Seigel posits that, since the early modern period at least, there are three definitions of the self: the bodily-material, the social-relational, and the reflexive (5-6). The first is identified with the thing-ness of an individuated human being, namely a body, along with its particular shape and desire. The second is individuation from within a social group, usually a people, as one is one out of a whole. The third is the conscious effort to abstract a "self" out from, and within, both body and society. In other words, it is the attempt to recognize an individual mind beyond mere materiality and sociality; that "you" are not simply identified with a body or a particular set of social relations. This process unfolds as self-consciousness, a particular focus for early modern philosophy as this "self" became important to define (or defeat) in relation to the threat of both materialism and nascent sociological structuralism.
As most things in philosophy, the modern crisis involved certain caesurae in Aristotelian philosophy, which left its imprint upon the Medieval mind (especially among so-called moderns, such as Bacon or Luther, who poured scorn on the Greek). The Aristotelian problem emerged with the radical disjuncture between intellectual-form and bodily-matter. Applied to the self, individuality becomes a mere empirical phenomenon, since the intellect only grasps the form impressed into matter. Yet, when it comes to the bodily-material definition of the self, such is mere accident. Hence "there can be no rational account of what makes a particular individual be the person he or she is: whatever is material in individuality lies beyond the grasp of the intellect". According to Seigel, Aquinas was willing to bite the bullet: our only means of recognizing individuality were sensory, and not rational. Yet this could lead to a belief that the self is a mere by-product of materiality, which increasing rationality will see dissolve. Individuality is something that fundamentally is unreal as the self becomes closer to the forms. Hence Seigel: "From Aristotle's perspective, it turns out, the closer one gets to the essential form that makes human beings human the farther one gets from individual human beings" (50). Thus, for some neo-Platonists (sic), like Plotinus, the boundaries of the self dissolve as one ascends further up towards the One.
This problem was only overcome through haeccity. First Scotus, then Leibniz in his attempt to salvage Aristotelian science with the findings of the new philosophy, postured that the only way to reconcile this problem was to see the principle of individuality was itself a unique form. We'll return to this near the end. But suffice to say, this opened up a new problem: "But to accept this conclusion would open the way to making each person a separate species, with a different end or goal" (51). Hence Seigel will frame modern philosophy's problem with the self, inherited from antiquity:
"We should therefore not be too quick to conclude that ancient thinking, even in its Aristotelian form, conceived the self as given, unquestioned, or free of inner tensions and divisions. Conflicts between active spirit and passive matter, between individuality and universality, surfaced in ancient consciousness as in modern, perhaps because they are inescapable features of human life. But these strains appeared differently, and more easily resolvable in classical theory because ancient culture gave access to a resource of which many moderns have deprived themselves, namely the belief that the world, like the self, is structured so as to fulfill intelligible moral ends" (51)
In other words, the fixed question took on a new urgency because the identity of man as microcosm of Reason had broken down. It was up to Christian philosophers (distinguished from Christians who had divorced philosophy from theology as irreconcilable, for one reason or another) to restore the ancient metaphysics.
One problem that has plagued Marxian historians, as well as other varieties of structuralist materialists, has been the misdiagnosis of the early-modern period as the creation of one-dimensional selves. Whether it is the image of a self-indulgent consumer reading his novel, the calculating merchant quantifying bodies into "labor", or the political economist penchant to look through the "objective" universal eye at society and its many moving parts, the rise of the bourgeoisie are condemned as the fracture of this uncritical (and primitive) spiritual harmony of a world. Seigel rejects this characterization. Liberal and bourgeois notions were neither one-dimensional nor reflecting a linear and calculating materialism (42-44). Instead the supposed progenitor of liberalism, Locke, offers a way through the problems of the self, taking account of all its dimensions. But we will return to him later.
Instead, I will summarize what Seigel considers as failed attempts to overcome the problems, usually at the expense of some dimension of the self. Descartes is one of the first who takes up the task, reknitting an Augustinian-Platonic moral universe with the new empirical sciences. Seeing in the nature's mechanism, Descartes turned inwards. But this was not to turn the individual consciousness as the new fundament for freedom, but because he had a critical belief that God would meet him in the depths of the self. Unlike later Kantian philosophy, the caesura between the mechanical-physical and intellectual-mind would because the turn inwards was the way out into the realm of the Forms, the path God would save the soul from within its material lesser-state (73). The Aristotelian disjuncture remained, but on radically new terms. The problem was less ontological (matter as inferior, passive, mere potentiality) than determinative (physical as locked into endless chain of cause-effect). Descartes attempted to revive Augustine's speculative inward reflections as the solution out of this mechanical box.
