History of the Human Sciences
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The reflexive project: reconstructing the moral agent
Alfred I. Tauber
History of the Human Sciences 2005; 18; 49
DOI: 10.1177/0952695105058471
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H I S T O RY O F T H E H UMA N SCIENCES
© 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol. 18 No. 4
pp. 49–75
[18:4; 49–75; DOI: 10.1177/0952695105058471]
The reflexive project:
reconstructing the moral agent
ALFRED I. TAUBER
ABSTRACT
In the 17th century, ‘reflexivity’ was coined as a new term for introspection and self-awareness. It thus was poised to serve the instrumental function of combating skepticism by asserting a knowing self. In this
Cartesian paradigm, introspection ends in an entity of self-identity. An
alternate interpretation recognized how an infinite regress of reflexivity would render ‘the self’ elusive, if not unknowable. Reflexivity in this
latter mode was rediscovered by post-Kantian philosophers, most
notably Hegel, who defined the self in its self-reflective encounter with
an other, and whose full articulation would occur at the final culmination of Reason’s evolution. In the rising tide of 19th-century individualism, Emerson and Kierkegaard formulated constructions both in
debt to, and in opposition against, Hegelian metaphysics. For each,
although employing distinct strategies of self-consciousness, ‘the self’
reached its apogee through divine encounter. Characterized by personal
responsibility and individual choice, their philosophies would later be
subsumed by secular existentialists committed to defining moral individualism and asserting the possibilities for human freedom and selfauthentication.
Key words
Emerson, Hegel, Kierkegaard, reflexivity, selfhood
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The Great God Self could not dwell at last with other gods, for his first
commandment was: Thou shall have no other gods before me. (Mosier,
1952: 202)
INTRODUCTION
From Augustine to our own era, introspection is inextricable from ‘selfconsciousness’, which in turn, is integral to and, in some sense, coincident
with various understandings of selfhood. Simply, self-consciousness is
enacted through self-reflexivity, and in this process of self-awareness,
identity, formulated as a self, emerges. But the word ‘reflexivity’ has a more
circumscribed history. Reflexivity appears as a paradigm of understanding the
self during the early modern period, coincident with the preoccupation with
optics and the birth of a new physics of light. ‘Reflexivity’ was first applied
to cognitive introspection, in referring to ‘thought as bending back upon
itself’, in the 1640s, when theologians, philosophers, and poets embarked on
their respective introspective inquiries only to ‘stop’ at some point to redirect consciousness into the world. Thus Descartes was very much a man of
his time as he explicitly articulated cogito ergo sum (more specifically, mental
states – as opposed, for instance, to psychological or body states) as the basis
of self-identity.
Descartes’s understanding of the self provided a defense against epistemological skepticism, for the very existence of reality depended on the recognition and bona fide character of a ‘knowing’ agent. In the splendid solitude
of his self-exploration, he dispelled doubt by self-inquiry and made selfconsciousness the sine qua non of selfhood. Descartes’s ‘thinking thing’ was
indeed a thinking thing – him. There he left the matter, and indeed, this
identification of ‘a self’, an ego that might know the world, served as the
foundation of his philosophy for him and for all those who followed or contested that formulation. For example, Descartes’s basic notion of a core self
was bolstered by the divergent philosophies of Locke and Leibniz, where, for
each, ‘reflection’ as perception of oneself, or attention to what is ‘in us’,
organized much of their respective epistemologies. In other words, no matter
how they differed from the Cartesian system, each depended on a singular
definition of a knowing entity.
This conceptual tradition continued well into the 20th century through
philosophy’s phenomenological pursuits and psychology’s introspective
explorations (e.g. Mach, Wundt, James, and Freud). And if philosophical
schools have victories, the basic Cartesian model also powerfully dominates
‘folk’ beliefs about selfhood. Common sense asserts that reflexivity reveals
an inner self-identity, an entity that navigates the world and experiences
emotions and its environment as a bounded subject. In short, I am a self; you
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are a self; the social world is composed of selves. Accordingly, by probing
personal thought, impressions, and feelings through reflexive self-inspection,
one may sense a private ego, which, while elusive, remains sufficient to
capture some inner essence of who we are. Self-consciousness per se grounds
and thus satisfies the commonsensical criteria for selfhood.
Yet, when critically probed in the mid-18th century, the self was nowhere
to be found. For Hume, only passing perceptions, bundled and psychologically cohered, sufficed for defining a self, and thus he crippled the Cartesian
formulation. And if ‘a self’ did not exist, what is the personal agent we refer
to as ‘the self’ or ‘the ego’ that mediates knowledge and morality?
Kant’s critique, despite its authority and lingering influence, hardly offered
a conclusive answer to Hume’s skeptical challenge. Kant concurred that the
ego as an entity could neither be observed nor known. Instead, the self was
the subject of experience and a presupposition of all representations.
