THE SELF FORM VARIOUS PERSPECTIVE

A. Philosophy

i. SOCRATES

Socrates (469/470-399 BCE) was a Greek philosopher and is considered the father of
western philosophy. Plato (l. c. 428-348 BCE) was his most famous student and would
teach Aristotle (l. 384-322 BCE) who would then tutor Alexander the Great (l. 356-323
BCE). By this progression, Greek philosophy, as first developed by Socrates, was spread
throughout the known world during Alexander's conquests.

Socrates' historicity has never been challenged but what, precisely, he taught is as elusive
as the philophical tenets of Pythagoras or the later teachings of Jesus in that none of
these figures wrote anything themselves. Although Socrates is generally regarded as
initiating the discipline of philosophy in the West, most of what we know of him comes
from Plato and so this honor is, rightly, challenged.

The "Socrates" who has come down to the present day from antiquity could largely be a
philosophical construct of Plato and, according to the historian Diogenes Laertius (3rd
century CE), many of Plato's contemporaries accused him of re-imagining Socrates in
Plato's own image in order to further Plato's own interpretation of his master's message.
Many different schools of philosophy were founded by Socrates' student and his influence
would be felt for generations and even to the present day.

Early Life and Career

Socrates was born c. 469/470 BCE to the sculptor Sophronicus and the mid-wife
Phaenarete. He studied music, gymnastics, and grammar in his youth (the common
subjects of study for a young Greek) and followed his father's profession as a sculptor.
Tradition holds that he was an exceptional artist and his statue of the Graces, on the road
to the Acropolis, is said to have been admired into the 2nd century CE. Socrates served
with distinction in the army and, at the Battle of Potidaea, saved the life of the General
Alcibiades.

He married Xanthippe, an upper-class woman, around the age of fifty and had three sons
by her. According to contemporary writers such as Xenophon, these boys were incredibly
dull and nothing like their father. Socrates seems to have lived a fairly normal life until he
was challenged to reecaluate himself by the Oracle at Delphi which claimed he was
special.
 ii. PLATO

Plato, (born 428/427 BCE, Athens, Greece—died 348/347, Athens), ancient Greek
philosopher, student of Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE), teacher of Aristotle (384–322 BCE),
and founder of the Academy, best known as the author of philosophical works of
unparalleled influence.
Building on the demonstration by Socrates that those regarded as experts in ethical
matters did not have the understanding necessary for a good human life, Plato introduced
the idea that their mistakes were due to their not engaging properly with a class of entities
he called forms, chief examples of which were Justice, Beauty, and Equality. Whereas
other thinkers—and Plato himself in certain passages—used the term without any precise
technical force, Plato in the course of his career came to devote specialized attention to
these entities. As he conceived them, they were accessible not to the senses but to the
mind alone, and they were the most important constituents of reality, underlying the
existence of the sensible world and giving it what intelligibility, it has.

In metaphysics Plato envisioned a systematic, rational treatment of the forms and their
interrelations, starting with the most fundamental among them (the Good, or the One);
in ethics and moral psychology he developed the view that the good life requires not just
a certain kind of knowledge (as Socrates had suggested) but also habituation to healthy
emotional responses and therefore harmony between the three parts of
the soul (according to Plato, reason, spirit, and appetite). His works also contain
discussions in aesthetics, political philosophy, theology, cosmology, epistemology, and
the philosophy of language. His school fostered research not just in philosophy narrowly
conceived but in a wide range of endeavours that today would be called mathematical or
scientific.
Life
The son of Ariston (his father) and Perictione (his mother), Plato was born in the year
after the death of the great Athenian statesman Pericles. His brothers Glaucon and
Adeimantus are portrayed as interlocutors in Plato’s masterpiece the Republic, and his
half brother Antiphon figures in the Parmenides. Plato’s family was aristocratic and
distinguished: his father’s side claimed descent from the god Poseidon, and his mother’s
side was related to the lawgiver Solon (c. 630–560 BCE). Less creditably, his mother’s
close relatives Critias and Charmides were among the Thirty Tyrants who seized power
in Athens and ruled briefly until the restoration of democracy in 403.
Plato as a young man was a member of the circle around Socrates. Since the latter wrote
nothing, what is known of his characteristic activity of engaging his fellow citizens (and
the occasional itinerant celebrity) in conversation derives wholly from the writings of
others, most notably Plato himself. The works of Plato commonly referred to as “Socratic”
represent the sort of thing the historical Socrates was doing. He would challenge men
who supposedly had expertise about some facet of human excellence to give accounts
of these matters—variously of courage, piety, and so on, or at times of the whole of
“virtue”—and they typically failed to maintain their position. Resentment against Socrates
grew, leading ultimately to his trial and execution on charges of impiety and corrupting
the youth in 399. Plato was profoundly affected by both the life and the death of Socrates.
The activity of the older man provided the starting point of Plato’s philosophizing.
Moreover, if Plato’s Seventh Letter is to be believed (its authorship is disputed), the
treatment of Socrates by both the oligarchy and the democracy made Plato wary of
entering public life, as someone of his background would normally have done.
After the death of Socrates, Plato may have traveled extensively in Greece, Italy,
and Egypt, though on such particulars the evidence is uncertain. The followers
of Pythagoras (c. 580–c. 500 BCE) seem to have influenced his philosophical program
(they are criticized in the Phaedo and the Republic but receive respectful mention in
the Philebus). It is thought that his three trips to Syracuse in Sicily (many of
the Letters concern these, though their authenticity is controversial) led to a deep
personal attachment to Dion (408–354 BCE), brother-in-law of Dionysius the Elder (430–
367 BCE), the tyrant of Syracuse. Plato, at Dion’s urging, apparently undertook to put into
practice the ideal of the “philosopher-king” (described in the Republic) by
educating Dionysius the Younger; the project was not a success, and in the ensuing
instability Dion was murdered.

iii. AUGUSTINE

Augustine (354—430 C.E.)

St. Augustine is a fourth century philosopher whose groundbreaking philosophy infused
Christian doctrine with Neoplatonism. He is famous for being an inimitable Catholic
theologian and for his agnostic contributions to Western philosophy. He argues
that skeptics have no basis for claiming to know that there is no knowledge. In a proof
for existence similar to one later made famous by René Descartes, Augustine says,
“[Even] If I am mistaken, I am.” He is the first Western philosopher to promote what has
come to be called "the argument by analogy" against solipsism: there are bodies external
to mine that behave as I behave and that appear to be nourished as mine is nourished;
so, by analogy, I am justified in believing that these bodies have a similar mental life to
mine. Augustine believes reason to be a uniquely human cognitive capacity that
comprehends deductive truths and logical necessity. Additionally, Augustine adopts a
subjective view of time and says that time is nothing in reality but exists only in the human
mind’s apprehension of reality. He believes that time is not infinite because God “created”
it.
Augustine tries to reconcile his beliefs about freewill, especially the belief that humans
are morally responsible for their actions, with his belief that one’s life is predestined.
Though initially optimistic about the ability of humans to behave morally, at the end he is
pessimistic, and thinks that original sin makes human moral behavior nearly impossible:
if it were not for the rare appearance of an accidental and undeserved Grace of God,
humans could not be moral. Augustine’s theological discussion of freewill is relevant to a
non-religious discussion regardless of the religious-specific language he uses; one can
switch Augustine’s “omnipotent being” and “original sin” explanation of predestination for
the present day “biology” explanation of predestination; the latter tendency is apparent in
modern slogans such as “biology is destiny.”
1. Early Years
Augustine is the first ecclesiastical author the whole course of whose development can
be clearly traced, as well as the first in whose case we are able to determine the exact
period covered by his career, to the very day. He informs us himself that he was born at
Thagaste (Tagaste; now Suk Arras), in proconsular Numidia, Nov. 13, 354; he died at
Hippo Regius (just south of the modern Bona) Aug. 28, 430. [Both Suk Arras and Bona
are in the present Algeria, the first 60 m. W. by s. and the second 65 m. w. of Tunis, the
ancient Carthage.] His father Patricius, as a member of the council, belonged to the
influential classes of the place; he was, however, in straitened circumstances, and seems
to have had nothing remarkable either in mental equipment or in character, but to have
been a lively, sensual, hot-tempered person, entirely taken up with his worldly concerns,
and unfriendly to Christianity until the close of his life; he became a catechumen shortly
before Augustine reached his sixteenth year (369-370). To his mother Monnica (so the
manuscripts write her name, not Monica; b. 331, d. 387) Augustine later believed that he
owed what lie became. But though she was evidently an honorable, loving, self-
sacrificing, and able woman, she was not always the ideal of a Christian mother that
tradition has made her appear. Her religion in earlier life has traces of formality and
worldliness about it; her ambition for her son seems at first to have had little moral
earnestness and she regretted his Manicheanism more than she did his early sensuality.
It seems to have been through Ambrose and Augustine that she attained the mature
personal piety with which she left the world. Of Augustine as a boy his parents were
intensely proud. He received his first education at Thagaste, learning, to read and write,
as well as the rudiments of Greek and Latin literature, from teachers who followed the old
traditional pagan methods. He seems to have had no systematic instruction in the
Christian faith at this period, and though enrolled among the catechumens, apparently
was near baptism only when an illness and his own boyish desire made it temporarily
probable. His father, delighted with his son's progress in his studies, sent him first to the
neighboring Madaura, and then to Carthage, some two days' journey away. A year's
enforced idleness, while the means for this more expensive schooling were being
accumulated, proved a time of moral deterioration; but we must be on our guard against
forming our conception of Augustine's vicious living from the Confessiones alone. To
speak, as Mommsen does, of " frantic dissipation " is to attach too much weight to his
own penitent expressions of self-reproach. Looking back as a bishop, he naturally
regarded his whole life up to the " conversion " which led to his baptism as a period of
wandering from the right way; but not long after this conversion, he judged differently, and
found, from one point of view, the turning point of his career in his taking up philosophy -
in his nineteenth year. This view of his early life, which may be traced also in the
Confessiones, is probably nearer the truth than the popular conception of a youth sunk in
all kinds of immorality. When he began the study of rhetoric at Carthage, it is true that (in
company with comrades whose ideas of pleasure were probably much more gross than
his) he drank of the cup of sensual pleasure. But his ambition prevented him from allowing
his dissipations to interfere with his studies. His son Adeodatus was born in the summer
of 372, and it was probably the mother of this child whose charms enthralled him soon
after his arrival at Carthage about the end of 370. But he remained faithful to her until
about 385, and the grief which he felt at parting from her shows what the relation had
been. In the view of the civilization of that period, such a monogamous union was
distinguished from a formal marriage only by certain legal restrictions, in addition to the
informality of its beginning and the possibility of a voluntary dissolution. Even the Church
was slow to condemn such unions absolutely, and Monnica seems to have received the
child and his mother publicly at Thagaste. In any case Augustine was known to Carthage
not as a roysterer but as a quiet honorable student. He was, however, internally
dissatisfied with his life. The Hortensius of Cicero, now lost with the exception of a few
fragments, made a deep impression on him. To know the truth was henceforth his deepest
wish. About the time when the contrast between his ideals and his actual life became
intolerable, he learned to conceive of Christianity as the one religion which could lead him
to the attainment of his ideal. But his pride of intellect held him back from embracing it
earnestly; the Scriptures could not bear comparison with Cicero; he sought for wisdom,
not for humble submission to authority.

