Self and Self-Concept

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Harvard psychologist William James laid down a cornerstone of modern self theory. In his 1890 Principles of Psychology, James distinguished between the self as knower (the I) and the self as object known (the Me, or self-concept). This formulation offered a language for talking about matters that had been obscured by reifications such as psyche, mind, soul, spirit, and ego. Following James, the self could be seen as both a process—acts of perception and knowing—and the outcome of that process—knowledge about the knower. James's distinction remains basic to self theory today.

The origins of self theory lie in human prehistory. As our hominid ancestors sought to explain the world around them, they likewise struggled to explain themselves. The world of dreams, images, thoughts, and feelings was perhaps no less troubling a mystery than the outer world of animals, plants, weather, and landscape. Where did these inner forces come from, and how did they relate to the outer world? What made one person different from another? To wrestle with these questions was to begin to theorize about the self.

Reflecting on the capacities, dispositions, and inner processes that make us human may thus be as old as consciousness. By the time such reflections began to be recorded, people surely had been thinking about human nature for ages. When Socrates (470–399 BCE) urged “know thyself,” he presumed an intellectual framework within which disciplined introspection made sense. The Socratic admonition leaves open, however, the question of precisely what it is we should seek to know. And that is the question that has occupied subsequent social theorists.

To try to identify a history of thought regarding the self raises, first, the question of whether there exists a body of thought that constitutes a coherent tradition of theorizing about the self. By modern standards of scholarship, the answer is no, at least prior to the nineteenth century. Before then, one can find a great deal of philosophical and theological discourse about the inner processes—or, more often, “essences”—that constitute human nature. Absent is conceptual consensus or continuity. Psyche, soul, spirit, mind, proprium, and ego may all be answers to roughly the same question, but the answers, cast in such disparate terms, refuse to add up.

A major shift in thinking began to appear in the eighteenth century. Before this, Leibniz, Descartes, and other rationalist philosophers of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Renaissance period embraced a neoclassical view of the human being. In this view, the mind—that which made us self-aware and uniquely human—is an indisputably natural, indeed axiomatic, feature of individuals. This was expressed in Descartes's famous dictum: I think, therefore I am. By the end of the nineteenth century, [Page 685]however, this dictum was supplanted by one that has remained foundational ever since: I am social, therefore I can think.

This shift had vast implications for theorizing about the self as a social phenomenon and a matter for empirical study. The eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosophers, notably David Hume and Adam Smith, drew attention to how social life engendered the moral habits and sentiments that make us human. Hume and Smith (and later Marx, Weber, and Durkheim) saw how capitalist industrialization was altering social relationships, giving rise to new categories and groups, creating new moral strains, and in these ways, generating new patterns of thought. In light of such changes, it was no longer tenable to see the human mind as insulated from social life. The inner processes that make us human were coming to be seen as inexorably linked to the organization of social life.

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