Properties of a ‘Self’: Words and Things, 1580–1690

Abstract

What did it mean to begin to use the word ‘self’ as a substantive term — to make it a thing rather than merely using it as an emphatic or reflexive pronoun? The question concerns not only what would cause such a development in usage, but what resulted from it — what difference it made to have and to use the word in this sense. To pursue these questions, we also have to ask what the word actually meant when it began to be used this way, which turns out to be far less predictable than one might have thought. ‘Self’ does become a thing in late sixteenth-century English, but not at all the same thing it becomes about a century later. Locke’s 1689 coinage gives a ‘self’ the properties that dominate modern usage: his ‘conscious thinking thing’ is at once abstract and radically subjective — a function purely of ‘consciousness’, and that consciousness purely its own. In contrast, the earlier ‘selves’ of Renaissance usage are often less familiar and always less pure. Not only do they tend to refer to the body more than the mind, they also have fundamentally social dimensions. Instead of honing an individual, freestanding identity, they seem to have an opposite aim — to tie the self to its world. In fact, among the first substantive uses of the word in the late sixteenth century, the most common is the now-obsolete trope in which ‘self’ refers not to oneself but to a significant other.

Self is that conscious thinking thing … which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends.

— Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding

[A]s we are our selues, what things are we.

— Shakespeare, All’s Well that Ends Well