Conclusions

MODERN SELVES

My first question is why so many Westerners believe they have unique and consistent identities? The short answer is that we have been socialized to think of ourselves this way. Late eighteenth century German idealists theorized about Identität [identity] and the concept gradually moved from philosophy into the public discourse. It burst upon the American scene in the 1960s through the writings of Danish-American psychiatrist Erik Erikson. Erikson was a Freudian, and Freud was steeped in German idealism.

Historians of political thought provide a more satisfying answer by putting these discourses into historical context; they portray them as the product of a long-term intellectual and political project, beginning in early modern Europe, to construct the autonomous individual.² It initially sought to transfer as much responsibility as possible from church, state, and family to individuals for enforcing moral codes. Another key goal was to make individuals responsible for their identities, rather than allowing society to define them in terms of their roles and status. Finally, autonomy came to be associated with life choices and the freedom of individuals to choose roles, and to make status more a function of merit than of birth. Autonomy is often thought to have a long history, with roots that in ancient Greece, but significantly influenced – positively and negatively --by Christianity and more recently by religious skepticism, state building and industrialization.³ The construction of the autonomous self is nevertheless a quintessential modern project, although Rousseau and the Romantics who followed envisaged it as a reaction against modernity. In the twentieth century the autonomous self was regarded by many intellectuals as a means of escaping from what Weber called the "stahlhartes Gehäuse" [iron cage] and Foucault the "disciplinary society."⁴

My reading of autonomy and its development differs from the conventional wisdom in two important ways. As noted above, I emphasize the extent to which so many forms of identity pioneered by utopias are anti-modern in the sense that they attempt to limit individual autonomy by reducing, or doing away with, interiority and reflexivity. I also challenge the sharp distinction routinely made between modern and ancient selves. Greeks and Romans are said to have derived their identities and moral compasses from the roles they performed and to have been incapable of thinking of themselves divorced from them or the societies that structured and conferred them.⁵ Modern people, by contrast, are thought to look more to themselves for definition -- routinely described as "self-definition." This characterization originates with nineteenth century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt.⁶ In sociology, it finds an influential statement in Durkheim's distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity. It is based on the idea that the replacement of the collectivity by the individual as the object of ritual attention is one of the hallmarks of the transition from traditional to modern societies.⁷ I contend that interiority and reflexivity were to some degree always present among human beings, although for cultural reasons did not find much expression in ancient literature and art. Simple comparisons between ancient and modern texts are accordingly misleading. The Burckhardt interpretation also ignores the extent to which modern identities are arguably as much social products as their ancient counterparts.

Let me address the ancient-modern distinction here as I treat the question of anti-modernism in a later section of this chapter. In Greece and Rome, it is claimed, nobody kept a diary or wrote an autobiography until Augustine of Hippo in the early fifth century of the Common Era.⁸ Characters in Greek tragedies are archetypes more than they are people; whatever distinctiveness they have is due to the roles they enact and secondarily to generic qualities like strength, bravery and intelligence.⁹ Inner struggles are rarely described, although they are not infrequently made evident by other means. The opening line of the Iliad tells us about Achilles' rage, but we do not encounter it until more than two hundred lines later when Agamemnon deprives him of the slave girl Briseus.¹⁰ Here and elsewhere, internal conflict is signaled by a god or goddess intervening to persuade a hero to pursue some course of action. Augustine, by contrast, tells us directly about his conflicts and how different parts of himself are at odds.

The distinction between the ancient and modern worlds is real but overdrawn.¹¹ The absence of diaries and autobiographies and the failure of ancients to represent the inner lives of their characters does not necessarily mean the absence of interiority. Before Freud, there was little recognition of the unconscious in Western literature and philosophy, but nobody would maintain that it did not exist or was unimportant before it was theorized. Ancient writers give hints of interiority, as Homer does when he acknowledges that heroes are reflective, and has Achilles do so directly when he thinks about how his father will respond to his death, which leads him to empathize with Priam.

Virgil, like Homer, uses gods to shape human destiny and individual behavior.  Both poets make it apparent that our lives are affected by many forces, some of them beyond human control, but that there is still ample room for agency. In the final scene of the Iliad, when Achilles weeps with Priam and returns Hector's body to him, we encounter Achilles the man, not a puppet of the gods or an enraged animal. At the end of the Odyssey, when its eponymous hero kills the suitors and brings peace to Ithaca, we observe the man of many devices, the skilled fighter and canny conjuror who must be chastised in the last line because of his increasingly dominant interiority. Virgil's Aeneas is guided and assisted by the gods, but toward the conclusion of the epic he kills Turnus in an act of range and vengeance that the poet leaves no doubt arises from within.  The Aeneid's ending lends itself to multiple interpretations. Most commonly, it has been read to symbolize Rome's unwillingness to share power with other political units, as evidence that Aeneas has lost the humanity that Achilles regained, and as a warning about the complexities of political life. All three readings indicate interiority, and alert us to some of its dangers.