iv. DESCARTES

René Descartes is often credited with being the “Father of Modern Philosophy.” This title
is justified due both to his break with the traditional Scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy
prevalent at his time and to his development and promotion of the new, mechanistic
sciences. His fundamental break with Scholastic philosophy was twofold. First, Descartes
thought that the Scholastics’ method was prone to doubt given their reliance on sensation
as the source for all knowledge. Second, he wanted to replace their final causal model of
scientific explanation with the more modern, mechanistic model.
Descartes attempted to address the former issue via his method of doubt. His basic
strategy was to consider false any belief that falls prey to even the slightest doubt. This
“hyperbolic doubt” then serves to clear the way for what Descartes considers to be an
unprejudiced search for the truth. This clearing of his previously held beliefs then puts
him at an epistemological ground-zero. From here Descartes sets out to find something
that lies beyond all doubt. He eventually discovers that “I exist” is impossible to doubt and
is, therefore, absolutely certain. It is from this point that Descartes proceeds to
demonstrate God’s existence and that God cannot be a deceiver. This, in turn, serves to
fix the certainty of everything that is clearly and distinctly understood and provides the
epistemological foundation Descartes set out to find.
Once this conclusion is reached, Descartes can proceed to rebuild his system of
previously dubious beliefs on this absolutely certain foundation. These beliefs, which are
re-established with absolute certainty, include the existence of a world of bodies external
to the mind, the dualistic distinction of the immaterial mind from the body, and his
mechanistic model of physics based on the clear and distinct ideas of geometry. This
points toward his second, major break with the Scholastic Aristotelian tradition in that
Descartes intended to replace their system based on final causal explanations with his
system based on mechanistic principles. Descartes also applied this mechanistic
framework to the operation of plant, animal and human bodies, sensation and the
passions. All of this eventually culminating in a moral system based on the notion of
“generosity.”
The presentation below provides an overview of Descartes’ philosophical thought as it
relates to these various metaphysical, epistemological, religious, moral and scientific
issues, covering the wide range of his published works and correspondence.
René Descartes was born to Joachim Descartes and Jeanne Brochard on March 31, 1596
in La Haye, France near Tours. He was the youngest of the couple’s three surviving
children. The oldest child, Pierre, died soon after his birth on October 19, 1589. His sister,
Jeanne, was probably born sometime the following year, while his surviving older brother,
also named Pierre, was born on October 19, 1591. The Descartes clan was a bourgeois
family composed of mostly doctors and some lawyers. Joachim Descartes fell into this
latter category and spent most of his career as a member of the provincial parliament.
After the death of their mother, which occurred soon after René’s birth, the three
Descartes children were sent to their maternal grandmother, Jeanne Sain, to be raised in
La Haye and remained there even after their father remarried in 1600. Not much is known
about his early childhood, but René is thought to have been a sickly and fragile child, so
much so that when he was sent to board at the Jesuit college at La Fleche on Easter of
1607. There, René was not obligated to rise at 5:00am with the other boys for morning
prayers but was allowed to rest until 10:00am mass. At La Fleche, Descartes completed
the usual courses of study in grammar and rhetoric and the philosophical curriculum with
courses in the “verbal arts” of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic (or logic) and the
“mathematical arts” comprised of arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. The course
of study was capped off with courses in metaphysics, natural philosophy and ethics.
Descartes is known to have disdained the impractical subjects despite having an affinity
for the mathematical curriculum. But, all things considered, he did receive a very broad
liberal arts education before leaving La Fleche in 1614.
Little is known of Descartes’ life from 1614-1618. But what is known is that during 1615-
1616 he received a degree and a license in civil and canon law at the University of Poiters.
However, some speculate that from 1614-1615 Descartes suffered a nervous breakdown
in a house outside of Paris and that he lived in Paris from 1616-1618. The story picks up
in the summer of 1618 when Descartes went to the Netherlands to become a volunteer
for the army of Maurice of Nassau. It was during this time that he met Isaac Beekman,
who was, perhaps, the most important influence on his early adulthood. It was Beekman
who rekindled Descartes’ interest in science and opened his eyes to the possibility of
applying mathematical techniques to other fields. As a New Year’s gift to Beekman,
Descartes composed a treatise on music, which was then considered a branch of
mathematics, entitled Compendium Musicae. In 1619 Descartes began serious work on
mathematical and mechanical problems under Beekman’s guidance and, finally, left the
service of Maurice of Nassau, planning to travel through Germany to join the army of
Maximilian of Bavaria.
It is during this year (1619) that Descartes was stationed at Ulm and had three dreams
that inspired him to seek a new method for scientific inquiry and to envisage a unified
science. Soon afterwards, in 1620, he began looking for this new method, starting but
never completing several works on method, including drafts of the first eleven rules
of Rules for the Direction of the Mind. Descartes worked on and off on it for years until it
was finally abandoned for good in 1628. During this time, he also worked on other, more
scientifically oriented projects such as optics. In the course of these inquiries, it is possible
that he discovered the law of refraction as early as 1626. It is also during this time that
Descartes had regular contact with Father Marin Mersenne, who was to become his long
time friend and contact with the intellectual community during his 20 years in the
Netherlands.
Descartes moved to the Netherlands in late 1628 and, despite several changes of
address and a few trips back to France, he remained there until moving to Sweden at the
invitation of Queen Christina in late 1649. He moved to the Netherlands in order to
achieve solitude and quiet that he could not attain with all the distractions of Paris and
the constant intrusion of visitors. It is here in 1629 that Descartes began work on “a little
treatise,” which took him approximately three years to complete, entitled The World. This
work was intended to show how mechanistic physics could explain the vast array of
phenomena in the world without reference to the Scholastic principles of substantial forms
and real qualities, while also asserting a heliocentric conception of the solar system. But
the condemnation of Galileo by the Inquisition for maintaining this latter thesis led
Descartes to suppress its publication. From 1634-1636, Descartes finished his scientific
essays Dioptique and Meteors, which apply his geometrical method to these fields. He
also wrote a preface to these essays in the winter of 1635/1636 to be attached to them in
addition to another one on geometry. This “preface” became The Discourse on
Method and was published in French along with the three essays in June 1637. And, on
a personal note, during this time his daughter, Francine, was born in 1635, her mother
being a maid at the home where Descartes was staying. But Francine, at the age of five,
died of a fever in 1640 when he was making arrangements for her to live with relatives in
France so as to ensure her education.
Descartes began work on Meditations on First Philosophy in 1639. Through Mersenne,
Descartes solicited criticism of his Meditations from amongst the most learned people of
his day, including Antoine Arnauld, Peirre Gassendi, and Thomas Hobbes. The first
edition of the Meditations was published in Latin in 1641 with six sets of objections and
his replies. A second edition published in 1642 also included a seventh set of objections
and replies as well as a letter to Father Dinet in which Descartes defended his system
against charges of unorthodoxy. These charges were raised at the Universities of Utrecht
and Leiden and stemmed from various misunderstandings about his method and the
supposed opposition of his theses to Aristotle and the Christian faith.
This controversy led Descartes to post two open letters against his enemies. The first is
entitled Notes on a Program posted in 1642 in which Descartes refutes the theses of his
recently estranged disciple, Henricus Regius, a professor of medicine at Utrecht.
These Notes were intended not only to refute what Descartes understood to be Regius’
false theses but also to distance himself from his former disciple, who had started a ruckus
at Utrecht by making unorthodox claims about the nature of human beings. The second
is a long attack directed at the rector of Utrecht, Gisbertus Voetius in the Open Letter to
Voetiusposted in 1643. This was in response to a pamphlet anonymously circulated by
some of Voetius’ friends at the University of Leiden further attacking Descartes’
philosophy. Descartes’ Open Letter led Voetius to have him summoned before the council
of Utrecht, who threatened him with expulsion and the public burning of his books.
Descartes, however, was able to flee to the Hague and convince the Prince of Orange to
intervene on his behalf.
In the following year (1643), Descartes began an affectionate and philosophically fruitful
correspondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, who was known for her acute
intellect and had read the Discourse on Method. Yet, as this correspondence with
Elizabeth was beginning, Descartes was already in the midst of writing a textbook version
of his philosophy entitled Principles of Philosophy, which he ultimately dedicated to her.
Although it was originally supposed to have six parts, he published it in 1644 with only
four completed: The Principles of Human Knowledge, The Principles of Material Things,
The Visible Universe, and The Earth. The other two parts were to be on plant and animal
life and on human beings, but he decided it would be impossible for him to conduct all the
experiments necessary for writing them. Elizabeth probed Descartes about issues that he
had not dealt with in much detail before, including free will, the passions and morals. This
eventually inspired Descartes to write a treatise entitled The Passions of the Soul, which
was published just before his departure to Sweden in 1649. Also, during these later years,
the Meditations and Principles were translated from Latin into French for a wider, more
popular audience and were published in 1647.
In late 1646, Queen Christina of Sweden initiated a correspondence with Descartes
through a French diplomat and friend of Descartes’ named Chanut. Christina pressed
Descartes on moral issues and a discussion of the absolute good. This correspondence
eventually led to an invitation for Descartes to join the Queen’s court in Stockholm in
February 1649. Although he had his reservations about going, Descartes finally accepted
Christina’s invitation in July of that year. He arrived in Sweden in September 1649 where
he was asked to rise at 5:00am to meet the Queen to discuss philosophy, contrary to his
usual habit, developed at La Fleche, of sleeping in late,. His decision to go to Sweden,
however, was ill-fated, for Descartes caught pneumonia and died on February 11, 1650.
v. JOHN LOCKE

