Editorial Introduction: Poetics of Self-construal in Postcolonial Literature

Abstract

How man is made and how he makes himself was at the crux of the anthropological inquiry launched by Immanuel Kant in his 1798 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. The subsequent story of the discipline, progressively aided by others, both from the field of humanities (philosophy, sociology, psychology, ethnography) and of sciences (biology, physics, physiology, psychiatry), followed one or the other paths opened by the Königsberg philosopher. The self grounded in physiology is considered by Kant egoistic, self-centred and motivated by irrational drives: involuntary perception, subconscious associations, arbitrary taste or unaccountable desires. On the contrary, the pragmatic self is historically and culturally generated in an individual who has a motivation and a purpose in his effort to civilize himself, living in the spirit of law and morality. As values transcend the empirical self and are shared in common with peers, these constitutive states and activities of the psyche point to the existence of a common human nature which, however, changes across time and space.