The Iliad valorizes warrior-based honor societies.¹² Archetypes are well-suited to this purpose because they create role models, uncomplicated by internal conflicts and inconsistencies, which listeners or readers are encouraged to emulate or shun. Homer provided a model for the Greeks and the Greeks for the Romans. I am unpersuaded that interiority emerged with Augustine, as is sometimes claimed.¹³ Other readings of his autobiography are possible, including one that interprets it as a pre-modern denial of the independent inner self.¹⁴ I surmise that his proselytizing goal led him to emphasize a long pre-existing but rarely articulated interiority. His incentive was to contrast secular pleasures with spiritual fulfillment in an attempt to demonstrate the superiority of the latter, but also to describe the internal conflict they generated and how appetite could be overcome by willpower and faith. Interiority is not the same as self-fashioning, and traditional Christian views of autonomy remained unreservedly negative. "Hands off yourself," Augustine warned. "Try to build up yourself, and you build a ruin."¹⁵

Autonomy and self-fashioning are undeniably products of the modern era. In the Introduction, I described how the two components of internal autonomy -- interiority and reflexivity – became more visible in the Renaissance art and literature and even more pronounced subsequently. These texts were catalysts for self-fashioning, which frequently found its initial expression in role playing. Role playing was an outlet and an experiment in a world where changing roles in practice was much more difficult. It heightened interiority and reflexivity – and also alienation to the degree that people felt more comfortable in their assumed roles than those they were compelled to perform on a daily basis.

Discourses and autonomy were to a significant degree co-constitutive. Charles Taylor nevertheless reminds us that the modern self is not simply the creation of the mind. It is the product of numerous changes in religious, social, political, economic, family and artistic practices. Some of these practices were supportive of discourses valorizing external and internal autonomy.¹⁶ Others were distinctly at odds with them, so we must avoid being drawn into a narrative of linear progress. The sixteenth century, where the story of modernity typically begins, witnessed little change in external autonomy as religious and state institutions became better organized and more capable of disciplining middle-class and aristocratic subjects alike.¹⁷ For these reasons, Stephen Greenblatt maintains, Renaissance self-fashioning was highly constrained. Subjectivity, he argues, is “not an epiphany of identity freely chosen but a cultural artifact." The self can only be constructed and maneuver within a set of collectively prescribed practices and codes. The power is to shape oneself is very much dependent on the tolerance or support offered by the society.¹⁸ This point is also made by Natalie Zemon Davis in the context of sixteenth century French villages. She finds considerable evidence of a normative ideal of self-expression and autonomy, although not nearly as pronounced as nineteenth century French individualism. She attributes this difference in large part to the confining nature of traditional religious obligations and patriarchal family structures. Individuality and its expression, she insists, is very much related to the external autonomy of agents.¹⁹

Tensions between individuals seeking freedom and states attempting to regulate the external and internal lives of their citizens intensified over the course of the modern era. Some of the philosophers, writers and artists who pioneered the concept of self found themselves severely constrained by dominant practices. John Locke's commitment to individualism might be understood as a reaction to the hierarchical nature of seventeenth century English social relations and his dependence on powerful patrons. His letters to his patron Alexander Popham are positively fawning, in accord with conventional practice. Cramped court etiquette and thinking and its limited cultural life were offensive to Locke and all the more painful given the openness and intellectual vitality of his circle of friends. This contrast may have provided a strong motive to invent a conception of the person that encouraged people to reject the model of the courtier in favor of the noble character.²⁰ Locke imagined a world in which he would feel at home and fulfilled.

Chapter four depicts Mozart and Da Ponte in a similar light. Given the political, economic and social restrictions of Austria of Maria Theresa, Joseph II and Leopold II, Mozart and his librettists had to experience the Enlightenment vicariously. In Salzburg, Mozart was repeatedly humiliated by his patron, Archbishop Colloredo. In Vienna, he was treated better, but still came up against serious creative, economic and social constraints. In their operas, Mozart and Da Ponte created worlds in which aristocrats and kings were powerless, parodied or even punished. In Marriage of Figaro, Figaro’s opening cavatina, “Se vuol ballare” [If you want to dance] asserts his equality, indeed, his superiority, over his employer the Count. Mozart struggled to make a living and rise in status. His ambitions were ahead of his time. Beethoven would be the first composer to cash in on growing public respect for, if not awe of, musical genius.²¹ Like Locke, Mozart and Da Ponte had little choice but to reach an uneasy and clearly uncomfortable accommodation with highly-placed representatives of the existing order. This made it possible for them to practice their respective arts and achieve a limited degree of independence.²² Rebellion was restricted to their art, where they were inspired to create imaginary worlds in which they or others might become "themselves." They were neither the first nor last artists or philosophers to pursue this strategy.