John Locke (1632—1704)

John Locke was among the most famous philosophers and political theorists of the
17th century. He is often regarded as the founder of a school of thought known as British
Empiricism, and he made foundational contributions to modern theories of limited, liberal
government. He was also influential in the areas of theology, religious toleration, and
educational theory. In his most important work, the Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, Locke set out to offer an analysis of the human mind and its acquisition
of knowledge. He offered an empiricist theory according to which we acquire ideas
through our experience of the world. The mind is then able to examine, compare, and
combine these ideas in numerous different ways. Knowledge consists of a special kind of
relationship between different ideas. Locke’s emphasis on the philosophical examination
of the human mind as a preliminary to the philosophical investigation of the world and its
contents represented a new approach to philosophy, one which quickly gained a number
of converts, especially in Great Britain. In addition to this broader project,
the Essay contains a series of more focused discussions on important, and widely
divergent, philosophical themes. In politics, Locke is best known as a proponent of limited
government. He uses a theory of natural rights to argue that governments have
obligations to their citizens, have only limited powers over their citizens, and can
ultimately be overthrown by citizens under certain circumstances. He also provided
powerful arguments in favor of religious toleration. This article attempts to give a broad
overview of all key areas of Locke’s thought.
1. Life and Works
John Locke was born in 1632 in Wrington, a small village in southwestern England. His
father, also named John, was a legal clerk and served with the Parliamentary forces in
the English Civil War. His family was well-to-do, but not of particularly high social or
economic standing. Locke spent his childhood in the West Country and as a teenager
was sent to Westminster School in London.
Locke was successful at Westminster and earned a place at Christ Church, Oxford. He
was to remain in Oxford from 1652 until 1667. Although he had little appreciation for the
traditional scholastic philosophy he learned there, Locke was successful as a student and
after completing his undergraduate degree he held a series of administrative and
academic posts in the college. Some of Locke’s duties included instruction of
undergraduates. One of his earliest substantive works, the Essays on the Law of Nature,
was developed in the course of his teaching duties. Much of Locke’s intellectual effort and
energy during his time at Oxford, especially during his later years there, was devoted to
the study of medicine and natural philosophy (what we would now call science). Locke
read widely in these fields, participated in various experiments, and became acquainted
with Robert Boyle and many other notable natural philosophers. He also undertook the
normal course of education and training to become a physician.
Locke left Oxford for London in 1667 where he became attached to the family of Anthony
Ashley Cooper (then Lord Ashley, later the Earl of Shaftesbury). Locke may have played
a number of roles in the household, mostly likely serving as tutor to Ashley’s son. In
London, Locke continued to pursue his interests in medicine and natural philosophy. He
formed a close working relationship with Thomas Sydenham, who later became one the
most famous physicians of the age. He made a number of contacts within the newly
formed Royal Society and became a member in 1668. He also acted as the personal
physician to Lord Ashley. Indeed, on one occasion Locke participated in a very delicate
surgical operation which Ashley credited with saving his life. Ashley was one of the most
prominent English politicians at the time. Through his patronage Locke was able to hold
a series of governmental posts. Most of his work related to policies in England’s American
and Caribbean colonies. Most importantly, this was the period in Locke’s life when he
began the project which would culminate in his most famous work, the Essay Concerning
Human Understanding. The two earliest drafts of that work date from 1671. He was to
continue work on this project intermittently for nearly twenty years.

vi. DAVID HUME

David Hume, (born May 7 [April 26, Old Style], 1711, Edinburgh, Scotland—
died August 25, 1776, Edinburgh), Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and
essayist known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism.

Hume conceived of philosophy as the inductive, experimental science of human nature.

Taking the scientific method of the English physicist Sir Isaac Newton as his model and
building on the epistemology of the English philosopher John Locke, Hume tried to
describe how the mind works in acquiring what is called knowledge. He concluded that
no theory of reality is possible; there can be no knowledge of anything beyond experience.
Despite the enduring impact of his theory of knowledge, Hume seems to have considered
himself chiefly as a moralist.

Early Life And Works

Hume was the younger son of Joseph Hume, the modestly circumstanced laird, or lord,
of Ninewells, a small estate adjoining the village of Chirnside, about nine miles distant
from Berwick-upon-Tweed on the Scottish side of the border. David’s mother, Catherine,
a daughter of Sir David Falconer, president of the Scottish court of session, was in
Edinburgh when he was born. In his third year his father died. He entered Edinburgh
University when he was about 12 years old and left it at 14 or 15, as was then usual.
Pressed a little later to study law (in the family tradition on both sides), he found it
distasteful and instead read voraciously in the wider sphere of letters. Because of the
intensity and excitement of his intellectual discovery, he had a nervous breakdown in
1729, from which it took him a few years to recover.
In 1734, after trying his hand in a merchant’s office in Bristol, he came to the turning point
of his life and retired to France for three years. Most of this time he spent at La Flèche on
the Loire, in the old Anjou, studying and writing A Treatise of Human Nature.
The Treatise was Hume’s attempt to formulate a full-fledged philosophical system. It is
divided into three books: Book I, “Of the Understanding,” discusses, in order, the origin of
ideas; the ideas of space and time; knowledge and probability, including the nature
of causality; and the skeptical implications of those theories. Book II, “Of the Passions,”
describes an elaborate psychological machinery to explain the affective, or emotional,
order in humans and assigns a subordinate role to reason in this mechanism. Book III,
on morals, characterizes moral goodness in terms of “feelings” of approval or disapproval
that people have when they consider human behaviour in the light of agreeable or
disagreeable consequences, either to themselves or to others.

vii. IMMANUEL KANT

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is the central figure in modern philosophy. He synthesized

early modern rationalism and empiricism, set the terms for much of nineteenth and
twentieth century philosophy, and continues to exercise a significant influence today in
metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and other fields. The
fundamental idea of Kant’s “critical philosophy” – especially in his three Critiques: the
Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the
Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) – is human autonomy. He argues that the
human understanding is the source of the general laws of nature that structure all our
experience; and that human reason gives itself the moral law, which is our basis for belief
in God, freedom, and immortality. Therefore, scientific knowledge, morality, and religious
belief are mutually consistent and secure because they all rest on the same foundation
of human autonomy, which is also the final end of nature according to the teleological
worldview of reflecting judgment that Kant introduces to unify the theoretical and practical
parts of his philosophical system.
Life and works
Immanuel Kant was born April 22, 1724 in Königsberg, near the southeastern shore of
the Baltic Sea. Today Königsberg has been renamed Kaliningrad and is part of Russia.
But during Kant’s lifetime Königsberg was the capital of East Prussia, and its dominant
language was German. Though geographically remote from the rest of Prussia and other
German cities, Königsberg was then a major commercial center, an important military
port, and a relatively cosmopolitan university town.[1]
Kant was born into an artisan family of modest means. His father was a master harness
maker, and his mother was the daughter of a harness maker, though she was better
educated than most women of her social class. Kant’s family was never destitute, but his
father’s trade was in decline during Kant’s youth and his parents at times had to rely on
extended family for financial support.
Kant’s parents were Pietist and he attended a Pietist school, the Collegium Fridericianum,
from ages eight through fifteen. Pietism was an evangelical Lutheran movement that
emphasized conversion, reliance on divine grace, the experience of religious emotions,
and personal devotion involving regular Bible study, prayer, and introspection. Kant
reacted strongly against the forced soul-searching to which he was subjected at the
Collegium Fridericianum, in response to which he sought refuge in the Latin classics,
which were central to the school’s curriculum. Later the mature Kant’s emphasis on
reason and autonomy, rather than emotion and dependence on either authority or grace,
may in part reflect his youthful reaction against Pietism. But although the young Kant
loathed his Pietist schooling, he had deep respect and admiration for his parents,
especially his mother, whose “genuine religiosity” he described as “not at all enthusiastic.”
According to his biographer, Manfred Kuehn, Kant’s parents probably influenced him
much less through their Pietism than through their artisan values of “hard work, honesty,
cleanliness, and independence,” which they taught him by example.[2]
Kant attended college at the University of Königsberg, known as the Albertina, where his
early interest in classics was quickly superseded by philosophy, which all first year
students studied and which encompassed mathematics and physics as well as logic,
metaphysics, ethics, and natural law. Kant’s philosophy professors exposed him to the
approach of Christian Wolff (1679–1750), whose critical synthesis of the philosophy of G.
W. Leibniz (1646–1716) was then very influential in German universities. But Kant was
also exposed to a range of German and British critics of Wolff, and there were strong
doses of Aristotelianism and Pietism represented in the philosophy faculty as well. Kant’s
favorite teacher was Martin Knutzen (1713–1751), a Pietist who was heavily influenced
by both Wolff and the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704). Knutzen introduced
Kant to the work of Isaac Newton (1642–1727), and his influence is visible in Kant’s first
published work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (1747), which was a
critical attempt to mediate a dispute in natural philosophy between Leibnizians and
Newtonians over the proper measurement of force.
Kant retired from teaching in 1796. For nearly two decades he had lived a highly
disciplined life focused primarily on completing his philosophical system, which began to
take definite shape in his mind only in middle age. After retiring he came to believe that
there was a gap in this system separating the metaphysical foundations of natural science
from physics itself, and he set out to close this gap in a series of notes that postulate the
existence of an ether or caloric matter. These notes, known as the Opus Postumum,
remained unfinished and unpublished in Kant’s lifetime, and scholars disagree on their
significance and relation to his earlier work. It is clear, however, that these late notes show
unmistakable signs of Kant’s mental decline, which became tragically precipitous around
1800. Kant died February 12, 1804, just short of his eightieth birthday.

