The Invention of the Self: The Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth CenturySouthern Illinois University Press, 1978 - 268 pages The absence of self in Classical literature and the emergence in the eighteenth century of the concept of the unique and individual self asserting its existence and seeking its truth in private experience and feeling is often touched upon in cultural histories but little explained. Seeking the reasons for and the effects of the change of attitude toward one's concept of one's self in the "new" eighteenth-century attitude toward history, biography, travel literature, pornography, and the novel, Lyons finds, first, that the term self is deceptively vague. It evolved, he notes, to fill the vacuum created by doubt about the existence of the soul. Second, Lyons finds that without a concept of the self--that ineffable something in a human being that to its inventors and their followers was an abstract of pure and intuited natural laws--the revolution and romanticism of the modern age would have been very different from what it has been. More importantly, Lyons concludes that the concept led to monumental error and to bitter disappointments rooted, as his illuminating history shows, in the impossibility of defining that which never was. |
From inside the book
... other end of the scale , the first person may simply serve a grammatical function . Sir Thomas Browne says that his Religion Medici is a " private Exercise di- rected to my self , " and he may appear very modern by saying that " there is ...
... work as racy , inaccurate , vivid , and slangy ( p . 74 ) . 27. Samuel Johnson , Essays from the “ Rambler ... Religio Medici and Other Works , p . 64 . 5. Boswell's Life of Johnson , 3 : 195 . 6. Sir Herbert Read , Icon and ...
... Religio Medici and Other Works . Edited by L. C. Martin . London : Oxford University Press , 1964 . Bulfinch , Thomas . The Age of Fable . Garden City , N.Y .: Doubleday , 1968 . Burckhardt , Jacob . The Civilization of the Renaissance ...
Contents
Out of the Void | 1 |
Dancing On the Head of a Pin | 18 |
Biography | 40 |
Copyright | |
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