Anything ascribed to the ‘I’ is ipso facto a predicate or object of the I, not the
I itself (Inwood, 1992: 121). So Kant, albeit from a different perspective and
for different reasons, could not locate the self. For him, the reflexivity of selfconsciousness was essentially no different than the ego’s survey of the worldat-large. So, when the ego was observed as an object, Kant treated it as he
would any natural object: the noumenal character of nature was unknowable,
and the phenomenal object, that which is known through sensory experience
organized by the categories of reason, is an amalgam of ‘mind’ and ‘nature’.
In short, ‘reality’ is known only through the particular structures of human
cognition. The self was similarly understood.
Kant defined the noumenal self (that in principle could not be known, just
as ‘the thing in itself’ could not be known) as a ‘transcendental apperception
of the ego’. ‘Apperception’ refers to the inner, fundamental, unified sense of
consciousness that precedes the content of our perceptions. ‘Transcendental’
refers to ‘the conditions for knowing’, i.e. that function which orders experience and makes it meaningful through intuitions of space and time and the
categories of understanding (e.g. quantity, quality, relation, etc.). Thus reflexivity could not discern the subject-in-itself, and the self, like any other natural
object, could only be known by the same a-priori categories of pure reason
that determine knowledge of the world (Kant, 1998[1781, 1787]: 230–4).1
Thus having dispensed with defining an entity, Kant presents only the necessary conditions of knowing, and the transcendental apperception of the ego
refers to a metaphysical category. Indeed, precisely because of Kant’s own
careful avoidance of arguing for, or postulating against, any first-order understanding of metaphysics, self-identity – the subject qua subject – must be left
unaddressed.
Kant has left the reflexive project as a remnant of the basic organization of
the human mind: we observe the world and we observe our thoughts and
emotions, but just as we are limited in our knowledge of the exterior reality
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so are we restricted in knowing ourselves. Indeed, the self is an artefact of the
knowing faculty. From this perspective, the transcendental ego occupies a
default position resulting from Kant’s novel metaphysics. But if another
metaphysics takes hold as it powerfully did in the German Idealist
movement, a very different philosophical construction appears, one that built
on the recursive character of reflexivity. In fact, this altogether different
formulation was already available at the same time Descartes wrote his
Meditations. Instead of a terminated introspection ending in an entity with
boundaries, one at least, Henry Jeanes (an obscure English minister,
1611–62), appreciated the infinite regress encoded in reflexivity and thus the
problematic status of ‘the self’: ‘Then the mind in its reflexive workings can
proceed in infinitum’ (Jeanes, 1656: 42; quoted by Oxford English Dictionary, vol. Q, 1971: 345). This latter sense of self-consciousness as an infinite
regress presents an interesting dilemma: if reflexivity has no end, where, or
what is ‘the self’ (or what Descartes called a ‘thinking thing’)? Jeanes’s prescient insight only reached its apogee in the mid-19th century, when the
notion of an entity constituting identity was eventually challenged on the
grounds he originally suggested. Simply, two constructions vied for dominance: self-reflection yielded an entity, a core self; alternatively, self-reflection
never can end and reflexivity becomes constitutive of another form of
identity, one which has no prescribed borders and is better depicted as a
function or a process.
Hegel, by employing the metaphysics of German Idealism, pursued the
implications of reflexivity as constitutive to self-identity. Instead of reflexivity serving an instrumental function or regarded as an artefact, in his reconfiguration, reflexivity effectively shifts from observing an entity (Descartes)
or describing the conditions of knowing (Kant), to constituting a process of
identity. With this shift from an atomistic identity to what would become a
relational formulation, a new emphasis on the moral construction of identity
(as opposed to older epistemological concerns) becomes apparent. We will
now consider the origins and trajectory of this philosophical exploration.
HEGEL
Most narratives describing the philosophy of selfhood place Hegel at the conceptual hinge, where reflexivity assumes new directions. In his own attempt
to present the ontological conditions of the subject’s action and knowledge
of the world, he clearly and effectively disputed Kant (and his early critics
[Hegel, 1977[1801]) and thereby set the agenda for those who followed him
(Löwith, 1991[1939]). Hegel’s dispute with Kant follows many paths, but
here the metaphysical argument focuses upon reflexion. For Hegel, reflexion
is an intermediate between faith (or intuition) and reason.
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The latter is able to synthesize and integrate, whereas reflexion, especially
as used by Kant (according to Hegel), maintains separation, e.g. faith and
reason, or finite and infinite. The reflecting subject is thus conceived as
distinct from and external to the objects on which it reflects (Inwood, 1992:
249):
Reflection makes distinctions upon and within our intuition. But it
keeps these distinctions apart, as such, and forgets the unity that
embraces them, perceiving them as one only within a third term
external to them, not as unified in themselves. (Hegel, 1984[1832]: 205)
Another version:
Our reflection distinguishes, apprehends different sides, recognizes a
manifold in them, and severs them. In this distinguishing, reflection
does not maintain the unity of the two. (Hegel, 1984: 206, note 59a)2
In contrast, for Hegel, speculative philosophy apprehends or establishes the
unity that reflection breaks. One might readily appreciate how crucial this
schema is for his attack on Kantian idealism with its inherent dualisms.
