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
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... begins even before his memory , for he confesses he cannot remember himself as an infant : " Little by little I began to realize where I was and to want to make my wishes known to others , who might satisfy them . But this I could not ...
... begins in the first person and past tense to re - create the memory of his first encounter with Mme . de Warens . Then , by a process identical to that which turns him into Saint - Preux in Émile , he becomes the " young proselyte " in ...
... begins with a weather report , and like a true scientist he often includes the temperature read- ing . But he goes on to suggest a very subjective observation . " Fri 3rd - it hailed more than once in the forenoon & it rained almost all ...
Contents
Out of the Void | 1 |
Dancing On the Head of a Pin | 18 |
Biography | 40 |
Copyright | |
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