viii. SIGMUND FREUD

Sigmund Freud (1856—1939)

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was a physiologist, medical doctor,
psychologist and influential thinker of the early twentieth century. Working initially in close
collaboration with Joseph Breuer, Freud elaborated the theory that the mind is a complex
energy-system, the structural investigation of which is the proper province of psychology.
He articulated and refined the concepts of the unconscious, infantile sexuality and
repression, and he proposed a tripartite account of the mind’s structure—all as part of a
radically new conceptual and therapeutic frame of reference for the understanding of
human psychological development and the treatment of abnormal mental conditions.
Notwithstanding the multiple manifestations of psychoanalysis as it exists today, it can in
almost all fundamental respects be traced directly back to Freud’s original work.
Freud’s innovative treatment of human actions, dreams, and indeed of cultural artifacts
as invariably possessing implicit symbolic significance has proven to be extraordinarily
fruitful, and has had massive implications for a wide variety of fields including psychology,
anthropology, semiotics, and artistic creativity and appreciation. However, Freud’s most
important and frequently re-iterated claim, that with psychoanalysis he had invented a
successful science of the mind, remains the subject of much critical debate and
controversy.
Life
Freud was born in Frieberg, Moravia in 1856, but when he was four years old his family
moved to Vienna where he was to live and work until the last years of his life. In 1938 the
Nazis annexed Austria, and Freud, who was Jewish, was allowed to leave for England.
For these reasons, it was above all with the city of Vienna that Freud’s name was destined
to be deeply associated for posterity, founding as he did what was to become known as
the ‘first Viennese school’ of psychoanalysis from which flowed psychoanalysis as a
movement and all subsequent developments in this field. The scope of Freud’s interests,
and of his professional training, was very broad. He always considered himself first and
foremost a scientist, endeavoring to extend the compass of human knowledge, and to
this end (rather than to the practice of medicine) he enrolled at the medical school at the
University of Vienna in 1873. He concentrated initially on biology, doing research in
physiology for six years under the great German scientist Ernst Brücke, who was director
of the Physiology Laboratory at the University, and thereafter specializing in neurology.
He received his medical degree in 1881, and having become engaged to be married in
1882, he rather reluctantly took up more secure and financially rewarding work as a doctor
at Vienna General Hospital. Shortly after his marriage in 1886, which was extremely
happy and gave Freud six children—the youngest of whom, Anna, was to herself become
a distinguished psychoanalyst—Freud set up a private practice in the treatment of
psychological disorders, which gave him much of the clinical material that he based his
theories and pioneering techniques on.
In 1885-86, Freud spent the greater part of a year in Paris, where he was deeply
impressed by the work of the French neurologist Jean Charcot who was at that time using
hypnotism to treat hysteria and other abnormal mental conditions. When he returned to
Vienna, Freud experimented with hypnosis but found that its beneficial effects did not last.
At this point he decided to adopt instead a method suggested by the work of an older
Viennese colleague and friend, Josef Breuer, who had discovered that when he
encouraged a hysterical patient to talk uninhibitedly about the earliest occurrences of the
symptoms, they sometimes gradually abated. Working with Breuer, Freud formulated and
developed the idea that many neuroses (phobias, hysterical paralysis and pains, some
forms of paranoia, and so forth) had their origins in deeply traumatic experiences which
had occurred in the patient’s past but which were now forgotten–hidden from
consciousness. The treatment was to enable the patient to recall the experience to
consciousness, to confront it in a deep way both intellectually and emotionally, and in thus
discharging it, to remove the underlying psychological causes of the neurotic symptoms.
This technique, and the theory from which it is derived, was given its classical expression
in Studies in Hysteria, jointly published by Freud and Breuer in 1895.
Shortly thereafter, however, Breuer found that he could not agree with what he regarded
as the excessive emphasis which Freud placed upon the sexual origins and content of
neuroses, and the two parted company, with Freud continuing to work alone to develop
and refine the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. In 1900, after a protracted period of
self-analysis, he published The Interpretation of Dreams, which is generally regarded as
his greatest work. This was followed in 1901 by The Psychopathology of Everyday Life;
and in 1905 by Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory
was initially not well received–when its existence was acknowledged at all it was usually
by people who were, as Breuer had foreseen, scandalized by the emphasis placed on
sexuality by Freud. It was not until 1908, when the first International Psychoanalytical
Congress was held at Salzburg that Freud’s importance began to be generally
recognized. This was greatly facilitated in 1909, when he was invited to give a course of
lectures in the United States, which were to form the basis of his 1916 book Five Lectures
on Psycho-Analysis. From this point on Freud’s reputation and fame grew enormously,
and he continued to write prolifically until his death, producing in all more than twenty
volumes of theoretical works and clinical studies. He was also not averse to critically
revising his views, or to making fundamental alterations to his most basic principles when
he considered that the scientific evidence demanded it–this was most clearly evidenced
by his advancement of a completely new tripartite (id, ego, and super-ego) model of the
mind in his 1923 work The Ego and the Id. He was initially greatly heartened by attracting
followers of the intellectual caliber of Adler and Jung, and was correspondingly
disappointed when they both went on to found rival schools of psychoanalysis–thus giving
rise to the first two of many schisms in the movement–but he knew that such
disagreement over basic principles had been part of the early development of every new
science. After a life of remarkable vigor and creative productivity, he died of cancer while
exiled in England in 1939.

ix. GILBERT RYLE

Although Gilbert Ryle published on a wide range of topics in philosophy (notably in the
history of philosophy and in philosophy of language), including a series of lectures centred
on philosophical dilemmas, a series of articles on the concept of thinking, and a book on
Plato, The Concept of Mind remains his best known and most important work. Through
this work, Ryle is thought to have accomplished two major tasks. First, he was seen to
have put the final nail in the coffin of Cartesian dualism. Second, as he himself anticipated,
he is thought to have argued on behalf of, and suggested as dualism's replacement, the
doctrine known as philosophical (and sometimes analytical) behaviourism. Sometimes
known as an “ordinary language”, sometimes as an “analytic” philosopher, Ryle—even
when mentioned in the same breath as Wittgenstein and his followers—is considered to
be on a different, somewhat idiosyncratic (and difficult to characterise), philosophical
track.
Philosophical behaviourism has long been rejected; what was worth keeping has been
appropriated by the philosophical doctrine of functionalism, which is the most widely
accepted view in philosophy of mind today. It is a view that is thought to have saved the
“reality” of the mental from the “eliminativist” or “fictionalist” tendencies of behaviourism
while acknowledging the insight (often attributed to Ryle) that the mental is importantly
related to behavioural output or response (as well as to stimulus or input). According to a
reasonably charitable assessment, the best of Ryle's lessons has long been assimilated
while the problematic has been discarded. If there are considerations still brewing from
the 1930s and 40s that would threaten the orthodoxy in contemporary philosophy of mind,
these lie somewhere in work of Wittgenstein and his followers—not in Ryle.
But the view just outlined, though widespread, represents a fundamental
misapprehension of Ryle's work. First, Cartesianism is dead in only one of its ontological
aspects: substance dualism may well have been repudiated but property dualism still
claims a number of contemporary defenders. The problem of finding a place for the mental
in the physical world, of accommodating the causal power of the mental, and of
accounting for the phenomenal aspects of consciousness are all live problems in the
philosophy of mind today because they share some of the doctrine's ontological,
epistemological, and semantic assumptions.
Second, and importantly, Ryle is not a philosophical behaviourist—at least he does not
subscribe to any of the main tenets associated with that doctrine as it is known today.
One may be confused by this if one is also confused about Ryle's conception of
philosophy. Although there is some truth in identifying him as an analytic philosopher—
he announces (1932, 61) that “the sole and whole function of philosophy” is philosophical
analysis—this is likely to be misunderstood today if one thinks that the proper goal of
philosophy (attainable if not in practice at least in ideals) is definitional analysis. It is this
that encourages the association with behaviourism (in at least one of its many senses).
But Ryle was not an analytical philosopher in this sense. True, Ryle acknowledges the
influence of Moore's emphasis on common sense (and thus on ordinary language); true,
he takes himself to be pursuing the type of philosophical investigation (exemplified by
Russell's Theory of Descriptions) that involves uncovering the logical form of
grammatically misleading expressions. But it is important to take account of the
differences that separate Ryle from the early Moore and Russell for it is their conception
of philosophy that has been inherited by many of us working within the “analytic” tradition
in philosophy today. That is the third point. For Ryle does not believe
in meanings (concepts or propositions) as these have been traditionally construed (as
stable objects or rules, the grasp of which is logically prior to, and thus may be used to
explain, the use of expressions). Indeed, Ryle's conception of philosophy was not
fundamentally different from that of Wittgenstein. Ryle sets out in print as early as 1932
a philosophical agenda that prefigures the published work of the later Wittgenstein; the
“elasticity of significance” and “inflections of meaning” Ryle finds in most expressions
appear to be the family of structures, more or less related, noticed by Wittgenstein; and
Ryle's attack on the “intellectualist legend” shares Wittgenstein's concern to understand
a proper—non-exalted—place for rules in an explanation of various philosophically
interesting achievements. In spite of the fact that some of Wittgenstein's protégés were
dismissive of Ryle's work,[1] the best way to understand Ryle is to see him, if not as
following in Wittgenstein's footsteps, then as walking some stretches of philosophical
terrain down a parallel path.

