what is self essay

What does Emerson say about self-reliance?

In Emerson's essay “ Self-Reliance ,” he boldly states society (especially today’s politically correct environment) hurts a person’s growth.

Emerson wrote that self-sufficiency gives a person in society the freedom they need to discover their true self and attain their true independence.

Believing that individualism, personal responsibility , and nonconformity were essential to a thriving society. But to get there, Emerson knew that each individual had to work on themselves to achieve this level of individualism. 

Today, we see society's breakdowns daily and wonder how we arrived at this state of society. One can see how the basic concepts of self-trust, self-awareness, and self-acceptance have significantly been ignored.

Who published self-reliance?

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the essay, published in 1841 as part of his first volume of collected essays titled "Essays: First Series."

It would go on to be known as Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self Reliance and one of the most well-known pieces of American literature.

The collection was published by James Munroe and Company.

What are the examples of self-reliance?

Examples of self-reliance can be as simple as tying your shoes and as complicated as following your inner voice and not conforming to paths set by society or religion.

Self-reliance can also be seen as getting things done without relying on others, being able to “pull your weight” by paying your bills, and caring for yourself and your family correctly.

Self-reliance involves relying on one's abilities, judgment, and resources to navigate life. Here are more examples of self-reliance seen today:

Entrepreneurship: Starting and running your own business, relying on your skills and determination to succeed.

Financial Independence: Managing your finances responsibly, saving money, and making sound investment decisions to secure your financial future.

Learning and Education: Taking the initiative to educate oneself, whether through formal education, self-directed learning, or acquiring new skills.

Problem-Solving: Tackling challenges independently, finding solutions to problems, and adapting to changing circumstances.

Personal Development: Taking responsibility for personal growth, setting goals, and working towards self-improvement.

Homesteading: Growing your food, raising livestock, or becoming self-sufficient in various aspects of daily life.

DIY Projects: Undertaking do-it-yourself projects, from home repairs to crafting, without relying on external help.

Living Off the Grid: Living independently from public utilities, generating your energy, and sourcing your water.

Decision-Making: Trusting your instincts and making decisions based on your values and beliefs rather than relying solely on external advice.

Crisis Management: Handling emergencies and crises with resilience and resourcefulness without depending on external assistance.

These examples illustrate different facets of self-reliance, emphasizing independence, resourcefulness, and the ability to navigate life autonomously.

What is the purpose of self reliance by Emerson?

In his essay, " Self Reliance, " Emerson's sole purpose is the want for people to avoid conformity. Emerson believed that in order for a man to truly be a man, he was to follow his own conscience and "do his own thing."

Essentially, do what you believe is right instead of blindly following society.

Why is it important to be self reliant?

While getting help from others, including friends and family, can be an essential part of your life and fulfilling. However, help may not always be available, or the assistance you receive may not be what you had hoped for.

It is for this reason that Emerson pushed for self-reliance. If a person were independent, could solve their problems, and fulfill their needs and desires, they would be a more vital member of society.

This can lead to growth in the following areas:

Empowerment: Self-reliance empowers individuals to take control of their lives. It fosters a sense of autonomy and the ability to make decisions independently.

Resilience: Developing self-reliance builds resilience, enabling individuals to bounce back from setbacks and face challenges with greater adaptability.

Personal Growth: Relying on oneself encourages continuous learning and personal growth. It motivates individuals to acquire new skills and knowledge.

Freedom: Self-reliance provides a sense of freedom from external dependencies. It reduces reliance on others for basic needs, decisions, or validation.

Confidence: Achieving goals through one's own efforts boosts confidence and self-esteem. It instills a belief in one's capabilities and strengthens a positive self-image.

Resourcefulness: Being self-reliant encourages resourcefulness. Individuals learn to solve problems creatively, adapt to changing circumstances, and make the most of available resources.

Adaptability: Self-reliant individuals are often more adaptable to change. They can navigate uncertainties with a proactive and positive mindset.

Reduced Stress: Dependence on others can lead to stress and anxiety, especially when waiting for external support. Self-reliance reduces reliance on external factors for emotional well-being.

Personal Responsibility: It promotes a sense of responsibility for one's own life and decisions. Self-reliant individuals are more likely to take ownership of their actions and outcomes.

Goal Achievement: Being self-reliant facilitates the pursuit and achievement of personal and professional goals. It allows individuals to overcome obstacles and stay focused on their objectives.

Overall, self-reliance contributes to personal empowerment, mental resilience, and the ability to lead a fulfilling and purposeful life. While collaboration and support from others are valuable, cultivating a strong sense of self-reliance enhances one's capacity to navigate life's challenges independently.

What did Emerson mean, "Envy is ignorance, imitation is suicide"?

According to Emerson, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to you independently, but every person is given a plot of ground to till. 

In other words, Emerson believed that a person's main focus in life is to work on oneself, increasing their maturity and intellect, and overcoming insecurities, which will allow a person to be self-reliant to the point where they no longer envy others but measure themselves against how they were the day before.

When we do become self-reliant, we focus on creating rather than imitating. Being someone we are not is just as damaging to the soul as suicide.

Envy is ignorance: Emerson suggests that feeling envious of others is a form of ignorance. Envy often arises from a lack of understanding or appreciation of one's unique qualities and potential. Instead of being envious, individuals should focus on discovering and developing their talents and strengths.

Imitation is suicide: Emerson extends the idea by stating that imitation, or blindly copying others, is a form of self-destruction. He argues that true individuality and personal growth come from expressing one's unique voice and ideas. In this context, imitation is seen as surrendering one's identity and creativity, leading to a kind of "spiritual death."

What are the transcendental elements in Emerson’s self-reliance?

The five predominant elements of Transcendentalism are nonconformity, self-reliance, free thought, confidence, and the importance of nature.

The Transcendentalism movement emerged in New England between 1820 and 1836. It is essential to differentiate this movement from Transcendental Meditation, a distinct practice.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Transcendentalism is characterized as "an American literary, political, and philosophical movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson." A central tenet of this movement is the belief that individual purity can be 'corrupted' by society.

Are Emerson's writings referenced in pop culture?

Emerson has made it into popular culture. One such example is in the film Next Stop Wonderland released in 1998. The reference is a quote from Emerson's essay on Self Reliance, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

This becomes a running theme in the film as a single woman (Hope Davis ), who is quite familiar with Emerson's writings and showcases several men taking her on dates, attempting to impress her by quoting the famous line, only to botch the line and also giving attribution to the wrong person. One gentleman says confidently it was W.C. Fields, while another matches the quote with Cicero. One goes as far as stating it was Karl Marx!

Why does Emerson say about self confidence?

Content is coming very soon.

Self-Reliance: The Complete Essay

Ne te quaesiveris extra."

Man is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man, Commands all light, all influence, all fate ; Nothing to him falls early or too late. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still." Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune Cast the bantling on the rocks, Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat; Wintered with the hawk and fox, Power and speed be hands and feet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson left the ministry to pursue a career in writing and public speaking. Emerson became one of America's best known and best-loved 19th-century figures. More About Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson Self Reliance Summary

The essay “Self-Reliance,” written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, is, by far, his most famous piece of work. Emerson, a Transcendentalist, believed focusing on the purity and goodness of individualism and community with nature was vital for a strong society. Transcendentalists despise the corruption and conformity of human society and institutions. Published in 1841, the Self Reliance essay is a deep-dive into self-sufficiency as a virtue.

In the essay "Self-Reliance," Ralph Waldo Emerson advocates for individuals to trust in their own instincts and ideas rather than blindly following the opinions of society and its institutions. He argues that society encourages conformity, stifles individuality, and encourages readers to live authentically and self-sufficient lives.

Emerson also stresses the importance of being self-reliant, relying on one's own abilities and judgment rather than external validation or approval from others. He argues that people must be honest with themselves and seek to understand their own thoughts and feelings rather than blindly following the expectations of others. Through this essay, Emerson emphasizes the value of independence, self-discovery, and personal growth.

What is the Meaning of Self-Reliance?

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to think that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.

Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—— and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light that flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought because it is his. In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Great works of art have no more affecting lessons for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility than most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance that does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

Trust Thyself: Every Heart Vibrates To That Iron String.

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, and the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

What pretty oracles nature yields to us in this text, in the face and behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold, then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary.

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private, but necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men, and put them in fear.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested, — "But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, 'Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper: be good-natured and modest: have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.' Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. The lintels of the door-post I would write on, Whim . It is somewhat better than whim at last I hope, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; — though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world, — as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. Wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. The primary evidence I ask that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions. For myself it makes no difference that I know, whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.

This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. The easy thing in the world is to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, — under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? With all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution, do I not know that he will do no such thing? Do not I know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, — the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise," the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation.

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the friend's parlour. If this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own, he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is the discontent of the multitude more formidable than that of the senate and the college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid as being very vulnerable themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment.

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

I suppose no man can violate his nature.

All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; — read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing, contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. They shed an united light on the advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels. That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity into Washington's port, and America into Adams's eye. Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it today because it is not of today. We love it and pay it homage, because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us never bow and apologize more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; He should wish to please me, that I wish. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you, and all men, and all events. Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design; — and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients. A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius, that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome"; and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, 'Who are you, Sir?' Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history, our imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common day's work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act to-day, as followed their public and renowned steps. When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.

The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful loyalty with which men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or the great proprietor to walk among them by a law of his own, make his own scale of men and things, and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money but with honor, and represent the law in his person, was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified their consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every man.

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust.

Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For, the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed. We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, and which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm. Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind, and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed. My wilful actions and acquisitions are but roving; — the idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, command my curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people contradict as readily the statement of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more readily; for, they do not distinguish between perception and notion. They fancy that I choose to see this or that thing. But perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it after me, and in course of time, all mankind, — although it may chance that no one has seen it before me. For my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun.

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole. Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away, — means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it, — one as much as another. All things are dissolved to their centre by their cause, and, in the universal miracle, petty and particular miracles disappear. If, therefore, a man claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; 'I think,' 'I am,' that he dares not say, but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see, — painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them, and are willing to let the words go; for, at any time, they can use words as good when occasion comes. If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.

And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid; probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off remembering of the intuition. That thought, by what I can now nearest approach to say it, is this. When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; not see the face of man; and you shall not hear any name;—— the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and experience. You take the way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision, there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea, — long intervals of time, years, centuries, — are of no account. This which I think and feel underlay every former state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my present, and what is called life, and what is called death.

Life only avails, not the having lived.

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates is that the soul becomes ; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power, not confidence but an agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is. Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not.

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war, eloquence , personal weight, are somewhat, and engage my respect as examples of its presence and impure action. I see the same law working in nature for conservation and growth. Power is in nature the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul.

Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our native riches.

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary! So let us always sit. Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood, and I have all men's. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say, — 'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act. "What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love."

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities. To nourish my parents, to support my family I shall endeavour, to be the chaste husband of one wife, — but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs that I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions if you are not. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men's, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh today? You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and, if we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last. — But so you may give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they justify me, and do the same thing.

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be shriven. You may fulfil your round of duties by clearing yourself in the direct , or in the reflex way. Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbour, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard, and absolve me to myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of duty to many offices that are called duties. But if I can discharge its debts, it enables me to dispense with the popular code. If anyone imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others!

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction society , he will see the need of these ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlour soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate , where strength is born.

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart.

Men say he is ruined if the young merchant fails . If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it , farms it , peddles , keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession,' for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations, that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but thank and revere him, — and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor, and make his name dear to all history.

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; education; and in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.

1. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. It is prayer that craves a particular commodity, — anything less than all good, — is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach, in Fletcher's Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind of the god Audate, replies, —

"His hidden meaning lies in our endeavours; Our valors are our best gods."

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him, because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him. "To the persevering mortal," said Zoroaster, "the blessed Immortals are swift."

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect . They say with those foolish Israelites, 'Let not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we will obey.' Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors, and recites fables merely of his brother's, or his brother's brother's God. Every new mind is a new classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a new system. In proportion to the depth of the thought, and so to the number of the objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which are also classifications of some powerful mind acting on the elemental thought of duty, and man's relation to the Highest. Such as Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating everything to the new terminology, as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time, that the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study of his master's mind. But in all unbalanced minds, the classification is idolized, passes for the end, and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to see, — how you can see; 'It must be somehow that you stole the light from us.' They do not yet perceive, that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning.

2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. The Vatican, and the palaces I seek. But I am not intoxicated though I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate, and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; Shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments, but our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other and undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous,  civilized, christianized, rich and it is scientific, but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two, the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe, the equinox he knows as little, and the whole bright calendar of the year are without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic, but in Christendom, where is the Christian?

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular equality may be observed between the great men of the first and of the last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than Plutarch's heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class. He who is really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man, and, in his turn, the founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men. The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and Behring accomplished so much in their fishing boats, as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than anyone since. Columbus found the New World in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery, which were introduced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon conquered Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of falling back on naked valor and disencumbering it of all aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las Casas, "without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries, and carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should receive his supply of corn, grind it in his hand-mill, and bake his bread himself."

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation today, next year die, and their experience with them.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental, — came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there, because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes. "Thy lot or portion of life," said the Caliph Ali, "is seeking after thee; therefore, be at rest from seeking after it." Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. The political parties meet in numerous conventions; the greater the concourse, and with each new uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex! The Democrats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feels himself stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner the reformers summon conventions, and vote and resolve in multitude. Not so, O friends! will the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method precisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Which quotation from "Self-reliance" best summarizes Emerson’s view on belief in oneself?

One of the most famous quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance" that summarizes his view on belief in oneself is:

"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string."

What does Emerson argue should be the basis of human actions in the second paragraph of “self-reliance”?

In the second paragraph of "Self-Reliance," Emerson argues that individual conscience, or a person's inner voice, should be the basis of human actions. He writes, "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." He believes that society tends to impose conformity and discourage people from following their own inner truth and intuition. Emerson encourages individuals to trust themselves and to act according to their own beliefs, instead of being influenced by the opinions of others. He argues that this is the way to live a truly authentic and fulfilling life.

Which statement best describes Emerson’s opinion of communities, according to the first paragraph of society and solitude?

According to the first paragraph of Ralph Waldo Emerson's " Society and Solitude, " Emerson has a mixed opinion of communities. He recognizes the importance of social interaction and the benefits of being part of a community but also recognizes the limitations that come with it.

He writes, "Society everywhere is in a conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." He argues that society can be limiting and restrictive, and can cause individuals to conform to norms and values that may not align with their own beliefs and desires. He believes that it is important for individuals to strike a balance between the benefits of social interaction and the need for solitude and self-discovery.

Which best describes Emerson’s central message to his contemporaries in "self-reliance"?

Ralph Waldo Emerson's central message to his contemporaries in "Self-Reliance" is to encourage individuals to trust in their own beliefs and instincts, and to break free from societal norms and expectations. He argues that individuals should have the courage to think for themselves and to live according to their own individual truth, rather than being influenced by the opinions of others. Through this message, he aims to empower people to live authentic and fulfilling lives, rather than living in conformity and compromise.

Yet, it is critical that we first possess the ability to conceive our own thoughts. Prior to venturing into the world, we must be intimately acquainted with our own selves and our individual minds. This sentiment echoes the concise maxim inscribed at the ancient Greek site of the Delphic Oracle: 'Know Thyself.'

In essence, Emerson's central message in "Self-Reliance" is to promote self-reliance and individualism as the key to a meaningful and purposeful life.

Understanding Emerson: "The American scholar" and his struggle for self-reliance.

Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-09982-0

Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Other works from ralph waldo emerson for book clubs, the over-soul.

There is a difference between one and another hour of life, in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.

The American Scholar

An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837

Essays First Series

Essays: First Series First published in 1841 as Essays. After Essays: Second Series was published in 1844, Emerson corrected this volume and republished it in 1847 as Essays: First Series.

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David Hume: Philosophy about Self Essay

Introduction, hume concept of self: discussion.

The concept of self has been defined differently by different scholars of philosophy and psychology. One of the scholars who have attempted to define the concept is the renowned Philosopher David Hume. In his book titled “A Treatise of Human Nature”, he puts forth the argument that the self is nothing but a bundle of perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity.

He goes ahead to argue that despite the fact that the self is composed of different perceptions which succeed each other, we always ascribe our identity to those perceptions (Hume 250). This assignment is about what Hume means by the statement that the self is “nothing but a bundle of perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity” as well as how he explains how we ascribe our identity to the different and successive perceptions.

The statement made by Hume that the self is nothing but a bundle of perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity has the meaning that what we refer to as self is just a succession of perceptions. Hume argues that we keep on perceiving different things using our senses. These perceptions are distinct and actually form separate identities. But since we keep on perceiving, the collection of the perceptions which succeed each other can be used to define the “self” (Hume 253).

To put it another way, when we do not perceive, we are either asleep or dead and the self is not present. Although the perceptions are different, they are united by their qualities which give us our identity. He uses the example of a river, which retains its nature and identity despite the fact that a lot of change keeps on taking place in the river every, and it is therefore these changes which keep happening in the river which gives the river its identity (Hume 255).

He also relates the concept of the self to a Republic, which is occupied by different people at different times and governed by laws which keep on changing, but the Republic remains the same and retains its identity. This is how Hume explains how we ascribe our identity to these different and successive perceptions.

His explanation is that we ascribe our identity to those perceptions simply because we always perceive and when we do not, we cease to exist and the self is therefore lost. He also argues that the mind is like a theatre, in which various perceptions “successfully make their appearance, pass, re-pass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations”, which according to him, gives us our identity (Hume 259).

David Hume was successful in demonstrating that the self is nothing but successive perceptions. This is because he was able to demonstrate that we perceive throughout our lives. The fact that we are dominated by perceptions, which alternate and replace each other depending on time and space and also the fact that the mind is like a theatre for different perceptions makes Hume’s argument not only valid and logical but also philosophical.

The concept of self has been defined differently by different Philosophers and Psychologists. David Hume gave his account of the self by arguing that the self is a bundle of perceptions which succeed each other to give us our identity. He argued that the different perceptions enable the self to exist and when people stop perceiving, the self is lost. Hume was successful in explaining the concept of self because he successfully demonstrated that different perceptions dominate our minds and it is this dominance which gives us our identity.

Hume David. A Treatise of Human Nature . Oxford university press: Oxford OX2 6DP, 1978.250-259.

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Essay on My Self for Students and Children

500+ words essay on my self.

Seven billion people are on this Earth, and everybody is different from the rest of others. There is nothing without purpose in this world. Everything has some purpose. Humans are the best creation, and each person is exclusive. Thus, writing about myself, I’m here to express myself that what I see, what I experience and what I plan for my life. I try myself to be modest, passionate, devoted, hardworking and honest.

My Family and My Childhood

I’m from a middle-class family of Bihar, I am Naresh Shukla. Nobody comes in this world, without the support of family and friends. Actually, whatever you will be, it is just because of your family. My father is a respectable businessman in our community.

My mother is a doctor. They both love their occupation. That’s I have learned from my parents the value of time, honesty, hard work and commitment to the purpose.

We are three brothers and sisters. Being the eldest I am the most liable from my brothers and sisters. I am wanted to guide and take care of my other siblings. We all are in the same school. Reading is my passion.

I am a keen reader of novels and history books as I have a strong interest in Indian History and classical architecture. I love to read books that refer to the rich history and civilization of ancient India.  At my pre-childhood, I used to listen to stories from my grandmother, and this has a long-lasting effect on me.

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My Education

I am studying at the best school in my city. I am presently in class 10th. I feel happy to be a part of this great school with the good friends, helpful and loving teacher and sound school administration. I have extraordinary skills in some subjects whereas I am very weak in the few.

My Strengths

In compare to studies, I am good at sports. so I am the captain of my class football team. I am the best football player at my school. Besides this, I am a fast runner also and I love athletics. I am in expert swimming.

The advice of my parents had a keen effect on my habits. I believe to speak the truth and try my best not to lie. My parents always advised me that if I commit a mistake, I should admit it. I try my best to do so. I know how to remain happy in every condition. Because I believe that: “Happiness is not out there; it’s in you.”

I am a very adventurous person too and like to take the risk. I like to do a creative thing besides doing old stuff again and again. Learning new things is one thing which I always enjoy. I always update myself with the news.

Along with this, I fond of reading a few children magazines in which different motivational stories are there. They taught me a high moral lesson. I am a very confident person and know how to talk. I always try to speak to every person according to his requirement so I understand people.

My Weaknesses

As every man have weaknesses, so have also. I am a little bit lazy at some places which I do not like. While playing time, I pass my lot of time there which is not a good habi t, but I try my best to overcome my weaknesses.

My Ambitions in Life

Everybody has an ambition in life . Aim or ambition is the inner aspiration of man. No man can do anything in the world without aim. So, all of us should be very determined about our aim in life.

Without good career planning, right from the start, one can’t be on the right track. One has to set the goals in accordance with his or her broad career goals.

I have studied biology and I will seat for the competitive entrance exam for admission to reputed medical college. I shall try to be a good and honest student. Then I shall be a qualified doctor. I will do all that to be a good doctor and will be sincere to it.

These are all the things which express me. Though nobody can be described in a few sets of sentences. One needs to have yet command of oneself before going to write something about his life. Life is meant to be lived avidly and with visualization to do good for your fellow beings. Keeping this aim in mind, I have always desired to serve my people in whatever capacity I can.

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What Is Self-Concept?

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Rachel Goldman, PhD FTOS, is a licensed psychologist, clinical assistant professor, speaker, wellness expert specializing in eating behaviors, stress management, and health behavior change.

Verywell / Cindy Chung 

• Development
• Can It Be Changed?
• Self-Concept Theories

Frequently Asked Questions

Self-concept is the image we have of ourselves. It is influenced by many forces, including our interaction with important people in our lives. It is how we perceive our behaviors, abilities, and unique characteristics. For example, beliefs such as "I am a good friend" or "I am a kind person" are part of an overall self-concept.

Other examples of self-concept include:

• How you view your personality traits, such as whether you are an extrovert or introvert
• How you see your roles in life, such as whether you feel that being a parent, sibling, friend, and partner are important parts of your identity
• The hobbies or passions that are important to your sense of identity, such as being a sports enthusiast or belonging to a certain political party
• How you feel about your interactions with the world, such as whether you feel that you are contributing to society

Our self-perception is important because it affects our motivations , attitudes, and behaviors . It also affects how we feel about the person we think we are, including whether we are competent or have self-worth.

Self-concept tends to be more malleable when we're younger and still going through self-discovery and identity formation . As we age and learn who we are and what's important to us, these self-perceptions become much more detailed and organized.

At its most basic, self-concept is a collection of beliefs one holds about oneself and the responses of others. It embodies the answer to the question: " Who am I? " If you want to find your self-concept, list things that describe you as an individual. What are your traits? What do you like? How do you feel about yourself?

Rogers' Three Parts of Self-Concept

Humanist psychologist  Carl Rogers believed that self-concept is made up of three different parts:

• Ideal self : The ideal self is the person you want to be. This person has the attributes or qualities you are either working toward or want to possess. It's who you envision yourself to be if you were exactly as you wanted.
• Self-image : Self-image refers to how you see yourself at this moment in time. Attributes like physical characteristics, personality traits , and social roles all play a role in your self-image.
• Self-esteem : How much you like, accept, and value yourself all contribute to your self-concept. Self-esteem can be affected by a number of factors—including how others see you, how you think you compare to others, and your role in society.

Incongruence and Congruence

Self-concept is not always aligned with reality. When it is aligned, your self-concept is said to be congruent . If there is a mismatch between how you see yourself (your self-image) and who you wish you were (your ideal self), your self-concept is incongruent . This incongruence can negatively affect self-esteem .

Rogers believed that incongruence has its earliest roots in childhood. When parents place conditions on their affection for their children (only expressing love if children "earn it" through certain behaviors and living up to the parents' expectations), children begin to distort the memories of experiences that leave them feeling unworthy of their parents' love.

Unconditional love, on the other hand, helps to foster congruence. Children who experience such love—also referred to as family love —feel no need to continually distort their memories in order to believe that other people will love and accept them as they are.

How Self-Concept Develops

Self-concept develops, in part, through our interaction with others. In addition to family members and close friends, other people in our lives can contribute to our self-identity.

For instance, one study found that the more a teacher believes in a high-performing student's abilities, the higher that student's self-concept. (Interestingly, no such association was found with lower-performing students.)

Self-concept can also be developed through the stories we hear. As an example, one study found that female readers who were "deeply transported" into a story about a leading character with a traditional gender role had a more feminist self-concept than those who weren't as moved by the story.

The media plays a role in self-concept development as well—both mass media and social media . When these media promote certain ideals, we're more likely to make those ideals our own. And the more often these ideals are presented, the more they affect our self-identity and self-perception.

Can Self-Concept Be Changed?

Self-concept is not static, meaning that it can change. Our environment plays a role in this process. Places that hold a lot of meaning to us actively contribute to our future self-concept through both the way we relate these environments to ourselves and how society relates to them.

Self-concept can also change based on the people with whom we interact. This is particularly true with regard to individuals in our lives who are in leadership roles. They can impact the collective self (the self in social groups) and the relational self (the self in relationships).

