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
Results 1-3 of 18
... expression that propose to reveal the nature of a person . Even so , portraiture is very late in growing out of the ancient tangle of pictorial art . The earliest human figures are always shown in terms of a function : as stick fig ...
... expression . There is an air in his approach of his imposing an order on the facts that does not derive from the facts themselves , but rather from some eternal order of the way men live their lives . It is this tacit assumption that ...
... expression , that is , expression of one's own intrinsic nature , results in social creativity and growth which in turn encourage and free the individual to further self - expression and discovery . " A more mechanistic view of the self ...
Contents
Out of the Void | 1 |
Dancing On the Head of a Pin | 18 |
Biography | 40 |
Copyright | |
8 other sections not shown