'Self'ie Time with Peter Heehs! ❤️

History of the ‘Self’ | Peter Heehs

Philosophers and sages down the ages, have given us powerful, life-sustaining, maxims that hinge on the importance of celebrating the wonderful concept of the ‘self’!

To Aristotle, “Knowing oneself is the beginning of true wisdom!”

To Pythagoras, ‘Only if you know yourself, you can then know the universe and God!’

To Jiddu Krishnamurti, ‘To know yourself you need not go to any book, to any priest, to any psychologist. The whole treasure is within yourself’ and so, ‘the more you know yourself, the more clarity there is’!

Indeed, the famous Emersonian essay on “Self-Reliance” also begins with a wonderful Latin quotation which goes thus: “Do not seek for things outside yourself.”

Mahatria Ra, (an illustrious alumnus of MCC School) speaks - 

Only if you enjoy a good relationship with yourself, you can enjoy a good relationship with others.

If you are too critical about yourself, if you have a complex about yourself, if you keep thinking ‘I am not good enough’, if you constantly feel low about yourself in the presence of others… when your own relationship with yourself is lousy, there is no way you can enjoy a good relationship with others.

You can only give what you have.

And this is where, Peter Heehs comes into the picture!

Well, the renowned American historian, who’s done extensive studies on Sri Aurobindo, has written a voluminous treatise on the concept of the Self, that’s simply phenomenal!

His impactful treatise on the ‘Self’ titled, Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of the Self, presents an enriching history of the idea of the ‘self’, told mainly with reference to diaries, memoirs, and other forms of first-person literature, which Peter Heehs calls, ‘fellowship of the first person’.

‘Writing the Self’ also has the honour of being named the ‘Outstanding Academic Title for 2013’, by Choice.

The book offers ‘an account of the self over the last two millennia’, in such a lucid and gripping narrative!

Says Peter Heehs – (excerpts from his book, Writing the Self)

All of us feel we are different than everybody else.

We see the world through our own eyes, hear it with our own ears, touch it with our own hands.

We call this our “I,” our personal identity, our self.

Historians and social scientists differ as to when this idea emerged in Europe, but most believe it did not assume its current form before the sixteenth century.

One of the main components of the modern idea of the self is interiority or inwardness, the feeling that there is a personal inner space that we alone have access to.

‘Historians of the self’ differ as to when the inner sense, as we understand it today, finally emerged, but it certainly was present in Augustine of Hippo (354–430 ce), whose works are filled with admonitions like –

“Do not go abroad. Return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth”.

For Augustine the inner realms were expansive halls, not closets fitted out with peepholes.

Naming the Self

The long history of the idea of the self is reflected in the terminology used in writing and speaking about it.

For centuries, the word soul or its equivalent in other languages was the term of choice. The Greek psyche originally meant “breath,” “life,” “spirit” but later was applied to the soul or immaterial part of ourselves as distinguished from the body.

The Latin anima, originally “breath,” “passion,” “living being,” underwent a similar development.

These two words dominated discussions of the subject in Europe until the seventeenth century, when new ways of thinking spawned a host of new terms or new uses of older terms: mind, self, consciousness, person, identity, personal identity.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, philosophers introduced new words in their increasingly technical discussions: subject, subjectivity, ego.

Giving Voice to the “I”: The SELF: Memoir, Autobiography, Diary

First-person genres are of special interest in the study of the self because they are, or at least profess to be, immediate self-expression.

It is natural to think, along with sociologist Alain Girard, that “among all written texts, it is those in the first person that tell us most about the image of the self.”

Note however that Girard spoke of the image of the self and not the thing itself. Contemporary critics of first-person writings agree that the narrators of diaries and memoirs are personae and not persons, images projected by the writers with future readers – themselves or others – in mind.

Some critics go further, suggesting that first-person writings are tools of self-construction: not just accounts of what happened but ways of molding the stuff of the past into models of what the writers wish to be.

To such critics, writing an account of one’s life is an act of self-creation.

Memoir, autobiography, and diary are separate genres though there is a certain amount of overlap between them.

A memoir, as I use the term, is a retrospective narrative about a portion of the writer’s life.

An autobiography is a long memoir, covering most of the subject’s life up to the time of writing.