In some cases, a medical diagnosis can change self-concept by helping people understand why they feel the way they do—such as someone receiving an autism diagnosis later in life, finally providing clarity as to why they feel different.

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Other Self-Concept Theories

As with many topics within psychology , a number of other theorists have proposed different ways of thinking about self-concept.

Social Identity

Social psychologist Henri Tajfel developed social identity theory, which states that self-concept is composed of two key parts:

• Personal identity : The traits and other characteristics that make you unique
• Social identity : Who you are based on your membership in social groups, such as sports teams, religions, political parties, or social class

This theory states that our social identity influences our self-concept, thus affecting our emotions and behaviors. If we're playing sports, for instance, and our team loses a game, we might feel sad for the team (emotion) or act out against the winning team (behavior).

Multiple Dimensions

Psychologist Bruce A. Bracken had a slightly different theory and believed that self-concept was multidimensional, consisting of six independent traits:

• Academic : Success or failure in school
• Affect : Awareness of emotional states
• Competence : Ability to meet basic needs
• Family : How well you work in your family unit
• Physical : How you feel about your looks, health, physical condition, and overall appearance
• Social : Ability to interact with others

In 1992, Bracken developed the Multidimensional Self-Concept Scale, a comprehensive assessment that evaluates each of these six elements of self-concept in children and adolescents.

Self-concept development is never finished. Though one's self-identity is thought to be primarily formed in childhood, your experiences as an adult can also change how you feel about yourself. If your self-esteem increases later in life, for instance, it can improve your self-concept.

Our self-concept can affect the method by which we communicate. If you feel you are a good writer, for instance, you may prefer to communicate in writing versus speaking with others.

It can also affect the way we communicate. If your social group communicates a certain way, you would likely choose to communicate that way as well. Studies on teens have connected high self-concept clarity with more open communication with parents.

Self-concept refers to a broad description of ourselves ("I am a good writer") while self-esteem includes any judgments or opinions we have of ourselves ("I feel proud to be a good writer"). Put another way, self-concept answers the question: Who am I? Self-esteem answers the question: How do I feel about who I am?

Our self-concept impacts how we respond to life, so a well-developed self-concept helps us respond in ways that are more positive and beneficial for us. One of the ways it does this is by enabling us to recognize our worth. A well-developed self-concept also helps keep us from internalizing negative feedback from others.

Different cultures have different beliefs. They have different ideas of how dependent or independent one should be, different religious beliefs, and differing views of socioeconomic development.

All of these cultural norms influence self-concept by providing the structure of what is expected within that society and how one sees oneself in relation to others.

Bailey JA 2nd. Self-image, self-concept, and self-identity revisited . J Natl Med Assoc . 2003;95(5):383-386.

Mercer S. Self-concept: Situating the self . In: Mercer S, Ryan S, Williams M, eds. Psychology for Language Learning . Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9781137032829_2

Argyle M. Social encounters: Contributions to Social Interaction . 1st ed . Routledge.

Koch S. Formulations of the person and the social context . In: Psychology: A study of a science. Vol. III. McGraw-Hill:184-256.

Pesu L, Viljaranta J, Aunola K. The role of parents' and teachers' beliefs in children's self-concept development . J App Develop Psychol . 2016;44:63-71. doi:10.1016/j.appdev.2016.03.001

Richter T, Appel M, Calio F. Stories can influence the self-concept . Social Influence . 2014;9(3):172-88. doi:10.1080/15534510.2013.799099

Vandenbosch L, Eggermont S. The interrelated roles of mass media and social media in adolescents' development of an objectified self-concept: A longitudinal study . Communc Res . 2015. doi:10.1177/0093650215600488

Prince D. What about place? Considering the role of physical environment on youth imagining of future possible selves . J Youth Stud . 2014;17(6):697-716. doi:10.1080/13676261.2013.836591

Kark R, Shamir B. The dual effect of transformational leadership: priming relational and collective selves and further effects on followers . In: Avolio BJ, Yammarino FJ, eds.  Monographs in Leadership and Management . Vol 5. Emerald Group Publishing Limited; 2013:77-101. doi:10.1108/S1479-357120130000005010

Stagg SD, Belcher H. Living with autism without knowing: receiving a diagnosis in later life . Health Psychol Behav Med . 2019;7(1):348-361. doi:10.1080/21642850.2019.1684920

Tajfel H, Turner J. An integrative theory of intergroup conflict . In: Hogg MA, Abrams D, eds.  Intergroup Relations: Essential Readings. Psychology Press:94–109.

Scheepers D. Social identity theory . Social Psychol Act . 2019. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-13788-5_9

Bracken BA. Multidimensional Self Concept Scale . American Psychological Association. doi:10.1037/t01247-000

Sampthirao P. Self-concept and interpersonal communication . Int J Indian Psychol . 2016;3(3):6. dip:18.01.115/20160303

Van Dijk M, Branje S, Keijsers L, Hawk S, Hale !, Meeus W. Self-concept clarity across adolescence: Longitudinal associations with open communication with parents and internalizing symptoms . J Youth Adolesc . 2013;43:1861-76. doi:10.1007/s10964-013-0055-x

Vignoles V, Owe E, Becker M, et al. Beyond the 'east-west' dichotomy: Global variation in cultural models of selfhood . J Exp Psychol Gen . 2016;145(8):966-1000. doi:10.1037/xge0000175

Weiten W, Dunn DS, Hammer EY. Psychology Applied to Modern Life: Adjustment in the 21st Century . Cengage Learning.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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1.4: Cultivating a Self in the Essay

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Chapter 3: Cultivating a Self in the Essay

We take the opinions and the knowledge of others into our keeping, and that is all. We must make them our own. We are just like a man who, needing fire, should go and find some at his neighbor’s house, and, having found a fine big fire there, should stop there and warm himself, forgetting to carry any back home. What good does it do to us to have our belly full of meat if it is not digested, if it is not transformed into us, if it does not make us bigger and stronger?

- Michel de Montaigne, “Of Pedantry”

As I mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 2, not long ago, I had a student who jeered at the rape and murder of women in the essays he submitted to me and to the class. When I first met with the student to talk about the content in his essays, he was hostile: “But this is who I really am!” he exclaimed. “I have a twisted sense of humor!” In taking this case to several of my rhetoric and composition colleagues, the most consistent bit of advice I got from them was to steer the student away from thinking about his self-on-the-page as a constitutive act of voice (an expression or a textual re-presentation of the “real” writer) and, instead, as a construction of ethos. With this shift in perspective, the assumption was that he would be able to see the self-on-the-page as his audience might see it. Then, we could talk about the ineffectiveness of that ethos and about how to revise so that the essay’s ethos would be more effective. Of course, what was implied in their advice, too, was that the student would then see the error of his ways, for inevitably, he would find that the more effective ethos would be one that aligned with the values, morals, and codes of conduct deemed acceptable by an audience of me and of upper-level English majors.

The problem with this implication is, I hope, obvious: that the student would be required to conform to institutionally accepted values, if he wanted to produce an effective essay. This would not necessarily be a problem if those values only involved his use of the conventions of a “good” essay—e.g., those mentioned in Chapter 1 (freedom, walking, and voice). Instead, in this particular case, what counted as a good/effective essay involved the rendering of a particular kind of voice or textual self—one that embodied the values and ethical practices that would be deemed appropriate, that would be accepted by a group of his peers and by me. Consequently, by asking the student to examine the ethos in his writing in order to deploy it more effectively, I would not have been asking him simply to reflect further (on) the voice-on-the-page or his textual self; I would have been teaching him to align his voice/textual self with particular socio-political values so that the ethos would be perceived to be reliable. 24 As such, I would have become a part of a system where the disciplining practices of our field take a turn toward the silencing practices of intellectual tyranny—just the sort of practices with which any voice scholar and/or teacher would take serious issue.

No doubt, one could argue (as I often do, myself) that it’s more important to teach students to be attentive, respectful, socially-responsible, and critical thinkers than it is to give them the space to “be their own persons,” which in my student’s case, would translate to being a person who participates in and perpetuates some of the most horrible ‘isms’ that exist today. Yet, doesn’t that privileging fly in the face of the real work of the personal essay as the last “free” space for self-expression? Perhaps even more importantly, by teaching said values, how am I much better than the kind of person whose ideology I’m trying to disempower?

Certainly, I know—and can argue—the difference between the self-righteousness that I am invoking and the self-righteousness articulated in the rape-celebrating essay written by my student. I can argue that in asking my student to revise the ethos of his essay and that in explaining why he needs to revise that ethos, I would be inserting myself into discourses that perpetuate dangerous hierarchies and abuse; I would be trying to create a disruption, trying to break a chain forged over centuries of problematic thinking, talking, and acting along perilous conceptions of gender roles. But after making such attempts over a decade of teaching, I know for certain that if students read such an attempt as me trying to silence them, then my attempts at “disruption” only persuade them to shut down the exchange (and, ironically, often in the name of “self-expression”).

In part, the problem seems to stem from our modern-day conceptions of self. To be more specific, as Crowley and Hawhee explain to rhetoric and writing students in their textbook Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, “Americans tend to link a person’s opinions to her identity. We assume that someone’s opinions result from her personal experience, and hence that those opinions are somehow ‘hers’—that she alone ‘owns’ them” (5). Thus, folks tend to get very upset when their opinions are challenged because the assumption is that their opinions are not all that is at stake in a discussion; their identities, their selfhoods, are.

The presence of this assumption about opinion-as-identity in personal essay courses, in writing pedagogies, and even in writing and essay scholarship is, arguably, the residual effect of an institutional purchase of (with all the associated advertising for) romanticism and its hero, the romantic subject. Borrowing the wording of John Muckelbauer in his work on imitation (and the humanities’ resistance to it), we are seeing the effects of “the institutional emergence of romantic subjectivity, an ethos that emphasizes creativity , originality , and genius ” (52, emphasis added). One of those effects can be seen in the fact that conceptions of the essayist, especially, are bound up in the belief in “opinion-as-identity.”

To explain with regards to agency, as it is forwarded in Chapters 1 and 2, if we buy the concept of the essential or socially constructed self, then we tend to see our subjectivities as entirely dependent on our ability to have and to interpret our experiences, as if how we experience and what we experience happen in a subject-object relation (i.e., me vs. the experience). When we enter into a relation with the object-that-is-experience, we interpret it and become, in that act, agents that can control it. In this relation, “life” becomes a series of events to be interpreted. We possess those interpretations by imposing on them a narrative (enter “creativity”) that is the product of our unique perspective (enter “originality”), which is unique because of the unique constellation of experiences that have been interpreted by our individual selves (enter “genius”). 25

The upshot of this tangle is that we get to see ourselves as agents in this world—not simply as actors but as unique entities that necessarily interpret and possess experience differently. What we also get is the belief that my perspective is who I am and that any challenge to that perspective—which, ironically, can be represented by groups to which I belong, e.g., institutions, families, etc.—is a threat to my very existence. One can easily see this belief in opinion-as-identity at work in my student’s argument for his voice, his true/honest self, on the page. One can easily see it in the failed attempts on my part to interject in a discourse in which that voice is implicated.

If we give in to the “implacable I” of the essayist, as Joan Didion calls it, or the “it’s all about me ethic,” as I called it in Chapter 2, and if we, consequently, dismiss any responsibility to the people who may be belittled or silenced by that implacability, then just how valuable can the essay really be? What is it likely to contribute to any discourse it participates in? Is it likely to be rigorous, skeptical, profound? I’d argue “no” because, contrary to popular belief, the essay would not be freed by the essentialized or socially-constructed self that is expressed or re-presented in an essay; rather, the essay would be limited by that self—and in dangerous ways.

For the purposes of this chapter, then, I would like “to make visible a bygone way of approaching the self and others which might suggest possibilities for the present” (Rabinow xxvii)—in particular, possibilities for how one might conceive of subjectivity in the essay. To do this work, I turn to the work of Michel Foucault. The practices that will be examined in this chapter are described best in Foucault’s piece, titled “Self Writing.” In it, he introduces self writing as a series of practices in which the writer participates in order to constitute and “cultivate” his/her self. Through this exploration of Foucault’s work on subjectivity, I hope to describe a compelling and progressive study of subjectivity in essaying, one that enables productive debate and, even, self-transformation, one that does not send writers right back into the traps created by the theories of the writer-page relationship that I articulated in the first two chapters of this project.

Foucault’s work, however, only provides the system of thought—the skeleton, so to speak, around which one can shape the conception/articulation of an actual subject-in-writing. In order to provide a few subjects-in-writing in which to examine relevant writing practices and in order to flesh-out this particular version of subjectivity, I have chosen to take up the essays of Montaigne. I’ve chosen his works for at least a few important reasons: the most important reason being that Montaigne is considered the “father” of the genre; the second reason being that his essays are often quoted to support each of the conceptions of the relationship between the writer and the self-on-the-page that I described in Chapters 1 and 2. As I will demonstrate, however, reading his essays as evidence of either conception of that relationship is a misreading, and as such, we have missed a very real, very productive possibility for conceiving of that relationship in the essay.

Self Writing

In “Self Writing,” Foucault looks at “the role of writing in philosophical cultivation of the self just before Christianity: its close link with companionship, its application to the impulses of thought, its role as a truth test” (208). Specifically, he studies the practices of self writing in the works of Seneca, Plutarch, and Marcus Aurelius. What he finds is that the “close link with companionship,” as well as self writing’s “application to the impulses of thought” and “its role as a truth test,” are all elements found in the works of these writers. These three elements should sound familiar to essayists and essay scholars, for essay writing involves conversing with the writer and with a reader (companionship), expressing or constructing “the mind on the page” (the application of writing to the impulses of thought), and experimenting with and/or exploring ideas (truth tests). The difference, though, between Foucault’s articulation of these elements and more common articulations is that the former involves the privileging of practices—of conversing, of applying, of testing—not the sovereignty of the writer, as the creator of companionship, as the creator of the application of writing to thought, as the creator of the truth test.

To explain, much of Foucault’s work focuses on several modes of objectivation, modes through which the subject “subjects” his/her self. “Subjecting,” however, does not simply imply “making into an object,” as the term “objectification” might suggest. Rather, a different process happens in that subjecting, so that the subject-on-the-page is constituted, not reflected or constructed. The distinction I want to make here between “constituted” and “constructed” is one of agency: i.e., saying a subject is “constructed” puts more emphasis on the writer (or the culture) that is doing the constructing, while “constituted” emphasizes the processes of subjection, the practices within which a subject is subjected. 26

For example, the practices of self writing, at least pre-Christian self writing, are driven not by the creative genius or essence of the expressive writer but by the cultivation of “the art of living.” 27 Foucault argues that according to the Pythagoreans, the Socratics, and the Cynics, “the art of living” can only be acquired with exercise, via “a training of the self by oneself” (“Self Writing” 208). This training is a way of caring for the self. Foucault states, “In Greek and Roman texts, the injunction of having to know yourself was always associated with the other principle of having to take care of yourself, and it was that need to care for oneself that brought the Delphic maxim [Know thyself] into operation” (“Technologies” 20). In other words, self writing is not simply the process of figuring out what I already know, who I already am. Rather, care of the self, which involves multiple practices that shape the self, makes possible knowledge of one’s self. In the ancient world, such practices often included the use of hupomnēmata, which, according to Foucault, were written for the purpose of meditation; as I will show, this, too, is precisely what Montaigne’s essays were written for.

The Hupomnēmata

Examples of hupomnēmata include “account books, public registers, or individual notebooks serving as memory aids.” These memory aids were used, though, not simply for the purpose of aiding memory but for the primary purpose of being “guides for conduct” (“Self Writing” 209). In “Self Writing” Foucault states, “They constituted a material record of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering them up as a kind of accumulated treasure for subsequent reading and meditation” (209). He explains further that they were “a material and a framework” for the exercises of “reading, rereading, meditating, [and] conversing with oneself and with others” (210). In other words, these texts were not written out, (re)read, and referenced simply for the sake of recollection but, to quote Plutarch, to “[elevate] the voice and [silence] the passions like a master who with one word hushes the growling of dogs” (qtd. in “Self Writing” 210). So, for example, in high school, I kept a quote journal, which was comprised of lines from texts I found to be particularly compelling. I returned to them when I needed them—usually for ideas for paper topics, but also for good advice when confronting complicated situations in my personal relationships, schooling, etc. This is [a simplification of] what I think Plutarch meant by “hush[ing] the growling of dogs”—the dogs, in this case, being conflicts and deadlines, for example.

The primary purpose, however, of the hupomnēmata is “to make one’s recollection of the fragmentary logos transmitted through teaching, listening, or reading, a means of establishing a relationship of oneself with oneself, a relationship as adequate and accomplished as possible” (“Self Writing” 211). As to how that collection becomes a means to establishing a relationship of oneself with oneself, the process is complicated. To start by putting this relationship into more general terms (and work down to the specifics), the truths constituted in these texts are—through the practice of meditation—“planted in” the soul: that is, “the soul must make them not merely its own but itself ” (“Self Writing” 210, emphasis added). To understand this process and to practice it, one must shift away from thinking about subjectivity in terms of the socially constructed self or the natural/essential self, and toward a different version.

In these more common conceptions of self, the assumption that the soul makes these truths its own would have been true. Students would accept and own the truths they encounter in readings, or they would reject them. In turn, when writing about those truths, the writer would become the owner of those beliefs by interpreting and rendering them through his/her own unique perspective. However, in stating that the soul does not merely make particular truths its own but “makes them itself,” the distinction is as follows: the soul does not create, possess, and/or wield truths; rather, the soul is constituted in the practices of reading, rereading, and writing about those truths. 28

As shown in Chapter 1, essay writing is often used in contemporary writing classrooms as a tool for expressing the innermost self, as a tool for expressing what is hidden/secret, what is oppressed/silenced in the self—the “stuff” of the soul that we own but have not owned up to, so to speak. Despite this common conception of the essay, though, in Montaigne’s work, expression does not actually seem to be the purpose. Rather, Montaigne’s essays work much like the hupomnēmata , which were written “for a purpose that is nothing less than the shaping of the self” (“Self Writing” 211). Montaigne admits to this project in “Of Giving the Lie.” He states,

And if no one reads me, have I wasted my time […]? In modeling this figure [this book] upon myself, I have had to fashion and compose myself so often to bring myself out, that the model itself has to some extent grown firm and taken shape. Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me—a book consubstantial with its author […]. (504)

In effect, he is saying that in writing his book, he’s not expressed a self; instead, in writing his book, the writing has cultivated his self. 29

The Practices of Reading and Writing: “Returning to the Hive”

Montaigne further describes at least a part of this process as such: “I have not studied one bit to make a book; but I have studied a bit because I had made it, if it is studying a bit to skim over and pinch, by his head or his feet, now one author, now another…” (“Of Giving” 505, emphasis added). Accordingly, it is not that he simply studied other works and then wrote about them; rather, as I will show, in the making of the book, Montaigne meditated on other authors’ works, and they became a part of the constitution of his book/self. For example, in “Of Books” he talks about “transplanting” original ideas (e.g., from the works of Seneca) into his own “soil” and “confound[ing]” them with his own (296).

In this context, I can imagine that the hupomnēmata can be used like personal diaries or writers’ notebooks, much like Didion describes in “On Keeping a Notebook,” where writers collect material for reflection and/or for future writings. 30 However, it’s worth noting that there’s a difference between collections like Didion’s notebooks and my students’ diaries. The latter, at least according to my students, are often simply collections of confessions, which have very little use-value beyond the act of confession (and in fact, are oftentimes impossible, even, to understand after any considerable lapse of time because of their opaquely self/situation-referential prose). The writer rarely returns to them. The hupomnēmata, on the other hand, are supposed to be guidebooks. As such, the students’ confessions would have to be used for meditative purposes—as material to later reflect on (in reading and in writing), to test the truth of by recontextualizing them in other experiences/scenarios, and if necessary, to revise.

The hupomnēmata are not, however, just another practice in pop-psychology. They are not simply collections of affirmations I repeat to myself in order to feel okay about myself or my life. Rather, in the act of meditating on those texts, a disciplining, a cultivating, of self occurs, for in that act, a relationship of oneself with oneself is established, a relationship that should be “as adequate and accomplished as possible”—i.e., one that makes possible a relation between the two (subjected) subjects so that they work agonistically toward an end that belongs to “an ethics of control” ( Care 65). This ethic in practice, in process, is a bit like Heracles wrestling the Nemean lion, which (if I may make a somewhat obscure reference) is described in The Mythic Tarot as a symbolic struggle between Heracles and his ego. It is an encounter of oneself to oneself, the latter of which is in relation to the former but not as its reflection, not even as its equal. Rather, the two are constituted in the encounter and struggle agonistically toward an end that is the conversion of the self. Thus, the end that belongs to an ethic of control is not an end where Heracles slays the lion or vice versa. Instead, he masters it. It is submitted, as is he, in the encounter that involves a series of practices—perhaps of tactical maneuvers of fatal bites and pinched veins. In fact, in Greene and Sharman-Burke’s reading of the story in The Mythic Tarot , neither player can be negated or rejected; to convert/transform, neither can be killed.

To come at this relationship another way, one of the ways that one can cultivate that relationship so that it is “as adequate and accomplished as possible” is to practice “turning back,” fixing the past in such a way that it can be studied. In this practice, the writer can, in turn, prepare for the future. To explain further this emphasis on composing a self capable of adapting to future events, I point to Foucault’s analysis of dreams in the first chapter of The Care of the Self. There, he quotes from Achilles Tatius’s The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon to show how the analysis of dreams was a life practice, practiced for the purpose not of controlling or outwitting one’s destiny but of preparing for it. Tatius states, “[…F]or when disasters come all together and unexpectedly, they strike the spirit with so severe and sudden a blow that they overwhelm it; while if they are anticipated, the mind, by dwelling on them beforehand, is able little by little to turn the edge of sorrow” (5). This practice of studying dreams relates to the practice of self writing, for in both, the self is constituted within practices that are used for the purpose of disciplining the self—in this case, to discipline the self in order to abate sorrow or to avoid the debilitating effects of suffering.

In another example, in “Of Presumption” Montaigne states, “Not being able to rule events [or ‘Fortune’], I rule myself, and adapt myself to them if they do not adapt themselves to me” (488). In other words, he cannot control the future, so instead, he cultivates a self that can adapt to the events that may happen in the future. In describing how one can work toward this self, in “Of Experience,” Montaigne states, “He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition” (822). In that remembering, in meditating on the past, and in preparing for the future, he practices control, and because of it, he also will be able to practice control in whatever future struggles he encounters.

The Practices of the Disparate (the Truth Test)

To the question, again, then: How does one “write” the self, particularly a more vigilant or less susceptible self? In part, one does so by collecting material, reading it repeatedly, reflecting on it, and writing about it. However, that is not enough. In order for the writing to work—in order for it to actually create a more disciplined or at least a different self—the truths (the maxims) of the writings being meditated on and the truths generated in that meditation must be tested.

Again, self writing is not repeating affirmations (“I am a good scholar. I am a good scholar”). In order for it to work, in order for that relationship between writer and page to transform the self of the writer, truths (e.g., quotes from my quote-journal or entries from a student’s diary) must be put to the test. Consequently, they are not “adopted” as the writer’s own, but in the process of testing them, the writer is disciplined in them. To put this is Foucault’s terms, “the writing of the hupomnēmata is also (and must remain) a regular and deliberate practice of the disparate” (“Self Writing 212). The “practice of the disparate” is a way “of combining the traditional authority of the already-said with the singularity of the truth that is affirmed therein and the particularity of the circumstances that determine its use” (“Self Writing” 212). In other words, writing becomes a practice of meditation in which the writer considers the selected passage as a maxim that may be true, suitable, and useful to a particular situation—or not. The purpose in practicing the disparate is mastery of the self—not via a conclusive and utterly naked revelation of self, as is so often argued about Montaigne’s work, but “through the acquisition and assimilation of truth.”

For example, in “Of Experience,” Montaigne finds that in all of the interpretations that might occur in the “art” of language, there is not one universally “true” interpretation. However, this does not discourage him from the practice of the disparate, for while belying the possibility of clear, irrefutable meaning in the language-use of, say, lawyers and doctors, Montaigne quotes Seneca (which is an example of the already-said, of a maxim): “What is broken up into dust becomes confused” (816). He explores this maxim at length in the next paragraph, applying it to the language-use of lawyers in contract sand wills. In the end, he explains that by picking apart the language of such contracts and wills, by debating the meaning, “[lawyers] make the world fructify and teem with uncertainty and quarrels, as the earth is made more fertile the more it is crumbled and deeply plowed” (816). This is an excellent example of the writer testing a maxim’s truth, suitability, and usefulness in a particular context: in ultimately arguing that there is no single, absolute interpretation for a text, Montaigne finds Seneca’s statement to be true, suitable, and useful to his point. He has brought together his experience and Seneca’s insight and tested the truth of the latter in the context of the former.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our student essayists approached the essays we have them read in the same way? Instead of inserting quotes that have been taken out of context, reduced to isolated entities, and thrust among the students’ own essays like fence posts, they might actually test out the truth, the validity, of some essayist’s insight. They might meditate on it, try to apply it to some situation in their own lives, bring it into relation with other insights from other essayists and test out the relation between multiple insights when brought into another relationship with some situation. I, for one, would much rather read those essays than the ones where students write what they already think they know, while simultaneously practicing reduction or outright misrepresentation of others’ works. After all, how much generation of knowledge, shared discovery, or intellectual exchange are we going to see in writings that do not practice any genuine attentiveness to others—other writers, other ideas, etc.?

