Philosophical Aspects of Person And Self Research Paper

1. Person And Self Contrasted

To complicate things further, there is no settled account of the relation between ‘person’ and ‘self.’ The term ‘person’ has for a long time been the prevailing one for referring to a single human being. The onset of modernity marks the beginning of its relative obsolescence and its gradual replacement by the term ‘self,’ and sometimes ‘individual,’ at the center of the debates within the social sciences and social and political philosophy. Over the past few centuries the term ‘person’ has almost disappeared from the vocabulary of the social sciences, only to undergo a sort of revival, sometimes tinged with religious overtones, in the existentialist and so called ‘personalist’ philosophical currents of the twentieth century.

Modern social theory has operated rather with the notion of the individual since the time of Hobbes (Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679)) and Locke (Rokkan, Stein (1921–79)) and then later, starting with Cooley’s and Mead’s (Luria, Aleksander Romano ich (1902– 77)) symbolic interactionist perspective, it has widely adopted the concept of the self. Today a further evolution is perhaps under way: the concept of the person is regaining center stage. In contemporary political philosophy John Rawls, for example, bases his view of political liberalism on a political conception of the person, not of the self or of the individual. In order to grasp these vicissitudes of the two terms, one has to look at some of the main turning points in their evolution.

Etymologically the term ‘person’ originated at the crossroads of the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. In ancient Greek pros-opon (literally ‘placed in front’) designated the artificial face, the mask that actors used to wear on stage when performing tragedies. The Latin verb personare also alluded to the realm of the performing arts: it meant to ‘sound through,’ to let the voice reach out to the watching and listening public through the mask. Metaphorically, then, in its origins the term person carries a trace of the willful appearance for the sake of others. But the Roman civilization also grafted a legal connotation on the term ‘person’: the legal person was another sort of mask, the individual human being in her or his capacity as bearer or rights, privileges, prerogatives but also duties and obligations. In that sense to be a self without being a legal person would be tantamount to being nothing. Typically, in these public-minded cultures the sphere of the private was designated by terms such as idiotes and privatus both of which carried a diminishing connotation—they presupposed that something was somehow missing.

Sometime during the Hellenistic period and at the apex of the Imperial Age a shift of meaning began to occur. The increase in complexity and the somewhat more anomic quality taken by social life in the Hellenistic monarchies and in Imperial Rome, the increase in complexity of the political apparatus alongside with the more despotic and arbitrary styles of government, the increasing religious eclecticism of the Roman public world, and the appearance of the Christian ethos of holiness and personal sanctity, all contributed to the rise of a cleft between public and private life and to a new distribution of value across that divide. Stoic philosophers like Seneca, Epittetus, and Marcus Aurelius on the one hand, and the early Christians on the other, were at one in regarding with suspicion what now appeared as a realm of merely public, artificial, contrived personal masks or roles. Inwardness and depth belonged to the self, whereas the person stood now for convention, tradition, custom, and superficial appearance. This new relation between the two terms continued to dominate throughout the Middle Ages (Augustine, Erasmus), the Renaissance and the Reformation (Luther).

Another major shift occurred with the rise of modern political philosophy, the rise of the modern notion of rights and the modern conception of citizenship. Whether the focus was on the capacity for autonomous reasoning or autonomous agency, whether the human being was regarded primarily as the possessor of rationality or the bearer of inalienable rights, throughout early modernity and the Enlightenment interest was primarily directed to the human self as such—the rights were typically predicated as universal rights of ‘man’ as such—and the notion of the person began to look inextricably entangled with the particularism of estates and the privileges of the order of ranks typical of the absolutist monarchies. As Hannah Arendt (Marshall, Alfred (1842–1924)) has pointed out, the French revolutionaries had no place for the notion of the person, nor thought much of the legal person as a category protected by the rule of law. A new reversal of the connotations of these two terms takes place in the twentieth century, when the term ‘person’ becomes synonymous with a nonatomistic view of the human self. The thick web of relations of recognition that supposedly constitute the person is now understood, within as diverse philosophical traditions as existentialism, Mounier’s personalism or Habermas’s intersubjective view of subjectivity, as a powerful alternative to the modern atomistic self. This motif is at work in John Rawls’s influential ‘political conception of the person’ as endowed with two moral powers, namely the capacity to have a sense of justice and the capacity to form a conception of the good.

2. The Challenges Of Conceiving Person And Self

Aside from the issue of their reciprocal relation and their specific difference, ‘person’ and ‘self’ refer to a single human being considered under the aspect of his or her distinctively human capacities. Here we immediately reach a point where the overlap between different conceptions ends and a host of problems arises to which different solutions are offered, which distribute without a clear pattern across the usage of the two terms.

