Abstract
Professor Seigel's history of the idea of the self is a superb contribution to modern scholarship; it has a broad historical and comparative scope, but it is carefully defined by a precise theoretical paradigm; it is carefully and scrupulously grounded in key historical texts; and it attempts successfully to address issues in modern debates about the ‘death of the subject’. Although the book is essentially and unapologetically historical, it also addresses ideas and authors that are regarded as central to the sociological canon, in particular the work of Emile Durkheim. This study is therefore a contribution to the history of ideas, but I shall unsurprisingly review Seigel in terms of his actual and potential contribution to the sociology of the self.
The Idea of the Self is divided into five major parts in which Seigel considers the British tradition (such as Locke and Mill), the French legacy from the Old Regime (for example Diderot, Rousseau and Constant), and the tradition of German idealism (for instance Kant, Goethe and Hegel). The concluding section considers modern accounts of the self and the eventual collapse of these European traditions in Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida in which, mainly as a consequence of a revolution in the philosophy of language, the subject disappears in the face of the triumph of anti-humanism and structuralism. The philosophical framework for this monumental overview is established in the introduction and then the main theme is picked up in the epilogue. There are fifty-three pages of densely packed footnotes and references. For those readers who despair that modern publishing companies will only publish handbooks, readers, and companions, this history of the self is reassuringly not an undergraduate textbook.
The analytical strength of Seigel's history is that he has developed a compelling model of how intellectuals have conducted a conversation about the self. There are three components of the self. Most importantly, there is reflection. To be a self, we must be able to reflect upon our identities, our actions, and our relationship with others. We must have language and memory. Selfhood, whatever else it involves, must have a capacity for continuous self assessment and monitoring of behaviour. By way of digression, Seigel notes the distinction between ‘reflectivity’ and ‘reflexivity’. While the former is active and constitutive, the latter is passive. Unfortunately sociological writing on intimacy and the modern self generally fails to observe this important distinction, and happily employs ‘reflexivity’ as if it described an active engagement with the everyday world. Secondly, the self is not a free-floating consciousness, because the self is also defined by its corporeal existence. Recognition of the self depends not simply on memory and consciousness but also on its peculiar physical characteristics. Seigel typically refers to this aspect of the discourse of the self as ‘the body’. In this regard, he has perhaps missed an important opportunity to distinguish between the body as a lived phenomenon and the body as object, namely a distinction between leib and korper. Seigel's emphasis on the corporeal dimension of the self is highly compatible with the development of the sociology of the body as in part a critique of Descartes. Although the terminological apparatus is missing, Seigel does want to work with a distinction between the Cartesian objective body and the phenomenology of embodiment. In short, while the conscious self is a reflective agent, the body is not necessarily an object, but participates in an embodied subjectivity towards the world. The final dimension of this tripartite model is the notion of the self as a product of or situated within social relationships. The western self has not been invariably captured in the figure of Robinson Crusoe, but has been interpreted as a social phenomenon that cannot survive without a social world. Seigel's argument is that, while specific aspects of the self are typically emphasised by philosophers, theories of the self have in practice to address all three aspects.
