Is the Self a Kind of Understanding?

Abstract

We present a developmental, relational perspective on the self as a kind of reflective, interpretive understanding. Such self understanding always is embedded and emergent within the historical, sociocultural life-world, and serves to disclose and extend the being of particular embodied agents. Following an introduction that links our work to related traditions of scholarly writing on the self, our essay is organized in four parts. The first of these provides a very brief conceptual clarification of the relationships we assume between self and other aspects of personhood. The second offers a broad, developmental framework for the emergence of self as the kind of understanding we envision. The third elaborates the kind of understanding that constitutes the self, especially in terms of the care manifested by human agents in the life-world. In the final section of the essay, critical consideration is given to the viability, coherence, and potential fruitfulness of our attempt to consider self as a kind of understanding.