All in Selfhood
Hegel’s conception of selfhood is amorphous, and gleaning it from the pages of his dense and complex tome, The Phenomenology of Spirit, is no mean feat. However, the picture of Hegelian self which reveals itself to the reader patient enough to tease it out from the idealist Titan’s pages, is as intriguing and it is nuanced and complex.
Descartes’ ‘epistemological turn’ would influence generations of philosophers who, in an attempt to understand the structure of the self, took him – either directly or indirectly – as the starting point of their own reflections. Among the most prominent of these undoubtedly is David Hume.
It can with little exaggeration be said that, with the works of Descartes, the modern philosophy of the self was born. Where for the Medievals, the self had first and foremost been a metaphysically conceived entity, Descartes would invert this primacy, outlining instead a self whose basic structure is epistemic in nature.
With his total privileging of the concept of Being, Heidegger radically changed the way we conceptualise selfhood. The self went from being an epistemic entity, as it had been for centuries under Descartes and Kant, to a largely ontological one. This paper attempts to shed light of aspects of this paradigmatic shift in the philosophy of the self.
What is the self? Is it a unity or a chimera? Can there be said to be a ‘self’ at all? Of all Enlightenment philosophers, it is perhaps Immanuel Kant who gave, to these questions, the most startlingly original answers.
For Kierkegaard, the self was a synthesis of the ‘finite’ and the ‘infinite’. The finite is the limiting factor, all that which we cannot change, and the infinite is the expanding factor, all that which could just as well be some other way.