This put an emphasis on the third-dimension of the self, abandoning the body and its social relations as mere flux. Yet the problem of identifying this individual mind as something other than self-subsistent form (where each individual is, to himself, a unique species) remained. Later theorists would invert this Cartesian paradigm, abandoning the intellectual and reformatting reason as strictly empirical-physical. Many English political economists turned to sociality as definitive for self-hood. The problem was that, which Mandeville posed, sociality was not sufficient to develop virtue (117). Evil society could prosper and expand, and produce a race of vile people (the real meaning behind his "Fable of the Bees"). This shift to the second-dimension makes sense as a response to the development of increasingly mercantile and commercial societies. For Mandeville, something more must be done (particularly a government-led Patriot platform of austerity and virtue). For those like Smith, chastened by Mandeville, offered that even vice could, against itself, serve to produce the kind of benevolent society that fostered virtue. Commerce created more abstract bonds between people, expanding their capacity for sympathy. This sympathy would produce the kind of self-possession (an individual aware of plight over there) that would make people more virtuous (159). Perhaps the baker, butcher, and candlestick maker act in their own self-interest, but this engagement in commercial relations would ameliorate these people. Commerce, not republican austerity, would serve this end.
The turn to the second-dimension was not so much a rejection of the third-dimension, as it was a product of novel social developments. Nevertheless, its being muted also could unveil the difficult challenges of reflexivity. The most obvious is Hume's misunderstanding of Berkeley to reject self-hood as a mere nominal function of life together. Our passions and thoughts reveal all kinds of internal contradictions that are irresolvable, thus individuality is merely a product of our body being physically different from other bodies, and a social convention when among others. Nevertheless, Hume was favorable to the Scottish Enlightenment's hopes in commercial society as producing better men. Republicanism took root more strongly among French philosophes, especially Rousseau. Reflectivity and commerce made man immoral and flabby: tainted with a selfishness that was unwilling to acknowledge and submit to the General Will. This kind of civilization ruined men. Thus the social contract was a necessary process to subordinate man's evil self-love. Ideally it would operate in a Spartan republic of equals, but Rousseau feared this reality was impossible. Social relations would produce jealousy that would make men evil and taint the virtue of any society (218-228). Thus, Rousseau settled for a Hobbist constitutional order, a sovereign that molded society forcibly as representative of the People and the General Will. This was not merely a speculative concern, but exhibited in Rousseau's very life. The desire for wholeness, of all-in-all, destroyed any relation that failed to fully submit. Rousseau found himself disgusted with his many lovers when they failed to give themselves entirely to him. Thus, in a way, Rousseau metaphysically finds himself back to the Aristotelian caesura. True individuality is when it is lost in the will of another, and consummately only when it is lost in the supreme will, Nature, exercised through the People's General Will. Individuality is thus merely a stage on the way.
Similarly, other French philosophers refused the meaningfulness of the third-dimension, of an individuality that subsists beyond mere physicality and sociality. Diderot's materialism turned to man as the lettered ape, capable of discerning himself as a product of his animal sociality. Similarly, Condillac's materialism led him to see reason as fundamentally a product of human language, which is itself a wholly natural cause. Man may rise above his mere physical status, but this process is circumscribed through the material boundedness of man. In other words, man may gesture towards the heavenlies, but it's ultimately a babble, as man cannot think what he cannot speak. Later, a liberal constitutionalist like Constant dwelt drearily on any use for self-reflection. Like Hume, he recognized that the turn inward only manifest contradictions and irreconcilable intentions/passions. Commercial society weakened this impulse, as man became conformed to sociality. Reason weakened to plumb inwards, but this itself helped preserve the order (276-278; 286). This French restatement of republicanism, as well as with its aping of English commercial philosophy, collapsed into a heap of contradictions, weakness, and weariness.
But a turn back to the third-dimension was unleashed with Kant's revolutionary philosophy. The copernican-turn was to revive reflexivity through a reintroduction of the Aristotelian caesura in critical terms. The world of science, of cause and effect, was mechanistic and deterministic. But for this world to exist, it subsisted within the boundaries of the noumenal. The meaningless bouncing of atoms was enveloped by the purposive real, of which the self was apart. Thus, it was precisely within this disjuncture, between phenomena and noumena, that the self (discerned through critical philosophy) had the potential for freedom, the spontaneous act of the will (298; 316-317). It was in this way that Kant adhered to the Leibnizian rationalism that he hoped to both save and overcome. Leibiniz' world of monads was similar to Scotus' haeccity (which Seigel doesn't fully grasp in its modal metaphysics), where each monad was itself a world to itself, a fundamental principle. The various bonds, held together in bonds of relation, interacted without confusion or interpenetration. The cosmic order purposive, linking together monads into a harmony of difference, in themselves lovingly conjoined under the oversight of God (74-75). For Kant this purposive cosmic order, which encircled the mechanistic physical world, was postured and developed through the critical philosophy. Yet, again, the caesura between the two opened a new avenue of inquiry. Hence began the project of German Idealism.