How does this model relate to the legacy of sociological theory? In general, we can argue that sociology has characteristically defined the self as simply the product of social processes (socialization) and social relationships (the looking-glass self). It has by contrast either denied or questioned the idea of an autonomous reflective self. Sociology was also traditionally anxious to deny any suggestion of biological determinism, and until recently rejected the idea that embodiment might be a significant feature of social agency. Durkheim is the classical representative of this tradition, but the idea of the social determination of the self was reinforced in Erving Goffman's The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life where the self merely learns a script that has to be delivered within the space available within a dramaturgical setting. But this is a superficial interpretation. Like the western tradition as a whole, sociology has struggled, largely unsuccessfully, with the contradictions between social action, social structure and the reflective self. The ‘solutions’ to the quandary of ‘action and structure’ include Talcott Parsons ‘institutionalised individualism’ and Anthony Giddens's ‘structuration theory’. For Durkheim, the individual was the product of the collective, and morals have a decisive force because they are social facts – they have the moral authority of the collective. The analytical tensions between Parsons's early voluntaristic theory of social action and his work on the media of social interchange was finally resolved in his idea of ‘institutionalised individualism’. Institutionalised individualism is a Kantian theory of the social agent as a moral being faced by inescapable choices, whose behaviour can become socially responsible. Parsons's treatment of the social actor as a form of institutionalised individualism represents a sociological attempt to combine an economic theory of action with a Kantian theory of moral action (Bourricaud, 1981). Both Parsons and Durkheim therefore attacked egoistical theories of the individual in British social theory, especially in the work of Herbert Spencer. Whereas the economic individual of classical economics was a hedonist, both Durkheim and Parsons embraced an altruistic (Kantian) model of the individual. To act morally is to act in terms of the categorical imperative – behave as you would wish others to behave towards you. In Durkheim's sociological theory, this position is worked out in Suicide (1951) where too little integration results in egoistical behaviour and too much regulation produces fatalistic suicide. The moral individual has to balance excessive egoistical and excessive conformist behaviour.
There is, however, from the perspective of historical sociology, a more interesting way of interpreting Seigel's tripartite model. We might argue that the reflective self was dominant in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a consequence of the Enlightenment after Kant's challenge to throw off infantile tutelage. The Romantic reaction placed greater emphasis on individuality, subjectivity and embodiment against the flat world of Kantian rationalism. It is plausible to consider that the rise of the concept of the social with industrial society, which was condemned by Hannah Arendt as a condition of modern totalitarianism, paved the way for sociology and the view that the individual is merely a product of social forces. This view of the passive self dominated the middle of the twentieth century and was articulated in sociological theories of mass society, the managerial revolution, consumer culture and the other-directed self. The individual became reflexive rather than reflective. I would argue that the corporeal self is the dominant paradigm of contemporary society, because the scientific revolutions in information science, micro-biology and genetics have provided us with a convenient language of genetic determinism in which both the social and reflective self are subordinate. The ‘criminal gene’, the ‘homosexual gene’ and the ‘divorce gene’ now circumnavigate any recognition of individual reflexivity and responsibility, and verify the political slogan that there is no such thing as society – individuals are driven by whatever contingent bundle of genes they have fortuitously and blindly inherited.
Despite the generous scope of this study of the self, it is important to be clear about what this study does not address. It is primarily a study of the idea of the self and hence the book makes very few strong assertions about the social ontology of selfhood. From a philosophical point of view the book is somewhat disappointing because it fails, more or less self-consciously, to develop a comprehensive view of the difference between persons, selves and individuals, and has little to say in fact about individualism or the bureaucratic processes of individuation, but it does have a lot to say about individuality in part IV on German idealism. It is a history of the idea of the self and not primarily the sociology of individualism (Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, 1986). Secondly it is definitely a history of western European thought and hence it has nothing to say about North American contributions. Although this is a justifiable authorial decision, it is not without negative consequences. For example, it neglects the important interactions between American pragmatism and European social theory, culminating in such figures as Richard Rorty. Thirdly, perhaps the most important gap is the absence of any serious commentary on religious thought. It can be argued that some of the major contributions to the evolution of the self, often negative contributions that emphasised the lack of free will and the burden of sin, came from St. Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Wesley, Schleiermacher, Biedermann, Barth, Tillich and Bonhoeffer, but none of these figures is given any prominence. How do the predominantly secular traditions of Feuerbach, Durkheim, Marx and Mill relate to a parallel history of theological writing on the self? The study should perhaps be regarded therefore as a history of secular contributions to the conceptualisation of the self. Fourthly, there is a parallel neglect of existentialism and phenomenology, and in particular the absence of any discussion of Levinas, whose philosophical contributions in many ways perfectly match Seigel's tripartite model of the debate about the self. Fifthly, there is almost no discussion of psychoanalysis or psychology apart from a brief commentary on Freud in the epilogue. Fromm, Marcuse, Lacan, and Klein get little or no attention. Finally and crucially, Seigel, partly because he concentrates on western Europe, does not systematically consider the traditional problem of relativism, apart from a few pages on Clifford Geertz and modern anthropology (pages 24–26). From an anthropological point of view, could one write a historical ethnography of the idea of the self in Thailand? Is the Japanese self comparable to the western tradition? Seigel might argue with some justification that these issues are simply beyond the scope of a single volume, but some opportunities have been lost. Is the western tradition unique and, if so, why?