In the criticism of Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi, Hegel regarded their philosophies as committed to making distinctions and establishing antitheses, in
contrast to the integrative approach he adopted.
Thought, as understanding [Verstand] sticks to fixed determinations
and to the distinction of one thing from another: every such limited
abstraction it treats as having a subsistence of its own. (Hegel, Lesser
Logic [par. 80], quoted by M. C. Taylor, 1980: 42–3)
Hegel argued that self-relation (self-consciousness) cannot be understood on
empirical or rational grounds and, more, that it was empty if considered apart
from intersubjectivity or outside its historical community (Pippin, 1989:
158). The dialectical synthesis, and more specifically the evolution of Geist,
directed itself precisely at this seeming defect of Kant’s philosophical
program. In short, whereas Kant’s transcendental idealism is interpreted as
embodying irreducible dualisms, Hegel sought synthesis through Reason.
In terms of our discussion, the Hegelian construction actualized the self in
self-conscious encounter with another, and thus pushed past ‘reflexivity’ to
‘synthesis’. In the Phenomenology of Spirit (1999[1807]), Hegel presents a
primal encounter of two men, who engage in mortal struggle. One prevails
and becomes Master, and the other, Slave. Only in the consciousness of the
Other, does identity emerge, and in this sense, introspective reflexivity fails
to identify selfhood, indeed, it does not exist prior to the Other.3 The self is
only known as self-conscious difference, as the ‘not-I’ – the ‘“I” that has its
otherness within itself’ (Hegel, 1999[1807]: 30).
This recognition is integral to Hegel’s metaphysics, as the self-conscious
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ego both recognizes its own selfhood and concomitantly the Geist of which
it is part. Indeed, Hegelian self-consciousness requires ‘awareness of oneself
as an inhabitant among others of a world informed by spirit’ (Inwood, 1992:
122). This dawning of I-awareness, awareness of one’s identity, is not only
the beginning of self-consciousness, but it portends the final evolution of
Geist, whose manifestation in the natural and human worlds is only fully conceived at the culmination of history at the height of philosophical Reason.
Thus Geist and human self-awareness evolve in tandem. So, while alterity, the
other, establishes the conditions of identifying the self, this encounter serves
as only the initial step in the synthetic process leading to History’s evolution,
which sweeps each individual in its path.
Self-identity becomes inseparable from that of Geist’s own course, which
includes the fate of the human collective. Here Hegel makes his social move,
integrating the history of the individual, the commune, and Geist into an integrated whole. Persons achieve their individuality only as participants in social
institutions, which Hegel regarded as the embodiment of freedom
(Neuhouser, 2000: 44–7). The point I wish to emphasize here is the social
character of selfhood: the self is inseparable from the other, and from the
whole, and the metaphysics of distinctions that drew Hegel’s scorn becomes
a social metaphysics that will have transformative effects in the 19th and 20th
centuries. The contrast to Kant’s own preoccupation with autonomy seemingly could not be more stark.4
IN PURSUIT OF THE SELF
Variations on the theme of selfhood emerged from each of these traditions
during the next generation, because, in some sense, each had failed: introspection could not end in any self-definition (Kant), nor could the logic of
synthesis preserve individually based moral parameters for personhood
(Hegel). Perhaps another strategy for another endeavor was required. Reflexivity lingered, but it took on new meanings and followed different logics as
Romantic philosophers continued to struggle to answer Kant’s basic challenges, namely, (1) how to synthesize experience fractured by different rationalities (e.g. positivist, moral, aesthetic, or spiritual subjectivity) (Neuhouser,
1990), and (2) how might moral choice (freedom) be understood (Allison,
1990; Schneewind, 1998)? Those pursuing responses to the first question,
replaced defining ‘a self’ with the wider effort of mending the fracture of
experience (Husserl, 1970[1935]). In recognizing the limits of a selfconsciousness that ultimately separated the self from the world, they sought
how to place the self in the world (Tauber, 2001) in response to Schiller’s challenge: ‘How are we to restore the unity of human nature . . . ?’ (Schiller,
1993[1801]: 121). By 1900, European phenomenologists and American
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pragmatists focused their respective efforts towards establishing greater
unities of Man and Nature or Society. Some remained fixed on introspection
(e.g. James, Mach and Brentano, Freud), while others pursued a social orientation (e.g. Dewey and followers of Marx).