Biography
Gilbert Ryle was born in Brighton, Sussex, England on 19 August 1900. One of ten
children, he came from a prosperous family and enjoyed a liberal and stimulating
childhood and adolescence. His father was a general practitioner but had keen interests
in philosophy and astronomy that he passed on to his children and an impressive library
where Ryle enjoyed being an “omnivorous reader” (Ryle, 1970, 1). Educated at Brighton
College (where later in life he would return as a governor) Ryle went to Queen's College,
Oxford in 1919 initially to study Classics, but he was quickly drawn to Philosophy,
graduating in 1924 with first-class honours in the new Modern Greats School of
Philosophy, Politics and Economics. While not particularly sporting, his undergraduate
studies were relieved by rowing for his college eight, of which he was captain, and he was
good enough to have trials for the University boat. After his graduation in 1924 he was
appointed to a lectureship in Philosophy at Christ Church College and a year later became
tutor. He would remain at Oxford for his entire academic career until his retirement in
1968; in 1945 he was elected to the Waynflete Chair of Metaphysical Philosophy. With
the outbreak of war Ryle volunteered. He was commissioned in the Welsh Guards,
serving in intelligence, and by the end of the War had been promoted to the rank of Major.
He became the Editor of Mind after G.E. Moore's retirement in 1947; a post he held until
1971. Ryle was unstinting in his advice and encouragement to generations of students.
With colleagues he was “tolerant (and) uncensorious” (Warnock, xiv), but in philosophical
debate he could turn into a formidable opponent, expressing an intense dislike of
pomposity, pretence and jargon (Urmson, 271; Gallop, 228). He was also ever ready to
challenge both the excessive veneration paid by others to Plato and Classical authors as
well as the philosophical positions held by such contemporary colleagues as Collingwood
in Oxford or Anderson in Australia. He befriended Wittgenstein whose work, if not his
effect on colleagues and students, he greatly admired. “Outstandingly friendly (and)
sociable” (Warnock, xiv), he is remembered as an entertaining conversationalist. Despite
having turned away from literary studies during his first year at Oxford, sensing he had
little aptitude for them, and even though he read little other than the novels of Jane Austen
(about whom he wrote authoritatively) and P. G. Wodehouse, the style of Ryle's writing is
often literary and instantly recognizable even after a few sentences (Urmson, 271;
Mabbott, 223). A confirmed bachelor, he lived after his retirement with his twin sister Mary
in the Oxfordshire village of Islip. Gardening and walking gave him immense pleasure, as
did his pipe. He died on 6 October 1976 at Whitby in Yorkshire after a day's walking on
the moors. “Philosophy irradiated his whole life” (Mabbott, 224). He is reputed to have
said that the only completed portrait of him made him look like a “drowned German
General” (Mabbott, 224).