The Process of Unification

It’s important to remember, though, that in self writing, the writing practices are not simply all about others. They are as much about the subject-that-is-the-writer as about any other author’s truth or insight. They are about constituting that subject-that-is-the-writer. To put this in Foucault’s terms, “the role of writing is to constitute, along with all that reading has constituted, a ‘body.’” That body is constituted because the writing “becomes a principle of rational action in the writer himself.” Per this principle, “the writer constitutes his own identity through this recollection of things said” (“Self Writing” 213), unifying these “things said”—the fragments found in his/her hupomnēmata— by bringing them together and meditating on them.

To put this in other terms, the writer constitutes his own identity by historicizing his self. Foucault states, “Through the interplay of selected readings and assimilative writing, one should be able to form an identity through which a whole spiritual genealogy can be read” (“Self Writing” 214). To put this in very practical terms, the writer “enters into the conversation,” as so many of my colleagues call it, a conversation that may, for example, be between the works of Montaigne and Foucault. In practicing the disparate, the writer becomes a part of the ideas/beliefs s/he is engaged with/in and is remade in them. Consequently, s/he becomes a part of a lineage of ideas, of a system of beliefs, etc.

Thus, an essay is not the transparent representation of an isolated, fixed, stable, “unique” agent, nor is s/he the socially constructed representation of a pre-existing agent in a world that consists of re/oppressive practices. Rather, the self is a historical moment, an event in the movement of discourses. To relay an apt metaphor, Seneca states, “The voices of the individual singers are hidden; what we hear is the voices of all together…. I would have my mind of such a quality as this; it should be equipped with many arts, many precepts, and patterns of conduct taken from many epochs of history; but all should lend harmoniously into one” (qtd. in “Self Writing” 214).

The Subjected Subject

In reference to classical texts, Foucault states, “The care of the self is the care of the activity and not the care of the soul-as-substance” (“Technologies” 25). In this statement lies the most profound distinction between the technologies of self that are articulated by Foucault and arguably by Montaigne and the writing-of-self described in other versions of subjectivity: the self is not a substance. There is no given, fixed, stable self that is then acted on and manipulated by outside forces. Rather, in the act of writing (an act of caring), selves are constituted. Admittedly, this seeming reversal, where the subject is subjected, flies in the face of most of Western philosophy. In an interview with Foucault, the interviewer states, “But what I don’t understand is the position of consciousness as object of an epistemè. The consciousness, if anything, is ‘epistemizing,’ not ‘epistemizable’” (“An Historian” 98). This confusion, perhaps, sums up the bewilderment toward Foucault’s work on subjectivity, for most of Western philosophy operates within the fundamental belief that “transcendental consciousness… conditions the formation of our knowledge” (98).

The two major theories of subjectivity (what one might call “expressivism” and “social constructionism”) in Rhetoric and Composition operate under the assumption that the writer is the agent that can exist outside of its own construction or outside of its social context, even outside of its own mind. Foucault’s theory of subjectivity refuses “an equation on the transcendental level between subject and thinking ‘I.’” He states, “I am convinced that there exist, if not exactly structures, then at least rules for the functioning of knowledge which have arisen in the course of history and within which can be located the various subjects” (“An Historian” 98). For example, within the hupomnēmata there are specific rules—like the (re)reading of other author’s texts, like the testing of truths from those texts—that serve as particular operations within which the subject-on-the-page is constituted. Obviously, the writer practices these practices, but s/he is not the transcendent origin of these practices. Rather, the point is that in these practices, the self is possible.

To quote Foucault: “[T]hese practices are nevertheless not something invented by the individual himself. They are models that he finds in his culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, and his social group” (“The Ethics” 291). Through these models, a relation of self to self is created, and through this relation, selves are constituted differently, newly, so that, for example, the constituted self on the page serves as the material for meditation and transformation of the constituted self of the writer. But, admittedly, it is this conceptual tangle that many scholars may find too alien to engage. So, in the next section, I will unravel this conceptual tangle via a discussion of the care of the self.

Caring for the Self

Foucault states, “In Greek and Roman texts, the injunction of having to know yourself was always associated with the other principle of having to take care of yourself, and it was that need to care for oneself that brought the Delphic maxim [Know thyself] into operation” (“Technologies” 20). In this, two ideas are most important: through the care of oneself, one knows oneself, and care is not simply a principle but involves a series of practices. Foucault argues that writing was one such practice in caring for oneself. He states, “One of the main features of taking care involved taking notes on oneself to be reread, writing treatises and letters to friends to help them, and keeping notebooks in order to reactivate for oneself the truths one needed” (“Technologies” 27). Examples of these features are evident in Montaigne’s works, e.g., where he has written about his endeavors to make a study of himself, to address his dearest friends (see his letter “To the Reader”), and to study other authors’ works in order to test the opinions he formed long ago. Examples of these features are also found in the work of Marcus Aurelius. 31 Foucault argues that Marcus Aurelius writes “an example of ‘a retreat within oneself’: it is a sustained effort in which general principles are reactivated and arguments are adduced that persuade one not to let oneself become angry at others, at providence, or at things” ( Care 51). 32

In both cases (of Montaigne’s work and in Marcus Aurelius’s), the practice of writing is a disciplining of self; it is a way of composing a self that is somehow better—perhaps less angry or fearful of the future. This composing happens because one “retreats into oneself” in the act of caring for oneself, but this does not mean that the writer cares for his/her self by turning inward to examine the essence seated within flesh. Rather, the practices of caring for oneself are ways of producing a subject so that the writer participates in the engineering of the subject, engineering that is a product of knowledge of the production of the subject.

To explain further, I point to a passage from Montaigne in “Of Experience.” He states:

He who calls back to mind the excess of his past anger, and how far this fever carried him away, sees the ugliness of this passion better than in Aristotle, and conceives a more justified hatred for it. He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. (822)

In essaying (even in the explanatory excerpt above), Montaigne studies his experiences and assesses his condition; in so doing, a self-on-the-page is constituted, a self that is wiser, less prone to anger, and so on. The ancients knew this kind of writing to be one practice that lends itself to the composition of the self. They practiced this kind of writing in order to participate in the engineering of the self. In that engineering, not only is the self-on-the-page made stronger, but that self serves as material for reflection for the essayist. In meditating on that self, the essayist is transformed, potentially made wiser, etc. This is the self-to-self relation of which I spoke earlier.

That said, if self writing, in general, is done in order to make us better people, then I can foresee essay teachers’ and scholars’ concerns that I might be condoning the teaching of essay writing as a mode for moralizing students. However, that would be a gross misreading of Foucault’s work and of my work here. It would presume, for example, that the practices of self writing should govern a universal self—i.e., that they should objectivize the same type of person, perhaps the moral or civic person—in the same ways and toward the same end. However, for Foucault, self writing is a way of practicing freedom.

By “freedom,” Foucault does not necessarily mean “liberation.” Rather, he shows that for the Greeks and Romans, “Not to be a slave (of another city, of the people around you, of those governing you, of your own passions) was an absolutely fundamental theme.” In turn, “the conscious practice of freedom has revolved around this fundamental imperative: ‘Take care of yourself’” (“The Ethics” 285). In this model, where practices (not codes of conduct or morals) are emphasized, “greater attention is paid to the methods, techniques, and exercises directed at forming the self within a nexus of relationships. In such a system, authority would be self-referential and might take a therapeutic or philosophical form” (Rabinow xxvii, emphasis added). I am reminded of Socrates saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” It is this examination that is crucial to the practice(s) of freedom, for in examination, a self is formed—one that does not have to be a slave to the discourses that shape it.

The So What and Where to Now

This shift in thinking about subjectivity—about how the self is constituted in practices—has implications for how we exchange ideas, how we enter into conversations and participate in them, and most importantly for this project, how we essay. If we took seriously the idea that the subject is constituted in practices, in the practices of self-writing, for example, then we would be able to get past the belief in opinion-as-identity and to actually exchange ideas, share opinions, and, even, potentially cultivate different selves. We’d be able to participate in the generation of other possibilities, in critique, and even (sometimes) in the resolution of conflict—not simply the back-and-forth articulation of what we already know/believe. In other words, we’d be cultivating more fluid, dynamic selves, not finite selves.

As such, I could have a productive conversation with the student who joked about the rape of women. I could ask him to examine where his willingness/desire to see humor in violence toward women comes from, where its roots and branches extend and where the shape of that willingness/desire is amplified or diminished. I could ask him to examine, even, why that attitude took hold in him and what it gets him in his work in the care of the self. In other words, I could help him to push his examination of the self-on-the-page further, and with any luck, he’d begin to see that self at play in a complex of discourses of which he, the writer, would also be a part … but differently.

There are at least two major possibilities for essaying and for conceiving of subjectivity in the essay that I’d like readers to take away from this chapter: 1) that essay writing can be discussed and taught according to a series of practices, particularly the practices of meditation (i.e., reading and writing), that it need not rely on a list of conventions; 2) that the relation of the writer to the page is an agonistic one, not a tyrannical or transparent one. The first possibility—that essay writing is a series of practices—stems from the fact that subjectivity does not have to be conceived in terms of an essential or socially constructed self. I have discussed here a different conception of subjectivity, one that is conceived in terms of practices of subjection, and this different conception of subjectivity has implications for how we talk about and teach essays. Instead of talking about and teaching essays as texts that allow students to discover and express their true selves, we might talk about the essay and teach it as a mode that does different kinds of work—work that is still invested in the self, but not The Self (a stable, often hidden, potentially transcendent self).

Regarding the second possibility I’d like readers to take away from this work (that the relation of the writer to the page is not a transparent or tyrannical one), I like to think of the relation, instead, as one of subject to subject— that relation writing me as much as I’m writing the page. As such, even when I receive a critique of this page, I can go into that exchange knowing that this work is not equal to me (and that it is not done). It does not equal who I am, where I come from, or my mind on the page. It’s an experiment. A long, arduous, but also in my opinion, compelling and important experiment—one that has made me as much as I have made it.

24. Here, I’m deploying a simplistic distinction between voice or the textual self and ethos: the former being the expression/construction of the writer’s self on the page (see Chapters 1 and 2) and the latter being the character of the self that is created to establish the writer’s credibility and judged according to accepted notions of “the ethical.”

25. Here, I’m referring to the concepts that Muckelbauer aligns with the concept (and celebration) of the romantic subject. Within that concept, creativity, originality, and genius all hinge on the belief that the subject is utterly originary—that from it, creation happens. The capacity to create and to exist as the source of creation is “genius.”

26. It’s important to note that one implication of this different conception of the subject (as one that is subjected) is that this version of subjectivity takes seriously the idea that the writer is one subject being subjected by a number of forces (acting on the body, for example) and that the subject-on-the-page must, therefore, be something different because it is subjected by other forces.

27. Though perhaps obvious, it’s worth pointing out that reconceptualizing essay writing as a complex of practices subverts the idea of the innately talented essayist. If we writing teachers want to take seriously the idea that essaying can be taught, then this theory of subjectivity gives us a way to teach it as a complex of practices, as something other than an expressive art that the student writer is inherently “good at” or not.

28. This is not to say that Foucault does not take seriously the question of ownership of texts. In “What is an Author?” his study of the author function does not involve any assumptions about the author-as-creator of the text, though, or about the author-manifested in the text. Rather, Foucault is most interested in the historical operations that are part of the author function, a function that does not invoke the privileging of an author’s agency over/in a text, but is an enunciation of how the author’s name provides a mode of “existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses” (211). For example, a text with the name “Montaigne” attached to it can be expected to be a prototype of the essay. It can be expected to be written in a meandering, contemplative mode; to quote many important, classical authors; to incorporate personal experiences; and to be relentlessly skeptical of its own claims.

29. The similarities here in Foucault’s articulation of self writing and Montaigne’s description of being made by his book are very likely due, at least in part, to the fact that Montaigne was such an avid reader of Seneca’s work—a writer who was very much invested in the self-disciplining practices of self writing. Montaigne goes so far as to write about the “Seneca in [him]” in his essay “Of Books” (297), and in the same essay, he states that the books from which he learned “to arrange [his] humors and [his] ways” are those of Plutarch and Seneca (it’s worth noting, too, that in the 2003 Penguin Edition of Montaigne’s essays, translator M.A. Screech uses the verb “control,” instead of “arrange” (463)).

As Foucault points out, “[…T]he theme of application of oneself to oneself is well known [in Antiquity]: it is to this activity… that a man must devote himself, to the exclusion of other occupations” ( Care 46). Montaigne, too, takes this occupation as seriously as the writers of Antiquity. He states, “For those who go over themselves in their minds and occasionally in speech do not penetrate to essentials in their examination as does a man who makes that his study, his work, and his trade, who binds himself to keep an enduring account, with all his faith, with all his strength” (“Of Giving” 504). I should note that “essentials,” as Montaigne is using the term, refers to tendencies or habits, not to an essence of self.

30. In “On Keeping a Notebook,” Didion argues that we should use our notebooks to “keep in touch” with old selves, past experiences, seemingly fleeting ideas/images/feelings. She states, “It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about” (140).

31. Though I’ve not found any evidence of the claim in my own reading, Bensmaïa states in The Barthes Effect that Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is one of the models that have been “invoked” as a “springboard” for the essay (90). In general, the essay scholarship I’ve read that reaches for roots older than Montaigne’s essays most often points to Seneca (see Lopate and Hall, for example).

32. Incidentally, this phrase “a retreat within oneself” should sound very familiar to Montaigne/essay scholars, for it is commonly used (even by him) to describe his work.

Sunday, April 7

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The Self essay

Firestone library at sunset.

José pablo fernández garcía / the daily princetonian.

To digest life in this world is such a messy undertaking that I find great satisfaction when everything seems to converge in a point of understanding — a point in which it all, for a moment oh so brief, assumes some unifying clarity. Oftentimes, this arrives a couple weeks into the semester, in the form of my courses melding into one overlapping set of questions and ideas — no longer discrete sets of readings, discussion posts, and final essays. This semester, I have felt everything barreling toward a most essential question of the self. Montaigne and Camus, Impressionist artworks and other European landmarks, they’ve all been racing to make sense of the self, the individual — or at least that’s how they’ve entered my mind.

All this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise; I’ve spent many months and notebooks scribbling out some essays — some attempts at making sense of my own self. And yet, sometimes, I sit before the blank page of my latest notebook and ask myself what I’m even accomplishing. The self is so tantalizing, without any egoism, yet I couldn’t say why that is. Maybe, perhaps, it’s a false notion that in a world so troubling or confusing, so difficult to penetrate and clarify, it might just be easier to first simply begin with one’s own self.

How wrong I have been about this. It has in no way been any easier. Every essay has been left so incomplete — so much left out and so much left unanswered. And yet, they’re all finished. I’ve placed the last period. I’ve sent them to my editors. I’ve read them online and in print. They’ve taken me as far as they can, as far as I’ve been able to write them. I’ve learned that as much as I write, as much as I try, any text, any understanding of my world and my self, remains incomplete.

And I try. I try and try and try. And when all has been exhausted, I try again. What more is there to do? At the very least, I can look back. I look back at all my previous attempts, at everything I’ve written so far. I find an act of creation — a rebirth for myself. Montaigne wrote himself, and Camus wrote the first man. Both were tackling these acts of creation — of trying to see the world and themselves; trying to see themselves in their world; trying to see the world in themselves — with a hope that others would see them in return and might care for them. At least that’s what I’ve seen embedded in the material of their creations. Perhaps, it is what I hope others see in the creations of my own.

But as I’ve written before , sight is so precarious, full of a destabilizing range of possibilities, as it tries to help us bridge the distance between each other and to the world. I can’t help but think back to some discussions on Manet and the Impressionists that were haunted by some of the writers of their day — all writing in fear of our selves enduring the world “side by side, but alone,” unable to see each other across that distance, unable to see past any isolation. And yet, they insisted on their sights. They insisted on seeing, piercing through the world like an arrow whistling from the bend of a bow. They insisted on seeing and then giving us their sights to behold.

Perhaps, I’ve tried to do much the same: to see myself, to see others, to see our world, and then to join us all together, overcoming any isolation. Maybe, that is the Self essay.

It seems a total act of chance that I ever began writing. I don’t know what keeps me returning to it. Yes, sometimes there are particular stories I want to share, particular emotions I want to unravel. But beneath all that lies some still unidentified, intangible motivation, I think. At least, that was the case until quite recently.

In a recent conversation, I finally shared what I had been mulling over in my mind for a long time: So much of my life has been spent with my self split, distinct parts isolated internally from each other. To access and center one part often came at the cost of alienating another — sometimes for so long that it would become an exile of my own self.

But now, finally, in these essays I’ve found the binding together of my self. These disparate parts have been gathered and collected like a bundle of sticks — still precarious but at least momentarily unified.

For a moment, so brief but still extant, all these parts are converging. They’re barreling towards one another, only accelerating, and for once they might just crash into one another in a moment of total, unrelenting, blinding clarity. A moment when I will see, at last, myself.

José Pablo Fernández García is a senior from Ohio and a head editor for The Prospect at the ‘Prince.’ He can be reached at jpgarcia[at]princeton.edu.

Self essays at The Prospect give our writers and guest contributors the opportunity to share their perspectives. This essay reflects the views and lived experiences of the author. If you would like to submit a Self essay, contact us at prospect[at]dailyprincetonian.com.

Baseball, softball fields to be displaced by new quantum building

Princeton baseball and softball teams will soon be relocated to the other side of Lake Carnegie due to campus construction. Clarke and Strubing Fields are being replaced by the Quantum Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering.

Princeton baseball and softball teams will soon be relocated to the other side of Lake Carnegie due to campus construction. Clarke and Strubing Fields are being replaced by the Quantum Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering.

An ode to my dorm plants

“To some people, plants are just plants — to me, they’re like companions. If they can live here, so can I; if they can stick it out through a gloomy twiggy East Coast winter, so can I.”

“To some people, plants are just plants: to me, they’re like companions. If they can live here, so can I; if they can stick it out through a gloomy twiggy East Coast winter, so can I.”

What are people posting about on Hoagie Digest? We looked at the numbers.

From promoting dance shows to subletting apartments, students use Hoagie Digest for all sorts of promotions.

Most Popular

We must not let eating clubs be ideological safe spaces, class of 2028 admitted, first class following affirmative action ban, charter club changed guest policy after conservative professor’s lunch. after headlines, the policy was reversed., hitch yourself to service, not just a man, princeton postdocs and scholars are united on unionization, and we’re ready to vote.

Psychology Discussion

Essay on the self: top 8 essays | self | psychology.

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After reading this essay you will learn about:- 1. Meaning of Self 2. Concept of Self 3. Need for the Concept 4. Significance 5. Development and Formation 6. Acquisition of Language 7. Self and Social Behaviour 8. Self-Related Issues.

Essay on the Self

Essay Contents:

• Essay on the Meaning of Self
• Essay on the Concept of Self
• Essay on the Need for the Concept of Self
• Essay on the Significance of the Self
• Essay on the Development and Formation of the Self
• Essay on the Acquisition of Language in the Process of Self-Development
• Essay on the Self and Social Behaviour
• Essay on the Self-Related Issues

Essay # 1. Meaning of Self:

Different psychologists and sociologists have tended to look at the self in different ways. There are some writers who look at the self as a structural part of the total system of personality and as a differentiated system indicating the characteristic of a person as perceived by him. According to this view, the self emerges and grows as a result of learning, as part of the process of socialisation and becomes a structural part of the personality.

If such a view is strictly accepted, then it may suggest that after a certain time the self stops growing. Some leading psychologists like Allport Snygg & Combs; Sheriff and Cantril. use the term self and ego synonymously. According to these writers, there is no need to make a distinction between the self and ego.

On the other hand, there are some other writers like Murphy who try to make a distinction between the self and the ego. According to him the ‘self includes individual as known to the individual and the ‘ego’ refers to a group of activities connected with the enhancement and defence of self.

In this view the ‘self is used as a structural unit consisting of many attitudes,’ perceptions and beliefs of an individual relating to himself. The ‘ego’ on the other hand is perceived as another unit primarily involving instrumental activities connected with the development of the self, its enhancement, etc.

Ausubel makes a distinction preferring to restrict the term self to a cluster of perceptual and cognitive components, whereas the ‘ego’ is considered to be more inclusive, including in addition, effectively charged variables or components like values, attitudes and sentiments. Ausubel further proceeds to indicate that the ‘self’ and the ‘ego’ together constitute the personality.

We have, in the above paragraphs, given the reader some idea of the controversy and divergence of views in studying and understanding the self. Taking into account this controversy, Allport came out with the suggestion that both the terms mentioned be discarded and instead suggested the term ‘proprium’. But it may be seen that much of this controversy is not relevant to the interests of modern social psychologists.

Social psychologists today are primarily interested in studying and understanding the concept of self in relation to the issue of how an individual develops a sense of personal and social identity and individuality which in turn results in selective, consistent, stable and continuous behaviour.

More than this, in the light of the clinical evidence available and also evidence from experiments in social psychology, the social psychologist is interested in how failure to develop a proper ‘self can result in maladjusted behaviour and dysfunctional behaviour. This is the view of leading social psychologists like Newcomb, Secord and others.

In-spite of the variations, there are some points of agreement, the most important being that the ‘self’ is not innate and that it develops and evolves as a result of social interaction with varied individuals and agencies starting from infancy.

Here, it has been found that while novel or new interactions and interactions concerned with affective process and need gratification play a more crucial role in the development of the self, repetitive interactions or passive interactions do not appear to be very crucial. In psychoanalytic terms the’ self arises and grows in the process of ‘reality distinc­tion’.

It is agreed that the formation of the self is not a case of the development of a unitary structure. It is a result of development marked by various stages characterised by different types of qualitative differences. It develops first as a distinct sense of one’s body and its parts from its surroundings.

It becomes progressively a more complex conceptual system, consisting of evaluative categories with associated traits or attributes. New acquisitions, qualities (e.g.., adolescence, old age, acquisition of new interpersonal roles and social status) continue to be incorporated in the system during the lifespan as observed by Murphy, Snugg and Combs and others.

We may now perhaps attempt an answer to the question-what is self? A review of the various studies and views on the concept of self appears to suggest that the best way of looking at the ‘self is to view it as a system of interrelated dynamic components which we may call as attitudes.

For our purpose here attitude may be satisfactorily defined as internal predisposition in an individual, acquired through experience, which makes him selectively respond to stimuli from the environment, experience certain emotional states or feelings in their presence and further be motivated or impelled by these predispositions to respond to or react in a particular manner.

In this context, some psychologists have even talked of ‘selves’ rather than a single ‘self to highlight the multi-dimensional and complex nature of the self. Among such writers was William James. More recently, certain other theorists from the angle of personality research and clinical psychology, like Murray, have also used concepts like ‘actual self, ‘ideal self, ‘moral self and so on.

But for the purpose of the discussion of the concept of ‘self in this article and also keeping in mind the more recent trends of thinking among contemporary social psychologists, we may use the term ‘self in a generic sense rather than talk of ‘selves’. In the light of the above the description of the self by Sheriff appears to be relevant.

According to Sheriff, ‘self is a developmental formulation in the psychological make-up of the individual consisting of inter-related attitudes that the individual has acquired in relation to his body and its parts, his capacities and to objects, persons, family, groups, social values, goals and institutions which define and regulate his relatedness to them in concrete situations and activities’.

The components or attitudes involved are usually strong in affective terms or intensity and are fairly specific in direction, and relate to people and issues indicating most favourable or un-favourable relations. They often reflect an individual’s deeply cherished inclinations, commitments and a high degree of involvement.

Needless to say, when such attitudes mediate or intervene in specific interactions or activities, the latter are likely to be influenced by the characteristics of these attitudes like direction and intensity, which results in consistency, stability and predictability of behaviour.

Under such conditions we may describe the behaviour as ‘involved’ behaviour. Human, social interactions show varying degrees of involvement. Tension-reduction interactions and habitual responses do not indicate much of a degree of involvement whereas unusual reactions or situations, complex situation or situations where one’s stakes are high tend to result in high degree of involvement.

The role and influence of the ‘self is directly related to the degree of involvement. Perhaps, one may describe it the other way also. When ‘self attitudes enter the picture this results in a high degree of involvement. Thus, the self attitudes provide the individualistic component in behaviour, particularly social behaviour.

The loss of individuality, loss of direction, ritualism and other forms of behaviour, is evident in certain clinical groups where it has been found that the ‘self formation has been faulty or inadequate and provides a strong evidence for understanding the importance of the self.

Essay # 2. Concept of Self:

The concept of self was also invoked to analyse and explain social behaviour. In the early days of psychology no clear-cut distinction was made between individual behaviour and social behaviour.

Dynamically oriented psychologists like Allport, Murray and Rogers who were pioneers in dealing with the concept of self did not make a distinction between individual behaviour in a non-social situation and in a social situation. In their view, every behavioural act is a total molar and meaningful act embedded in the subjective personality system or the self-system in a person.

