The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century

by Jerrold Seigel

• ISBN13: 9780521605540
• ISBN10: 0521605547
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-03-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

What is the self? The question has preoccupied people in many times and places, but nowhere more than in the modern West, where it has spawned debates that still resound today. Jerrold Seigel here provides an original and penetrating narrative of how major Western European thinkers and writers have confronted the self since the time of Descartes, Leibniz, and Locke. From an approach that is at once theoretical and contextual, he examines the way figures in Britain, France, and Germany have understood whether and how far individuals can achieve coherence and consistency in the face of the inner tensions and external pressures that threaten to divide or overwhelm them. He makes clear that recent 'postmodernist' accounts of the self belong firmly to the tradition of Western thinking they have sought to supersede, and provides an open-ended and persuasive alternative to claims that the modern self is typically egocentric or disengaged.

Author Biography

Jerrold Seigel is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of History at New York University

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
PART I INTRODUCTORY
Dimensions and contexts of selfhood	3	(42)
Between ancients and moderns	45	(42)
PART II BRITISH MODERNITY
Personal identity and modern selfhood: Locke	87	(24)
Self-centeredness and sociability: Mandeville and Hume	111	(28)
Adam Smith and modern self-fashioning	139	(32)
PART III SOCIETY AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE: FRANCE FROM OLD REGIME TO RESTORATION
Sensationalism, reflection, and inner freedom: Condillac and Diderot	171	(39)
Wholeness, withdrawal, and self-revelation: Rousseau	210	(38)
Reflectivity, sense-experience, and the perils of social life: Maine de Biran and Constant	248	(47)
PART IV THE WORLD AND THE SELF IN GERMAN IDEALISM
Autonomy, limitation, and the purposiveness of nature: Kant	295	(37)
Homology and Bildung: Herder, Humboldt, and Goethe	332	(29)
The ego and the world: Fichte, Novalis, and Schelling	361	(30)
Universal selfhood: Hegel	391	(36)
PART V MODERN VISIONS AND ILLUSIONS
Dejection, insight, and self-making: Coleridge and Mill	427	(42)
From cultivated subjectivity to the culte du moi: polarities of self-formation in nineteenth-century France	469	(39)
Society and selfhood reconciled: Janet, Fouille, and Bergson	508	(29)
Will, reflection, and self-overcoming: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche	537	(31)
Being and transcendence: Heidegger	568	(35)
Deaths and transfigurations of the self: Foucault and Derrida	603	(48)
Epilogue	651	(9)
Notes	660	(54)
Index	714