x. CHURCHLAND AND MERLEAU- PONTY

Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), French philosopher and public
intellectual, was the leading academic proponent of existentialism and phenomenology in
post-war France. Best known for his original and influential work on embodiment,
perception, and ontology, he also made important contributions to the philosophy of art,
history, language, nature, and politics. Associated in his early years with the existentialist
movement through his friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir,
Merleau-Ponty played a central role in the dissemination of phenomenology, which he
sought to integrate with Gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Saussurian
linguistics. Major influences on his thinking include Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl,
Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as neurologist Kurt
Goldstein, Gestalt theorists such as Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, and literary figures
including Marcel Proust, Paul Claudel, and Paul Valéry. In turn, he influenced the post-
structuralist generation of French thinkers who succeeded him, including Michel Foucault,
Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, whose similarities with and debt to the later
Merleau-Ponty have often been underestimated. Merleau-Ponty published two major
theoretical texts during his lifetime: The Structure of Behavior (1942 SC)
and Phenomenology of Perception (1945 PP). Other important publications include two
volumes of political philosophy, Humanism and Terror (1947 HT) and Adventures of the
Dialectic (1955 AdD), as well as two books of collected essays on art, philosophy, and
politics: Sense and Non-Sense ([1948]1996b/1964) and Signs (1960/1964). Two
unfinished manuscripts appeared posthumously: The Prose of the World (1969/1973),
drafted in 1950–51; and The Visible and the Invisible (1964 V&I), on which he was
working at the time of his death. Lecture notes and student transcriptions of many of his
courses at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France have also been published.
For most of his career, Merleau-Ponty focused on the problems of perception and
embodiment as a starting point for clarifying the relation between the mind and the body,
the objective world and the experienced world, expression in language and art, history,
politics, and nature. Although phenomenology provided the overarching framework for
these investigations, Merleau-Ponty also drew freely on empirical research in psychology
and ethology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and the arts. His constant points
of historical reference are Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. The characteristic approach
of Merleau-Ponty’s theoretical work is his effort to identify an alternative to intellectualism
or idealism, on the one hand, and empiricism or realism, on the other, by critiquing their
common presupposition of a ready-made world and failure to account for the historical
and embodied character of experience. In his later writings, Merleau-Ponty becomes
increasingly critical of the intellectualist tendencies of the phenomenological method as
well, although with the intention of reforming rather than abandoning it. The posthumous
writings collected in The Visible and the Invisible aim to clarify the ontological implications
of a phenomenology that would self-critically account for its own limitations. This leads
him to propose concepts such as “flesh” and “chiasm” that many consider to be his most
fruitful philosophical contributions.
Merleau-Ponty’s thought has continued to inspire contemporary research beyond the
usual intellectual history and interpretive scholarship, especially in the areas of feminist
philosophy, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, environmental philosophy and
philosophy of nature, political philosophy, philosophy of art, philosophy of language, and
phenomenological ontology. His work has also been widely influential on researchers
outside the discipline of philosophy proper, especially in anthropology, architecture, the
arts, cognitive science, environmental theory, film studies, linguistics, literature, and
political theory.
Life and Works
Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, in the province of Charente-Maritime, on
March 14, 1908.[1] After the death in 1913 of his father, a colonial artillery captain and a
knight of the Legion of Honor, he moved with his family to Paris. He would later describe
his childhood as incomparably happy, and he remained very close to his mother until her
death in 1953. Merleau-Ponty pursued secondary studies at the Parisian lycees Janson-
de-Sailly and Louis-le-Grand, completing his first course in philosophy at Janson-de-Sailly
with Gustave Rodrigues in 1923–24. He won the school’s “Award for Outstanding
Achievement” in philosophy that year and would later trace his commitment to the
vocation of philosophy to this first course. He was also awarded “First Prize in Philosophy”
at Louis-le-Grand in 1924–25. He attended the École Normale Supérieure from 1926 to
1930, where he befriended Simone de Beauvoir and Claude Lévi-Straus. Some evidence
suggests that, during these years, Merleau-Ponty authored a novel, Nord. Récit de
l’arctique, under the pseudonym Jacques Heller (Alloa 2013b). His professors at ENS
included Léon Brunschvicg and Émile Bréhier, the latter supervising his research on
Plotinus for the Diplôme d’études supérieures in 1929. Bréhier would continue to
supervise Merleau-Ponty’s research through the completion of his two doctoral
dissertations in 1945. During his student years, Merleau-Ponty attended Husserl’s 1929
Sorbonne lectures and Georges Gurvitch’s 1928–1930 courses on German philosophy.
He received the agrégation in philosophy in 1930, ranking in second place.
After a year of mandatory military service, Merleau-Ponty taught at the lycee in Beauvais
from 1931 to 1933, pursued a year of research on perception funded by a subvention
from the Caisse nationale des sciences (the precursor of today’s Centre national de la
recherche scientifique) in 1933–34, and taught at the lycee in Chartres in 1934–35. From
1935 to 1940, he was a tutor (agégé-répétiteur) at the École Normale Supérieure, where
his primary duty was to prepare students for the agrégation. During this period, he
attended Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel and Aron Gurwitsch’s lectures on Gestalt
psychology. His first publications also appeared during these years, as a series of review
essays on Max Scheler’s Ressentiment (1935), Gabriel Marcel’s Being and
Having (1936), and Sartre’s Imagination (1936).[2] In 1938, he completed his thèse
complémentaire, originally titled Conscience et comportement [Consciousness and
Behavior] and published in 1942 as La structure du comportement [The Structure of
Behavior, SC]. He was the first outside visitor to the newly established Husserl Archives
in Louvain, Belgium, in April 1939, where he met Eugen Fink and consulted Husserl’s
unpublished manuscripts, including Ideen II and later sections of Die Krisis.
With the outbreak of World War Two, Merleau-Ponty served for a year as lieutenant in
the 5th Infantry Regiment and 59th Light Infantry Division, until he was wounded in battle
in June 1940, days before the signing of the armistice between France and Germany. He
was awarded the Croix de guerre, recognizing bravery in combat. After several months
of convalescence, he returned to teaching at the Lycée Carnot in Paris, where he
remained from 1940 until 1944. In November 1940, he married Suzanne Jolibois, and
their daughter Marianne was born in June 1941. In the winter of 1940–41, Merleau-Ponty
renewed his acquaintance with Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he had met as a student at the
École Normale, through their involvement in the resistance group Socialisme et Liberté.
The group published around ten issues of an underground review until the arrest of two
members in early 1942 led to its dissolution. After the conclusion of the war, in 1945,
Merleau-Ponty would collaborate with Sartre and Beauvoir to found Les Temps
Modernes, a journal devoted to “littérature engagée”, for which he served as political
editor until 1952.
At the end of the 1943–44 school year, Merleau-Ponty completed his main
thesis, Phénoménologie de la perception [Phenomenology of Perception, PP], and in
1944–45 he taught at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, replacing Sartre during the latter’s
leave from this position. Merleau-Ponty defended his two dissertations in July 1945,
fulfilling the requirements for the Docteur ès lettres, which was awarded “with distinction”.
In October 1945, Les Temps Modernes published its inaugural issue; Merleau-Ponty was
a founding member of the journal’s governing board, managed its daily affairs, and
penned many of its editorials that were signed simply “T.M.”, even though he refused to
allow his name to be printed on the cover alongside Sartre’s as the review’s Director. That
fall, Merleau-Ponty was appointed to the post of Maître de conférences in Psychology at
the University of Lyon, where he was promoted to the rank of Professor in the Chair of
Psychology in 1948. From 1947 to 1949, he also taught supplementary courses at the
École Normale Supérieure, where his students included the young Michel Foucault.
Student notes (taken by Jean Deprun) from Merleau-Ponty’s 1947–48 course on “The
Union of the Soul and the Body in Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson”—a course that he
taught at both Lyon and E.N.S. to prepare students for the agrégation and which was
attended by Foucault—were published in 1968 (1997b/2001).
In 1947, Merleau-Ponty participated regularly in the Collège philosophique, an
association formed by Jean Wahl to provide an open venue for intellectual exchange
without the academic formality of the Sorbonne, and frequented by many leading Parisian
thinkers. Merleau-Ponty published his first book of political philosophy in
1947, Humanisme et terreur, essai sur le problème communiste [Humanism and Terror:
An Essay on the Communist Problem, 1969, HT], in which he responded to the
developing opposition between liberal democracies and communism by cautioning a
“wait-and-see” attitude toward Marxism. A collection of essays concerning the arts,
philosophy, and politics, Sens et non-sense [Sense and Non-Sense, 1996b/1964],
appeared in 1948. In the fall of 1948, Merleau-Ponty delivered a series of seven weekly
lectures on French national radio that were subsequently published as Causeries
1948 (2002/2004).
Merleau-Ponty declined an invitation to join the Department of Philosophy at the
University of Chicago as a Visiting Professor in 1948–49, but instead received a leave
from Lyon for the year to present a series of lectures at the University of Mexico in early
1949. Later in 1949, Merleau-Ponty was appointed Professor of Child Psychology and
Pedagogy at the University of Paris, and in this position lectured widely on child
development, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, and anthropology.
His eight courses from the Sorbonne are known from compiled student notes reviewed
by him and published in the Sorbonne’s Bulletin de psychologie (1988/2010). Merleau-
Ponty held this position for three years until his election, in 1952, to the Chair of
Philosophy at the Collège de France, the most prestigious post for a philosopher in
France, which he would hold until his death in 1961. At forty-four, Merleau-Ponty was the
youngest person ever elected to this position, but his appointment was not without
controversy. Rather than following the typical procedure of ratifying the vote of the
General Assembly of Professors, who had selected Merleau-Ponty as their lead
candidate, the Académie des sciences morales et politiques made the unprecedented
decision to remove his name from the list of candidates; the Académie’s decision was
subsequently overturned by the Minister of Education himself, who allowed the faculty
vote in favor of Merleau-Ponty to stand. Merleau-Ponty’s January 1953 inaugural lecture
at the Collège de France was published under the title Éloge de la Philosophie [In Praise
of Philosophy, 1953/1963]. Many of his courses from the Collège de France have
subsequently been published, based either on student notes or Merleau-Ponty’s own
lecture notes (1964b, 1968/1970, 1995/2003, 1996a, 1998/2002, 2003/2010, 2011,
2013).
In the face of growing political disagreements with Sartre set in motion by the Korean
War, Merleau-Ponty resigned his role as political editor of Les Temps Modernes in
December of 1952 and withdrew from the editorial board altogether in 1953. His critique
of Sartre’s politics became public in 1955 with Les Aventures de la
dialectique [Adventures of the Dialectic, 1973 AdD], in which Merleau-Ponty distanced
himself from revolutionary Marxism and sharply criticized Sartre for “ultrabolshevism”.
Beauvoir’s equally biting rebuttal, “Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism”, published
the same year in Les Temps Modernes, accuses Merleau-Ponty of willfully
misrepresenting Sartre’s position, opening a rift between the three former friends that
would never entirely heal. Merleau-Ponty’s intellectual circle during his years at the
Collège de France included Lévi-Straus and Jacques Lacan, and for several years he
was a regular contributor to the popular weekly magazine L’Express. In October and
November 1955, on a commission from Alliance française, Merleau-Ponty visited several
African countries, including Tunisia, French Equatorial Africa, the Belgian Congo, and
Kenya, where he delivered a series of lectures on the concept of race, colonialism, and
development. In 1956, he published Les Philosophes célèbres [Famous Philosophers], a
large edited volume of original introductions to key historical and contemporary thinkers
(beginning, interestingly, with philosophers from India and China) whose contributors
included Gilles Deleuze, Gilbert Ryle, Alfred Schutz, and Jean Starobinski. In April 1957,
Merleau-Ponty declined to accept induction into France’s Order of the Legion of Honor,
presumably in protest over the inhumane actions of the Fourth Republic, including the
use of torture, during the Battle of Algiers. In October and November of 1957, as his
second commission from Alliance française, he lectured in Madagascar, Reunion Island,
and Mauritius, citing as a primary motivation for accepting the commission his desire to
see first-hand the effects of reforms in French policies governing overseas territories. The
last book Merleau-Ponty published during his lifetime, Signes [Signs, 1960/1964],
appearing in 1960, collecting essays on art, language, the history of philosophy, and
politics that spanned more than a decade. His last published essay, “L’Œil et l’esprit” [“Eye
and Mind”, 1964a OEE] addressing the ontological implications of painting, appeared in
the 1961 inaugural issue of Art de France. Merleau-Ponty died of a heart attack in Paris
on May 3rd, 1961, at the age of 53, with Descartes’ Optics open on his desk.
Merleau-Ponty’s friend and former student Claude Lefort published two of his teacher’s
unfinished manuscripts posthumously: La prose du monde [The Prose of the World,
1969/1973], an exploration of literature and expression drafted in 1950–51 and apparently
abandoned; and Le visible et l’invisible [The Visible and the Invisible, 1968 V&I], a
manuscript and numerous working notes from 1959–1961 that present elements of
Merleau-Ponty’s mature ontology. The latter manuscript was apparently part of a larger
project, Être et Monde [Being and World], for which two additional unpublished sections
were substantially drafted in 1957–1958: La Nature ou le monde du silence [Nature or the
World of Silence] and Introduction à l’ontologie [Introduction to Ontology] (Saint Aubert
2013: 28).[3] These manuscripts, along with many of Merleau-Ponty’s other unpublished
notes and papers, were donated to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France by Suzanne
Merleau-Ponty in 1992 and are available for consultation by scholars.

B. Sociology
 i. The self as a product of modern society among other constructions

The Self as Social Construction

The paper begins with the articulation of key assumptions central to contemporary
constructionist scholarship. This is followed by an analysis of the issues in the social
construction of the self. To this end several major lines of inquiry along with their socio-
political implications are brought into focus. Finally, an alternative to traditional
conceptions of self, one that emerges distinctly from social constructionist theory is
presented.
In treating the social construction of self it is first necessary to sketch the contours of the
terrain. At the outset, there is the matter of the self. History has prepared us to speak of
the self in many different ways, and some of these are more central to constructionist
concerns than others. My particular concern in the present paper will be with a family of
uses that generally refer to a psychological or mental world within the individual. The
members of this family are many and varied. We variously speak of persons as
possessing mental concepts of themselves, and it is often said that these concepts are
saturated with value, that they may be defective or dysfunctional, that they figure
importantly in the individual’s rational calculus, and that they ultimately supply resources
for the exercise of personal agency. And too, many simply identify the process of
conscious choice as equivalent to the individual self. Such assumptions are deeply
embedded in Western culture and provide the under-girding rationale for practices of
jurisprudence, childrearing, education, counseling, and psychotherapy, among others.
Further, such assumptions furnish the basis for much research in psychology. While the
particular conceptions of Western culture are not widely shared, similarities in concern
with a mental world of the individual may be located in many cultures of the world. With
this particular focus on self in place, I shift attention to the matter of social construction.
In this case, it is important to outline some of the major assumptions that play themselves
out in contemporary constructionist scholarship. This will prepare the ground for treating
issues in the social construction of the self. Here I will discuss several major lines of
inquiry along with their sociopolitical implications. Finally, I will introduce an alternative to
traditional conceptions of self, one that emerges distinctly from social constructionist
theory.

ii. MEAD AND THE SOCIAL SELF

Recognizing that the self can not appear in consciousness as an “I,” that it is always an
object, i.e., a “me,” I wish to suggest an answer to the question, What is involved in the
self being an object? The first answer may be that an object involves a subject. Stated in
other words, that a “me” is inconceivable without an “I.” And to this reply must be made
that such an “I” is a presupposition, but never a presentation of conscious experience, for
the moment it is presented it has passed into the objective case, presuming, if you like,
an “I” that observes – but an “I” that can disclose himself only by ceasing to be the subject
for whom the object “me” exists. It is, of course, not the Hegelism of a self that becomes
another to himself in which I am interested, but the nature of the self as revealed by
introspection and subject to our factual analysis. This analysis does reveal, then, in a
memory process an attitude of observing oneself in which both the observer and the
observed appear. To be concrete, one remembers asking himself how he could undertake
to do this, that, or the other, chiding himself for his shortcomings or pluming himself upon

his achievements. Thus, in the redintegrated self of the moment passed, one finds both
a subject and an object, but it is a subject that is now an object of observation, and has
the same nature as the object self whom we present as in intercourse with those about
us. In quite the same fashion we remember the questions, admonitions, and approvals
addressed to our fellows. But the subject attitude which we instinctively take can be
presented only as something experienced – as we can be conscious of our acts only
through the sensory processes set up after the act has begun.

