Abstract
An examination of what was unique about the concept of the self as it developed in late-Enlightenment thought: a picture of a self emerging from nature into society but still caught between the two, giving a divided, paradoxical, view of the self; showing us ideas of authenticity and autonomy, freedom and self-government, self and society in their relation and tension. The human subject was increasingly placed at the centre of the world creating in the process a temptation to remake the world in its own image: deepening and extending a crisis of authority that continues to this day.
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Notes
- 1.
For a fuller discussion of this, see Arendt (2006: 42ff). ‘[I]t was mortality which became the hallmark of human existence. Men are the “mortals”, the only mortal things there are, for animals exist only as members of their species and not as individuals.’
- 2.
Even if ‘reason’ is understood in a Lutheran sense as being the personal witness of the Holy Spirit in each individual.
- 3.
Although to a lesser degree in the Anglican and Methodist church.
- 4.
Consider the hyper-realist statues of martyrs like that of St Bartholomew in the Duomo of Milan: depicted holding his flayed skin.
- 5.
If the early Enlightenment, in its rejection of man’s immortality, sought to see him as a machine, then it is suggestive that today’s rejection of man’s freedom is inclined to see him as merely programmed, as a robot.
- 6.
Larry Siedentop, for example, argues that the humanist ‘cult of individuality’ in the Renaissance presented social institutions ‘as a threat to the self’: a victim ‘of social pressures’ (Siedentop 2014: 337).
- 7.
‘Reason Is and Ought Only to Be the Slave of the Passions’.
- 8.
Overwhelmingly the attitude of the ‘woke’ generation today to the ‘sleepers’ who preceded them: all too happy to put the past on trial for its failure to adhere to the standards of the present.
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Kennedy, A. (2019). Self-Enlightenment. In: Kennedy, A., Panton, J. (eds) From Self to Selfie. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19194-8_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19194-8_4
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