According to the views of these psychologists, the individual was the centre of analysis. It was only subsequently with the emergence and development of the social learning theories, particularly of the stimulus response (S-R) hue, that concepts like self, personality etc. were relegated to the background in favour of concepts like drives, reinforcement, etc.

Very soon however, it was realised that terms like self, personality, ego, etc., cannot be permanently kept out in an examination and analysis of social behaviour, excepting at the cost of losing sight of obvious truth. It was against this background that the concept of self made a re-entry into social psychology, though, perhaps, in a changed form and with a changed meaning.

According to Rotter the term self has been employed in psychology with three different connotations:

(a) A wholistic gestalt view which emphasises internal and subjective expe­riences including self-evaluation. Here the term self means, an agency which is internal and which influences, mediates and moderates behaviour including social behaviour.

(b) A second view tends to hold all behaviour as a consequence of the dynamic processes and interactions among the different aspects of the self or personality. The typical example of such an approach is the classical psychoana­lytic view of behaviour as resulting from the dynamic interactions among the forces of the id, the ego and the superego.

This type of view is also reflected in the self theories of Rogers, Lecky and many others. (These views employ concepts like self-consistency, self-congruence, self-ideal discrepancy, as primary motivat­ing factors in human behaviour, social behaviour).

(c) A third view holds that the self itself is a force which motivates the organism and initiates action directed towards integration, actualization or expres­sion. Classical Jungian views and even the Maslowian concept of self-actualization belong to this category.

According to this approach, motivation and goal direction of behaviour are entirely attributed to the ‘self as an internal entity in the individual life. Such a view probably is in agreement with the concept of self found in our own traditional Upanishads.

All these different conceptualizations of the self have been used in explain­ing social behaviour. While many of these approaches which have employed the concept of the self in explaining social behaviour, have been traditional, descrip­tive, and analytical, more recent theories and approaches which are inclined towards empirical and experimental studies of social behaviour have also employed the concept of self but with different meanings.

More than the concept of self as such, they use self-derived and self-related concepts like self-esteem, self-perception and objective self-awareness and many other terms.

Thus, the self-concept continues to occupy an important place in contemporary social psychology though in a form far different from the traditional views. The ‘self’ therefore has returned to centre stage of psychology after being discarded. The return has been very grand.

Essay # 3. Need for the Concept of Self :

Terms like soul, self and spirit have occupied a prominent place in the discussions and writings of the logicians, philosophers and students of religion. Religious texts are full of discussions about the nature of ‘self and ‘soul’.

The Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita deal extensively with the concept of self. But, in all these discussions the concept of self was mostly employed in a metaphysical sense and in the context of understanding the essential nature of man and his relationship with the ‘cosmic self or the ‘ultimate self etc. But even here some of the discussions, particularly in the Upanishadic texts looked at the self from a functional point of view.

The self was often described in such terms as ‘seer’, ‘doer’ etc. hinting at some of the problems which have been analysed and studied in relation to the self, in contemporary psychology.

Though some of the early psychologists like William James, Baldwin and also sociologists like Coolie and Mead took a very active interest in describing and analysing the term ‘self in terms of its development and functions, scientific psychology in its initial stages out of its obsession to imitate physics, chemistry and physiology shunned the use of the term ‘self particularly because of the phobia that it may lead psychology away from the objective method and result in subjective and speculative analysis.

William James analysed the self in terms of its elements or parts including bodily features, behavioural characteristics, abilities and skills, desires and aspirations and also social affiliations and arriving at certain skills of maintaining self-esteem. He also made reference to the self being influenced by what one feels about ‘others evaluation of oneself. James interesting formula for arriving at a person’s self-esteem was

Self-esteem = Success/Pretensions

Subsequently a number of psychologists who may be identified by various terms like personal psychologists, ideographic psychologists and many others as Calkins, Stem, and Allport have tried to reintroduce the concept of self in psychology particularly in clinical psychology and social psychology and of course in studying personality.

Why do we need a concept of self? One of the characteristics of human behaviour is that it is total, meaningful, stable and consistent except in case where a person is mentally disturbed. If we analyse behaviour into various units or elements, still there remains the significant problem of explaining and understanding the integration, stability and continuity, often over years, in human behaviour.

Apart from this, it is also seen that our behaviour is very often guided by both situational conditions and basic needs. A person who is feeling hungry does not eat anything and everything because he is hungry. He may like to eat the proper food at the proper place and at the proper time.

Similarly, in most of our activities we find certain basic stabilising influences and considerations of a psychological nature emerging from within the individual and influencing our actual behaviour. Phenomena like these necessitate a concept like ‘self, otherwise human behaviour can very often be a mess.

Fortunately, it is not so in many instances. Many instances of individual differences in behaviour are also explained by a concept like self Two or three people under the same situation behave differently.

One person is ready to fall at somebody’s feet and flatter him however worthless the latter may be to attain personal ends; whereas others refuse to bow down to mediocres. The lives of Socrates, Galileo and other people who were prepared to die rather than give up their convictions are standing examples.

Many of our social restraints are sustained because of the role played by the concept of ‘self. Thus it may be seen that the ‘self concept helps us to understand many characteristics of human behaviour like ‘totality’, ‘meaningfulness’, ‘stability’, ‘continuity’ and ‘individuality’ and also the bizarre nature of behaviour of those who are severely disturbed mentally and in whom the self is disturbed.

Essay # 4. Significance of the Self:

The wide ranging and crucial role of the self in the behaviour of the individual has come to be recognised increasingly. The influence of the ‘self on behaviour operates both consciously and unconsciously and is much more noticeable where motivated and need satisfying interactions are involved, and also in situations where there is a choice.

In the words of Shoben, in any case self involved behaviour seems close to impossible to explain on the basis of a tension reduction model, and postulation of self-involvement seems necessary to account for the pursuit of long-term goals, so typical of human motivation’.

While the role of self is more prominent in goal-directed activities, its role and influence extend to many other spheres of activity like perceiving, thinking, learning and other cognitive processes and of course in many complex activities like decision-making.

Needless to say, goal setting and even task performance are known to be influenced by the self Adjustive and coping behaviour of varied kinds are also influenced by the self There is considerable evidence from the clinical side for this.

Thus, choice of behaviour, consistency, integration, continuity and a number of attributes of human actions seem to be very much influenced by the self in the words of Sheriff, “in brief, the growing interest in a self-concept reflects the search for integrating concepts, particularly motivation, where empirical work has tended to be fragmentary”.

Studying motivation in isolation from personality has lead to a very strange situation. It has fallen short in providing an adequate account of human motivation. The self enters into the operation of human motives as a regulative factor. So too the self enters into other psychological processes.

Involvement of the self in these processes is reflected in the consistency and continuity of behaviour in a person. In fact self-involvement in particular aspects of the kaleidoscopic stimulus world is the basis for the experience of continuity in personal identity.

It is evident that continuity, integration, consistency and identity are the most crucial characteristics of social behaviour. Any attempt at prediction and control of social behaviour depends on an understanding of these processes for its success. The more complex the social interaction, the greater is the relevance of the above characteristics.

It is the self which gives an individuality to a person particularly in his social behaviour. Further, the behavioural processes, like perceiving, thinking and decision making form the foundations of social behaviour. Needless to say, long-term goal-setting is the most typical hallmark of social behaviour and the role of the self here is critical.

Essay # 5. Development and Formation of the Self:

The self, is entirely a product of learning and experience. Self-formation and development go hand in hand with the general psychological development and growth, including physical growth. The development of the self is again a very integral part of the process of socialisation.

One of the pioneering attempts to deal with the process of development and formation of self was that of the distinguished sociologist G H Mead. In his classical work, ‘Mind, Self and Society’, Mead made attempts to examine the process of the development of the self. This approach may be characterised as ‘dynamic interactional’.

The self, according to Mead, arises and develops as a result of social interaction. Every individual, as he grows, enters into a greater number and variety of interactions. As a result of these interactions, two types of perceptions arise in the individual about himself.

The first set is what he calls the T perceptions and the second the ‘Me’ perceptions. The student can perhaps guess the difference between these two types of perceptions. In the course of a series of interactions with the others and also as he grows and also as the variety of interactions expand, the child learns to look at itself from two angles, one from his own angle, as he perceives himself, i.e. himself as the subject.

These perceptions are known as “I” perceptions. At the same time, he also learns to look at himself through the eyes of others and other important persons whom Sullivan would describe as ‘significant adults’ i.e., the individual learns to look at himself as he believes others are looking at him. These are called “Me” perceptions.

Over a period of time and with repeated interactions we find the emergence of a generalized and integrated ‘I’ and also a generalized and integrated ‘Me’. Further integration takes place and ultimately form the generalized ‘Me’ and the generalized ‘I’ emerges as an integrated concept of ‘self.

The effectiveness of the individual depends on whether he or she, succeeds in reaching this stage, where the discrepancies between the generalized and the ‘I’ generalized ‘Me’ are minimal. Some writers would probably refer to the former as ‘subjective self and the latter as ‘objective self.

Here it may be noticed that even the objective self evolves out of subjective perceptions and understanding. Hence our understanding of ‘others perceptions of ourselves’ is invariably influenced to some extent or other by subjective elements.

It has been shown in this context that one of the most significant factors in the development of the self is interaction with other children or peer groups, where all are equal. Peer group relations are usually based on equality and reciprocity and this helps the child to arrive at a more valid and stable picture of himself.

The studies of Piaget have produced ample evidence to this effect. Another point that may be noted here is that while the formation of the ‘self is a continuous process, at the same time, there are some critical stages in human life which are crucial. This is because during these periods the individual is subject to critical bodily changes and also consequent social expectations.

Two such periods are, the transition from childhood to adulthood, or ‘adolescence’ and old age. The former corresponds to what Freud would call the ‘latency period’ or what Sullivan would describe as the ‘juvenile era’. The interaction between the subjective self or the ‘I’ and the objective self invariably results in a continuous process of evaluation of the both.

This process of development gets facilitated by another factor. The older child by virtue of his membership in the peer group gets an opportunity to validate the ‘I’ and ‘Me’. We may here make a reference to Sullivan’s concepts of ‘reflected appraisals’ and ‘consensual validations’.

According to Sullivan these two processes are very crucial in the formation of the self. The former involves evaluation by the individual of himself in retrospect, thinking back and the latter involves evaluation against outside criteria like reactions of others.

Such processes result in greater integration, consistency and continuity of behaviour. If the environment of the child does not permit the operation of such evaluative behaviour then the result is a defective, disturbed or distorted self.

While the above account gives a general schematic idea of the process of self-development or self-formation, it should be borne in mind that the actual pace and manner of development varies from group to group and individual to individual.

The earliest awareness of self finds expression through an experienced and expressed distinction of one’s own physical body from the surroundings and what has sometimes been referred to as the ‘Me’ and ‘not Me’. This may be described as what Murphy would refer to as the ‘perceptual stage’.

Thus the initial stage in the development of the self is a sense of physical identity of one’s own body as an entity independent of and separate from the environment. Perhaps, in reaching this stage there may not be much of individual or group differences unless there are marked variations in the early socialisation processes particularly weaning behaviour.

But, once the individual crosses this stage, a number of factors like the amount of interaction with others, the variety of interactions, the reactions of others like parents in terms of acceptance, rewarding, punishing, approving, criticising of these assume importance. The impact of such social interaction and reaction is very crucial to the development of self.

Essay # 6. Acquisition of Language in the Process of Self-Development:

A real milestone in the process of self-development is the acquisition of language, particularly spoken language. This achievement is very significant from the point of view of the development of the self during the later stages. Language serves as a very powerful tool in enabling the person to arrive at primary representations and conceptualizations.

The early ‘perceptual self-identity’ based on a distinction of one’s body from external reality gradually got modified and transformed into evaluative classifications and categorisation of one’s own body and its various parts, resulting in what is known as ‘body image’.

The ‘body image’ incorporates within it a number of attitudes favourable or unfavorable towards one’s own body as a result of verbal interaction and representation. Increased ability for verbal behaviour contributes to a greater degree of consistency and also generality. Language helps in abstraction and also the ‘living’ of a particular situation in its absence both retrospectively and prospectively.

A review by Sheriff and Sheriff of a number of studies has shown that consistency in competing with others, in cooperating with others, in expressing sympathy at another’s distress, in responsibility for self and others and in setting goals for one’s own performance, appear gradually as the child participates in social and cooperative forms of play in contrast to the earlier side by side or parallel play.

The process definitely is made possible to a considerable degree by verbal interaction. Gradually, apart from consistency, one also moves towards continuity as the time perspective expands and concern with the immediate perspective gives way to an extended view involving past, present and future. Once again verbal ability and verbal interactions are very important.

As described by Kurt Lewin, the life space expands in three dimensions, space, time and reality- irreality. The points of reference cease to be confined to the immediate present or the concrete here and now. This expansion of the life space also results in gradual expansion and differentiation of the self itself.

Essay # 7. Self and Social Behaviour:

The role of the self in the context of ‘individual behaviour’, in terms of integration, consistency and continuity and that the importance of the self for social behaviour has not been made very clear as seen in the case of the manic- depressives where at one phase the individual is highly excited, feels on top of the world and resulting in ideas of grandeur.

The other phase of depression shows the opposite features of self-deprecation, blaming oneself etc. McDougall’s theory of sentiments and his explanation of manic-depressive pathology on the basis of inadequate integration of self-assertion and self-submission may not be very acceptable today.

But, certainly his concept of self-regard was the forerunner of many later concepts and research. Another leading theorist of a later date, Cattell, employing more sophisticated and complex analysis of personality also postulated a concept ‘self-sentiment’.

More recently, another term, ‘self-esteem’ has come into existence and has been studied extensively, particularly in relation to different forms of social behaviour. People who can be classified into ‘low esteem group’, ‘high esteem group’ etc., have been compared to see whether there are significant differences in their social behaviour patterns and whether one could draw the social behaviour profile of such groups differing in the level of self-esteem.

Essentially, the term self-esteem refers to the way in which an individual evaluates himself in relation to others, on a number of criteria like achievement, success, capacity, etc. In brief, self-esteem may be described as the degree to which a person likes himself and rates himself as capable, satisfactory, etc.

How does a person evaluate himself or how does self-esteem develop?

Certainly this depends on one’s experiences of success or failure. A person who has met with only failures in his various experiences perhaps will have a low degree of self-esteem. But, here again, standards of comparison are derived from cultural and social roots.

According to Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory, people in general evolve their own implicit or explicit standards of comparison based on their observation of performance and behaviour and those whom they otherwise consider their peers or equals. A number of studies have demonstrated the role of such comparisons in evaluating oneself.

The norms and values held in a particular culture or society do also influence one’s self-esteem. Certainly, in a society which lays emphasis on individualism, achievement and success, the standards of comparison are likely to be higher. Similarly, in modern societies, individuals occupying higher social positions have been found to show a higher degree of self-esteem by Himmelweit.

The earlier trends in American societies was that individuals belonging to minority groups tended to be lower in self-esteem, but such trends have been shown to be disappearing as found by Lensing & Zagorun. Some studies like those of Fey, Riese and others have shown that people who are popular and liked tend to have a higher degree of self-esteem than people who are unpopular and not liked.

In their classical investigations Sears, Maccoby and Lewin suggested that the degree of self-esteem or self-approval-disapproval, to a large extent depends on how early an individual recognises the standards employed by others for approving or disapproving one’s conduct, action, achievement, etc.

Essay # 8. Self Related Issues:

(i) self-esteem :.

Self-esteem assumes significance for understanding social behaviour in view of the fact that it has been shown to be an influential factor associated with different categories of social behaviour. A person’s willingness to interact with others, itself has been shown to be related to the degree of self-esteem.

On the other hand, sometimes individuals with low self-esteem may actually engage in compensatory arrogant and aggressive behaviour which can be obnoxious and irritating, particularly in small group situations. Apart from this, studies have also shown that the degree of ‘self-esteem’ is related to susceptibility to stress, rigidity, resistance to change, persuasion and different kinds of social behaviour.

An important characteristic of ‘self-esteem’ is that it is motivating. Very often people resort to defensive behaviour to maintain their self-esteem. This has been particularly pointed out in studies relating to behaviour where we attribute characteristics to others.

Investigations in the field of attribution behaviour, have pointed to the role of self-esteem in influencing ego defensive attribution behaviour as reported by Heider; Jones & Davis, Kelly and others. Thus we see that esteem as a characteristic process associated with self ‘formulation’ and ‘functioning’ is of significant importance in analysing and understanding social behaviour.

(ii) Reference Groups:

Our concept of self is very much related to the environment. The process of self-formation is very much influenced by the environment, events in the environment and other people. Thus an important factor here is the ‘reference group’ or groups. Reference group or groups as described by Sherif and Sherif are categories of people to whom people relate themselves psychologically.

These may be age groups, socio-economic groups, church affiliation groups, religious groups, interest groups etc. In complex differentiated societies the self concept has points of anchorage in different sub-groups.

When a person is asked to answer the question ‘who am ‘I’ the normal response starts with the name and identity in terms of social classification, identifying him and placing him in a particular category as reported by Kuhn & Mcfarland.

The psychological implications of this is that the self-image of an individual is influenced by the characteristics of the group to which he refers himself to, whether he belongs to that category or not. Thus, most people in modem society are influenced by so called middle-class values, whether they actually belong there or not.

The concept of reference groups therefore helps us to explain and account for many of the self-characteristics and identifying the people with whom an individual relates himself.

In the words of Sherif when the person locates himself within a set or group of people, the relative status of the group in the social organization and his own position within it serve as standards (anchors) for appraisals of performance by himself and others.

An effect of this anchoring on particular group standards is a resulting stabilisation of performance, self-confidence and various other behavioural characteristics. Allport, Sherif and Carter, Seigal and Seigel have reported that attitudes of a person tend to taper towards the attitudes of a group if that group also is a reference group.

Individual differences in importance or value attached to the various components of self-esteem are to a large extent traceable to reference groups. Thus in many instances attitude change or behaviour change becomes possible only if we can understand the reference groups or reference set of the individual. Reference group relations often involve high ego involvement and can result in resistance to change.

(iii) Self-Radius :

Closely related to the issue of ‘reference group’ or self-set is the ‘self- radius’. Reference groups play a central role in determining one’s behaviour and evaluation of one’s behaviour. But over and above the fact of reference, each one’s self extends a little beyond the reference group’s.

Thus, while self-esteem and also approval and disapproval of behaviour may be determined and influenced by one’s immediate reference group like family, peer groups, etc., at the same time self is also influenced by groups and issues and events a little more distant both in space and also psychologically.

Such influence, concern and involvement may be only personal and may not influence actual behaviour. Most of us are disturbed by acts of violence, discrimination and other forms of barbarity going on in different parts of the world. Thus when a large number of young people were mercilessly shot by the Chinese Communist regime, a few years ago when they were agitating for democratic rights, we were upset.

Many of us were disturbed by the famine conditions in Somalia, when we see the photographs in newspapers and magazines. Similarly, many of us feel happy and also share the sense of achievement, when somebody in a far off place achieves something great like landing on the moon or conquering the Mount Everest. This phenomenon of the extension of one’s self-involvement and concern varies from person to person in its extensity and distance.

Some people have a less extended involvement and some people a more extended involvement. Thus the psychological extent of one’s concern and sensitivity or involvement is known as ‘self-radius’. Some people are least disturbed or concerned about things and events which happen somewhere and do not have any immediate concern for them. Such people are more circumscribed in their lives.

The greater the self-radius, the more is the person’s concern and involvement with events and happenings further away. Great personalities like Buddha, Christ, and Mother Theresa were concerned about events and issues concerning entire humanity and their self-radius was very high. On the other hand people with narrow moral values and prejudices, who are dogmatic have a much shorter ‘self-radius’.

Another variation of this radius belongs to the time dimension. Some individuals are very proud of the ancient culture and heritage of the society than others whereas others are not. Some individuals are more bothered about events, things and remote happenings of both past and future, while others have more concern with things in the immediate present.

A child is more concerned and involved about events and things ‘here and now’ compared to an adult. The term self-radius then represents a person’s perspective varying from proximate to distant and also varying on the past, present, future continuum.

Thus people with global and universal outlook have a much longer self-radius than most of us. While an extended self-radius may not always influence our behaviour, it certainly has an emotional impact on us.

(iv) Self-Values :

Values are vectors or variables which influence our behaviour. Values are very close to our ‘selves’. While other variables like attitudes may not be very close to the self-concept, our values very often become part of our self-system.

Some psychologists even make a distinction between self-values and social values. Values have been shown to influence our personal behaviour, choice reactions, responses, etc. Honesty, openness, integrity, etc., are examples of personal values which become integral parts of one’s self-system.

(v) Self-Disclosure :

In recent years, psychologists who have been interested in dealing with personality problems and also concerned with bringing about changes in behaviour, values, motives and attitudes of others have found that many such changes become possible effectively only if an individual’s self-system is involved.

The concept of ‘self-disclosure’ has been brought into use in this context, by Rokeach while dealing with the problem of bringing about changes in values. Rokeach has developed a technique which uses the concept of self-disclosure.

This implies that a person who wishes to bring about value changes and attitude changes in others can achieve greater success by making himself open and disclosing himself. Such disclosure of oneself has been found to have greater impact on behaviour change, attitudes and values.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Self Awareness — The Meaning and Importance of Self-awareness

The Meaning and Importance of Self-awareness

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Published: Dec 3, 2020

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Works Cited

• Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Bantam Books.
• Brown, B. (2010). The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. Hazelden Publishing.
• Tolle, E. (2004). The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. New World Library.
• Dweck, C. (2007). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Ballantine Books.
• Kabat-Zinn, J. (2005). Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. Hachette Books.
• Neff, K. D. (2011). Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind. HarperCollins.
• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2008). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper Perennial.
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2002). Handbook of Self-Determination Research. University of Rochester Press.
• Sinek, S. (2014). Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. Penguin.
• Greene, R. (2012). Mastery. Penguin Books.

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Chang, E. (2016). The power of an open mind. Journal of Positive Psychology, 11(5), 569-571.Greene, J. D. (2013). Moral tribes: Emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them. Penguin Books.Krumrei-Mancuso, E. J., & Rouse, S. [...]

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Chapter 6: Thinking and Analyzing Rhetorically

6.7 What is self analysis?

Emilie Zickel

The final assignment in your English 100 or 101 course at Cleveland State University will include a reflective essay in which you describe your growth as a writer over the course of the semester. This activity of reflecting on your growth and performance is what is called a metacognitive activity: one in which you think and write about your learning.

Writing a formal reflective essay may be a new thing for you, so this chapter will provide an overview of why we write reflections on our learning and how to approach a reflection assignment.

How is reflective writing in the academic setting different from journaling or writing in a diary?

If you write in a diary or a journal, recording your thoughts and feelings about what has happened in your life, you are certainly engaging in the act of reflection. Many of us have some experience with this type of writing. In our diaries, journals, or other informal spaces for speaking – or writing- our mind,  write to ourselves, for ourselves, in a space that will largely remain private.

Your reflection essay for college courses will contain some of those same features:

• The subject of the reflective essay is you and your experiences
• You can generally use first person in a reflective essay

But writing academic reflections, like the one that is due for the English 100/101 portfolio assignment, is a bit different from journalling or keeping a diary:

What can be gained from metacognitive activities that ask you to reflect on your learning and your performance as a writer?

One of the major goals in any First-Year Writing class is to encourage students’ growth as writers. No one is expected to be a perfect writer at the end of the semester. Your instructor’s hope, however, is that after 16 weeks of reading, writing, and revising several major essays, you are more confident, capable, and aware of yourself as a writer than you were at the beginning of the semester. Reflecting on the process that you go through as you write – even if your writing is not perfect – can help you to identify the behaviors, strategies, and resources that have helped you to be successful or that could support your future success. In short, reflecting on how you write (or how you have written during a particular semester) can be quite powerful in helping you to identify areas where you have grown and areas where you still have room for more growth.

How can I write a reflective essay?

As with any essay, a reflective essay should come with its own assignment sheet. On that assignment sheet, you should be able to identify what the purpose of the reflective essay is and what the scope of the reflection needs to be. Some key elements of the reflective essay that the assignment sheet should answer are:

• What, exactly, the scope of the reflection is. Are you reflecting on one lesson, one assignment, or the whole semester?
• Do you have detailed guidelines, resources, or reference documents for your reflections that must be met?
• Is there a particular structure for the reflection?
• Should the reflection include any outside resources?

If you are struggling to find the answers to these questions, ask your professor!

Another wonderful resource for writing a reflective essay comes from Writing Commons , in the article “Writing an Academic Reflection Essay” . This article offers great information about the following:

• What it means to be “academic” or “critical” and at the same time personal and reflective
• How you can achieve focus in a reflective essay
• What “evidence” is in a reflective essay

A Guide to Rhetoric, Genre, and Success in First-Year Writing by Emilie Zickel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Self-Consciousness

Human beings are conscious not only of the world around them but also of themselves: their activities, their bodies, and their mental lives. They are, that is, self-conscious (or, equivalently, self-aware). Self-consciousness can be understood as an awareness of oneself. But a self-conscious subject is not just aware of something that merely happens to be themselves, as one is if one sees an old photograph without realising that it is of oneself. Rather a self-conscious subject is aware of themselves as themselves ; it is manifest to them that they themselves are the object of awareness. Self-consciousness is a form of consciousness that is paradigmatically expressed in English by the words “I”, “me”, and “my”, terms that each of us uses to refer to ourselves as such .