On the other hand, the stuff that goes to make up the “me” whom the “I” addresses and
whom he observes, is the experience which is induced by this action of the “I.” If the “I”
speaks, the “me” hears. If the “I” strikes, the “me” feels the blow. Here again the “me”
consciousness is of the same character as that which arises from the action of the other
upon him. That is, it is only as the individual finds himself acting with reference to himself
as he acts towards others, that he becomes a subject to himself rather than an object,
and only as he is affected by his own social conduct in the manner in which he is affected
by that of others, that he becomes an object to his own social conduct.

The differences in our memory presentations of the “I” and the “me” are those of the
memory images of the initiated social conduct and those of the sensory responses
thereto.

It is needless, in view of the analysis of Baldwin, of Royce and of Cooley and many others,
to do more than indicate that these reactions arise earlier in our social conduct with others
than in introspective self-consciousness, i.e., that the infant consciously calls the attention
of others before he calls his own attention by affecting himself and that he is consciously
affected by others before he is conscious of being affected by himself.

The “I” of introspection is the self which enters into social relations with other selves. It is
not the “I” that is implied in the fact that one presents himself as a “me. “ And the “me” of
introspection is the same “me” that is the object of the social conduct of others. One
presents himself as acting toward others – in this presentation he is presented in indirect
discourse as the subject of the action and is still an object,– and the subject of this
presentation can never appear immediately in conscious experience. It is the same self
who is presented as observing himself, and he affects himself just in so far and only in so
far as he can address himself by the means of social stimulation which affect others. The
“me” whom he addresses is the “me,” therefore, that is similarly affected by the social
conduct of those about him.

This statement of the introspective situation, however, seems to overlook a more or less
constant feature of our consciousness, and that is that running current of awareness of
what we do which is distinguishable from the consciousness of the field of stimulation,
whether that field be without or within. It is this “awareness” which has led many to
assume that it is the nature of the self to be conscious both of subject and of object – to
be subject of action toward an object world and at the same time to be directly conscious
of this subject as subject, – “Thinking its own existence along with whatever else it thinks.”
Now, as Professor James pointed out, this consciousness is more logically conceived of
as sciousness – the thinker being an implication rather than a content, while the “me” is
but a bit of object content within the stream of sciousness. However, this logical statement
does not do justice to the findings of consciousness. Besides the actual stimulations and
responses and the memory images of these, within which lie perforce the organic
sensations and responses which make up the “me,” there accompanies a large part of
our conscious experience, indeed all that we call self-conscious, an inner response to
what we may be doing, saying, or thinking. At the back of our heads we are a large part
of the time more or less clearly conscious of our own replies to the remarks made to
others, of innervations which would lead to attitudes and gestures answering our gestures
and attitudes towards others.

The observer who accompanies all our self-conscious conduct is then not the actual “I”
who is responsible for the conduct in propria persona – he is rather the response which
one makes to his own conduct. The confusion of this response of ours, following upon
our social stimulations of others with the implied subject of our action, is the psychological
ground for the assumption that the self can be directly conscious of itself as acting and
acted upon. The actual situation is this: The self acts with reference to others and is
immediately conscious of the objects about it. In memory it also redintegrates the self
acting as well as the others acted upon. But besides these contents, the action with
reference to the others calls out responses in the individual himself – there is then another
“me” criticizing approving, and suggesting, and consciously planning, i.e., the reflective
self.
It is not to all our conduct toward the objective world that we thus respond. Where we are
intensely preoccupied with the objective world, this accompanying awareness
disappears. We have to recall the experience to become aware that we have been
involved as selves, to produce the self-consciousness which is a constituent part of a
large part of our experience. As I have indicated elsewhere, the mechanism for this reply
to our own social stimulation of others follows as a natural result from the fact that the
very sounds, gestures, especially vocal gestures, which man makes in addressing others,
call out or tend to call out responses from himself. He can not hear himself speak without
assuming in a measure the attitude which he would have assumed if he had been
addressed in the same words by others.

The self which consciously stands over against other selves thus becomes an object, an
other to himself, through the very fact that he hears himself talk, and replies. The
mechanism of introspection is therefore given in the social attitude which man necessarily
assumes toward himself, and the mechanism of thought, in so far as thought uses
symbols which are used in social intercourse, is but an inner conversation.

Now it is just this combination of the remembered self which acts and exists over against
other selves with the inner response to his action which is essential to the self-conscious
ego – the self in the full meaning of the term – although neither phase of self-
consciousness, in so far as it appears as an object of our experience, is a subject.

It is also to be noted that this response to the social conduct of the self may be in the role
of another – we present his arguments in imagination and do it with his intonations and
gestures and even perhaps with his facial expression. In this way we play the roles of all
our group; indeed, it is only in so far as we do this that they become part of our social
environment – to be aware of another self as a self implies that we have played his role
or that of another with whose type we identify him for purposes of intercourse. The inner
response to our reaction to others is therefore as varied as is our social environment. Not
that we assume the roles of others toward ourselves because we are subject to a mere
imitative instinct, but because in responding to ourselves we are in the nature of the case
taking the attitude of another than the self that is directly acting, and into this reaction
there naturally flows the memory images of the responses of those about us, the memory
images of those responses of others which were in answer to like actions. Thus the child
can think about his conduct as good or bad only as he reacts to his own acts in the
remembered words of his parents. Until this process has been developed into the abstract
process of thought, self-consciousness remains dramatic, and the self which is a fusion
of the remembered actor and this accompanying chorus is somewhat loosely organized
and very clearly social. Later the inner stage changes into the forum and workshop of
thought. The features and intonations of the dramatis personae fade out and the
emphasis falls upon the meaning of the inner speech, the imagery becomes merely the
barely necessary cues. But the mechanism remains social, and at any moment the
process may become personal.

It is fair to say that the modern western world has lately done much of its thinking in the
form of the novel, while earlier the drama was a more effective but equally social
mechanism of self-consciousness. And, in passing, I may refer to that need of filling out
the bare spokesman of abstract thought, which even the most abstruse thinker feels, in
seeking his audience. The import of this for religious self-consciousness is obvious.

There is one further implication of this nature of the self to which I wish to call attention.
It is the manner of its reconstruction. I wish especially to refer to it, because the point is
of importance in the psychology of ethics.

As a mere organization of habit the self is not self-conscious. It is this self which we refer
to as character. When, however, an essential problem appears, there is some
disintegration in this organization, and different tendencies appear in reflective thought as
different voices in conflict with each other. In a sense the old self has disintegrated, and
out of the moral process a new self arises. The specific question I wish to ask is whether
the new self appears together with the new object or end. There is of course a reciprocal
relation between the self and its object, the one implies the other and the interests and
evaluations of the self answer exactly to content and values of the object. On the other
hand, the consciousness of the new object, its values and meaning, seems to come
earlier to consciousness than the new self that answers to the new object.

The man who has come to realize a new human value is more immediately aware of the
new object in his conduct than of himself and his manner of reaction to it. This is due to
the fact to which reference has already been made, that direct attention goes first to the
object. When the self becomes an object, it appears in memory, and the attitude which it
implied has already been taken. In fact, to distract attention from the object to the self
implies just that lack of objectivity which we criticize not only in the moral agent, but in the
scientist.

Assuming as I do the essentially social character of the ethical end, we find in moral
reflection a conflict in which certain values find a spokesman in the old self or a dominant
part of the old self, while other values answering to other tendencies and impulses arise
in opposition and find other spokesmen to present their cases. To leave the field to the
values represented by the old self is exactly what we term selfishness. The justification
for the term is found in the habitual character of conduct with reference to these values.
Attention is not claimed by the object and shifts to the subjective field where the affective
responses are identified with the old self. The result is that we state the other conflicting
ends in subjective terms of other selves and the moral problem seems to take on the form
of the sacrifice either of the self or of the others.

Where, however, the problem is objectively considered, although the conflict is a social
one, it should not resolve itself into a struggle between selves, but into such a
reconstruction of the situation that different and enlarged and more adequate
personalities may emerge. A tension should be centered on the objective social field.In
the reflective analysis, the old self should enter upon the same terms with the selves
whose roles are assumed, and the test of the reconstruction is found in the fact that all
the personal interests are adequately recognized in a new social situation. The new self
that answers to this new situation can appear in consciousness only after this new
situation has been realized and accepted. The new self cannot enter into the field as the
determining factor because he is consciously present only after the new end has been
formulated and accepted. The old self may enter only as an element over against the
other personal interests involved. If he is the dominant factor it must be in defiance of the
other selves whose interests are at stake. As the old self he is defined by his conflict with
the others that assert themselves in his reflective analysis.

Solution is reached by the construction of a new world harmonizing the conflicting

interests into which enters the new self.

The process is in its logic identical with the abandonment of the old theory with which the
scientist has identified himself, his refusal to grant this old attitude any further weight than
may be given to the other conflicting observations and hypotheses. Only when a
successful hypothesis, which overcomes the conflicts, has been formulated and
accepted, may the scientist again identify himself with this hypothesis as his own, and
maintain it contra mundum. He may not state the scientific problem and solution in terms
of his old personality. He may name his new hypothesis after himself and realize his
enlarged scientific personality in its triumph.

