The Idea of the Self
Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century

This 2005 book explores how major Western European thinkers have confronted the self from the seventeenth century to the present.

Jerrold Seigel (Author)

9780521605540, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 17 February 2005

734 pages
22.8 x 15.8 x 4.6 cm, 1.13 kg

'Seigel has written an important and invaluable book.' The New Republic

What is the self? The question has preoccupied people in many times and places, but nowhere more than in the modern West, where it has spawned debates that still resound today. In this 2005 book, Jerrold Seigel provides an original and penetrating narrative of how major Western European thinkers and writers have confronted the self since the time of Descartes, Leibniz, and Locke. From an approach that is at once theoretical and contextual, he examines the way figures in Britain, France, and Germany have understood whether and how far individuals can achieve coherence and consistency in the face of the inner tensions and external pressures that threaten to divide or overwhelm them. He makes clear that recent 'postmodernist' accounts of the self belong firmly to the tradition of Western thinking they have sought to supersede, and provides an open-ended and persuasive alternative to claims that the modern self is typically egocentric or disengaged.

Part I. Introductory: 1. Dimensions and contexts of selfhood
2. Between ancients and moderns
Part II. British modernity: 3. Personal identity and modern selfhood: Locke
4. Self-centeredness and sociability: Mandeville and Hume
5. Adam Smith and modern self-fashioning
Part III. Society and Self-Knowledge: France from Old Regime to Restoration: 6. Sensationalism, reflection, and inner freedom: Condillac and Diderot
7. Wholeness, withdrawal, self-revelation: Rousseau
8. Reflectivity, sense-experience, and the perils of social life: Maine de Biran and Constant
Part IV. The World and the Self in German Idealism: 9. Autonomy, limitation, and the purposiveness of nature: Kant
10. Purposiveness and Bildung: Herder, Humboldt, and Goethe
11. The ego and the world: Fichte, Novalis, Schelling
12. Universal selfhood: Hegel
Part V. The Past in the Present: 13. Dejection, insight, and self-making: Coleridge and Mill
14. From cultivated subjectivity to the polarities of self-formation in nineteenth-century France
15. Society and selfhood reconciled: Janet, Fouill, Bergson
16. Will, reflection, and self-overcoming: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
17. Being and transcendence: Heidegger
18. Deaths and transfigurations of the self: Foucault and Derrida
19. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Philosophy [HP], History [HB]