Self: History of the Concept

Abstract

It is often asserted that the concept of the self emerges only in early modern times in connection with the concern for subjectivity that is taken to be characteristic of modernity. While it is true that the term ‘self’ as a noun, describing that which in a person is really and intrinsically this person, comes into use only from the seventeenth century onwards, what can be called the question of selfhood was not unfamiliar to earlier thinkers. This is, in its core, the question whether there is—and if so, what is—some unity, or at least continuity and coherence, of a human being over the life-course beyond their bodily constitution, beyond the unity of the body. Broadly, empirical traditions tended to doubt the existence of such unity. They could observe changes, even radical transformations, in the human mind. Transcendental traditions, in contrast, tended to argue that there had to be a unity of apperception, or of consciousness. In the intellectual space between these two positions, so to say, the issue could be addressed in ways that are more specific to the social and psychological sciences. Starting out from observations by Georg Simmel and George Herbert Mead on the formation of identities in social interaction, a sociology and social psychology of selfhood and identity has developed that could conceptualize variations of self-formation in different social contexts. Over the twentieth century, research on selfhood has developed in a broad semantic space in which aspects of the self are emphasized in highly various ways, connecting the concept of self to notions of modernity, of meaning, and of difference.