The second question led to a focus on individualism, where autonomy and
freedom (as centered on individual responsibility and potential) displaced a
more integrative configuration of selfhood.5 This ‘cultural tilt’ towards political, economic, and social independence has myriad sources, and as many
explanations, but in that array at least one feature stands out: reflexivity
assumed new intensity as it probed different dimensions. The ‘Age of the I’
(or more formally, ‘It is said to be the age of the first person singular’
[Emerson, 1963: 70]) was marked by a keen self-reflection on consciousness,
moral agency, and the demands of a newly evolving positivism as configured
by new demands for individual choice and independence. The parameters by
which such self-governance might be achieved, and the strictures placed upon
achieving that goal, led to a renewed interest in defining selfhood – its characteristics, its boundaries, its potentials. In that inquiry, self-consciousness itself
became an object of inquiry as it served as one means of defining the self in
its multiple modes – social, psychological, moral, historical, etc. Indeed, by
mid-century, each domain of personhood demanded reflexivity – the reiterations that would describe and evaluate the evolving relation between the
subject and his natural, social, and divine worlds through self-conscious
reflection.
The Cartesian tradition had subordinated an interactive, integrated self
constituted by relationships, because the architecture of the self in the early
modern period was based on the ego’s independence – both as an objective
observer of the world (to do science) and as a self-governing citizen (to participate in liberal democracy). The Romantic era made new demands on the
self’s constitution: admittedly over-simplified, we might point to the early
19th century, when the autonomous self, with a new sense of individuality,
found itself alone in the world and acutely aware of its deep relationship with
God, nature, or society. In some instances a celebration of those relations is
evident, and in other cases we witness the troubled angst of alienation; in
either orientation, a new self-consciousness characterized the age. Reflexivity thus assumed an invigorated role in defining selfhood, not to address
epistemological skepticism, but now to probe the configuration of the moral
universe, namely the relation of the self with its world – natural and spiritual.
Below, I explore how Hegelian and Kantian traditions were treated like
strands of a complex braid in weaving new formulations of selfhood with this
overlay of concern with individuality. In searching for the ‘inflection point’
that turned the trajectory of their thought towards another direction, I have
chosen the philosophies of selfhood as expounded by Ralph Waldo Emerson
and Søren Kierkegaard. Each turned self-consciousness outward to engage
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the Other in a way quite different from their predecessors, which in some
respects holds a certain irony considering their preoccupation with individual freedom and autonomy. Each formulates the self as radically dependent,
in one sense, and radically free, in another. The dependency on the Other is
God (not the social); freedom is exercised by the recognition of that dependency and the acceptance or denial of faith is based on that relationship (and
thus individually determined). In sum, the tensions within their respective
philosophies of selfhood are best regarded as responses to an existential
insecurity of self-identity framed by an ethos of individuality.
What began as a search for the self’s inner core, which spurred the reflexive inquiry in the first place, became in their revised version, an attempt to
existentially ‘save’ the self. That task became a moral undertaking, and thus
the project shifted from its epistemological origins to a renewed emphasis on
moral agency (Taylor, 1989). This orientation played a decisive role during
the 20th century, as it was further elaborated by existentialists (both theologians and secularists) in its full ethical array: the self exists as a moral agent
who assumes responsibility for choices taken. That freedom, whether real or
illusionary, is the basis of self-identity. Despite the demurral of postmodernists, who would argue how Foucauldian power relations reduced the
self to a cultural construct, useful for political and social manipulation,6 existentialists asserted that choice and responsibility conferred individual authenticity, irrespective of the self’s contingency or construction for political
control.7 Thus I see an existentialist theme counterbalancing the postmodern
one in the 20th century, and it stems, in part, from a reconfiguration of
selfhood initiated by the Dane and the American. We begin with Emerson.
EMERSON
Emerson’s thought revolves around the problem of selfhood, principally its
definition in relation to spirit. He faced two challenges: an age increasingly
doubtful about articulating the relationship, if any, between Creator and
Man, and second, the new primacy claimed for individual autonomy.
Emerson responded by offering a new theology of selfhood. He presented a
philosophical scaffolding for a religious sensibility responsive to the complex
cultural forces defining a social and political moral agent with revised expectations concerning personal autonomy. By proselytizing the ‘divine
sufficiency of the individual’ (Parrington, 1987[1927]: 390), he placed individualism within a new religious context. Underpinning the entire enterprise,
Emerson sought to uphold the sovereignty of ‘the self’, albeit in relation to
the divine.
Much as Descartes had done three centuries earlier, Emerson found his
relationship to God and ultimately the character of his own personhood
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inextricably intertwined with self-consciousness. This construction is
complex, but may be broken down into a composite of Kantian and Hegelian
stages as described in the short manifesto, Nature (1971a[1836]).8 Emersonian idealism is, broadly speaking, Kantian, where both the world and idea
depend upon each other, and indeed, reality is a synthesis of the two (Duncan,
1973). On the one hand, he asserted that nature by itself cannot constitute
reality, for reality must include – indeed, it may be a function of – consciousness. On the other hand, man equally depends on nature, for without
the ‘not me’, he could not become conscious – the Hegelian component. The
reciprocity of nature’s dependence on consciousness and Man’s dependence
on nature to articulate his own consciousness is held together by the coherence of Spirit (Emerson, 1979a: 160). Nature thus becomes the vehicle that
permits the universal spirit to address humans. In short, God speaks through
Nature, to Man.