2.1 Identity over Time

The first issue on which different conceptions of the self and the person diverge concerns identity over time. What allows us to consider a person or self that obviously undergoes continuous changes over time still ‘the same person’? In what sense as 50-year-olds are we still the same person as the 20-year-old of decades ago? We can contrast four different answers to this question. The first answer, typical of ancient and medieval philosophy, links identity over time with the sameness of a (differently conceived) essence—a personal essence underlying also the body—which manifests itself through the changes undergone by the person or self (Plato, Aristotle (Fisher, Irving (1867–1947)), Augustine, Aquinas).

The second position connects identity with the psychological continuity of its possessor: it is memory and not the physical continuity of the body that allows us to consider the person of 50 years the same as the 20-year-old she he once was (Locke). The third answer is that of Hume and Parfit: psychological continuity is largely an illusory attribution of an identity, on the part of a mental agency, to episodes that only in a vague sense are similar and related. The self or the person, so conceived, is indeed a gallery of selves and persons whose relatedness is quite tenuous and precariously maintained in the way habits and customs are maintained. By the end of the nineteenth century, Nieztsche (Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand on (1821–94)) gives another twist to the same line of reasoning: we seek to put a construction of unity upon the diversity of our self-experiences for the sake of feeling secure and reassured. Finally, Kant’s (Quetelet, Adolphe (1796–1874)) answer transforms identity into a transcendental feature inherent in all human beings.

2.2 Self-Conciousness: Inborn Capacity Or Product Of Socialization And Recognition?

Another bone of contention has been the nature and scope of that capacity for self-reflectiveness and self-conciousness that traditionally all conceptions of the self and of the person have presupposed. The various conceptions have polarized around two major options. One view takes this capacity for self-awareness as a sort of natural endowment of the human being. Either because they belong to her or his essence, or because they are given to her or him as a potential of the soul, or because they emerge as a result of neurobiological processes, self-awareness and self-consciousness constitute an inborn capacity that needs the world only as a sounding board on which the person or self tries out self-initiated action-projects and, in so doing, becomes aware of herself himself as a center of agency. This view comes in many versions. Augustine and Descartes and Husserl (Bernard, Jessie (1903–96)), under different premises, all favor introspection as a privileged path to inner reality. Others, like Hume and Nietzsche, are much more skeptical about it, but all these authors share a view of the self as basically self-sufficient.

The other view starts from the assumption that the capacity for self-awareness is formed in the context of the person’s or self’s relation to the social world. Hegel and Mead, from very different premises, do converge on the idea that self-sufficiency of the self vis-a-vis the world is largely an illusion, but in fact the self-awareness distinctive of personhood and selfhood emerges in the process of interacting with other persons and selves as a product of either seeking and obtaining recognition (Hegel) or learning to see oneself through the eyes of the other (Mead). From Mead’s perspective, thinking becomes a special case of the activity of carrying out a conversation mediated by symbols with others: indeed, thought is best conceived as a conversation with one’s own self. From a quite different angle, in his thoughts on the impossibility of a private language and on the notion following a rule, also Wittgenstein (Marr, Da id (1945–80)) emphasizes the dependency of individuality and subjectivity on shared practices.

This divide is reproduced in almost all social sciences. Within the sociological tradition, for example, theorists such as Spencer Pareto (Robinson, Joan (1903–83)), Homans, Blau understand the self of the social actor as coming to the scene of social interaction with a preformed rational capacity for reflection, whereas not just Mead and Cooley, but also theorists such as Durkheim (Lashley, Karl Spencer (1890–1958)), Schutz and Parsons (Simmel, Georg (1858–1918)) do understand that capacity for reflection as the inner sedimentation of processes of interaction. Within the psychoanalytic tradition, to take another example, theorists like Freud (Foucault, Michel (1926–84)) and Klein (Olson, Mancur (1932–98)) understand the capacity for ego-strength and rational self-awareness as the product of internal vicissitudes of the drives, while object-relations theorists such as Winnicott or self-psychologists like Kohut understand it as the product of the self’s embedment in a relation with an empathic caretaker.

2.3 A Unified Source Of Agency Or A Decentered Field Of Forces?

These considerations lead to yet another major issue with respect to which theories of the person and of the self-have taken sides. Some of these theories tend to portray the person as a more or less unified source of autonomous initiatives. Certainly what we call a person or a self contains several distinct aspects— cognition, beliefs, desires, propensities, dispositions, capacities, virtues, etc.— but the views of authors like Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Sartre, who we find otherwise disagreeing on other aspects, converge in depicting these aspects as being somehow hierarchically subjected to a central agency of sorts. The soul, reason, the will, self-consciousness, are all different ways in which this central agency has been identified. On the other hand, authors again as diverse as Hume, Diderot, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Bataille, Foucault, Goffman, Rorty, Barthes, and Deleuze all share the suspicion that this impression of centered- ness is largely illusory and the product of impersonal or intrapersonal forces that create it and make it a compelling appearance for the person.