A central topic throughout the history of philosophy—and increasingly so since the seventeenth century—the phenomena surrounding self-consciousness prompt a variety of fundamental philosophical and scientific questions, including its relation to consciousness; its semantic and epistemic features; its realisation in both conceptual and non-conceptual representation; and its connection to our conception of an objective world populated with others like ourselves.

1.1 Ancient and Medieval Discussions of Self-Consciousness

1.2 early modern discussions of self-consciousness, 1.3 kantian and post-kantian discussions of self-consciousness, 1.4 early twentieth century discussions of self-consciousness.

• Supplement: Scepticism About Essential Indexicality and Agency
• Supplement: Evans on First Person Thought
• Supplement: The Scope of Immunity to Error Through Misidentification

3.1 Consciousness of the Self

3.2 pre-reflective self-consciousness, 3.3 the sense of ownership, 4.1 self-consciousness and personhood, 4.2 self-consciousness and rationality, 4.3 self-consciousness and consciousness, 4.4 self-consciousness and intersubjectivity, 5.1 mirror recognition, 5.2 episodic memory, 5.3 metacognition, other internet resources, related entries, 1. self-consciousness in the history of philosophy.

A familiar feature of ancient Greek philosophy and culture is the Delphic maxim “Know Thyself”. But what is it that one knows if one knows oneself? In Sophocles’ Oedipus , Oedipus knows a number of things about himself, for example that he was prophesied to kill Laius. But although he knew this about himself, it is only later in the play that he comes to know that it is he himself of whom it is true. That is, he moves from thinking that the son of Laius and Jocasta was prophesied to kill Laius, to thinking that he himself was so prophesied. It is only this latter knowledge that we would call an expression of self-consciousness and that, we may presume, is the object of the Delphic maxim. During the course of the drama Oedipus comes to know himself, with tragic consequences. But just what this self-consciousness amounts to, and how it might be connected to other aspects of the mind, most notably consciousness itself, is less clear. It has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been the topic of considerable discussion since the Greeks. During the early modern period self-consciousness became central to a number of philosophical issues and, with Kant and the post-Kantians, came to be seen as one of the most important topics in epistemology and the philosophy of mind.

Although it is occasionally suggested that a concern with self-consciousness is a peculiarly modern phenomenon, originating with Descartes (Brinkmann 2005), it is in fact the topic of lively ancient and medieval debates, many of which prefigure early modern and contemporary concerns (Sorabji 2006). Aristotle, for example, claims that a person must, while perceiving any thing, also perceive their own existence ( De Sensu 7.448a), a claim suggestive of the view that consciousness entails self-consciousness. Furthermore, according to Aristotle, since the intellect takes on the form of that which is thought (Kahn 1992), it “is thinkable just as the thought-objects are” ( De Anima 3.4.430), an assertion that was interpreted by Aristotle’s medieval commentators as the view that self-awareness depends on an awareness of extra-mental things (Cory 2014: ch. 1; Owens 1988).

By contrast, the Platonic tradition, principally through the influence of Augustine, writing in the fourth and fifth centuries, is associated with the view that the mind “gains the knowledge of [itself] through itself” ( On the Trinity 9.3; Matthews 1992; Cary 2000) by being present to itself. Thus, on this view, self-awareness requires no awareness of outer things. In a similar vein, in the eleventh century, Avicenna argues, by way of his Flying Man thought experiment, that a newly created person floating in a void, with all senses disabled, would nevertheless be self-aware. Thus the self that one cognises cannot be a bodily thing of which one is aware through the senses (Kaukua & Kukkonen 2007; Black 2008; Kaukua 2015). On such views, and in contrast to the Aristotelian picture, basic self-awareness is neither sensory in nature nor dependent on the awareness of other things. This latter claim was accepted by Aquinas, writing in the thirteenth century, who can be seen as synthesising aspects of the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions (Cory 2014). For not only does Aquinas claim that there is a form of self-awareness—awareness that one exists—for which, “the mere presence of the mind suffices”, there is another form—awareness of one’s essence—that, as Aristotle had claimed, is dependent on cognising other things and so for which “the mere presence of the mind does not suffice” ( Summa 1, 87, 1; Kenny 1993: ch. 10).

This ancient and medieval debate concerning whether the mere presence of the mind is sufficient for self-awareness is related to another concerning whether self-awareness is itself sensory in character or, put another way, whether the self is or is not perceptible. Aquinas has sometimes been interpreted as offering a positive answer to this question, sometimes a negative answer (see Pasnau 2002: ch. 11, and Cory 2014: ch. 4, for differing views). These issues were also discussed in various Indian (Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist) debates (Albahari 2006; Siderits, Thompson, & Zahavi 2013; Ganeri 2012a,b), with a variety of perspectives represented. For example, in the writing of the eleventh century Jain writer Prabhācandra, there appears an argument very much like Avicenna’s Flying Man argument for the possibility of self-awareness without awareness of the body (Ganeri 2012a: ch. 2), whereas various thinkers of the Advaita Vendānta school argue that there is no self-awareness without embodiment (Ram-Prasad 2013). There were, therefore, wide-ranging debates in the ancient and medieval period not only about the nature of self-consciousness, but also about its relation to other aspects of the mind, most notably sensory perception and awareness of the body.

Central to the early modern discussion of self-consciousness are Descartes’ assertions, in the second of his Meditations , that “ I am , I exist , is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind” (Descartes 1641: 80), and, in both his Discourse and Principles , that “I think, therefore I am”, or “ cogito ergo sum ” (Descartes 1637: 36, and Descartes 1644: 162; see the discussion of Reflection in the entry on seventeenth century theories of consciousness ). The cogito , which was anticipated by Augustine ( On the Trinity 10.10; Pasnau 2002: ch. 11), embodies two elements of self-awareness—awareness that one is thinking and awareness that one exists—that play a foundational role in Descartes’ epistemological project. As such, it is crucial for Descartes that the cogito is something of which we can be absolutely certain. But whilst most commentators are happy to agree that both “I am thinking” and “I exist” are indubitable, there is a great deal of debate over the grounds for such certainty and over the form of the cogito itself (Hintikka 1962; Wilson 1978: ch. 2, §2; B. Williams 1978: ch. 3; Markie 1992). Of particular concern is the question whether these two propositions are known by inference or non-inferentially, e.g., by intuition, an issue that echoes the medieval debates concerning whether one can be said to perceive oneself.

One philosopher who accepts the former, intuition-based, account is Locke, who claims that

we have an intuitive Knowledge of our own Existence , and an internal infallible Perception that we are. In every Act of Sensation, Reasoning, or Thinking, we are conscious to ourselves of our own Being. (1700: IV.ix.3)

A similar claim can be found in Berkeley’s Three Dialogues (1713: 231–234; Stoneham 2002: §6.4). Further, Locke makes self-consciousness partly definitive of the very concept of a person, a person being “a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places” (1700: II. xxvii.9; Ayers 1991: vol.II, ch.23; Thiel 2011: ch. 4), and self-consciousness also plays an important role in his theory of personal identity (see §4.1 ).

If Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley can be interpreted as accepting the view that there is an inner perception of the self, on this question Hume stands in stark contrast notoriously writing that whilst

there are some philosophers, who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self […] For my part when I enter most intimately into what I call myself , I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. (Hume 1739–40: bk.1, ch.4, §6; Pitson 2002: ch. 1; Thiel 2011: ch. 12; cf. Lichtenberg’s famous remark that one should not say “I think” but rather, “it thinks”, discussed in Zöller 1992 and Burge 1998)

Hume’s view that there is no impression, or perception, of oneself is crucial to his case for the understanding of our idea of ourselves as nothing more than a “heap or collection of different perceptions” (1739–40: bk.1, ch.4, §6; Penelhum 2000; G. Strawson 2011a), since lacking an impression of the owner of these perceptions we must, in accordance with his empiricist account of concept acquisition, lack an idea of such. It is clear, then, that in the early modern period issues of self-consciousness play an important role in a variety of philosophical questions regarding persons and their minds.

Hume’s denial that there is an inner perception of the self as the owner of experience is one that is echoed in Kant’s discussion in both the Transcendental Deduction and the Paralogisms, where he writes that there is no intuition of the self “through which it is given as object” (Kant 1781/1787: B408; Brook 1994; Ameriks 1982 [2000]). Kant’s account of self-consciousness and its significance is complex, a central element of the Transcendental Deduction being the claim that a form of self-awareness—transcendental apperception—is required to account for the unity of conscious experience over time. In Kant’s words, “the ‘I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations” (Kant 1781/1787: B132; Keller 1998; Kitcher 2011; see the entry on Kant’s view of the mind and consciousness of self ). Thus, while Kant denies that there is an inner awareness of the self as an object that owns its experiences, we must nevertheless be aware of those experiences as things that are, both individually and collectively, our own. The representation of the self in this “I think” is then, according to Kant, purely formal, exhausted by its function in unifying experience.

The Kantian account of self-awareness and its relation to the capacity for objective thought set the agenda for a great deal of post-Kantian philosophy. On the nature of self-awareness, for example, in an unpublished manuscript Schopenhauer concurs with Kant, asserting that, “that the subject should become an object for itself is the most monstrous contradiction ever thought of” (quoted in Janaway 1989: 120). Further, a philosophical tradition stemming from Kant’s work has tried to identify the necessary conditions of the possibility of self-consciousness, with P.F. Strawson (1959, 1966), Evans (1980, 1982), and Cassam (1997), for example, exploring the relation between the capacity for self-conscious thought and the possession of a conception of oneself as an embodied agent located within an objective world (see §4.3 ). Another, related tradition has argued that an awareness of subjects other than oneself is a necessary condition of self-consciousness (see §4.4 ). Historical variations on such a view can be found in Fichte (1794–1795; Wood 2006), Hegel (1807; Pippin 2010), and, from a somewhat different perspective, Mead (1934; Aboulafia 1986).

Fichte offers the most influential account of self-consciousness in the post-Kantian tradition. On the reading of the “Heidelberg School”, Fichte claims that previous accounts of self-consciousness given by Descartes, Locke, and even Kant are “reflective”, regarding the self as taking itself not as subject but as object (Henrich 1967; Tugendhat 1979: ch. 3; Frank 2004; Zahavi 2007). But this reflective form of self-awareness, Fichte argues, presupposes a more primitive form since it is necessary for the reflecting self to be aware that the reflected self is in fact itself . Consequently, according to Fichte, we must possess an immediate acquaintance with ourselves, “the self exists and posits its own existence by virtue of merely existing” (Fichte 1794–1795: 97). Once more, this debate echoes ancient discussions concerning the nature and role of self-consciousness.

In the early twentieth century, Frege suggests a form of self-acquaintance, claiming that “everyone is presented to himself in a special and primitive way” (Frege 1918–1919: 333). In a similar vein, in early work Russell (1910) favours the idea that we are acquainted with ourselves, but by the 1920s (1921: 141) he seems to endorse a view more in line with Hume’s sceptical account. The same can be said of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus , who famously likens the self to the eye which sees but does not see itself (Wittgenstein 1921: 5.6–5.641; O’Brien 1996; Sullivan 1996). Husserl’s philosophical development seems to have taken the opposite trajectory to that of Russell, with his (1900/1901, Investigation V, §8) denial of the inner awareness of a “pure ego” being subsequently revised into something resembling Kantian transcendental apperception (Husserl 1913: §57; Carr 1999: ch. 3; Zahavi 2005: ch. 2). Continuing with the phenomenological tradition, Sartre (1937; Priest 2000) takes Husserl’s later view to task, arguing against the view that we are continually aware of a transcendent ego, yet in favour of the picture of consciousness as involving a “pre-reflective” awareness of itself reminiscent of the Heidelberg School view (Wider 1997: ch. 3; Miguens, Preyer, & Morando 2016). Questions about the nature of self-consciousness and, in particular, over whether there is an immediate, or intuitive, consciousness of the self, were as lively as ever well into the twentieth century.

2. Self-Consciousness in Thought

One natural way to think of self-consciousness is in terms of a subject’s capacity to entertain conscious thought about herself. Self-conscious thoughts are thoughts about oneself. But it is commonly pointed out that thinking about what merely happens to be oneself is insufficient for self-consciousness, rather one must think of oneself as oneself . If one is capable of self-conscious thought, that is, one must be able to think in such a way that it is manifest to one that it is oneself about whom one is thinking.

It is widely recognised that the paradigmatic linguistic expression of self-consciousness in English is the first-person pronoun “I”; a term with which one might be said to refer to oneself as oneself (Sainsbury 2011). Plausibly, every utterance of a sentence containing “I” is expressive of a self-conscious “I-thought”, that is a thought containing the first-person concept. Thus, discussions of self-consciousness are often closely associated with accounts of the semantics of the indexical term “I” and the nature of its counterpart first-person concept (e.g., Anscombe 1975; Perry 1979; Nozick 1981: ch. 1, §2; Evans 1982: ch. 7; Mellor 1989; O’Brien 1995a; Castañeda 1999; de Gaynesford 2006; Recanati 2007; Rödl 2007: ch. 1; Bermúdez 2016).

As Castañeda (1966; cf. Anscombe 1975) points out, there is an ambiguity in certain ascriptions of belief containing “he” or “she”. I may say “Jane believes that she is F ” without implying that Jane realises that it is herself that she believes to be F . That is, there is a reading of “Jane believes that she is F ” that does not imply self-consciousness on Jane’s part. But, in some cases, we do intend to attribute self-consciousness with that same form of words. To resolve this ambiguity, Castañeda introduces “she*” for self-conscious attributions. I will use the more natural indirect reflexive “she herself”. Thus, “Jane believes that she is F ” does not imply that Jane self-consciously believes that she is F , whilst “Jane believes that she herself is F ” does. Before the dreadful revelation, Oedipus believed that he was prophesied to kill his father, but did not believe that he himself was so prophesied.

2.1 The Essential Indexical

First-personal language and thought is commonly taken to be sui generis , irreducible to language or thought not containing the first-person pronoun or corresponding concept (Castañeda 1966, 1967; Perry 1977, 1979, 2001). Arguments for this view have typically appealed to the essential role seemingly played by the first-person in explanations of action. This point is supported by a number of well-known examples. Consider Perry’s case of the messy shopper,

I once followed a trail of sugar on a supermarket floor, pushing my cart down the aisle on one side of a tall counter and back the aisle on the other, seeking the shopper with the torn sack to tell him he was making a mess. With each trip around the counter, the trail became thicker. But I seemed unable to catch up. Finally it dawned on me. I was the shopper I was trying to catch. (Perry 1979: 33)

As Perry points out, he knew all along that the shopper with the torn sack was making a mess. He may also have believed that the oldest philosopher in the shop (in fact himself) was making a mess, yet failed to check his own cart since he falsely believed that Quine was at the Deli Counter. Indeed, it seems that for any non-indexical term a that denotes Perry, it is possible for Perry to fail to believe anything naturally expressed by the sentence “I am a ”. If so, it is possible for Perry to rationally believe that a is making a mess without believing anything that he would express as “I am making a mess”. It was only when Perry came to believe that he himself was making a mess that he stopped the chase. Indeed, it would seem that only the first-personal content can provide an adequate explanation of Perry’s behaviour when he stops. If Perry had come to believe that John Perry is making a mess then, unless he also believed that he himself was John Perry, he would not have stopped. The first-personal content is “self-locating”, thereby enabling action, whereas the non-first-personal content is not. To use Kaplan’s (1977) example, if I believe that my pants are on fire, pure self-interest will surely motivate me do something about it. If, however, I believe that Smith’s pants are on fire, pure self-interest will only so motivate me if I also believe that I am Smith.

On this widely accepted picture, then, first-personal thought and language is irreducible to non-first-personal thought and language, and is essential to the explanation of action (Kaplan 1977: 533; D. Lewis 1979; McGinn 1983: ch. 6; Recanati 2007: ch. 34; Musholt 2015: ch. 1; Prosser 2015; García-Carpintero & Torre 2016). Importantly, on Perry’s view, what is irreducible is the first-personal way of thinking about ourselves, not the facts or states of affairs that make such thoughts true. So, whilst my belief “I am F ” is not equivalent to any non-first-personal belief, it is true if and only if Smith is F , this being the same fact that makes true the non-first-personal “Smith is F ”. Thus, whilst first-person representations are special, a special class of first-person facts are nowhere to be found (for views that do accept the existence of first-personal facts, see McGinn 1983; Baker 2013; also see Nagel 1986).

Perry (1977, 1979) argues that terms such as “I” which are, as he puts it, “essentially indexical”, pose a problem for the traditional Fregean view of belief as a two-place relation between a subject and a proposition (cf. Spencer 2007). Fregean senses are, according to Perry, descriptive and as Perry has argued no description is equivalent to an essential indexical. Consequently, no Fregean proposition can be the thing believed when one believes first-personally. Essential indexicality, if somehow forced into the Fregean mould, means that we must implausibly accept that there are incommunicable senses that only the speaker (or thinker) is in a position to grasp (see García-Carpintero & Torre 2016); cf.Evans 1981; Longworth 2013). D. Lewis goes further than this, arguing, partly on the basis of his much discussed Two Gods example (1979), in which each God knows all the propositions true at their world yet fails to know which of the two Gods he himself is, that the objects of belief are not propositions at all but rather properties (or centred worlds). That is, since they already know all the true propositions, there is no true proposition the Gods would come to believe when they come to realise which God they are. Essential indexicality forces us away from the model of propositions as the objects of belief. Further, Lewis claims that not just the explicitly indexical cases, but all belief is in this way self-locating or, in his terminology, de se . On this account, every belief involves the self-ascription of a property and so, arguably, is an instance of self-consciousness (for discussion, Gennaro 1996: ch. 8; Stalnaker 2008: ch. 3; Feit 2008; Cappelen & Dever 2013: ch. 5; Magidor 2015).

Arguments such as Perry’s might be challenged on the grounds that it is not possible to rationally doubt that one is the subject of these conscious states , where that formulation involves an “introspective demonstrative” picking out one’s current conscious states. This, it might be claimed, constitutes a reduction of first-person content (cf. Peacocke 1983: ch. 5, although his goal is not reductive). Even if it is true, however, that one cannot doubt that one is the subject of these conscious states, it is not clear that this poses a significant challenge to Perry’s argument for the essential indexicality of the first-person. For one thing, the content itself contains a demonstrative, so indexical, element. Second, it has been argued that our capacity to refer to our own experiences itself depends on our capacity to refer to ourselves as ourselves (P.F. Strawson 1959: 97; Evans 1982: 253). That is, to think of these conscious states is to think of them as these conscious states of mine . If to demonstratively think of one’s conscious state is, necessarily, to think of it as one’s own conscious state, then the purported reduction of first-person thought to thought not containing the first-person will fail.

Cappelen and Dever (2013) present a sustained attack on the constellation of philosophical claims surrounding the “essential indexical”, including its purported relation to action, and both Perry’s and Lewis’s arguments for it (for an alternative objections to Perry and Lewis, see Millikan 1990; Magidor 2015). A central element in their critique is the claim that cases, such as Perry’s shopper, that are often thought to show the special connection between self-consciousness (I-thoughts) and the capacity for action really only show that action explanation contexts do not allow for substitution salva veritate , but rather are opaque (Cappelen & Dever 2013: ch. 3). Just as, if I am at the airport waiting for Jones, I will only signal that man if I believe him to be Jones, so if I am looking for the shopper with the torn sack I will only stop when I believe that I am that shopper. On their view, despite the popularity of the view to the contrary, the capacity for self-consciousness does not possess any philosophically deep relation to the capacity for action. See the supplement: Scepticism About Essential Indexicality and Agency .

2.2 First-Person Reference

Because of its connection with the first-person pronoun, it is often taken as platitudinous to say that self-conscious thought is closely associated with the capacity to refer to oneself as oneself . When I think self-consciously, I cannot fail to refer to myself. More than this, it has often been claimed that for a central class of first-person thoughts, there is no possibility of misidentifying myself: not only can I not fail to pick myself out, I cannot take another person to be me. But first-person reference, and indexicality more generally, has sometimes been thought to pose a challenge to theories of reference, requiring special treatment. Indeed, some have argued that the platitude itself should be rejected.

Terms whose function it is to refer can, on occasion, fail in that function. A use of the term “Vulcan” to refer to the planet orbiting between Mercury and the sun, fails to refer to anything for the reason that there is nothing for it to refer to. If I see the head of one dachshund protruding from behind a tree and the rear end of another protruding from the other side of the tree, and utter “that dog is huge”, my use of “that dog” has arguably failed to refer due to there being too many objects. It would seem that, by contrast, the term “I” cannot fail to refer either by there being too few or too many objects. “I” is guaranteed to refer.

As an indexical, the referent of “I” varies with the context of utterance (see the entry on indexicals ). That is, “I” refers to different people depending on who utters it. Following Kaplan (1977), it is common to think of the meaning of such terms as determining a function from context to referent. In the case of “I”, a natural proposal is the “Self-Reference Rule” (SRR), that the referent of a token of “I” is the person that produces it (Kaplan 1977: 491; Campbell 1994: ch. 3). “I” is thus, unlike “this” or “that”, a pure indexical, seemingly requiring no overt demonstration or manifestation of intention (Kaplan 1977: 489–91). SRR captures the plausible thought that “I” is guaranteed against reference failure. Since every token of “I” has been produced, the fact that “I” refers to its producer means that there is no chance of its failing to pick out some entity. This account of “I”, then, treats it as not only expressive of self-consciousness, but also guaranteed to refer to the utterer.

SRR is Kaplan’s specification of the character of “I”, which is fixed independently of the context of any particular utterance. This character is to be distinguished from the content of a tokening of “I”, which it has only in a context. On Kaplan’s account, the content of an utterance of “I am F ” will be a singular proposition composed of the person that produced it and F ness (Recanati 1993; for an account that attributes to the utterance both singular content, and the “reflexive content” the speaker of this token is F , see Perry 2001; for an alternative “Neo-Fregean” account in terms of object-dependent de re senses, see Evans 1981; cf. McDowell 1977; and Evans 1982: ch. 1).

Intuitively plausible as it is, SRR is open to a number of potential counterexamples. Suppose, for example, that you are away from work due to illness and I leave a note on your door reading “I am not here now”. Plausibly, whilst it was me that produced this token of “I”, it nevertheless refers to you . Or consider a situation in which I walk into a petrol station, point to my car, and say “I’m empty”. In this case, it might be suggested, my use of “I” refers to my car rather than myself (for these and related cases, see Vision 1985; Q. Smith 1989; Sidelle 1991; Nunberg 1993, 1995). If so, SRR cannot specify the character of “I” and so, arguably, some tokens of “I” fail to express the self-conscious thoughts of those that produce them. In light of such cases, a variety of alternatives to SRR have been proposed. Q. Smith (1989) suggests that “I” is lexically ambiguous; Predelli (1998a,b, 2002) offers an intention-based reference rule for “I”; Corazza, Fish, and Gorvett (2002) offer a convention-based account; and Cohen (2013) argues that the cases can be handled by a conservative modification of Kaplan’s original proposal (also see, Romdenh-Romluc 2002, 2008; Corazza 2004: ch. 5; Dodd & Sweeney 2010; Michaelson 2014).

Although she didn’t have Kaplan’s formulation of SRR in mind, an earlier criticism of such a rule can be found in the work of Anscombe (1975) who argues that the rule cannot be complete as an account of the meaning of “I” (for discussion see O’Brien 1994). Anscombe considers a world in which each person has two names, one of which (ranging from “B” to “Z”) is printed on their chest, the other (in every case “A”) is printed on the inside of their wrist. Each person uses “B” to “Z” when attributing actions to others, but “A” when describing their own actions (Anscombe 1975: 49). Anscombe argues that such a situation is compatible with the possibility that the people in question lack self-consciousness. Whilst B uses “A” to refer to B, C uses “A” to refer to C, and so on, there is no guarantee that they are thinking of themselves as themselves , for they may be reporting what are in fact their own actions without thinking of those actions as things that they themselves are performing. They may treat themselves, that is, just as the treat any other. This is despite the fact that, in this scenario, “A” complies with SRR.

Can the Self-Reference Rule be reformulated in such a way as to entail self-consciousness on the part of those who use terms that comply with it? According to Anscombe it can, but any such reformulation will presuppose a prior grasp of self-conscious reference to oneself. For example, if we say, employing the indirect reflexive, that “I” is a term that a person uses to refer to she herself , we have travelled in a tight circle since “she herself” can be understood only in terms of “I” (Anscombe 1975; Castañeda 1966; for discussion, see Bermúdez 1998: ch. 1). This can be seen clearly in the first-person formulation of such a rule: “I” is a term that I use to refer to myself . For here the “myself” must itself be understood as an expression of self-consciousness, i.e., we should really say that “I” is a term that I use to refer to myself as myself .