Seigel believes that the Germans failed to overcome the balance necessary to hold all three-dimensions in tension, as well lacking the humility of distinguishing each from the other. Fichte, as a Jacobin, attempted to locate the tangent in the ego's will, but this was itself an echo of the universal will, whose holy crusade was to posses the inert world of objects. Thus, one would end up in a metaphysical Robespierre dictatorship of the People (370-371). Schelling, as a mirror image of Fichte, saw the self as part of a process in between a Neo-Platonic exitus-reditus, requiring submission to the divine absolute of Fate (390). Seigel's problem with both, as well as to the project of German Idealism, is that the world (phenomenal) and self (noumenal) were isomorphic, expected to image each other identically. If the world was not, indeed, suffused with moral purpose, but was lifeless mechanism animated by some ghost, then the attempt to refashion microcosm-macrocosm will end in artificial systems-building. Perhaps the greatest stride forward was Hegel's undertaking Kant's problem, but nevertheless trapped in the same set of problems. Seeking to overcome Kant's dualism, Hegel worked through the problem but resulted in an ideal self that, through dialectical aufehebung, was fully free, but in practice was limited through his precise historical moment (423). Perhaps Seigel sees Hegel in more an ontological key than a logical one, that this trans-historical process is something working itself out, rather than the process one witnesses macrocosmically and microcosmically that the self can undertake. In the latter form, Hegel indeed presents a way for the individual, through rigorous dialectics, reason himself into the vantage of the Absolute Subject, to see the world as it really is. It's for this reason Hegel believed his philosophy was Christianity restated in wholly rational, philosophical, terms, divested of its mythic/historic particularity. It's also perhaps why this form of Hegel was attractive to Nishida of the Kyoto School. But as Nishida postulated, Hegel (as was Christianity) was incomplete for he failed to advance one step more. Still there was the duality of God and the world, Creator and creation, which Zen sought to overcome to reach the true threshold of Nothingness.
Seigel then continues on to explore later philosophy which rejected the Newtonian universe for an increasingly fluid and amorphous physicality. The pinnacle of this shift is Foucault, who draws upon Nietzsche and Heidegger, to posit a transcendental self emerged out of corporeality. (603-605). For Seigel this too finds itself in a privileging of bodiless of the first-dimension, which disgusted or confused earlier modern figures. But philosophy was no longer concerned with Christian questions of individual subsistence, since the idea that the embodied and ensouled individual would maintain a singular identity before the Judgement Throne of Christ. Instead, one can pursue a corporealized Neo-Platonism as one finds in the infinite fragmentation of corporeality as individuation of pure potentiality, matter. I'm not doing all the subtleties of Continental philosophy justice, thus I will leave it off here. But circling back, Seigel does not believe liberal-bourgeois man is one-dimensional, but rather later philosophies which rejected the quest for a reflective self that was circumscribed in body and body-politic. The sacred state of individuality, despite its ambiguities, seems to be a core element of his project to define as not merely naivety or convention. Here we return to Locke.
John Locke seems the least likely source to resolve the problems introduced. In fact, he was the one who shifted much Enlightened discourse in England and France towards sociality. Locke had rejected the notion of innate ideas (famously positing man as a tabula rasa), which exploded any Platonistic account of the soul as a principle or purposive monad. The self, rather than working out its own principle, was a product of experience. This account threatened to dissolve all personhood into a legal fiction (89-91). But to stop here is to misunderstand Locke's entire project. Like Hume later, Locke recognized the internal chaos of the given natural self. Bodily passions, desires, intentions, as well as the many overlapping and interlocking obligations and rights of society, threatened to tear a man apart. Certainly much tragedy juxtaposed these as a permanently wounded self. Antigone could do no other than die before the demands of family and city. Othello was torn to pieces between his honor and his jealous love, as the devilish Iago exploited this caesura into murder. Hurled into this world, man was bombarded with the contradictions of physical and social life. Locke recognized man was weak, but he also had the divine gift of reason. In this way, Locke could be considered doctor humilitae: Locke forces man to reconcile with limits. Locke rejected the mind-body dualism of Descartes, but postured the seemingly deus ex machina of mind superadded to matter. Reason is something supernatural, nevertheless to man it is wholly natural. With reason, despite individual human's halting attempts to use it, man has a fighting chance to bring these contradictions together. In a way, not unlike Locke's view of labor and nature, man must use his reason to unify a self out of his bodily sensations and his social bonds. Antigone may have been torn apart, but she reasoned to choose to be the faithful sister who buried her brother (which means she fulfilled natural law, despite the rule of Creon). Hence the Lockean battle-cry, derived from a claim in his Second Treatise: Appeal to Heaven!