Nature serves as a Hegelian Other by which the self articulates itself in correspondence with the natural world. But for Emerson, nature in the ordinary
sense transmutes into a spiritual universe. Almost as if climbing a Platonic
ladder, Emerson soars into a higher realm. In probably the most famous line
of this work, Emerson described how ‘I become a transparent eye-ball; I am
nothing; I am all’ (Emerson, 1971a: 10). This declaration of mystical union
signifies Emersonian ascent to its highest ambition, and in the process, the
self is lost. He has pushed past the placement of individual consciousness at
the center of the universe to a mystical union with it. In this metaphysical
treatise, the self dissolves.
Emerson’s celebrated essay ‘Experience’, where he moves from the sublime
to the prosaic, follows the same tack as found in Nature. Writing approximately eight years after Nature, he famously describes how experience, all
experience including the terrible loss of his first-born, is ultimately disconnected from the core of his being.
People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with
them as they say. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the
hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of
truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only
thing grief has taught me is, to know how shallow it is. That, like all the
rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality,
for contact with which, we would even pay the costly price of sons and
lovers. Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in
contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea
washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and
converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son,
now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, –
no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If to-morrow I should be
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informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my
property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many
years; but it would leave me as it found me, – neither better nor worse.
So is it with this calamity: it does not touch me: something which I
fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing
me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no
scar. It was caducous. . . . Our relations to each other are oblique and
casual. (Emerson, 1983: 29–30)
For Emerson, a core ‘self’ resides isolated and inured from a world that it
calmly and imperturbably surveys, which includes a more superficial layer of
personal experience. This scheme is perfectly consistent with the one depicted
in Nature, where the all-seeing eye surveys nature in perfect harmony with
its object, integrating spirit and cosmos oblivious to a subject–object divide.
In ‘Experience’, this same contentless self detachedly surveys Emerson’s own
anguish.
In both essays, Emerson describes an essential core of selfhood that exists
in communion with the rest of nature, unawares of its unique identity
(Nature) – a metaphysical assertion – or shockingly disjointed from human
experience (‘Experience’) – an existential observation. Strikingly, this core is
‘unknown’ in its splendid isolation, and so we hear Kantian echoes of the
self’s essential mystery. In some sense, the self, the inner core that somehow
organizes experience and identity, remains unknowable – ever-present, but
possessing a function and organization alien to human understanding.
Thus the Emersonian self is layered: an ‘outer’ stratum experiences and
self-reflects – aware of itself, the world, and a perplexing isolated deeper
source, the core self. This inner self is incapable of absorbing experience and
remains epistemologically inert, which allows Emerson to place the self of
consciousness, of human relationships and experiences superficial to a deeper
core. This core self remains obscure, virtually hidden from direct encounter,
enigmatic in the extreme. In this sense, it is noumenal, and Emerson makes
no attempt to formally structure its function, nor posit conditions for its
existence. This core is intuited and left as a mystery. Its silence, disturbingly
aloof, leaves even its bearer with precious little connection to its own inner
workings. It remains as a distinctive expression of certain existential truths
concerning the essential isolation of man’s being and the jealous guarding of
his vitality.9
When Emerson writes, ‘souls never touch their objects’, he is making more
than an epistemological claim: not only is human consciousness separated
from nature and thus impelled to read her as one would read a text, we live
at a remove from the heart of our own selfhood. The core self is the limit of
self-consciousness, the place where reflection ends and our being is, but it
is also the domain of our inner divinity, the source of the knowing ego’s
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metaphysical sensibility. In short, we know God, because the core self
partakes of Spirit, of the divine. Here, we hear strong echoes of Hegel’s own
thought.
Emerson’s task, then, shifts from probing the inner character or workings
of his personhood, to seeking spiritual union with the self’s universe: Nature,
or God. For Emerson, this spiritual connection is achieved in the mystical
moment, where the untouchable core of his being is left untouched by selfconsciousness. When Emerson reiterates Luke’s biblical claim, ‘The highest
revelation is that God is in every man’ (Emerson, 1964a: 84), he means this
quite literally: ‘The foundations of man are not in matter [nature], but in
spirit’ (1971a: 42). So while we, sentient, self-conscious, knowing creatures,
wish to engage spirit and be nurtured by it, the deepest reaches of the self
have no such yearning; it is neutral to our worldly aspirations, satisfied like
the seas and clouds and mountains to simply be (1964a: 28–9). And more to
the point, our self-consciousness impedes unification, disrupting the integration with spirit.