In response to Anscombe’s argument, it has been argued that SRR is not intended to explain the connection between self-consciousness and the first-person (O’Brien 1994, 1995a; Garrett 1998: ch. 7; cf. Campbell 1994: §4.2; Peacocke 2008: §3.1). On this view, all that the example of “A” users shows is that self-consciousness has not been fully accounted for by SRR, not that SRR fails as an account of the character of “I”. Kaplan himself, however, does appear to be more ambitious than this, claiming that the “particular and primitive way” in which each of us is presented to ourselves is simply that each “is presented to himself under the character of "I"” (Kaplan 1977: 533). This claim, it would seem, is indeed open to Anscombe’s challenge.

Anscombe’s (1975) paper is perhaps most notable for her claim that “I” is not a referring expression at all. Assuming that if “I” refers it must be understood on the model of either a proper name, a demonstrative, or an abbreviation of a definite description, Anscombe argues that each of these kinds of referring expression requires what she calls a “conception” by means of which it reaches its referent. This conception must explain the seemingly guaranteed reference of “I”: the apparent fact that no token of “I” can fail to pick out an object. However, she argues, no satisfactory conception can be specified for “I” since either it fails to deliver up guaranteed reference, or it succeeds but only by delivering an immaterial soul. Since we have independent reason to believe that there are no immaterial souls, it follows that “I” cannot be understood on the model of a proper name, demonstrative or definite description, so is not a referring expression (see Kenny 1979 and Malcolm 1979 for positive appraisals of Anscombe’s position. Criticisms can be found in White 1979; Hamilton 1991; Brandom 1994: 552–561; Glock & Hacker 1996; McDowell 1998; Harcourt 2000).

That “I” does not function as either a name or an abbreviated definite description is widely accepted. The more contentious aspect of Anscombe’s case for the view that there is no appropriate conception for “I” is her claim that “I” does not function like a demonstrative. Her argument for this claim is highly reminiscent of Avicenna’s Flying Man argument (see §1.1 ), with which she was surely familiar. We can, she tells us, imagine a subject in a sensory deprivation tank who has been anaesthetised and is suffering from amnesia. Such a subject would, claims Anscombe, be able to think I-thoughts, perhaps wondering, “How did I get into this mess?”. Since such a subject can think self-consciously in the absence of any presented referent, it follows that “I” cannot mean something like “this person”, since demonstratives require the demonstrated object to be presented to conscious awareness. Treating “I” on a demonstrative model, then, fails (cf. Campbell 1994: §4.2; O’Brien 1995b; see Morgan 2015 for a defence of a demonstrative account).

According to Evans (1982: ch. 7), the problem with Anscombe’s argument is that it fails to appreciate that “I” can be modelled on “here” rather than “this”. According to Evans’ account, the similarity between what he calls “I”-Ideas and “here”-Ideas shows up in their functional role (for an alternative broadly functional account, see Mellor 1989; for an argument that, far from being amenable to a functional analysis, self-consciousness poses a threat to the coherence of functionalism, see Bealer 1997). Once we see how both “I”-Ideas and “here”-Ideas stand at the centre of distinctive networks of inputs (ways of gaining information about ourselves and our locations respectively) and outputs (including the explanation of action), we can see how to model “I” on “here”, thus escaping Anscombe’s argument. For further discussion, see the supplement: Evans on First Person Thought .

2.3 Immunity to Error Through Misidentification

In The Blue and Brown Books , Wittgenstein distinguishes between two uses of the term “I” which he calls the “use as subject” and the “use as object” (1958: 66–70; Garrett 1998: ch. 8; cf. James’ distinction between the I , or pure ego, and the me , or empirical self (1890: vol. 1, ch. X)). As Wittgenstein describes the difference, there is a certain kind of error in thought that is possible when “I” is used as object but not when “I” is used as subject. Wittgenstein notes that if I find myself in a tangle of bodies, I may wrongly take another’s visibly broken arm to be my own, mistakenly judging “I have a broken arm”. Upon seeing a broken arm, then, it can make sense to wonder whether or not it is mine. If, however, I feel a pain in the arm, and on that basis judge “I have a pain”, then it makes no sense at all for me to wonder whether the pain of which I am aware is mine. That is, it is not possible for me to be aware, in the ordinary way, of a pain in an arm but mistakenly judge it to be my own arm that hurts. On this picture, self-ascriptions of pain, at least when based on the usual introspective grounds, involve the use of “I” as subject and so are immune to this sort of error of misidentification.

Immunity to this sort of error should not be conflated with another sort of epistemic security that is often discussed under the heading of self-knowledge (see entry on self-knowledge ). Some philosophers have held that, for a range of mental states, one cannot be mistaken about whether one is in them. Thus, for example, if one sincerely judges that one has a pain, or that one believes that P, then it cannot turn out that one is not in pain, or that one does not so believe. That the kind of immunity to error described by Wittgenstein differs from this sort of epistemic security follows from the fact that one may be sceptical of the latter while accepting the former. That is, one may reject the claim that sincere judgements that one has a pain cannot be mistaken (perhaps it is possible to mistake a sensation of coldness for one of pain), whilst nevertheless maintaining that if one is introspectively aware of a pain, then that pain must be one’s own. Immunity to errors of this sort has been taken, by a number of philosophers, to be importantly connected to self-consciousness.

Under the influence of Shoemaker (1968) this phenomenon has become known as immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun, or IEM. On Shoemaker’s formulation, an error of misidentification occurs when one knows some particular thing, a , to be F and judges that b is F on the grounds that one mistakenly believes that a is identical to b . To this it is important to add that IEM is not a feature that judgements possess in virtue of their content alone but only relative to certain grounds (perception, testimony, introspection , memory , etc.). Thus, the judgement that I am jealous of a might be IEM when grounded in introspection, but not when grounded in the overheard testimony of my analyst. For I may have misinterpreted my analyst’s words, wrongly taking his use of “Smith” in “Smith is Jealous of a ” to refer to me (“Smith” after all is a common name). IEM is always relative, then, to the grounds on which a judgement is based. Which grounds might give rise to first-person judgements that are IEM is a contested matter, see the supplement: The Scope of Immunity to Error Through Misidentification .

On this account, first-person thoughts will be IEM relative to certain grounds just in case errors of misidentification are not possible with respect to them. That is, they will be IEM relative to grounds G if and only if it is not possible that one knows, via G , some particular thing, a , to be F and judges oneself to be F in virtue of mistakenly believing that a is identical to oneself. Whilst precise formulations differ in various ways, this can reasonably be thought of as the standard account of IEM (see, for example, Shoemaker 1968, 1970, 1986, 2012; Brewer 1995; Bermúdez 1998: §1.2; Peacocke 1999: ch. 6; 2008: §3.2; 2014: §5.1; Coliva 2006; Recanati 2007: part 6; Perry 2012; most of the papers in Prosser & Recanati 2012; Musholt 2015: ch. 1).

An alternative way of formulating IEM can be found in the work of variety of philosophers. On this view, a judgement “ a is F ” is IEM if and only if it is not possible to undercut one’s evidence for judging that a is F without thereby undercutting one’s evidence that someone is F (for variations on this idea, see Hamilton 1995; Wright 1998; Pryor 1999; Campbell 1999a; 2002: ch. 5; for discussion see Coliva 2006; Joel Smith 2006a; McGlynn 2016). As Wright puts it, a claim

made on a certain kind of ground involves immunity to error through misidentification just when its defeat is not consistent with retention of grounds for existential generalization. (1998: 19)

The idea is that, for a wide range of judgements it is possible that one knows that something is F but wrongly supposes that a is F . That is, one has misidentified which thing is F. For other judgements, perhaps including the introspection based judgement that one has a headache, this sort of identification error is not possible. After Pryor’s (1999) influential discussion, this is typically known as immunity to which -misidentification, or wh -IEM.

That wh-IEM is a distinct phenomenon from IEM as it is standardly formulated is shown by the fact one may consistently claim that a form of experience, for example memory, does not put one in a position to think, of some a distinct from oneself, that a was F , yet nevertheless does put one in a position to think that someone was F . That is, it might give rise to judgements that are IEM but not wh -IEM. The converse, however, is not possible. For since “ a was F ” entails “ someone was F ”, it will not be possible for a judgement, relative to some grounds, to be wh -IEM without it also being IEM. If a judgement is based on an identification, it will be subject to errors of wh -misidentification. For this reason, wh -IEM might legitimately be considered the more fundamental notion (as it is by Pryor 1999).

What is the philosophical significance of IEM? First, consider what it would take for a form of experience to ground thoughts that are IEM. Suppose that a form of experience, introspection for example, itself has first-personal content. That is, suppose that the content of introspective awareness is not adequately conceptualised as pain but rather requires the first-personal form, my pain . If so, then there would be no need for an identification of some object as oneself, for the identity of the subject of pain is already given as oneself. On this way of thinking, to determine which forms of experience ground judgements that are IEM would be to determine which forms of experience have first-personal content. And that, according to some philosophers, is to determine which forms of experience are themselves forms of self-consciousness (see, for example, Bermúdez 1998: 144). This issue is further discussed in §3 .

Second, Wittgenstein suggests that the phenomenon of IEM is responsible for the (in his view, mistaken) opinion that the use of “I” as subject refers to an immaterial soul (1958: 66). This is for the reason that one may be tempted to suppose that if introspectively based self-ascriptions of psychological predicates do not rely on an identification of a bodily entity, they must rely on the identification of a non-bodily entity (1958: 70; for related discussion, see Peacocke 1999: ch. 6; Coliva 2012). Wittgenstein’s view, of course, is that they rely on no identification at all. As Evans puts it, they are identification-free. Essentially the same point is made by Strawson in his diagnosis of “the fact that lies at the root of the Cartesian illusion”, which is that “criterionless” self-ascription gives rise to the idea of a “purely inner and yet subject-referring use for ‘I’” (P.F. Strawson 1966: 164–166). In short, the fact that a certain class of first-person thoughts depend for their reference on no identification of myself as some publicly presented object (they are identification-free) gives rise to the idea that they pick out a private object, a soul. There is a clear connection between this idea and Anscombe’s (1975) argument for the non-referential character of “I”.

3. Self-Consciousness in Experience

Some philosophers maintain that, in addition to its manifestation in first-personal thinking, self-consciousness is also present in various forms of sensory and non-sensory experience (Bermúdez 1998; Hurley 1998: ch. 4; Zahavi 2005; Peacocke 2014; Musholt 2015). After all, self-consciousness is presumably a form of consciousness (see entry on consciousness ). On the view that experience, like thought, has representational content, this can be understood as the view that experiences, like thoughts, can have content that is first-personal. On the further view that the content of experience is non-conceptual (see the entry on non-conceptual mental content), the claim is that there is non-conceptual first-person content (for a conceptualist response, see Noë 2002). Bermúdez also argues that there is a non-conceptual form of self-conscious thinking that arises from non-conceptual self-conscious experience, which he calls “protobelief” (Bermúdez 1998: ch. 5; cf. Bermúdez 2003).

The claim that there is a form of self-consciousness in experience, one which arguably grounds the capacity to entertain first-personal thought, can be understood in a number of ways. According to one view there is a perceptual, or quasi-perceptual, consciousness of the self as an object of experience. On another, there is a “pre-reflective” form of self-consciousness that does not involve the awareness of the self as an object. A third claims that various forms of experience involve a distinctive “sense of ownership” in which each of us is aware of our own states as our own . In each case, the question is whether the mode of experience in question can, in Peacocke’s (2014: ch. 4) words, act as the “non-conceptual parent” of the first-person concept and associated phenomena, in particular that of immunity to error through misidentification.

It is natural to suppose that self-consciousness is, fundamentally, a conscious awareness of the self. On such a view, one is self-conscious if, when one introspects, one is aware of a thing that is, in some sense, presented as oneself. This is the view, mentioned in §1.2 , that Hume seems to be rejecting with his claim that when he introspects he can never catch himself, but only perceptions (Hume 1739–40: bk. 1, ch. 4, §6). Whilst Hume’s claim has been very influential, it has not found universal acceptance. Those siding with Hume include Shoemaker (1986), Martin (1997), Howell (2010), and Prinz (2012) (for a related, Jamesian perspective, see Flanagan 1992: ch. 9). Those opposing him include Chisholm (1976: ch. 1), Cassam (1995), G. Strawson (2009), Damasio (2010) and Rosenthal (2012).

As with first-person thought, the issue is not whether one is, or can be, conscious of what is in fact oneself. If that were sufficient for self-consciousness then, on the supposition that one is identical to one’s body, seeing oneself in a mirror would be a case of self-consciousness, even if one were unaware that it was oneself that one saw. Rather, the issue is whether one is, or can be, conscious of oneself as oneself , a form of awareness in which it is manifest to one that the object of awareness is oneself. If there is such an awareness then this is philosophically significant, since one might expect it to ground certain cases of self-knowledge, first-person reference, and the immunity to error of certain first-person thoughts (Shoemaker 1986; see the entry on self-knowledge ). The inner consciousness of the self as F , for example, would account for one’s capacity to refer to oneself as oneself , one’s knowledge that one is F , and the fact that such a thought cannot rest on a misidentification of another thing as oneself. On the other hand, the claim that there is no such conscious awareness of the self is philosophically significant, not only because it undermines the possibility of such explanations but also for the reason that it plays an important role in various well known arguments: for example, in Kant’s First Critique (1781/1787), most obviously the Transcendental Deduction, the Refutation of Idealism, and the Paralogisms, and in Wittgenstein’s discussion of the conceptual problem of other minds (Kripke 1982: Postscript).

A simple argument for the claim that we are introspectively aware of ourselves is that in introspection one is perceptually aware of one’s own mental properties, and that when one perceives a property one perceives that which has that property, i.e., oneself. Shoemaker (1984b, 1986) agrees that if there is an introspective awareness of the self as an object, then it should be understood as a form of self -perception . He argues, however, that, on a plausible account of perception, introspection is not a form of perception, so we do not introspectively perceive anything, including the self. As such, we cannot conclude in this way that we are introspectively aware of the self (cf. Martin 1997; Rosenthal 2012).

Shoemaker further argues, in a way reminiscent of the Heidelberg School (Frank 1995; Musholt 2015: ch. 1), that the postulation of an introspective awareness of the self as the self would not be in a position to explain all self-knowledge. According to Shoemaker (1984b: 105), if inner perception revealed an object to be F , then I would only be in a position to judge that I am F if I already took myself to be that object that I perceive. But this both presupposes some (non-perceptual) self-knowledge (i.e., that I am the thing perceived via inner sense), and also implausibly opens up introspection based first-person thought to the possibility of errors of misidentification, since such a view would entail that introspective self-knowledge is based in part on an identification of the self.

A number of philosophers have maintained that, even if Hume is right that introspection does not reveal the self as an object, there is another form of perceptual experience which does: bodily awareness (see entry) . Versions of this claim can be found in P.F. Strawson (1966: 102), Evans (1982: ch. 7), Sutton Morris (1982), Ayers (1991), Brewer (1995), Cassam (1995, 1997), Bermúdez (1998, 2011). On this view, through bodily awareness I am aware of my body “from the inside” as a bodily self, as me . Brewer (1995), for example, argues that since bodily sensations are both manifestly properties of oneself and are perceived as located properties of one’s body, it follows that in bodily awareness one perceives one’s body as oneself.

If one’s body is presented as oneself in bodily awareness then, as mentioned above, we might expect this bodily self-perception to ground first-person thought about one’s bodily states. As pointed out in §2 , it is plausible that first-person thoughts cannot fail to refer to their thinker and further that this is manifest in the thinking of them. Martin (1995, 1997) argues on the basis of these two claims that if bodily awareness is a form of self-awareness, then one’s body as presented in bodily awareness must manifestly be oneself. That is, if a form of awareness is to ground judgements which are manifestly about myself, then that form of awareness must manifestly be an awareness of myself. But this is arguably a condition that it does not meet, since it is perfectly coherent to wonder whether or not one is identical to one’s body, just as Descartes famously did in the Meditations (for a different, imagination-based, argument against bodily awareness as a form of self-awareness, see Joel Smith 2006b; see Bermúdez 2011 for a response; for discussions of the relation between self-consciousness and imagination see B. Williams 1973; Reynolds 1989; Velleman 1996).

Another way in which it can be argued that the self figures in sensory experience is in the self-locating content of perceptual experience, most notably vision. Visual experience is perspectival, containing information not only about perceived objects but also of their spatial relation to the perceiver: I see the wall as in front of me , the bookcase as to my left, and so on. The (bodily) self, it might be argued, is experienced as an object in the world, the point of origin of egocentric perception (Cassam 1997: 52–53; Hurley 1998: ch. 4; Bermúdez 1998: ch. 5, 2002, 2011; Peacocke 1999: ch. 6; Schwenkler 2014). On an alternative view, one consistent with the rejection of any sort of awareness of the self as an object, visual perception does not present the self at its point of origin, but rather represents the locations of perceived objects in monadic terms, as ahead , to the left , and so on, without specifying what it is that they are ahead, or to the left, of (Campbell 1994: §4.1; 2002: §9.3; Perry 1986).

If first-person thought is not grounded in an awareness of the self as an object, then some other account is arguably required to account for the capacity to entertain self-conscious thought (O’Brien 1995a). One suggestion is that subjects possess a form of “pre-reflective self-awareness” as a necessary condition of consciousness (Sartre 1937, 1943: Introduction; Zahavi 2005, 2007; Legrand 2006; cf. Kriegel 2009. For criticism, see Schear 2009; also see the entry on phenomenological approaches to self-consciousness ). On this view, all conscious experience involves an implicit awareness of oneself as its subject without explicitly representing the self as an object of awareness (cf. Musholt’s distinction between “self-representationalist” and “non-self-representationalist” accounts of non-conceptual self-consciousness (2015: chs. 3–4)). Indeed, it might be argued that the necessity of an active agent’s possessing some form of self-awareness follows from the connection between action and self-consciousness that many suppose to have been established by considerations of the essential indexical discussed in §2.1 (cf. Bermúdez 1998).

These views are closely associated with theories that explain consciousness in terms of self-consciousness ( §4.3 ). Pre-reflective self-awareness is “pre-reflective”, according to its proponents, in the sense that it does not require one to explicitly reflect on one’s own mental states, or to otherwise take them as objects of attention. Rather, pre-reflective self-awareness is manifest even in those situations in which one’s attention is directed outwards toward worldly objects and events. Pre-reflective self-awareness, then, is implicit in all consciousness, providing one with a continuous awareness of oneself as the subject of one’s stream of experience.

One way in which such views can be understood is as maintaining that experience involves self-consciousness in the mode, rather than the content, of conscious experience (Recanati 2007: part 5; 2012; O’Brien 2007: ch. 6). This can be fleshed out by analogy with the case of belief: one might claim that the concept of truth figures in the mode, but not the explicit content of every belief. That is, whilst every belief is a holding true, it is not the case that every belief has the content that such and such is true. Similarly, whilst every experience is an experience of one’s own, it is not the case that every experience has the content that such and such is experienced by oneself. Rather, the mode of conscious experience (introspection, bodily awareness, etc.) includes an implicit awareness of the self. A related view is that the self can be considered an “unarticulated constituent” of the experience, just as some claim that “here” is an unarticulated constituent of “It is raining” (Perry 1986; Recanati 2007: parts 9 & 10; for scepticism about unarticulated constituents, see Cappelen & Lepore 2007). So, just as the person who believes “It is raining” is implicitly aware of the fact that it is here that it is raining, so the subject of self-conscious experience is implicitly aware of the fact that it is she herself who is undergoing that experience.

Accounts of self-consciousness as involving unarticulated constituents, or as implicit in the mode of consciousness, will need to explain how the transition is made from such implicit self-awareness to the explicit representation of the self in first-person thought. One option is to appeal to the idea that certain sources of information are self-tracking or, in Perry’s (2012) words, “necessarily self-informative”. A form of experience is self-tracking if it is a way of coming to know of the instantiation of properties of a certain type and, necessarily, a subject can come to know, in that way, of the instantiation of her own states only. For example, if it is true that a subject can only remember conscious episodes from her own past, then episodic memory is self-tracking. If so, then the subject may legitimately think the first-person thought “I was F ”, on the basis of her episodic memory of being F . This account may also be used to explain IEM, since if a form of experience is self-tracking, then it will not be possible for me to know, in that way, that a is F but mistakenly think that it is me that is F on the grounds that I mistakenly believe myself to be identical to a (Perry 2012; Recanati 2012; cf. Campbell 1999a; Martin 1995). Here we have an architectural feature of a given form of experience (that it is necessarily an awareness of oneself) being employed in an explanation of an epistemic feature of self-ascriptions based on such experience (that they are not partly grounded in an identity judgement). If I know, in the relevant way, that a is F , then it must be the case that I am a . On this view, making a first-person judgement grounded in a given form of experience is a matter of articulating the unarticulated self. The experience itself is not explicitly first-personal, representing the self as oneself . Nevertheless, it “concerns” the subject, in that it is necessarily tied to the self (see Musholt 2015: ch. 5 for an alternative account).

Pre-reflective, or implicit, accounts of the place of self-consciousness in experience are often associated with the so-called “sense of ownership”, or “sense of mineness” (Flanagan 1992; Martin 1995; Dokic 2003; Marcel 2003; Zahavi 2005: ch. 5; de Vignemont 2007, 2013; Tsakiris 2011; Zahavi & Kriegel 2015). According to some, a fundamental aspect of conscious experiences is that they seem, in each case, to be mine . In being aware of a thought, action, emotion, perceptual experience, memory, bodily experience (and also my body itself), I am aware of it as being my own . This sense of ownership arguably does some work in explaining why it seems difficult to conceive of what it would be like to experience a thought as located in another’s mind, or a pain as located in another’s body (Martin 1995; Dokic 2003). For such an experience would involve being aware of a thought that seemed to be mine but as located in a mind that did not seem to be my own. The sense of ownership is also a candidate for explaining immunity to error through misidentification since if conscious experiences seem to be one’s own, then there is presumably no need for any identification of the experience’s subject as oneself.

Whilst the sense of ownership would, presumably, be accounted for by an introspective awareness of the self, it can also arguably be explained with the more minimal commitments of the implicit view. The sense of an experience as my own can be understood as nothing over and above the fact that the self is implicitly given in the mode of conscious awareness (Musholt 2015: §4.2). Thus the focus on the sense of ownership might be thought to provide a minimal answer to Humean scepticism about self-perception. As Chisholm points out, for example, although Hume complained that he could find no self in introspection, he reported his findings in first-personal terms. That is, he was aware not only of his mental states, but also aware of them as his own (Chisholm 1976: ch. 1; cf. P.F. Strawson’s 1959: ch. 3, attack on the “no-ownership” view).

Even within the context of an implicit account of self-consciousness in experience, we can further distinguish between reductive and non-reductive construals of the sense of ownership (Bermúdez 2011; Zahavi & Kriegel 2015; Alsmith 2015). For example, Zahavi and Kriegel (2015; cf. Kriegel 2003, 2009; Zahavi 2014) defend a non-reductive understanding of the sense of ownership as a distinct aspect of the phenomenal character of experience. By contrast, a reductive account will explain the sense of ownership in terms of cognitive and/or experiential states whose existence we are independently willing to endorse. For example, Bermúdez (2011: 161–166) argues in favour of a reductive account of the sense of ownership over one’s own body, according to which it consists in nothing more than the phenomenology of the spatial location of bodily sensations alongside our disposition to judge the body in which they occur to be our own (cf. Dainton 2008: §8.2; Prinz 2012). Bermúdez’s argument for the reductive view is, in part, based on the claim that, despite appearances, the non-reductive sense of ownership is not in fact able to explain first-personal judgements of ownership (cf. Schear 2009; for a response see Zahavi & Kriegel 2015).

It is sometimes claimed that the variety of ways in which self-consciousness can break down poses a challenge to the claim that the sense of ownership is a universal characteristic of experience (e.g., Metzinger 2003: §7.2.2). Thought insertion, anarchic hand, alien limb, anonymous memory, and anonymous vision, all seemingly involve subjects who are aware of their own conscious states, actions, or body parts, but without being aware of them as their own (for references, see the supplement: The Scope of Immunity to Error Through Misidentification ). They may disown them or attribute them to others. For example, in cases of thought insertion, a symptom of schizophrenia, subjects report that they are aware of the thoughts of other people or objects entering their own minds (see, for example, Saks 2007: ch. 2; for general discussion of schizophrenia and self-consciousness see Parnas & Sass 2011). On the assumption that such subjects are actually aware of what are, in fact, their own thoughts, this might seem to be a case of a conscious experience that lacks the sense of ownership. Thus, either the sense of ownership is not a necessary feature of experience, or perhaps there is no sense of ownership at all (see, for example, Chadha 2017).

A common response to this line of thought involves, first, distinguishing between the sense of ownership and the sense of agency and, second, claiming that subjects of thought insertion lack the latter whilst retaining the former (Stephens & Graham 2000; Gallagher 2004; Peacocke 2008: §7.8; Proust 2013: ch. 12). The sense of agency is the awareness of being the source or the agent of some action or activity, including mental agency. It is the sense that it is me that is thinking a given thought (Bayne 2008; O’Brien & Soteriou 2009; Proust 2013: ch. 10). According to this standard view, cases of thought insertion or anarchic hand, for example, can be wholly explained by postulating a lack of a sense of agency. The usual sense of being the agent of a thought is lacking, but the sense of ownership remains since the thought seems to the subject be taking place in their own mind.

