unjust monarchs. 

In other words, the American and French Revolutions both emerged in the name of the Autonomous Self.

Of course, the notion of the Autono-mous Self can also generate some logical problems.  The very fact that I inherited my ideas about individuality from a culture ar-guably belies or exposes my status as a de-individualized subject of my culture. (Why do I value individuality in the first place?  Some cultures don’t.)  In other words, the very idea of the Autonomous Self that is free from cultural and social rules is itself a cultural and social inven-tion—the more we claim our belief in the autonomous self, the more we demon-strate our immersion in a history of cultural norms that emphasizes the importance of autonomy (you may have noticed that the latter argument serves as yet another ex-ample of deconstructive thinking.)  On the other hand, we could not explore these ideas here without our mutual capacity for reason, and I could not write these ideas here without my individual freedom to do so.  We need to reinforce that the notion of the Autonomous Self may not be more wrong nor right than any other notion of self.  This is for you to decide. (You have the Autonomy to reason and decide for yourself!  Or do you???) My goal is to ar-

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ticulate this model of selfhood as one of many “sources of the modern self.”           

Moreover, what is known as the En-lightenment does not refer to a single set of ideas.  The Enlightenment was a diverse period, filled with equally diverse, often conflicting voices. The Enlightenment idea of the Autonomous Self also refers to a large range of often-contradictory claims about human nature. In the same way that key developments in Enlightenment thought, and early modern thought in gen-eral, first posed the question of the self as a free, autonomous and rational being (what we call the “individual”), we can also find there the seeds of radical attacks on this model, attacks which have aimed ei-ther to replace it with a different model, or to abandon the whole idea of the Autono-mous Self altogether. In other words, the very fact that it became necessary to de-fine subjectivity at a certain moment in Western thought, that traditional practices and languages of selfhood were no longer to be taken for granted, opened up a field of contention, crisis and perpetual re-evaluation of the self. The self became an issue, a problem and question--a point of fundamental instability in the world. It was the Enlightenment that made the modern era the era of the subject, an era preoccu-

pied with the nature and makeup of the self.

            As we shall explore further, the En-lightenment notion of the Autonomous Self, despite its persistence and popularity in Western culture, has come under vari-ous and complex criticism over the past 200+ years.  Nevertheless, the Enlighten-ment development of the Autonomous Self set the stage for Modern Selfhood.  Did the individual Self serve as a reliable site for the ordering of experience and knowl-edge through reason?  Or is the Self an un-stable site of disorder, subject to influence beyond its capacity for rational aware-ness?   After the Enlightenment, these two sides of the individual Modern Self be-came an unavoidable topic of debate.

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“I think; therefore, I am.”

“I think; therefore, I am.”

You may very well have heard these words floating around: "I think; therefore, I am." You may even have given some thought to the meaning of these words.  I remember having heard them in high school, thinking, “‘I think; therefore, I am?’ Oh yeah, makes sense … Now where’s the remote? Seinfeld is on.”  Of course, I went to school on the other side of the tracks.  I didn’t start thinking until I was 20.  Before then, my life was merely a hazy collection of TV shows, flirting, legos, and the perpet-ual attempt to avoid getting the crap beat of me by big dudes (not always in the afore-mentioned order).  You all, however, go to Chadwick, so you have the chance to think now—lucky you!

Despite their reduction into philosophi-cal cliché, the words “I think; therefore, I am” carry profound resonance and impor-tance for our discussion of the Enlighten-ment model of the Autonomous Self.   The words come from the French Enlighten-ment Philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes originally penned the phrase in Latin, “Cogito ergo sum”—hence the tendency to refer to the term as the "Cartesian Cogito." (“Cartesian” is the ad-jective used to describe all things Descar-tes—sort of like people using the phrase “Matsonian” to refer to debilitatingly awk-ward self-consciousness), or simply “the Cogito” (by the way, this would be a great name for an egotistical superhero--"I am the COGITO!" or maybe a pretentious cof-fee drink--"I'll have a half-caff Cogito with soy, please."  Just saying.)

I am tempted to explain the notion of the Cogito to you, but I’m done with explaining--I mean, I just wrote a long freak’n introduction to the Autonomous Self!  So you get to close read “The Co-gito” for yourselves.  The Cogito appears in the second of Descartes’ Meditations, a

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3.     What is the potential good or bad of the Cogito?

4.      Is anything missing from the Cogito?

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5. Develop your own discussion question.

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