For Locke, reason was man's best chance to bring order, cultivating his own internal garden of freedom and moral responsibility out of the chaos (92). Man was given a task to cultivate paradise, even as he was not one of the gods or made of the eternal, but a contingent being drawn out of the dust of nothingness. But this task of self-fashioning was not like the aristocratic Neo-Stoicism that had been popular, a process of (often vain) self-willing and modeling. Often these selves are brittle, smashed to pieces by the challenges of life. Beyond Seigel, I'm reminded of Benjamin's assessment of the trauerspiel: the German prince's tragedy was his sovereignty exceeded his Neo-stoic self-fashioning. He could do none other than Fate decreed and thus could only find solace in shutting his inner-eye, sorrowfully submitting to inscrutable providence, paralyzed by the power he could not wield. Locke instead staked his hopes on the eschaton. To summarize Lock's pluralized-yet-unified self:
"From this we can conclude that even though Locke seems to present personal identity as a single thing, his discussion actually suggests that it has three different aspects (independently of our identity as 'men'). We are selves to others by virtue of what they know about our mental and moral life; we are selves to ourselves, but incompletely so, through the imperfect consciousness we have our lives and deeds in the here and now; and we can imagine and hope to be complete selves in light of the transparency that God can and at a certain point will open for us" (103)
Seigel offers a comment here that for those who don't believe in the third-aspect will have to find contentment in an ultimately undefined self-as-project. This articulation can find appeal to the modern liberal, subsumed in a Dewey-esque valorization of endless debate. And perhaps that's why Seigel finds Locke to be the hero of his narrative (though perhaps he's religious, I don't know). Nevertheless, it's particularly this Christian and eschatological referent that allows Locke's humility to be grounded in an eschatological reality. Reason (the third-dimension process of reflective selfhood) brings together our empirical sensations and our social bonds, fashioning a unified self out of them. But this project is unfinished. We are ourselves by dint of both others' perceptions of us and our own perceptions of ourselves. But these are all unfinished perspectives and we will not fully know who we are until the Final Judgement, when God opens up all the books. Rather than searching inward for a metaphysical source of unity, man's contingency is allowed to fully flower. Unlike Stoic self-fashioning, one's self-knowledge is partially mediated through the several relations we have. And finally, unlike modern liberal relativity, God is the ultimate author of our selves. Today we see in a mirror darkly, but one day we will see as we are seen.
From this vantage, Locke becomes a solidly Christian philosopher, in a similar light as Scotus and Leibniz, who seeks to preserve a unified vision of man as the image of God, bearer of eternal significance. The caesura is ultimately closed, all dualisms fulfilled, through man's own quest to become what God called him to be. Yet this self is itself entirely creaturely, contingent and subject to a battery of cosmic forces. Nevertheless, God gave man the means to begin this process and overcome the morass of confusion.
A problem with this vantage is that Locke's God seems some remote from the particular shape of God given in the Scripture. One way of looking at it is that Locke is giving a metaphysical account that would then undergird the reading of Scripture. Nevertheless, the lack of specificity can loan Locke a Deistic air, applicable to Nature's architect or any other Theistic account. It's not hard to see how Locke could be bent into a variety of other contexts, which synthesize Lockean empirical humility with the new (or faux) liberal project of utilitarianism and pragmatism. Even so, Locke's eschatological grounding of the self can cut through the presentist metaphysics of many forms of idealism, as well as the turn towards materiality and sociality to ground the self. The fullness of a man's haeccity is not seen until the End, humanity defined less in terms of something internal (form or otherwise) rather than man's external temporal extension. The End gives meaning not only to the hic et nunc, but defines even proctology. Man's historical contingency, which is what is finally unveiled and judged before God, is allowed to bloom as something fundamentally real. The "I" becomes more real through history, the mere (formally empty) individuation (the core meaning of hypostasis) subsumes the formal characteristics of the person (prosopon). Your mask-face is *you*.
Through this vantage, Locke might open up some interesting vantages on selfhood. Putting Locke in dialogue with the Cappadocians (and their metaphysical grammar of hypostasis), along with Scotus and Leibniz might bear fruit. One can even reconcile some elements of Locke's thought with Berkeley's empirical idealism. Seigel's historical reconstruction may have all kinds of misdiagnoses or misreading (I won't judge), but his appraisal of Locke opens interesting new paths of inquiry. For it's only, ultimately, in the End that (as CS Lewis titled his tragicomedy) we will have faces.