We might, however, wish to make a three-way distinction between the sense of agency (the sense that one is the author of a mental state), the sense of ownership (the sense that one is the owner of a mental state), and what we might call the sense of location (the sense that a mental state is located within one’s own mind). The sense of location might be understood as being possessed if one is aware of a mental state in the ordinary way, i.e., introspectively. Crucial, it would seem, for evaluating the significance of thought insertion and related cases, and so of the standard view, will be determining which, if any, of the senses of agency, ownership, or location remain intact. For it might be argued that what such subjects retain is in fact the sense of location, rather than the sense of ownership. That is, it may be possible to take their descriptions at face value when they deny, in thought insertion for example, that the thoughts in question are their own (or were thought by them), whilst nevertheless accepting that the inserted thought occurs within the boundary of their own mind (for criticisms of the standard view, see Bortolotti & Broome 2009; Pacherie & Martin 2013; Fernández 2013: ch. 5; Billon 2013).

4. The Conditions of Self-Consciousness

Much of the philosophical work on self-consciousness concerns its relation to a variety of other phenomena. These include the nature of personhood, rationality, consciousness, and the awareness of other minds. In each case we can ask whether self-consciousness is a necessary and/or sufficient condition for the phenomenon in question.

As was mentioned in §1.2 , Locke characterises a person as “a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places” (1700: II.xxvii.9). On such a view, self-consciousness is essential to personhood. In particular, on Locke’s view it is the capacity to reidentify oneself at different times that is important, a claim which is in keeping with the central role of memory in his account of personal identity (see Ayers 1991: vol. II, chs. 22–25; Thiel 2011: ch. 4; Weinberg 2011; G. Strawson 2011b; Snowdon 2014: ch. 3; entry on personal identity ). As such, Locke considers the capacity for self-conscious thinking to be a necessary condition of personhood. What is less clear is whether, on this view, self-consciousness is sufficient for personhood. One reason for doubt on this score is that since it is concerned with self-conscious thought the account provides no reason to suppose that creatures that enjoy non-conceptual self-consciousness are persons. A second is that the requirement of being able to reidentify oneself over time is not one that we need consider met by all self-conscious creatures for, we can suppose, it is possible for a self-conscious subject to lack the conceptual sophistication to understand the past and future tense.

An alternative conception of personhood that also gives a central role to self-consciousness can be found in Frankfurt’s claim that it is essential to persons to have a capacity for reflective self-evaluation manifested in the possession of what he calls “second-order volitions” (Frankfurt 1971: 110). Second-order volitions involve wanting a certain desire to be one’s will, that is wanting it to move one to action. A subject with second-order volitions has the capacity to evaluate their first-order desires and this, it would seem, involves being aware of them as (potentially) their own. Thus persons, thought of as subjects with second-order volitions, are self-conscious (for discussion, see Watson 1975; Dennett 1976; Frankfurt 1987; Bratman 2007: chs. 5 & 11).

An account of persons that would appear to distance that notion from self-consciousness is that offered by P.F. Strawson in chapter 3 of Individuals ,

the concept of a person is the concept of a type of entity such that both predicates ascribing states of consciousness and predicates ascribing corporeal characteristics, a physical situation &c. are equally applicable to a single individual of that type. (1959: 101–102; for discussion, see Ayer 1963; Hacker 2002)

Frankfurt points out that this is inadequate as a definition of personhood since “there are many entities beside persons that have both mental and physical properties” (Frankfurt 1971: 5). It may be, however, that Strawson’s formulation here is somewhat loose, and that his central idea is that persons are those entities that self­ -ascribe both types of predicate, a condition that perhaps rules out at least most non-human animals. After all chapter 3 of Individuals , entitled “Persons”, is primarily concerned with the conditions of such self-ascription, with “the use we make of the word ‘I’” (P.F. Strawson 1959: 94).

Strawson’s primary goal is to argue for the claim that the concept of a person is primitive, a position that he contrasts, on the one hand, with Cartesian dualism and, on the other, with what he calls the “no-ownership view”: a view according to which we don’t really self-ascribe states of consciousness at all, at least not with the use of “I” as subject (cf. Wittgenstein 1953: §244; 1958: 76; Anscombe 1975; it is controversial whether Wittgenstein ever really held this view, for discussion see Hacker 1990: chs. 5 & 11; Jacobsen 1996; Wright 1998). To say that the concept of a person is primitive is, on Strawson’s account, to say that it is “logically prior” to the concepts subject and body ; persons are not to be thought of as compounds of subjects and bodies. Strawson argues that the primitiveness of the concept of a person is a necessary condition of the possibility of self-consciousness (P.F. Strawson 1959: 98–103). His argument is that one can only self-ascribe states of consciousness if one is able to ascribe them to others (for more on this theme see §4.4 ). This rules out Cartesian dualism, since ascribing states of consciousness to others requires that one be able to identify others, and one cannot identify pure subjects of experience or Cartesian egos. The condition that one must be able to ascribe states of consciousness to others also rules out the “no-ownership view” because such a view is inconsistent with the fact that psychological predicates have the very same sense in their first and third person uses.

Closely related to the no-ownership view are a family of claims about persons that Parfit dubs “reductionism” (Parfit 1984: §79). Two prominent members of this familiar are the claim that

[a] person’s existence consists in the existence of a brain and body, and the occurrence of a series of interrelated physical and mental event, (1984: 211)

[t]hough persons exist, we could give a complete description of reality without claiming that persons exist. (1984: 212)

Parfit’s reductionism, and it’s relation to Buddhist views of the self, has been widely discussed (see for example, Stone 1988; Korsgaard 1989; Cassam 1989, 1993, 1997: ch. 5; Garrett 1991, 1998: ch. 2; Siderits 1997; McDowell 1997; Blackburn 1997). As is the case with the “no-ownership view” it has sometimes been argued that reductionism is incompatible with self-consciousness so, since we are indisputably self-conscious, reductionism must be false. Against the claim that the (continued) existence of a person consists merely in the (continued) existence of brain, body, and interrelated physical and mental events that do not presuppose anything about persons as such, McDowell (1997) for example, argues from a broadly Evansian position on self-consciousness (see the supplement: Evans on First Person Thought ) that there simply are no such “identity-free relations” (1997: 378) to which a person’s identity could be reducible. That is, there is no way of characterising memory and the other psychological phenomena relevant to personal identity without invoking the identity of the person whose memory it is. As McDowell puts it,

[i]n continuity of “consciousness”, there is what appears to be knowledge of an identity, the persistence of the same subject through time. (1997: 361)

Memory, at least, cannot be employed in a reductive account of persons (for discussion of McDowell’s argument see Buford 2009; Fernández 2014; for related arguments from self-consciousness to the falsity of reductionism, see Cassam 1997: ch. 5).

Is self-consciousness a necessary condition of rationality? A number of philosophers have argued that rationality requires self-knowledge which itself implies self-consciousness (see Shoemaker 1988, 1994; Burge 1996; Moran 2001; Bilgrami 2006; Boyle 2009, 2011; for a general discussion of this approach to self-knowledge, see Gertler 2011: ch. 6). In his case against perceptual theories of self-knowledge, Shoemaker (1994) argues against the possibility of self-blindness; against, that it is, the possibility that a rational creature with all the necessary concepts might be simply unaware of its own sensations, beliefs, and so on. A rational creature that is in pain, Shoemaker argues, will typically desire to be rid of her pain, and this requires that she believe that she is in pain. As Shoemaker puts it, to see rational responses to pain

as pain behavior is to see them as motivated by such states of the creature as the belief that it is in pain, the desire to be rid of the pain, and the belief that such and such a course of behaviour will achieve that result. (Shoemaker 1994: 228)

This belief, that she is in pain, is a self-conscious one; it is a belief that she herself is in pain. This connection between rational behaviour and first-person thought is, of course, the one highlighted by Perry’s (1979) case of the messy shopper in his discussion of the essential indexical (see §2.1 ).

The connection between rationality and self-knowledge (and so self-consciousness), Shoemaker argues, is even more pronounced in the case of our awareness of our own beliefs. Rational subjects should abide by certain strictures on the contents of their beliefs, updating them in line with new evidence, removing inconsistencies, and so on. And this, Shoemaker argues, requires that they not be self-blind with respect to their beliefs. It requires that they are self-conscious. As Shoemaker writes,

in an important class of cases the rational revision or adjustment of the belief-desire system requires that we undertake investigations aimed at determining what revisions or readjustments to make […] What rationalizes the investigation are one’s higher-order beliefs about what one believes and has reason to believe. (Shoemaker 1994: 240; also see Shoemaker’s discussion of Moore’s Paradox in Shoemaker 1988, 1994; for critical discussion of Shoemaker’s arguments in the context of theories of self-knowledge see, for example, Macdonald 1999; Kind 2003; Siewert 2003; Gertler 2011: ch. 5)

The connection that Shoemaker sees between the requirements of rationality, on the one hand, and self-awareness, on the other, is also stressed in so-called “rationalist” accounts of self-knowledge, most prominently in the work of Burge (1996) and Moran (2001; for critical discussion of the rationalist approach as an account of self-knowledge see, for example, Peacocke 1996; O’Brien 2003; Reed 2010; Gertler 2011: ch. 6). Burge focuses on the notion of the critical reasoner . He writes,

[t]o be capable of critical reasoning, and to be subject to certain rational norms necessarily associated with such reasoning, some mental acts and states must be knowledgeably reviewable. (Burge 1996: 97; for a fuller argument for the same conclusion, see Burge 1998)

On Burge’s account, the critical reasoner must be in a position to recognise their reasons as reasons, and that requires “the second order ability to think about thought contents or propositions, and rational relations among them” (1996: 97). This is for the reason that belief involves commitments and such commitments involve meeting certain standards—providing reasons, reevaluating where necessary, and so on.

A similar line of thought can be found in Moran’s account of the role of reflection on one’s own state in practical deliberation about what to do and how to feel (Moran 2001: ch. 2). Here the focus is not so much on critical reasoning but rather practical deliberation as that which requires self-consciousness. This is an idea that is also central to much of Korsgaard’s work (see, in particular, Korsgaard 1996, 2009). A central concern of hers is to distinguish between the sort of action of which all animals are capable and the sort of autonomous agency of which we self-conscious subjects are capable. The difference lies, on her broadly Kantian view, in simply having one’s most powerful desire result in action, on the one hand, and counting that desire as a reason for action, on the other. It is the latter that is constitutive of autonomous, deliberative action understood from the perspective of practical reason. As she writes,

[w]hen you deliberate it is as if there were something over and above all your desires, something which is you , and which chooses which desire to act upon. (Korsgaard 1996: 100)

Self-consciousness, on this view,

is the source of reason. When we become conscious of the workings of an incentive within us, the incentive is experienced not as a force or a necessity but as a proposal, something we need to make a decision about. (Korsgaard 2009: 119; for discussion of Korsgaard’s account of the relation between self-consciousness and the perspective of practical reason, see, for example, Nagel 1996; Fitzpatrick 2005; Soteriou 2013: ch. 12).

Self-awareness, on these views, is a necessary condition of rationality (conceived as the capacity for critical reasoning or practical deliberation). Burge also makes it clear that he regards the capacity for critical reasoning to be a necessary condition of (conceptual) self-consciousness, since to master and self-ascribe psychological concepts such as belief, once must be able to recognise their role in reasoning, and so employ them (Burge 1996: 97, n.3). As he puts it,

[a]cknowledging, with the I concept, that an attitude or act is one’s own is acknowledging that rational evaluations of it which one also acknowledges provide immediate […] reason and rationally immediate motivation to shape the attitude or act in accordance with the evaluation […] The first-person concept fixes the locus of responsibility. (Burge 1998: 253)

The claim that there is a constitutive connection between self-consciousness and rationality has been met with scepticism by Kornblith (2011, 2012: ch. 2; for a related line of thought, see Doris 2015: ch. 2). Regarding the sort of responsiveness to reason involved in updating one’s beliefs in accordance with new evidence—one of the capacities emphasised by both Shoemaker and Burge—Kornblith argues that “[w]hile such responsiveness may be achieved, at times, by way of reflection on one’s beliefs and desires, it does not require any such reflection” (2012: 49). Rationally revising beliefs in the face of evidence, Kornblith is keen to point out, is a capacity enjoyed by non-reflective animals. He further presents the rationalist view with a challenge: if one thinks that (first-order) beliefs are not themselves responsive to reason, how does adding (second-order) beliefs help? One response to this challenge is to point out that the connection between self-awareness and rationality that Shoemaker finds is intended to hold only for “an important class of cases” (Shoemaker 1994: 240), that is it holds for those cases of belief revision that themselves qualify as exercises in rational investigation. On this view, whilst non-reflective creatures may have some degree of rationality, their lack of self-consciousness means that they are not, as we are, capable of fully rational deliberation (for discussion of Kornblith’s scepticism concerning the role of self-consciousness in rationality, see Pust 2014; M. Williams 2015; Smithies 2016).

Central to the history of the self-consciousness sketched in §1 is a concern with the relation between self-consciousness and consciousness. Since self-consciousness is itself a form of consciousness, consciousness is, of course, a necessary condition of it. But is self-consciousness necessary for consciousness? Positive answers to this question come in both reductive and non-reductive varieties.

One way in which consciousness might entail self-consciousness is if the former is reducible to the latter. One such family of views are higher order theories of consciousness which maintain that a psychological state is conscious if and only if it is represented, in the right way, by a higher order state (Gennaro 2004; for a very different account that nevertheless posits a tight connection between consciousness and self-consciousness, see O’Shaughnessy 2002: ch. 3). A natural assumption is that this higher order state is distinct from that which it represents. Higher Order theories that accept this assumption fall into two camps: Higher Order Thought (HOT) theories (Rosenthal 1986, 2005; Carruthers 2000, 2005), which maintain that the higher order state is a thought or belief, and Higher Order Perception (HOP) theories (Armstrong 1968; Lycan 1996, 2004), which by contrast maintain that the higher order state is a perception-like sensory state—an exercise of the sort of inner perception, or “inner sense”, that was extensively debated throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Thiel 2011; see §3.1). Since, however, we can be aware that someone else is in some conscious state, it seems that simply being aware that a thought is occurring is insufficient to render that thought conscious. Arguably, what is required is that one be aware that one is in the relevant first-order state. That is, one represents oneself as being in the state in question. Since this seems to involve a form of self-awareness, the HOT and HOP theories can be understood as holding that consciousness entails self-consciousness (Gennaro 1996). Given this, it is natural to think of the distinction between HOT and HOP theories of consciousness as closely related to that between conceptual and non-conceptual self-consciousness.

An alternative to HOT and HOP theories that still maintains the ambition to reduce consciousness to self-consciousness is the self-representational view (Kriegel & Williford 2006; Kriegel 2009; Caston 2002), according to which a psychological state is conscious if and only if it represents itself. Such accounts are higher-order views that deny that the first and second-order states are distinct. As with both HOT and HOP, self-representationalism can be thought of as supporting the view that a form of self-consciousness is a necessary condition of consciousness. Kriegel (2003) dubs this “intransitive self-consciousness”, the phenomenon purportedly picked out by phrases of the form “I am self-consciously thinking that P”, and distinguishes it from the “transitive self-consciousness” purportedly picked out by phrases of the form “I am self-conscious of my thought that P”. This is a version of the distinction between reflective and pre-reflective self-consciousness discussed in §3.2 (and the views of Fichte and Sartre mentioned in §1 ; cf. Kapitan 1999). If conscious states are those that represent themselves then, it might be argued, consciousness entails intransitive self-consciousness, since one’s conscious states do not only represent themselves but also (in some way implicitly) represent oneself as having them (Kriegel 2003: 104).

Aristotle, considering a version of the HOP theory, argued that the view suffered from a regress problem since the higher-order perception must itself be conscious and so be accompanied by a HOP, which would itself be conscious, and so on ( De Anima 3.2; Caston 2002). The standard way to diffuse such a worry is to deny that the higher order state, be it perception or thought, need be conscious. An alternative, of course, is to endorse a self-representational account. There are other objections to higher order views, however, each of which applies to one or more versions of the view. They include worries about the possibility of objectless and non-veridical higher order states (Byrne 1997; Block 2011), about whether it can account for the conscious states of infants and non-humans (Dretske 1995: ch. 4; Tye 1995: ch. 1), the complaint that the postulation of a distinct higher-order state for every conscious state leads to an unnecessarily “cluttered picture of the mind” (Chalmers 1996: 231), and the fundamental worry that no form of higher-order view has the resources to explain consciousness at all (Levine 2006; cf. Kriegel 2012). As such, higher-order and self-representational theories of consciousness, that posit a necessary connection between consciousness and self-consciousness, are far from being established.

If consciousness cannot be reduced to self-consciousness, perhaps the latter is nevertheless a necessary condition of the former. Some non-reductive views, already mentioned, see pre-reflective consciousness (see §3.2 ), or the sense of ownership (see §3.3 ) as necessary conditions of consciousness (see Zahavi 2005). A different non-reductive, and broadly Kantian, argument for the claim that self-consciousness is a necessary condition of consciousness first of all claims that conscious experience is necessarily unified and, second, that this unity of consciousness in turn depends on self-awareness. Of primary interest here is the second step which is articulated by Strawson in his discussion of Kant’s transcendental deduction as the claim that,

if different experiences are to belong to a single consciousness, there must be the possibility of self­ -consciousness on the part of the subject of those experiences. (P.F. Strawson 1966: 93; for discussion of Kant’s views of the matter, see Henrich 1989; Powell 1990; Brook 1994; Keller 1998; Kitcher 2011; Allison 2015; for detailed discussion of whether consciousness is necessarily unified, see Bayne 2010; see also entry on unity of consciousness ).

One reason for supposing that there is a connection between self-consciousness and the unity of consciousness is given by Kant, who writes,

only because I can comprehend their manifold in a consciousness do I call them altogether my representations; for otherwise I would have as multi-coloured diverse a self as I have representations of which I am conscious. (Kant 1781/1787: B134)

That is, a single self must be able to “comprehend” its own experiences together, otherwise they would not really be its own. Such “comprehension” would seem to involve self-consciousness. As Kant famously puts it,

[t]he I think must be able to accompany all my representations for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me. (Kant 1781/1787: B131–132)

On this view, it is the unity of the self that guarantees that co-conscious experiences are jointly self-ascribable; that unity requires self-consciousness (there is a question as to whether self-consciousness is here supposed to explain the unity of consciousness; cf. Dainton’s strong and weak “I-thesis” (2000: §2.3)). This Kantian picture is associated with the claim that unified self-consciousness requires a conception of the world as objective; as transcending the perspective that one has on it. The idea here is that to self-ascribe an experience one must have some grasp of the distinction between one’s (subjective) experience that the (objective) condition of which it is an experience (these issues are explored in P.F. Strawson 1966; Bennett 1966; Evans 1980; Cassam 1997; Sacks 2000; also see Burge 2010: ch. 6).

The claim that the unity of consciousness requires self-consciousness can be criticised in a number of different ways. How one evaluates the claim will depend on whether one has conceptual or non-conceptual self-consciousness in mind. As Bayne (2004) points out, the claim that the unity of consciousness requires that one possess the concept of oneself seems, implausibly, to imply that conceptually unsophisticated infants and non-human animals could not possess a unified stream of consciousness (of course, this worry applies quite generally to views that connect consciousness with self-consciousness). The view that non-conceptual self-consciousness is a necessary condition of the unity of consciousness would appear to be vulnerable to the objection that it implausibly rules out the possibility of cases such as Anscombe’s (1975) subject in a sensory deprivation tank, a case in which the forms of experience typically classed as forms of non-conceptual self-consciousness are lacking (for related cases see Bayne 2004; also see G. Strawson 1999). A different worry about the connection between self-consciousness and the unity of consciousness is the “just more content” objection (B. Williams 1978: ch. 3; Hurley 1994; and 1998 Part I). The concern is addressed to the view that self-consciousness is not merely a necessary condition of the unity of consciousness but is that in virtue of which it is unified. For if the self-ascription of experiences is taken to be that which is responsible for the unity of consciousness, how can we account for the fact that the self-conscious thoughts are themselves unified with the first-order experiences that they supposedly unify? As Hurley puts it,

self-conscious or first-person contents […] are just more contents , to which the problem of co-consciousness [i.e., the unity of consciousness] also applies (1998: 61)

To appeal to the third-order self-ascription of the self-conscious thought would appear to invite a regress.

What is the connection between self-consciousness and the awareness of others? On some views self-consciousness requires awareness of others, on another view the awareness of others requires self-consciousness. In each case we can distinguish between those accounts according to which such awareness is merely an empirical condition from those according to which it is a strictly necessary/sufficient condition. There is also a distinction to be made regarding the sense of “awareness of others” that is in play: whilst some philosophers are concerned with knowledge of other minds, others are content with the representation of others, veridical or not.

A familiar account of our knowledge of others takes the form of an argument from analogy (Slote 1970: ch. 4; Avramides 2001: part I). The argument from analogy presents an account of our justification for moving from judgements about others’ observable behaviour to judgements about their unobservable mental states. I am aware from my own case that, say, wincing is the result of pain so, on seeing another’s wincing, I am justified in judging them to be in pain. On this picture, self-awareness, as manifest in the judgement about my own case, is a necessary condition of knowledge of other minds. In this respect the view is related to contemporary simulation theory, standard versions of which see our capacity to attribute mental states to others as dependent on our capacity to attribute them to ourselves (Heal 1986; Goldman 2006: ch. 9; for a simulationist theory that differs in this respect, see Gordon 1996). Associated with the argument from analogy is a view according to which our grasp of mental state concepts is an essentially first-personal affair. That is, we understand what, for example, pain is first from our own case (Nagel 1986: §2.3; Peacocke 2008: ch. 5–6; it has sometimes been claimed that this view gives rise to the conceptual problem of other minds, see Wittgenstein 1958: §302; McGinn 1984; Avramides 2001: part II).

In opposition to this package stand views on which our grasp and application of mental state concepts is neutral between the first and third-person cases. Theory theorists, for example, claim that we attribute mental states to both ourselves and others by means of a (tacitly held) psychological theory. They may also hold that possession of such a theory constitutes our grasp of mental state concepts (Carruthers 1996, 2011: ch. 8; Gopnik & Meltzoff 1997; for an account that combines elements of theory with elements of simulation, see Nichols & Stich 2003). While such views accord no priority to the first-person case, they may see a tight connection between self-consciousness and our capacity to think about others: these are simply two aspects of the more general capacity to think about the mind. A distinct, though related, family of views see both self-consciousness and awareness of others as emerging from a primitive “adualist” state in which self and other are not distinguished (Piaget 1937; Merleau-Ponty 1960; Barresi & Moore 1996; Hurley 2005; Gallese 2005; also see D. Stern 1985: part II). Against such “adualist” views, it is often claimed the phenomena of neonate imitation, joint attention, and emotion regulation show that infants display an awareness of others as others from the very beginning of life (Meltzoff & Moore 1977; Trevarthen 1979; Hurley & Chater 2005; Eilan et al. 2005; Legerstee 2005; Reddy 2008). One empirical proposal is that it is from this early form of social interaction and capacity to understand others that self-consciousness emerges as a self-directed form of mindreading (Carruthers 2011; Carruthers, Fletcher, & Ritchie 2012; for an early such account, see Mead 1934). On such a view the first-person case is treated as secondary, reversing the traditional picture associated with the argument from analogy.

A more ambitious version of this approach to the relationship between self-consciousness and awareness of others, prioritizing the awareness of others, is to argue that knowledge of other minds is a necessary condition of the possibility of self-consciousness. Well known examples of such arguments can be found in the work of P.F. Strawson (1959: ch. 3) and Davidson (1991; for the related Hegelian view that various forms of self-consciousness depend on intersubjective recognition, see Honneth 1995). Since knowledge of other minds is typically considered to be open to sceptical doubt, and self-consciousness is not, such lines of reasoning are transcendental arguments and so potentially open to general criticisms of that form of argument (Stroud 1968; R. Stern 1999, 2000). Strawson’s argument hinges on his claim that

the idea of a predicate is correlative with that of a range of distinguishable individuals of which the predicate can be significantly, though not necessarily truly, affirmed. (P.F. Strawson 1959: 99; cf. Evans’ generality constraint, 1982: §4.3)

This means, Strawson claims, that one can only ascribe mental states to oneself if one is capable of ascribing them to others which, in turn, means that I cannot have gained the capacity to think of others’ mental states by means of an analogical reasoning from my own case. This, Strawson argues, shows that others’ observable behaviour is not a “sign” of their mentality, but is a “criterion” of it. In short, we must have knowledge of others’ minds if we are self-conscious (for the full argument, see P.F. Strawson 1959: 105ff; for critical discussion, see R. Stern 2000: ch. 6; Sacks 2005; Joel Smith 2011).