For Emerson, humans only assume their full humanity when spiritually
cognizant, and redemption is achieved in recognizing that spirit and allowing
it full play. He proclaims near the end of Nature that
. . . the reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps,
is because man is disunited from himself. He cannot be a naturalist until
he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. (1971a: 43)
And that unification begins in recognizing this core identity of spirit, this
immutable essence of identity, which confers both human uniqueness and
the connection with the unified One: ‘As a plant upon earth, so a man rests
upon the bosom of God’ (Emerson, 1971a: 38). Indeed, self-reliance, the
credo we associate with rugged American individualism, is, in fact, for
Emerson not egoism, but reliance on God: ‘if he [man] rests at last on the
divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise’ (Emerson, 1979b: 182). But
reliance not in some passive ‘so be God’s will’, but in the recognition that
our own freed being is a manifestation of our own divinity.10 Repeatedly,
Emerson asserts that reliance should be placed in that which is his ultimate
cause. The divine resides within us and is, indeed, the basis for our discovery
of Spirit, and this carries a moral lesson: Do not mistakenly assert selfreliance as some kind of autonomous, or freed, effect, and thus break the
divine unified cause–effect relationship which unites one to the eternal
(Emerson, 1965: 229–30).
If man fails to accept this essential union, alienation follows. The finite
human, the experiencing person, is as much a ‘stranger in nature as we are
aliens from God’ (Emerson, 1971a: 39). The antidote to alienation is a new
religious consciousness, one based on a self-awareness of our own essential
divine nature, its correspondence with the divinity imbued in nature, and
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finally, in that discovery, our placement in God’s work. Ultimately, our
self-development is an expression of seeking that cognizance; selfaggrandizement celebrates the potential of our mission and the centrality of
its importance as an instantiation of the divine.11 Experience may baffle or
distract us, but Emerson appreciates the divine in the ordinary – ‘We see God
face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature’ (Emerson, 1883e[1904,
1911]: 306) – and relishes the rare moments of heightened lucidity that comes
in recognizing divine presence (ibid.: 308).
Emerson is willing to pay the high price for his self-consciousness and lost
innocence that extracts this challenge. He readily admits that
We have lost all reverence for the state. It is merely our boardinghouse.
We have lost all reverence for the Church; it is also republican. . . . We
have great contempt for the superstitions and nonsense which blinded
the eyes of all foregoing generations.
But we pay a great price for this freedom. The old faith is gone; the
new loiters on its way. The world looks very bare and cold. We have
lost our Hope, we have lost our spring. (Emerson, 1964b: 169)
But the burdens are well worth the costs, for he goes on to claim a great
opportunity for a new salvation:
Then, the act of reflection has its own good. If the ancient possessed
one world, we have two. Let us accept with joy the lofty destiny of
exploration and discovery in the hidden regions of thought. Let us pay
with joy the price of resigning somewhat of simplicity and unison with
nature, for the compensation of the sublime pleasures of reading the
spiritual sense of nature and life. For my part I am content there shall
be a certain slight discord in the song of the moving stars, if that discord
arise from my ear being opened to the undersong of spirits. This insight,
this introversion gives us to know that all the seeming confusion of
events and voices around us, beheld from a certain elevation of thought,
become orderly and musical. (ibid.: 171)
Man thus becomes his own arbiter of the world, and the self-reliance of his
freedom to understand becomes Emerson’s declaration of selfhood, one ultimately constituted as a religious credo, clothed in the garb of philosophy, but
very much grounded in a religious consciousness (Tauber, 2003).
The call of the divine pulled Emerson out of the reflexive regression.
Kierkegaard heard the same call, but their interpretative introspection
differed. For Emerson, reflexivity revealed a beguiling paradox: in seeking the
self, he discovered that to the extent one ‘exists’, he is a stranger to it. And
perhaps more to the point, given the stubborn resistance to finding that deep
identity, he would abandon self-reflection and thereby reverse his inward
journey to find himself with an Other. Kierkegaard placed reflexivity
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squarely at the nexus of his own selfhood, and arrived at the same place.
Different horse; different path; same stable.
KIERKEGAARD
Precisely at the same time Emerson offered his own musings on the divine,
the self, and their relation, Kierkegaard pursued God through a ‘teleological
suspension of the ethical’ (1985a[1843]: 83ff.; 95) and the consequent absurd
leap demanded by belief (ibid.: 57ff.). Through the eclipse of the rational, he
declared ‘subjectivity is the truth’ (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1846)
and thereby displaced the analytic faculty for the ethical and the religious.
These domains stratified ascension of human potentials (Either/Or, 1843)
and set the groundwork for existentialism’s precept of self-responsibility and
moral agency based on the fulfillment of some singular choice. Standing at
the chasm, Kierkegaard, with his celebrated absurd leap, invited us to exercise
choice, however configured. He thus championed individualism, and from
that orientation the Hegelian project was turned from its integrative aspirations to one committed to personal autonomy.