The fundamental difference between the scientific and moral solution of a problem lies in
the fact that the moral problem deals with concrete personal interests, in which the whole
self is reconstructed in its relation to the other selves whose relations are essential to its
personality.

The growth of the self-arises out of a partial disintegration, – the appearance of the
different interests in the forum of reflection, the reconstruction of the social world, and the
consequent appearance of the new self that answers to the new object.

C. ANTHROPOLOGY

i. THE SELF AND PERSON IN CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY

Anthropology has important contributions to make in extending the study of the self. An
integrated and cumulative body of anthropological theory relevant to the self has yet to
be realized. Nevertheless, it is possible to connect several lines of theory to suggest
converging general orientations and research strategies bearing on the study of the self
and related ideas. In addition, the ever-expanding comparative ethnographic record
constitutes a valuable resource that can be exploited to examine the broader applicability
or inapplicability of Western conceptions of the self--as well as to investigate, in their own
right, self-concepts that have developed independent of Western influence.
Anthropologists have historically displayed both an explicit and an implicit concern with
the self and related concepts. The late nineteenth-century British evolutionists focused
primary attention on the idea of progress as it was manifested in the cumulative accretions
of generic cultural growth and in the orthogenic development of supposedly universal
institutions. They anchored their theories in a conception of the human mind that operated
under a self-evident, if not selfish, philosophy of utilitarianism and that adopted an
appropriate logic of self-conscious "rational" choice. This self~fulfilling methodological
individualism viewed the human actor as operating, to some extent, independently of
social and cultural constraints. Contemporaneous reactions to aspects of British
evolutionism arose in Germany and France. Nascent German social science was strongly
influenced by idealistic philosophy. Volkerpsychologie (as elaborated by Steinthal and
Lazarus, Wundt, and others) stressed the existence of the group mind or collective
identity, a construct based in part on biology but more decisively shaped by the cumulative
effects of history and tradition. While developmentalism and transformation were parts of
the overarching schemes, there was recognition of varying Volkgeisten (or ethe)--or to
use Adolf Bastian's term, Volkergedenken, 'folk ideas'--produced by the different
geographical situations (geographicische Provincen) and historical experiences of human
groups. [2] Methodological individualism, however, continued to prevail in the sense that
group psychology was conceived of as an individual psychology writ large. Various
cultural institutions were seen as differentially reflective of separate faculties of the
individual mind. Wilhelm Wundt rejected the simple Lockean tabula rasa cause-and-
effect/stimulus-response psychology of British associationism. Conation, or will, was
coordinate with cognition; affects formed an important part of his system; and processes
of apperception could shape and transform sensory perception. The individual mind--and
by extension, the collective mind--was capable of creative synthesis based upon
particular past experiences, the momentary state of the apperceiving mind, and a whole
host of other contingent factors. Cause and effect, stimulus and response, could not be
understood without recourse to the intervening mediation of the apperceptive mass. The
Boasian notion of cultural integration and the particularistic resynthesis of diffused culture
traits are direct analogues of the apperceiving individual mind.
 ii. THE SELF EMBEDDED IN CULTURE

This research originated with an exploration of contaminated1 objects, colloquially

referred to as “heirlooms,” that our informants had received from or planned to pass on
to their kin. During the analysis of the data we became absorbed trying to understand the
locus of meaning for our informants’ valuation of these objects. We elaborated and added
to this foundation with insights from the literature and from our data to create an
integrative theoretical framework of sociocultural motivations and material culture.
Motivations and processes are described within the central dialectic of an individual actor
seeking positive affect through the pursuit of connectedness and worthiness and in the
context of the larger social order. The framework brings individual, societal and cultural
perspectives to the traditional dialectic of the self-versus the other in a way that enlightens
the processes and symbolic nature of the possessions.

The “embedded self” concept is derived from Goldschmidt’s “culturally embedded self”
(1990, 104) as “The symbolic self is inevitably embedded in the context of others”.
Particular emphasis is on object symbolism as it relates to connectedness and worthiness
of the self and the embedded self. From a material culture perspective, four types of object
symbolism are recognized: sentimental objects, prestige markers, status symbols, and
icons. The theoretical reason for these four types is explained as a matter of sociocultural
motivations and perspective. The motivations, perspectives, and processes that link
object symbolism to meaning for the embedded self are specified. The framework is
referred to with the acronym MOSES for Motivations, Object Symbolism, and the
Embedded Self. The concept of the “kinship embedded self” presents the family as a
special case of the other, as the kinship system is one of the most powerful “other”
contexts in which people find themselves embedded. By applying the MOSES framework,
we present a rich analysis of the data from our study of heirlooms. We are able to integrate
significant bodies of literature with our data findings and draw connections within the
literature not previously identified. Through examining the heirlooms from this material
culture theory, we are able to address our informants’ motivations for connectedness and
worthiness, how those manifests in object symbolism differently depending on
perspective, and the process by which that occurs. We demonstrate the importance and
value of considering the self as embedded within a social context, particularly within the
family. The concept of the kinship embedded self leads to powerful insights regarding the
meaning of contaminated objects in the family. The MOSES framework explains how
objects (1) provide a sense of connectedness with personal history or with kin, (2) classify
or mark the prestige of one’s own or one’s ancestors merits or achievements, (3)
symbolize status and maintain norms and roles in social and kinship structures, and (4)
serve as icons that, along with myth and ritual, communicate personal, community,
cultural and family values. MOSES is a theoretical framework and analytical tool that
integrates important concepts and bodies of literature to inform the understanding of
consumers’ motivations and meaning creation. When viewed as part of this larger
theoretical structure, many of the concepts in the social science and consumer behavior
literature, and the relationship among those concepts, are brought to light in a new and
powerful way. This framework should be useful to consumer culture theorists seeking to
interpret the symbolic role of objects as consumers seek connectedness and worthiness
for their embedded selves.

D. Psychology

i. THE SELF AS A COGNITIVE CONSTRUCTION

In treating the social construction of self it is first necessary to sketch the contours of the
terrain. At the outset, there is the matter of the self. History has prepared us to speak of
the self in many different ways, and some of these are more central to constructionist
concerns than others. My particular concern in the present paper will be with a family of
uses that generally, refer to a psychological or mental world within the individual. The
members of this family are many and varied. We variously speak of persons as
possessing mental concepts of themselves, and it is often said that these concepts are
saturated with value, that they may be defective or dysfunctional, that they figure
importantly in the individual’s rational calculus, and that they ultimately supply resources
for the exercise of personal agency. And too, many simply identify the process of
conscious choice as equivalent to the individual self. Such assumptions are deeply
embedded in Western culture and provide the under-girding rationale for practices of
jurisprudence, childrearing, education, counseling, and psychotherapy, among others.
Further, such assumptions furnish the basis for much research in psychology. While the
particular conceptions of Western culture are not widely shared, similarities in concern
with a mental world of the individual may be located in many cultures of the world. With
this particular focus on self in place, I shift attention to the matter of social construction.
In this case, it is important to outline some of the major assumptions that play themselves
out in contemporary constructionist scholarship. This will prepare the ground for treating
issues in the social construction of the self. Here I will discuss several major lines of
inquiry along with their sociopolitical implications. Finally, I will introduce an alternative to
traditional conceptions of self, one that emerges distinctly from social constructionist
theory.

The Emergence of Social Constructionist Theory

There are many stories to be told about the development of social constructionism in
scholarly worlds. I offer here but one, although one that is congenial with much common
understanding. To be sure, one may trace the intellectual roots of social constructionism
to Vico, Nietzsche, Dewey, and Wittgenstein, among others. And too, Berger and
Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966) was a landmark volume with strong
reverberations in neighboring disciplines. However, there are at least three major
intellectual movements that began to take shape in the late 1960s in the United States
and Western Europe. The amalgamation of these forms of inquiry—sometimes identified
with postmodernism—largely serve as the basis for most social constructionist inquiry in
the scholarly world today. Perhaps the strongest and most impassioned form of critique
of the dominant orders has been, and continues to be, ideological. In this case, critics
challenge various taken for granted realities in society and reveal the political ends that
they achieve. In effect, such analysis discloses the socio-political consequences of the
sedimented accounts of reality, in the attempt to liberate the reader from their subtle
grasp. Within the scholarly world more generally, such “unmasking” has played a major
role in Marxist scholarship, along with anti-psychiatry, feminist, racial, gay and lesbian,
and anti-colonialist movements, among others. The second major form of critique may be
viewed as literary/rhetorical. With developments in semiotic theory in general and literary
deconstruction in particular (Derrida 1976), attention was variously drawn to the ways in
which linguistic convention governs all claims to knowledge. Thus, whatever reality posits
one puts forward, they will bear the marks of the linguistic forms (including, for example,
grammatical rules, narrative conventions, and binary distinctions) necessary for
communication. In this sense the forms of language are not driven by reality so much as
they provide the forestructure
for what we take to be its nature. The third significant critique of foundational science was
stimulated largely by the 1970 publication of Thomas Kuhn’s, The structure of scientific
revolutions. Kuhn portrayed normal science as guided by paradigms of thought and
practice shared by particular communities. In effect, the outcomes of science were not
demanded by the world as it is, but are the result of communal negotiation. This social
account of science was further buttressed by a welter of research in the sociology of
knowledge and the history of science. Although these movements largely originated
within separate scholarly spheres, scholars increasingly discovered affinities among
them. In effect, one could recognize the contours of a broader movement, often identified
as social constructionist. Within this movement, three domains of agreement are
noteworthy.
ii. WILLIAM JAMES AND THE ME-SELF, I-SELF