Davidson’s transcendental argument—the triangulation argument—connects self-consciousness, knowledge of other minds, and knowledge of the external world. At its heart is the claim that for my thoughts to have determinate content there must exist another subject who is able to interpret me. As Davidson puts it,

it takes two points of view to give a location to the cause of a thought, and thus to define its content […] Until a base line has been established by communication with someone else, there is no point in saying one’s own thoughts or words have a propositional content. (Davidson 1991: 212–213)

Since self-conscious subjects are aware of the contents of their thoughts, they must know that there are other minds, since the sort of intersubjective externalism that Davidson endorses guarantees it. Self-knowledge, on this view, entails knowledge of others (for discussion, see R. Stern 2000: ch. 6; Sosa 2003; Ludwig 2011).

5. Self-Consciousness in Infants and Non-Human Animals

At what age can human infants be credited with self-consciousness? Is self-consciousness present beyond homo sapiens ? Some theorists, for example Bermúdez (1998), claim that various forms of perceptual experience constitute a non-conceptual form of self-consciousness (see §3 ). Others, for example Rosenthal (2005), claim that phenomenal consciousness entails self-consciousness. If either view is correct then self-consciousness, of some kind, can plausibly be attributed to creatures other than adult humans. But when it comes to more sophisticated forms of self-awareness, matters are less clear. What is required is some empirical criterion for judging a creature self-conscious even if, as with infants and non-human animals, they are unable to provide evidence via their use of the first-person pronoun. Such evidence, if available, may reasonably be thought to shed light on both the phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of self-consciousness (Ferrari & Sternberg 1998; Terrace & Metcalfe 2005; see the entries on animal consciousness and animal cognition ).

It has sometimes been claimed, most forcefully by Gallup and colleagues, that the capacity to recognise oneself in the mirror is a marker of self-consciousness (Gallup 1970; Gallup, Anderson, & Platek 2011; Gallup, Platek, & Spaulding 2014). It is easy to see why this might seem to be so since, if first-person thought involves thinking about oneself as oneself , then it is natural to suppose that a capacity to recognise that a subject seen in a mirror is oneself involves such a thought. In Evans’s (1982) terminology such thoughts involve an “identification component”.

Gallup (1970) devised a test for mirror self-recognition: surreptitiously placing a red mark on a subject’s forehead before exposure to a mirror, then observing whether they touch the relevant spot. It is well established that chimpanzees pass the mirror test while other primate species fail (Anderson & Gallup 2011). It has also been claimed that dolphins and some elephants pass the test (Reiss & Marino 2001; Plotnik et. al. 2006). With respect to human infants, the consensus is that success in the mirror test begins at around 15 to 18 months of age, and that by 24 months most children pass (Amsterdam 1972; M. Lewis & Brooks-Gunn 1979; Nielsen, Suddendorf, & Slaughter 2006).

It is not universally accepted, however, that success in the mirror test is an indication of self-consciousness. For example, Heyes (1994) presents an influential critique of the claim that it is a marker of self-awareness, arguing that all that is required for success is that subjects be able to distinguish between novel ways of receiving bodily feedback in order to guide behaviour, on the one hand, and other forms of incoming sensory data, on the other. Such a view, however, needs to explain why it is that passing the mirror test seems to be connected with the phenomena arguably associated with self-consciousness, such as experiencing shame and embarrassment (M. Lewis 2011). There remains, then, significant controversy concerning what success in the mirror test really shows, and so whether it can shed light on the development of self-awareness (see, for example, Mitchell 1993; Suddendorf & Butler 2013; Gallup, Platek, & Spaulding 2014. For related philosophical discussion, see Rochat & Zahavi 2011; Peacocke 2014: ch.8).

Another potential marker of self-consciousness is episodic memory, the capacity that we have to recollect particular episodes from our own past experience (see Tulving 1983; Michaelian 2016; entry on memory ). As Tulving describes it, episodic memory involves “autonoesis” or “mental time-travel”, the experience of transporting oneself in time (which also has a future oriented dimension in expectation, planning, and so on; see Michaelian, Klein, & Szpunar 2016). The connection between memory and self-consciousness is one that is often made (see §2.3 , §3 , and §4.1 ). If it is correct that episodic memory essentially involves a form of self-consciousness, and we are able to test for the presence of episodic memory in non-linguistic infants and animals, then we have a way of detecting the presence of self-conscious abilities. Since, however, episodic memory is not the only form of self-consciousness, the lack of it does not indicate that a creature is not self-aware. Indeed, the much discussed case of K.C. seems to be one in which, due to an accident, someone has lost episodic memory but appears to remain otherwise self-conscious (see Rosenbaum et. al. 2005).

Tulving himself argues that only humans possess episodic memory, and only when they reach the age of around 4 years (2005; also see Suddendorf & Corballis 2007). Whilst human infants and non-human animals possess non-episodic forms of memory such as semantic memory (remembering that such and such is the case), they lack the “autonoetic” consciousness of themselves projected either back or forwards in time. For example whilst most 3 year old infants can remember presented information, most are unreliable when it comes to the question of how they know—did they see it, hear it, etc. (Gopnik & Graf 1988). The suggestion here is that the development of the reliable capacity to report how they know some fact reflects the development of the capacity to episodically remember the learning event.

In the case of animals perhaps the most suggestive evidence of episodic memory derives from work on scrub-jays, who can retain information about what food has been stored, where it was stored, and when (Clayton, Bussey, & Dickinson 2003). This evidence coheres with the “what, where, when” criterion of episodic memory originally proposed by Tulving (1972). It is, however, widely accepted that this content-based account of episodic memory—episodic memory is memory that contains information about what happened, where it happened, and when—is inadequate, since non-episodic, semantic memory often involves the retention of “what, where, when” information. Due to the difficulties in finding a behavioural test for “autonoetic” consciousness, it is often, though not universally, claimed that there is no compelling evidence for episodic memory, and thus this particular form of self-consciousness, in non-human animals (Tulving 2005; Suddendorf & Corballis 2007; Michaelian 2016: ch. 2; for discussion relating to apes, see Menzel 2005; Schwartz 2005; for an alternative perspective suggesting that episodic memory abilities come in degree, see Breeden et. al. 2016).

Another body of research pertaining to the question of self-consciousness in infants and non-human animals is the work on metacognition (and metamemory). The term “metacognition” typically refers to the capacity to monitor and control one’s own cognitive states, and is manifest in one’s judgements (or feelings) concerning one’s own learning and consequent level of certainty or confidence (J.D. Smith 2009; Beran et al. 2012; Proust 2013; Fleming & Frith 2014). The suggestion is that if a creature is able to monitor their own level of confidence, they are to that extent self-conscious. One common paradigm for testing metacognitive abilities involves presenting subjects with a stimulus that they must categorise in one of two ways. Crucially, they are also given the opportunity to opt out of the test, with correct categorisation resulting in the highest reward, opting out resulting in a lower reward, and incorrect categorisation resulting in no reward. The assumption is that the opt-out response reflects a meta-cognitive judgement of uncertainty. Evidence gathered from such a paradigm has been taken to show metacognitive abilities in some birds (Fujita et. al. 2012), dolphins (J.D. Smith et. al. 1995), primates (Shields et. al. 1997), and children from the age of around 4 years (Sodian et. al. 2012).

The view that success on metacognitive opt-out tests is indicative of self-consciousness is not uncontroversial, however. For example, it has been suggested that the uncertainty response is indicative not of metacognitive uncertainty monitoring but rather of first-order, environmental judgements concerning a third category between the intended two (Kornell, Son, & Terrace 2007; Hampton 2009; also see Carruthers 2008; Kornell 2014; Musholt 2015: ch. 7). On such an interpretation, the research on metacognition does not provide compelling evidence regarding self-consciousness in infants and non-human animals (but for critical discussion see J.D. Smith 2005; J.D. Smith, Couchman, & Beran 2014; also relevant is the distinction between “evaluativist” and “attributivist” accounts of metacognition outlined by Proust (2013)). The question of the significance of opt-out tests for attributions of self-consciousness remains controversial.

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The Day Ram Dass Died

By Christopher Fiorello

I woke up every thirty minutes the night before Ram Dass died. Stretching my perception through the big divider that separated his study—where I lay on a narrow couch—from his bedroom, I’d count the seconds between the short, ragged breaths churning through his sleep-apnea machine.

Four years later, I still have no idea why I was chosen to watch over him that night. I was at the bottom of the caregiver pecking order when it came to things directly related to Ram Dass’s body. I lacked the size and strength to transfer him from bed to wheelchair, or wheelchair to recliner, on my own; was too much of a novice to help organize his schedule or coördinate with his doctors; and was too unfamiliar to offer intellectual comfort in the rare moments that he wanted to talk. I’d met him ten months earlier, had his voice in my head for just three years. There were people in the house, on Maui, who had known him for more than three decades.

Before arriving, I had no formal medical training, but I had done three weeks of volunteering at a hospice facility in anticipation of coming to the island. Most of it involved moving Kleenex and changing the amount of light in empty rooms. Several times I sat with the dying. It was overwhelming to look at their closed eyes, feeling the heaviness in the room, the sense of something happening or about to happen. I scanned their faces for signs of pain, of fear or bliss, of transcendence. Through the palliative haze of opioids, they were impossible to read. No one was thrashing in pain; no one was smiling, either.

But it somehow buoyed me, being so close to death. The heaviness seemed critically important to my spiritual growth. I imagined myself giving peace to the dying through my presence, and in the process conquering my own fear of leaving life behind.

During my time with Ram Dass, I flitted constantly between self-righteousness and self-pity, one day indulging in grandiose fantasies that I was the heir to his legacy, charged with scattering his ashes, and the next imagining that everyone in the house hated me. The caregivers called it the classroom or the fire—a site of purifying work, a pathway to enlightenment.

My own work, purifying or otherwise, consisted mostly of handling various chores needed to keep a six-bedroom cliffside home with a pool, guesthouse, and two-acre yard going. For the bits that mattered—the scrubbing and the laundry and the cooking—there was a team of cleaners and a rotating cast of chefs. I ended up doing a lot of the rest: separating recycling, washing dishes, and replacing cat-scratched screens. There were three other caregivers in the house, and I was given a modest salary, plus my own room, meals, and shared access to a truck. I was an employee, but most days the house felt like a family, for better or worse.

Still, this was only the second time I’d been asked to spend the night in the study. It was generally perceived as an act of intense devotion: accepting a horrible night’s sleep, on a couch that reeked of cat pee, while facing the prospect of Ram Dass dying on your watch. I hated it, but I was there to care for the guy however it was decided that he needed care.

Most of the deciding was done by a woman affectionately dubbed Dassi Ma, a seventysomething lapsed-Catholic firecracker from Philadelphia. Dassi Ma was Ram Dass’s primary caretaker, and, though she no longer did the more strenuous physical tasks, she was still in command of what he got and when, often more so than Ram Dass himself. He was eighty-eight, and his health had been steadily deteriorating owing to a host of issues, including chronic infections. When I moved to Maui to be near him, in February, 2019, he had almost died the night I arrived. He bounced back, to everyone’s surprise but his own. “It wasn’t time,” I remember him saying in his stoic way, neither relieved nor disappointed. Now he had another spreading infection, and what appeared to be a cracked rib from being transferred to and from his wheelchair.

Ram Dass’s life is the subject of multiple documentaries, an autobiography, and a docuseries in development starring “ High Maintenance ” ’s Ben Sinclair. He was born Richard Alpert in 1931 to a wealthy Boston family. His pedigree was sterling: a Stanford psychology Ph.D., tenure track at Harvard, visiting professorship at Berkeley. In 1963, after five years at Harvard—much of it spent studying psychedelics with his fellow-psychologist Timothy Leary —he was fired for giving psilocybin mushrooms to an undergraduate.

He bopped around for a few years, often taking obscene amounts of mind-altering substances with Leary at the Hudson Valley estate of his friend Peggy Hitchcock. In 1967, like so many other Westerners of the time, he travelled to India in pursuit of exotic answers to life’s biggest questions. He’d grown disenchanted with the psychedelic world, which had come to seem rotely defined by highs and comedowns. In India, he met a Californian hippie named Kermit Riggs and followed him to a village called Kainchi, in the Himalayan foothills, to meet Riggs’s guru.

The guru was an old, squat man named Neem Karoli Baba. Before long, an enthralled Alpert was reborn as Ram Dass, or roughly “servant of God.” He returned to America later that year, arriving at the airport dressed in white robes and with a long, scraggly beard, and began his career as a spiritual teacher. Most of what he talked about, from 1967 to his death, were the experiences he had with Neem Karoli Baba, whom he called Maharaj-ji (“great king”), and the spiritual beliefs that emerged from those experiences.

One of his main ports of call became death and dying. In 1981, he co-founded the Dying Center, in Santa Fe, an organization that described itself as “the first place specifically created to support and guide its residents to a conscious death.” The center sought, in effect, dying people who wanted to use their death to become spiritually enlightened, and staff members who wanted to use other people’s deaths to achieve the same. Even before the Dying Center took shape, Ram Dass was lecturing on the spirituality of death, its place in the natural order, and the starkly contrasting way that he believed it was perceived in the East. His teachings were rooted in a specific vision of metaphysical reality, as informed by his guru and by the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu text. Roughly, he believed in nondualism, that there existed an unchanging and absolute entity—the Hindu Brahman, which Ram Dass more frequently called God, the divine, or oneness—from which all material reality came. Included in that reality were souls (something like the Hindu atman ), which by their nature were caught in the illusion of their separateness from God, repeating a cycle of birth, suffering, death, and reincarnation until they remembered their true nature as part of the oneness—that is, until they became enlightened.

Death could be a crucial moment for remembering this nonduality, as it was when the “veil of separateness” was thinnest. In his 1971 book, “ Be Here Now ,” which has sold more than two million copies worldwide, Ram Dass summarizes his views: “You are eternal . . . There is no fear of death because / there is no death / it’s just a transformation / an illusion.”

He often spoke to crowds afraid of dying, repeating that he had “no fear of death.” He sat with people on their deathbeds and talked routinely about the power of “leaving the body,” his efforts to “quiet himself” so that the dying could see where they were in the reincarnation process and do what they could to escape it. His stories were sometimes graphic—people dying prematurely, or dying in tremendous pain—but always tinged with a lightness and humor.

Perhaps Ram Dass’s most memorable remarks about death came not from his own mind but from a woman named Pat Rodegast, who claimed she had channelled a spirit named Emmanuel from 1969 to her death, in 2012. Rodegast was working as a secretary, raising children, and practicing Transcendental Meditation when she began to see a light, which evolved into what she called telepathic auditory guidance. Some of that guidance was captured in three books published in the eighties and nineties, two of which came with forewords from Ram Dass. According to Ram Dass, when he asked Emmanuel what to tell people about death, Emmanuel replied that it was “absolutely safe,” “like taking off a tight shoe.”

I first encountered the voice of Ram Dass in 2016. I was twenty-seven and living in New York, in a Chinatown building that rattled every time an empty box truck drove down First Avenue. Each morning, I tumbled down five flights of sticky stairs and placed one of his talks deep into my ears, letting his distinct blend of scientific erudition and spiritual mysticism carry me across town.

He had a habit of segueing from psychological concepts, like attachment theory and childhood trauma, to cryptic ones, like Emmanuel’s messages and the astral plane, pausing briefly to ask listeners if they could really, truly “hear this.” He seemed to build on the insights of others who had revolutionized end-of-life care in America—thinkers such as the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross —but also spoke in the New Age argot of Alan Watts. I gobbled it all up, feeling my spiritual life deepen exponentially by the day. His lectures made me more prosocial, more anti-capitalist, more curious, and decidedly more self-loving.

This was my second rodeo with spirituality; growing up, a rigid strain of Protestantism had been foisted on me like a chore. In Kansas City, Missouri, I was enveloped by an atmosphere of creationism, tent revivals, and anti-abortion screeds. I still recall standing on a busy street as a six-year-old and holding a sign that read “Before I Formed You in the Womb I Knew You—God.”

The teachings of Ram Dass were nothing like that. They were straight out of the hippie movement, and seemed to license a more liberal, self-directed search for meaning. As the grind and filth of Manhattan wore me down, Ram Dass’s voice became a salve, a way to “wake up to the illusion of our separateness.” I turned to his work again and again—to ease my loneliness when, walking down the street, droves of people moved around me like I was a light post, or to arrogantly tell my ex-girlfriend that we would always be “together,” even though I’d already dumped her.

After a couple of years, I learned that I could actually meet Ram Dass, for free, by signing up for one of his “Heart-to-Hearts”—a one-on-one, hour-long Skype call he offered as a sort of public service. When my time came, and the man appeared onscreen, I was stunned into silence. I had thought of him as a spry, ethereal figure who existed only in decades-old recordings. This Ram Dass was very old and lived with fairly advanced aphasia, a side effect of a major stroke he’d had in 1997. His speech was slow—in our full hour, he said roughly sixty words—but not at all ponderous. I thought it gave him a mystical quality.

There was no format to the session; Ram Dass just smiled his winning smile and listened. At one point, after I’d nervously overshared, he told me, “You take yourself pretty seriously.” That struck me as profound, at least at the time, but what endured was more feeling than words. It seemed he had arrived at a place from which he could find genuine love for strangers like me. It didn’t strike me as brand positioning, or as a form of ego; I didn’t think he loved me in the sense that he wanted to be close, or even that he cared whether we got to know each other. I just believed he saw me as another soul, and that, in his view, made me worthy of kindness.

By then, I was walking around New York, trying desperately to feel connected to anything. I wanted what Ram Dass had. So I left the city, intending, among other things, to get him to show me how to have it.

The friend I’d discovered Ram Dass with had already moved to Neem Karoli Baba’s temple, in Taos, New Mexico. I visited him for a fortnight of cooking group meals, wandering through the snowy high desert, and hobnobbing with Maharaj-ji zealots, including one white teen-ager who insisted that he was the reincarnation of Krishna, one of Hinduism’s most revered avatars. Like the young Krishna of lore, he would steal away to the temple pantry to eat pure butter until caught.

Some of this evoked my childhood church, where kids compared how quickly they could transition into speaking in tongues, or flexed the depth of their personal relationship with Jesus while leading a collective prayer. But this was my first encounter with Neem Karoli Baba devotees; I figured followers would be a bit more mellow the farther I got from his temple. Toward the end of my stay, I met a longtime friend of Ram Dass. He saw that I was eager to do volunteer work—known as seva , Sanskrit for “service”—so, when he learned of my intent to find Ram Dass on Maui, he offered to put in a good word to Dassi Ma.

That recommendation made the seemingly impossible possible. People of all ages came to the island to be near Ram Dass. Some found their way into the group texts for arranging kirtan —living-room chanting sessions at Ram Dass’s house—or beach excursions. A few found opportunities to be useful around the house, or made friends with one of the live-in caregivers, enabling them to drop by every week or so. But to be offered to help care for Ram Dass, for pay, as a virtual nobody, was exceptionally rare.

Upon arriving at the house, I found it shot through with the same quasi-religious fervor I had seen at the temple. I was quickly intercepted by another caregiver and taken to a lean-to, in a nearby pasture, so that I could silently meditate with prayer beads. It was incredibly humid, and I got annihilated by mosquitoes. I returned to the house to find a living room packed with people chanting—mostly the Hanuman Chalisa, a devotional hymn that features verses like “With the lustre of your vast sway, you are propitiated all over the universe.” A collective effervescence filled the room, and I joined along, staring at hundreds of statuettes of religious figures while fighting back the sense that I was in church.

After more than an hour of chanting, we milled about, greeting one another over chai and snacks. Attendees swapped stories of Maharaj-ji’s miracles, told me that my presence must be part of his plan, sat smiling at Ram Dass’s feet, their hands over their hearts. During my year on Maui, Ram Dass’s foundation led retreats at a local resort, where hundreds of people would gather for spiritual talks and chanting. Inevitably, someone at these events would look at me with confusion or pity when I told them my name was Christopher. “He hasn’t given you a name yet?” the person would ask. Ram Dass often bestowed a Hindu name on people: Lakshman, Govinda, Hari, Devi. I was fine with Christopher.

But there were other moments, informal and fleeting, when I witnessed the mixture of play and profundity that first drew me to Ram Dass. One autumn morning, two other caregivers and I were helping him get through his daily routine—brushing teeth and hair, putting on clothes and hearing aids, making the bed—when I turned on Doja Cat’s “Go to Town,” a song I later learned was about cunnilingus. I cranked the volume, and the four of us started dancing with illicit glee. One caregiver jumped on the bed, another swung from the divider between the bedroom and the study, and Ram Dass waved his one mobile hand with bright eyes and a rascally smile.

Another day, I was alone with Ram Dass, helping him pick out a shirt. Though I spent nearly all my time in the house, I could count the hours we had been alone together on two hands, and most of them had involved food and drink, or foot massages, ostensibly to relieve the pain that he felt from diabetic neuropathy. On this day, the house was recovering from Ram Dass having been denied psilocybin owing to his health. I felt sorrow for him; the drug was, after all, the beginning of his spiritual journey more than five decades prior. I asked him if the house ever felt like a prison. A full minute of silence passed, with me standing over him in his walk-in closet. Eventually, he tapped his temple and said, “This is the prison.”

When morning broke on December 22, 2019, and Ram Dass was still alive, I allowed myself a moment of relief. Dassi Ma came up, looking short on sleep, and took his vitals. They were horrible. We snapped into action, trying to comfort Ram Dass until one of his doctors arrived.

The infection had pooled fluid in his lungs, which made every breath a burden. Wet, rattling half-breaths were punctuated by coughs of bloody mucus. He looked wrecked, but still managed a weak smile when his Chinese-medicine doctor told a joke at his bedside.

At some point, Dassi Ma and the doctor began talking in the study; other caregivers were on an oxygen-tank-and-essentials supply run. I was on one side of Ram Dass’s bed; on the other was his longtime co-author Rameshwar Das, a friend since Kainchi. Then Ram Dass started choking.

It wasn’t that different from any of the other horrible breaths he’d taken that morning, except that he just couldn’t breathe it. When he realized this, he turned to me with a look that haunts me even now: light eyes wide as quarters, mouth open, lips a bit rounded. I immediately panicked, calling for Dassi Ma and trying to get his adjustable bed as upright as possible so that he could clear his throat. Then, when that didn’t seem upright enough, I frantically tried to lug his torso up so that his head could hang over his waist; perhaps he could vomit his throat clear.

Thirty seconds had passed since he first lost his breath. Somewhere from near his feet, the doctor snapped at me: “You have to calm down!” It jolted me into an awareness that Ram Dass was dying, right there. Perhaps it did the same for Dassi Ma, because she sprang for the study, returned with a large framed photo of Neem Karoli Baba, and commanded him to focus. “Ram Dass! Maharaj-ji! Maharaj-ji!” she said, placing the photo at the foot of the bed. She told him that she loved him, that he could go. I told him that I loved him. And then Ram Dass stopped trying to breathe.

I was the only person to leave the room. Stumbling into the study, I picked up my phone, hands quivering, and sent word to the other caregivers: “RD’s dying imminently. Like within the next couple of minutes.”

The wind was screaming outside. On Maui’s North Shore, it wasn’t unusual for it to reach thirty, forty knots, rattling the windows and throwing palm fronds across the lawn. That day, it had blown from early in the morning, under a tightly woven blanket of gray clouds. Sitting in the study, I watched it bend the trees, felt the violence of it, indiscriminate.

Ram Dass believed that fear kept us from recognizing our interconnection to all things. “Change generates fear; fear generates contraction; contraction generates prejudice, bigotry, and ultimately violence,” he said. In his teachings, he often placed fear and love on opposing sides of the human experience. Fear was the by-product of the ego; love was the by-product of the soul that remained pure, in the moment, especially at the time of death. “When we are fully present,” Ram Dass wrote, “there is no anticipatory fear or anxiety because we are just here and now, not in the future.”

And yet this binary is precisely what made watching him die so disorienting. I’ve no idea what Ram Dass felt in those final moments, what he could see or hear. I don’t even really know if that was fear I saw in his eyes, though it certainly looked like it. Perhaps it was surprise or another sensation entirely, the rush of emptiness before a huge plunge into something tremendous.

Whatever it was, its existence seemed largely absent from his teachings. There were times when he acknowledged the pain and coarse brutality of death. In his book “ Still Here ” (2000), he writes:

Dying is often not easy . . . the stoppage of circulation and starving of the heart muscle . . . the inadequate transport of oxygen to tissues, the failure of organs . . . Where can we hope to stand in our own consciousness during such traumatic conditions, in order to die with clarity and grace?

Yet the emphasis he placed, over decades of lectures, on the importance of grace during death made so little space for terror—for how fear could coexist with presence, and even with love. In the minutes after his passing, the chasm between how he died and how I thought he was supposed to die reminded me of the betrayal I’d felt when, at sixteen, I flouted my mother’s and pastor’s admonitions and stopped asking God for protection, only to discover that a similar slew of terrible and wonderful things still happened to me.

In the house, too, marching through three days of death rituals before Ram Dass’s body was removed, I felt my spirituality slip its moorings. Late on the second night, his body lay on ice in his study—a rite he’d specifically requested, hoping that it would help those around him transcend their fear. I sat on the floor and peered up at his face through candlelight, his skin whitish blue and gaunt, his mouth slightly agape. I waited for grace, for him to speak reassuringly from some other plane of reality. Instead, I was taken back to our final moments together, where fear sutured me to each passing second. Not fear of the past or some uncertain future, but fear of the vast, strange intensity of what is. ♦

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