Given the intellectual fecundity of The Idea of the Self, there are many ways by which in principle it could be critically reviewed. I shall consider the book from the perspective of religious thought. The issue of religion is important, not simply because there is a lot of it, but because the theology of the self connects in important ways with major questions raised by Seigel with respect to the body and determinism. Modern sociology has in approaching the self emphasised issues relating to intimacy, sexuality and subjectivity. Anthony Giddens (1992) and Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Gernsheim-Beck (1995) are pertinent illustrations. I want to argue that this form of subjectivity is part of the legacy of western pietism.
The notion of the individual in modern society has also become increasingly emotional and erotic. Beck and Gernsheim-Beck (1995: 179) argue that love is now our ‘secular religion’, and claim that as ‘religion loses its hold, people seek solace in private sanctuaries’, but this sociological interpretation fails to recognise that modern erotic, sentimental love is itself part of the legacy of the Protestant conversionist sects. This emotional component of religious experience entered Protestantism in eighteenth-century England through Wesleyanism, specifically from the evangelical preaching of John Wesley and the evocative hymns of Charles Wesley. Hymn singing, confessions of personal guilt and extemporary prayer preserved a tradition of emotional expressivity. However, the specific origins of this emotional trend in Christian spirituality were in German pietism. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) defended religion against the rationalist assumptions of the Enlightenment, and argued that religious feelings of dependency on the divine are the foundation of religious faith. Schleiermacher's theological anthropology recognised a common humanity that was expressed through powerful emotions and feeling. From this religious tradition, one can recognise the modern notion that private and intimate experiences are fundamental to the authentic self, and that social relations such as marriage are primarily about establishing satisfactory social interactions of companionship and intimacy. These ideas have been especially potent in the United States in the New Age Movement and more generally in American approaches to marriage and divorce. Happiness in a secular society depends crucially on successful, that is intimate, relations in sexual encounters, companionship and marriage.
What Parsons (1974) called ‘the expressive revolution’ was closely related to subjective individualism in popular culture and the importance of choice in life styles and values. The emphasis on choice and consumer satisfaction in religion was achieved through the development of a spiritual market place. The new quest cultures have been critically evaluated as forms of expressive individualism. This American religious revolution involved a shift from the cognitive-instrumental values of early capitalism to an affective-expressive culture. Individuals are free to reinvent themselves and refashion themselves constantly and self-consciously. American society was the modern cradle of individualism which Alexis de Tocqueville recognised as a unique product of the American Revolution. The expressive revolution signified in the student rebellions of the 1960s a new cultural movement that may have been part of the legacy of the American Protestant settlers but was also a significant departure from the asceticism that Max Weber (1930) had detected in the ‘spirit of capitalism’. The expressive revolution celebrated hedonism, self expression and hostility to conventional norms and social institutions. The 1960s language of personal freedom had largely evaporated by the end of the century, and has been replaced by a return to determinism in the language of genetic causation, but this determinism may itself be a reiteration of an existing (religious) tradition.
Although Seigel discusses Weber (on five occasions), Weber's sociology is somewhat neglected and yet Weber is highly germane to Seigel's project. The dominant theme of Seigel's comprehensive overview of the western tradition is not reflexivity but determinism. Although the western tradition, and specifically the Enlightenment, emphasised the freedom of individuals to fashion their selves through reflection, this position was constantly challenged by a negative view that the self is the plaything of biology or the puppet of social forces. The western view of the self, ending in the death of the subject, is a tragic tradition, and this pessimistic view was the underlying, partly hidden, voice of Weber's sociology. In Weber, the tragic conception of the self as subject to the unintended consequences of action was in turn a legacy of German Lutheranism and its later American representatives. My argument is that religion is far more important to the history of the self than Seigel allows, and theology has been far more important to sociological theory than we care to admit.