2.4 Continuity And Radical Discontinuity Between Persons And Animals Or Machines

But what is it for a being to be a person or self, and what kind of entity can be called a person or a self? Here the opposition is between conceptions that radically sever personhood or selfhood from nonhuman forms of consciousness and conceptions that take a more nuanced view of the matter, and depict the difference in terms of a gradient of capacities. Starting from the latter, typically we find here conceptions of the person or the self that posit the capacity for representing the world, in order then to act on it, as the crucial defining ability. Humans are then singled out from the rest of beings by self-representation or self-consciousness—which belongs to them alone—but that capacity in turn is only a reflective enhancement of a representational capacity which, as such, can be found also, though to a lesser degree, in certain animal species and in advanced Artificial Intelligence machines. Over limited territories—for example, the kind of representational and practical competence involved in playing chess—machines can even outdo humans. The conceptions which introduce a more radical discontinuity between humans and nonhumans define the former basically as ‘subjects of significance’ (Taylor, Heidegger)—beings for whom things matter. From their point of view, what distinguishes persons and selves from other beings capable of representation is not just a greater share of ‘strategic power,’ ‘the capacity to deal with the same matter of concern more effectively’ or a superior capacity for planning (Taylor 1985, p. 104). The central defining feature is responsiveness, openness to certain strong evaluations, principles or values in the light of which not only single life plans but even one’s own life are conceived and assessed. From this standpoint the sense of the self is the sense of where one stands in relation to this matrix of meaning. In one of its most famous versions, this view posits that as persons or selves, human beings are beings for whom their own being is matter of concern (Heidegger).

2.5 The Person, The Self And Fulfilment

Finally, conceptions of the person and of the self do take quite different views of what it means for a person or a self to flourish or to attain self-realization. Some conceptions understand self-realization as being primarily linked with breaking free from the constrictions of an entrenched social order. For example, some authors affiliated to aesthetic modernism (Baudelaire) or to Lebensphilosophie (notably Nietzsche) tend to understand authenticity as something to be attained in opposition to the demands of society and of culture, whereas in the writings of authors such as Rousseau (Evans-Pritchard, Sir Edward E (1902–73)), Schiller, Herder, Kierkegaard, and others we find a recognition (with very different degrees of awareness and explicitness) of the fact that social expectations, roles, and institutions cannot be understood as playing a merely constraining, ‘disciplinary,’ or repressive role but also somehow constitute the symbolic material out of which fulfillment can be generated. In the psychological realm, too, we find representatives of these two versions of self-realization. Laing’s understanding of schizophrenia as a response to the imposition of an inauthentic life and of ‘madness’ as resistance to the irregimentation of mental life, or Lacan’s understanding of the unconscious, are views of the first kind. On the other hand Kohut’s psychology of the self and Winnicott’s notions of ‘creative living’ and of the ‘true self’ are the most obvious representatives of an integrative understanding of fulfillment within the psychoanalytic tradition.

From another point of view we can contrast coherence-oriented and decentered views of fulfillment. Far from considering fulfilled a life course which can be summed up as a coherent narrative, some consider narratability as the epitome of failure. In his reflections on the notion of ‘limit-experience,’ for example, Foucault, continuing a tradition which he associates with the names of Nietzsche and Bataille, equates the paradigmatic kind of fulfilled subjectivity with the one undergoing a limit-experience i.e. an experience in which the self comes close to disintegration. From a variety of lebensphilosophisch, aesthetic modernist, poststructuralist, therapeutic, and postmodernist vocabularies, the advocates of a decentered understanding of fulfillment oppose all attempts to restore an internal hierarchy between what is central and what is peripheral to a life-project, a personality, an identity. By contrast, all authors who propound a centered notion of authenticity do wish (a) to maintain some kind of orderly stratification of the layers of an identity, (b) to continue to speak of a core and a periphery, and (c) to make sense of the plurality of experiences, detours, and side-narratives to a life history as variations on a unique theme.

Finally, we can contrast consequentialist and exemplary views of fulfillment. According to the former (what Ronald Dworkin has called the ‘model of impact’), a person’s life is more fulfilling the greater its impact on the external world, the larger the difference it has made. Hegel and Marx certainly share such a view. According to the exemplary view (also called by Dworkin the ‘model of challenge’) the measure of fulfillment is provided by success in meeting a challenge that carries a unique significance for the person, independently of the impact of such success on the external world. Rousseau and Kierkegaard offer representative versions of such a view.

3. Concluding Remarks

To conclude this review of the ways in which the person and the self have been conceived, there could not be a sillier question to raise than ‘Which of these views comes closest to grasping the reality of the human self or the person?’ For these views are in a way not to be understood as representations of an independent reality in the empiricist sense of the word. Rather, they are to be seen as competing vocabularies, as alternative types of lenses—indeed, as sets of premises—which we use in order to make sense of something so crucial for our experience of the world as the idea of personhood. Evidence for and against each of them can be and certainly is usually considered, but is unlikely to be ultimately decisive. Ultimately decisive has generally been our sense of the contribution that adopting one or the other can give to shaping an overall view of the world in which we find reflected what most matters to us.

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