Chapter five explores yet another variation on this theme: the liminal position of eighteenth and nineteenth century German intellectuals and its implications for literature and philosophy. This problem existed at the individual and collective level. The biography of Johann Gottlieb Fichte offers insight into the constraints faced by individuals from non-aristocratic backgrounds. By dint of his phenomenal memory and ability to recite sermons verbatim, he escaped from his family's Saxon village and weaving trade. In 1770, a local aristocrat sponsored his education with the idea that he would become a minister. Fichte’s unorthodox religious views, combative posture and insistence on being treated as an equal alienated sponsors and employers alike and kept him in a professional limbo for some years. So did his plebian origins, regional speech inflection and aristocratic prejudices against people of lower class origins. He was denied entry into the system of patronage that reserved the best educations and positions for sons, deserving or not, from well-born families. The frustrated Fichte described himself at “ceaseless war” against “a host of prejudices, obstructions, and insolences of all sorts.”²³

In 1792, Fichte published his first major publication, which instantly made him the most prominent of Kant’s disciples. However, this work and subsequent ones earned him an undeserved reputation as a Jacobin and he was fortunate to secure a teaching post at Jena in 1794. At Jena, he tried and failed to secure academic freedom for the staff, an involvement that cost him his job. Of all the German thinkers of his era, Fichte was arguably the most committed to the construction of the self as a fully autonomous moral agent. Before the end of the eighteenth century he had drawn on his reflexive premise to show how the self might be developed and situated in a modern world characterized by the increasing importance of what Hegel would call civil society. Fichte conceived of the self very much in terms of its public presentation and stressed its rhetorical nature, somewhat akin to self-fashioning through role playing. This approach mirrored and legitimized his life-long ambition to build a successful identity career by this means.²⁴

In the various German states the public sphere [Öffentlichkeit] was relatively undeveloped until well into the nineteenth century and aristocratic elites were more parochial in their thinking than their French and British counterparts. As Kant observed, it was the age of Enlightenment, but in Germany it was not yet an enlightened age.²⁵ Centralizing authorities drew support from local nobles and many urban elites who were anxious to protect their local economic and social privileges. German intellectuals had little recourse but to reach some kind of accommodation with the existing order as the state employed them as ministers, professors, teachers and other kinds of civil servants. For much of the nineteenth century they remained dependent on the support and toleration by the very princes and bureaucrats whom they believed stood in the way of cultural progress and national rebirth and with it, the possibility of developing identities in harmony with a much evolved society.

German intellectuals turned to a highly idealized ancient Greece as a source of freshness, balance and reason. The golden age of Athens they invented was intended as a model for restructuring German society through Bildung [self improvement] in lieu of direct political action. Following the Napoleonic Wars, Prussia and other German states turned their backs on reforms and liberal thinking and Greece increasingly became a fantasy world where intellectuals and artists could dream and create in personally fulfilling ways. As early as 1801, Schiller described Germany as an “inward Empire.”²⁶

Given Germany's situation as a late economic and cultural developer, its intellectuals faced working conditions not dissimilar from those of pre-commercial and industrial Britain. In both societies, artists and intellectuals were dependent on patrons and constrained by their subservient positions. The German situation was far more intolerable by virtue of the readily available comparisons with contemporary France and Britain, where intellectuals had a freer existence and often met with more commercial success. Short of exile – a solution embraced temporarily by Heine in Paris and Nietzsche for good in Switzerland – they had to find some means of coping psychologically and practically with what most regarded as a backward and oppressive order. Cultural isolation and insecurity found expression in the construction of an identity bound to the state and an image of the German state and Kultur as superior to those of Enlightenment Britain and revolutionary France. Kant’s effort to discipline French individualism with the supposedly enlightened corporatism of Germany is an early example. Even more revealing was Fichte’s 1807 Address to the German Nation, which praised the “German spirit,” whose ideals were said to transcend the selfish goals of France and Britain, making Germans the only Europeans capable of profound and original thought. Anti-Western diatribes became a major trope of German literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Throughout the West, identity became a paramount concern. Within national states and cultures, there were nevertheless important differences in how this project developed. A key determinant was the relative power of state and society. In countries like Britain and the United States, where the state was relatively weak and the society strong, identity was framed as a matter of individual choice. After coming up to London, the young Boswell wrote in his diary that "I have begun to acquire a composed genteel character very different from a rattling, uncultivated one which for sometime past I have been fond of. I have discovered that we may be to some degree whatever character we choose."²⁷ Boswell, Hume and Mill regarded society as a valuable resource, where people intent on developing and expressing themselves were exposed to a range of role models. They considered this diversity beneficial to individuals and society alike.

In strong states, like France and the newly unified Germany, civil society was regarded negatively or with ambivalence. A few thinkers like Helvétius envisaged civil society as a vehicle for personal and cultural development, but many more intellectuals eyed it warily as an uncontrolled space where people could easily be led astray. Rousseau was among the first to characterize society as Janus-faced; it corrupts human beings but nevertheless has the potential to restore their humanity. Diderot insisted that society wore away individuality instead of fostering it. Throughout the nineteenth century French thinkers warned that individuals who wiggle free of state-imposed social controls indulge their selfish interests at the community's expense.²⁸ Even Durkheim, who considered the French state a tyranny, felt compelled to genuflect to the conventional wisdom by distinguishing two kinds of self, one positive, the other committed to individuality with selfishness.²⁹ In Germany, where society was weaker still, it was regarded with even more suspicion. Chapter four described how German philosophers, writers and educators denigrated commercial activities and sought to focus the ambitions of the young on grand collective projects. Most envisaged identity construction as a national rather than individual enterprise and the state as source of individual identification and fulfillment.