The ethical challenge Kierkegaard presents to his reader is to conform not
to particular mores or codes of conduct (the usual parameters of ethics or law
as socially construed), but to another ethic that defies human comprehension.
The ethical, in the usual sense, is only a stage to a higher morality, the
religious. And the religious resides beyond the social (thus religion, proper),
and more specifically beyond the individual self. An Other beckons, which
transcends human categories and understanding. Indeed, the faith required
to hear that call is divinely bestowed (Kierkegaard, 1985b[1844]: 64–6). This
beckoning structures Kierkegaard’s self-conscious inquiry from a precipitous
solipsism to a more complex introspection directed at relating the finite and
the infinite. This bi-directional mediation then replaces self-contained human
structures of personhood with one that must end in another formulation altogether. This ‘deconstruction’ (quite different from its latter meanings) transforms the encounter with God – radically independent of any social structure
(religion), rationality, or mediation by another.
Kierkegaard uses Abraham’s impossible sacrifice of Isaac, who would
both die and live, as an exemplar not only of the absurdity of divine engagement, but as the paragon of authentic individualism (Fear and Trembling,
1985a[1843]). Just as Abraham discerns no ethical basis for sacrificing his son,
man’s greater telos is similarly unknown and thus the biblical story presents
an existential challenge to human identity. Further, if the basis of human
choice is abrogated by a higher calling, namely by belief, then what constitutes human responsibility? The project requires a notion of agency different from that presented by earlier thinkers. While existential freedom
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remains, the leap of faith displaces modern understandings of autonomy and
individualism with a deeper sense of choice: in choosing to abrogate the ego’s
rationality or dispense with the most obvious selfish desires, no matter how
absurd, a superior ethical framework for decision and responsibility is
offered.12
Fittingly, the biblical story begins with God calling for Abraham, who
answers, ‘Here I am’ (Genesis, 22:1; 1985a[1843]: 54–5). From this primal
response, the divine challenge unfolds, and we discern in Kierkegaard’s
retelling of the fable how clearly the ‘I’ is defined in terms of that response.
All else is suspended – notions of independence, selfhood, responsibility – as
Abraham adheres to his declarative presence in relation to the unknowable.
Reason, and, more particularly, philosophy (analysis in any form), has
nothing to offer either as explanation or rationale for Abraham’s faith
(Kierkegaard, 1985a: 63), and with a pointed barb at Hegel, Kierkegaard
leaves philosophy as virtually irrelevant to the task at hand:
I for my part have spent considerable time to understanding the
Hegelian philosophy, believe also that I more or less understand it, am
rash enough to believe at those points where, despite the trouble taken,
I cannot understand it, the reason is that Hegel himself hasn’t been altogether clear. All this I do easily, naturally, without it causing me any
mental strain. But when I think of Abraham I am virtually annihilated.
I am all the time aware of the monstrous paradox that is the content of
Abraham’s life. I am constantly repulsed, and my thought, for all its
passion, is unable to enter it, cannot come one hairbreadth further. I
strain every muscle to catch sight of it, but at the same instant I become
paralysed. (1985a: 62–3)
Abraham is the paragon of authenticity precisely because he moves beyond
normal discourse, orthodox reason, and conventional ethics. Whereas Hegel
sought to integrate the fragmentation and disintegration among, and within,
individuals to harmonious unification, Kierkegaard regarded the malaise (the
‘spiritlessness’ of their age) as due to a thorough identification of the individual with the socio-cultural milieu (M. C. Taylor, 1980: 12–13). Abraham
becomes the Kierkegaardian hero only in radical isolation from the social.
For Kierkegaard, self-authentication depends on unmediated encounter with
God, which precluded communal religion; existentially he sought separation,
freedom from others, and thus objectivity, as a tool of public, common
knowledge, is subordinated to subjectivity. Primary relationship is critical,
and there we find that Emerson and Kierkegaard row the same boat.
But what is the role of reflexivity? Kierkegaard directly responds to Hegel
in Sickness unto Death, which begins with a complex fugue that effectively
puts Emerson’s theme into a different register: ‘A human being is spirit. But
what is spirit? Spirit is the self’ (1980[1849]: 13). ‘Despair’ is ‘to be unaware
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of being defined as spirit’ (ibid.: 25), and, more, it is a failure of exercising the
freedom of living that spirit. For Kierkegaard, fundamentally, ‘the self is
freedom’ (ibid.: 29), which is directed by the free ability to consciously synthesize the finite and infinite, the essential requirement of becoming an
authentic self. The abiding ethical demand is to ‘be oneself’ which is attained
by ‘consciousness of an infinite self’ (ibid.: 67–8). The vectors then overlap:
one directed inward in self-consciousness, and the other directed outward
towards the infinite.