A diary is a document in which the writer records his or her experiences, thoughts and feelings shortly after they happen, in discreet entries, often dated.

Diaries differ from memoirs in not being retrospective and in not having an explicit plot. They are written from day to day, with the present as a moving vantage point and without any knowledge of the future.

But the distinction between diary and memoir is not absolute: many diaries became the bases of memoirs, many memoirs have passages that read like diary entries.

Diaries and memoirs are important sources for biographers and historians because they provide first-hand accounts of public and private events and offer privileged access to the personality of the writers.

It is hard for us to be honest with ourselves, harder to be frank with others, still harder to write the truth as we have seen it and preserve what we have written.

No one has spoken of this with more perception than the novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

As the narrator of his Notes from Underground begins to write his memoir, he remarks -

“There are things in every man’s past that he won’t admit except to his most intimate friends.

There are other things that he won’t admit even to his friends but only to himself – and only in strictest confidence.

But there are things, too, that a man won’t dare to admit even to himself, and every decent man has quite an accumulation of such things.”

Eighty years later, George Orwell wrote –

“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.”

By this standard, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, the prototypical modern memoir, ought to be regarded as trustworthy, since it contains many things that eighteenth-century readers found scandalous!

Even more than the memoir, the diary has been, in the words of critic Susan Sontag, an “exemplary instrument in the career of consciousness.”

Diaries as we know them today did not appear in Europe before the sixteenth century but they were preceded by other sorts of verbal recording devices.

The Greeks had hypomnemata, wax tablets on which they jotted down things they wanted to remember: ideas, quotations, things said or observed.

The primary aim of early diarists was to record what they observed, thought, and did. As the genre developed, people began to use their diaries for subjective expression as well as objective documentation.

Along with self-expression came self-reflection, and along with self-reflection the desire for self-improvement.

As the scholar Roger North observed in the seventeenth century, for a man to keep a diary was a useful “check upon all his exorbitancies,” since, “being set down they would stain his reputation.”

Two hundred years later, Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel wrote toward the end of his 17,000-page Journal, “the chief utility of the personal diary is to restore wholeness of mind and equilibrium of consciousness, that is to say, inner health.”

His remark could have been taken as a watchword by the millions who have tried using diaries as parts of self-improvement programs.

More recently, the Web has made it possible for bloggers to upload their observations, confessions, and harangues a moment after writing them.

Autobiographers, memoirists, diarists, bloggers, and users of social networks share the urge to express themselves or to create themselves through writing. All belong to what might be called the fellowship of the first person!

None of the diarists mentioned above had any influence on Ennin, Abutsu-ni, Matsuo Basho or other contributors to the oldest continuous tradition of diary writing in the world, the nikki bungaku (“diary literature”) of Japan.

The earliest examples of nikki date from the eighth century, predating the Western diary by 800 years.

In the centuries that followed, many women wrote personal diaries that were intensely subjective but doubtfully factual, while many men wrote diaries filled with facts but lacking in subjectivity.

The two currents came together in the work of Matsuo Basho (1644–94), the preeminent master of the nikki.

Basho already was famous as a haiku writer when, at the age of forty, he set out on the first of four journeys he would commemorate in his poetic diaries.

Though based on the events of his wanderings, they were far from being documentary accounts. He revised them for months after he returned home, introducing a lot of fictional material.

His artful prose and poetry make a world come alive but tell us very little about himself. Self-revelation was not his aim.

When he wrote about the beauty of the landscape, the loneliness of the traveler, and the ineluctable passage of time, he wanted his remarks to have a universal resonance.

“It was a great pleasure,” he wrote in The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel, 

“to see the marvellous beauties of nature, rare scenes in the mountains or along the coast, or to visit the sites of temporary abodes of ancient sages where they had spent secluded lives, or better still, to meet people who had entirely devoted themselves to the search for artistic truth”.

“Since I had nowhere permanent to stay, I had no interest whatever in keeping treasures, and since I was empty-handed, I had no fear of being robbed on the way”.

And that’s how interestingly the book develops on the concept of the ‘Self’, the ‘I’ and the fellowship of the first person!

I would strongly recommend that you read through this book to get a beautiful, holistic view of the concept of the ‘Self’!

More power to Peter Heehs and his ‘Self’-ie narrative!