The Invention of The Self

Abstract

The Invention of the Self: Personal Identity in the Age of Art proposes that the notion of personal identity is a psycho-social construction that has evolved over many centuries. While this idea has been widely discussed in recent years, The Invention of the Self approaches it from a completely new point of view. Rather than rely on the thinking subject’s attempts to identify itself consciously and verbally, it focuses on the traces that the self-sense has unconsciously left in the fabric of its environment in the form of non-verbal cultural conventions, co-evolving with them. Covering a millennium of western European cultural history, it amounts to an ‘anthropology of personal identity in the West’. The Invention of the Self follows a broadly chronological path, tracing the self-sense from its emergence from the collectivity of the medieval Church to its consummation in the individualistic concept of artistic genius in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, it traces the development of tangible conventions, such as spaces, objects, images, gestures, behaviours and language, that were conducive to the exercise of the self-sense in the world. On the other hand, it observes the emergence of intangible dispositions, such as new sensibilities and experiences of emotion, which functioned as mental environments in which the self-sense could thrive. The Invention of the Self aims to bridge a gap that exists between cultural history and philosophy. Regarding cultural history (especially art history), it elicits significances from its material that have been thoroughly overlooked. Regarding philosophy, it highlights the crucial role that material culture plays in the formation of philosophical ideas. It argues that the sense of personal self is as much revealed by cultural conventions – and as a cultural convention – as it is observable to the mind as an object of philosophical enquiry.