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!’
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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!
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