The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that relates
itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can be done only
through the relationship to God. To become oneself is to become
concrete. But to become concrete is neither to become finite nor to
become infinite, for that which is to become concrete is indeed a synthesis. Consequently, the progress of becoming must be an infinite
moving away from itself in the infinitizing of the self, and an infinite
coming back to itself in the finitizing process. (1980: 29–30)13
The polarities are synthesized by ‘the self’ as Spirit, whose ontological basis
in freedom serves as the dialectical bridge (ibid.: 29). Thus the self becomes
an ongoing, synthetic exercise – a self-consciousness that has no bounds, and
one that is ever-present:
As a rule, men are conscious only momentarily, conscious in the midst
of big decisions, but they do not take the daily everyday into account
at all; they are spirits of sorts for an hour one day a week – which, of
course, is a rather crude way to be spirit. But eternity is the essential
continuity and demands this of a person or that he be conscious as spirit
and have faith. (Kierkegaard, 1980[1849]: 105)
Reflexivity, both through its moral mandate and by its own nature, thereby
becomes the very essence of selfhood. Reflexivity would be employed to
assert the independence of the individual, and more specifically to address the
requirements of a true religiosity. Note, the centrality of reflexivity directly
contradicted Hegel’s own views, where ‘reflection’ was regarded as incapable
of unifying the finite and infinite, and thereby must fail as the means towards
the highest religious consciousness (i.e. ‘reflection’ is an intermediate
between the ‘natural’ or primitive mode and that of Reason [Hegel, 1984
[1832]: 288–310]).
The self for Kierkegaard shifts from an analytical focus to a subjective one,
and, more fundamentally, it rests on a metaphysics of irreconcilable difference between subject and object (in contradistinction to Hegel’s pursuit of
dialectical synthesis). Accordingly, the authentic self is a logical product of
the absolute separation of the subject from others (Taylor, 1980: 162ff.). And
Kierkegaard also challenges Kant’s noumenal self, whose depiction by
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Emerson as a ‘core’ of mysterious aloofness, is eclipsed. Rather, the self
becomes a recursive reflection upon itself that has neither an end (as culmination), nor a purpose beyond fulfilling human nature’s synthesis of the finite
and the infinite. That synthesis (as well as that of the temporal and eternity,
freedom and necessity) ‘must either have established itself or been established
by another’ (ibid.: 13). For Kierkegaard, God bestowed the relational selfconsciousness required for the synthetic process, and when acknowledged,
despair is rooted out as ‘the self rests transparently in the power that established it’ (ibid.: 14). Self-consciousness is ‘decisive. . . . The more consciousness, the more self; the more consciousness, the more will; the more will, the
more self’ (ibid.: 29). Indeed, reflexivity, the process of relating, is the self. In
other words, reflexivity has displaced circumscribed entity with infinite
process.14
This much seems clear. But Kierkegaard goes further: he has turned reflexivity upon itself in an endless regress only to turn it outward.15 The move is
profound: either the regression continues with no end, or it turns away from
further introspection of ‘the self’ and answers its own inquiry with the only
alternative, the Other. This ‘other’ may be any species of alterity, but for
Kierkegaard, man attains his highest state when the other is God. Seeking the
divine offers the infinite framework for being, the second part of the synthesis (finite being the first). It is a choice governed by the absurd, but to make
that choice is, for Kierkegaard, the final expression of freedom that completes
the turn of the reflexive spiral. There, authentication is achieved.16
CONCLUSION
We have examined two fates of the reflexive turn: with Emerson, selfconsciousness hits a dead end and rebounds to seek union with the divine
Other; Kierkegaard’s reflexivity is ongoing in the self’s relating the finite with
the infinite. In the end, each finds God in answer to the self-conscious
question, Who am I? And, more broadly, each exemplifies how the inquiry
of identity shifted from the primary consideration of ‘the self’ as an epistemological agent to a moral one (C. Taylor, 1989). In short, they offered unique
views of how the ethical dimension defines the self. But the question remains:
To what end?
One interpretation beckons with great force: both Emerson and
Kierkegaard declined the Hegelian idea of persons finding themselves within
the collective, and by championing individualism, they set the stage for
Nietzschean and later formulations of personal responsibility and moral selfdetermination. From here, a rights-based culture emerged, ranging from a
radical libertarian perspective to a more balanced neo-conservative bent
(Sandel, 1996). Each seeks to protect the sanctity of a certain vision of
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individualism, which trumps a more communal understanding of selfhood.
The argument from liberals against this interpretation, particularly as
deriving from Kant, has been provocative, and the debate stems from reconfiguring Kant’s original thesis from one developed to assert autonomy to one
concerned with rational action determined by membership in the collective
(see note 4). Perhaps, ironically, a meeting with a Hegelian social theory
underlies this move, but irrespective of its historical heritage, the configuration of selfhood along the private–community axis dogs any individualistic
philosophy. In this context, how do we measure Emerson and Kierkegaard?
Because of the nature of their own inquiry, orienting the individual to the
divine, we must acknowledge that they were not particularly concerned with
a social ethic. After all, the reflexive turn is centered on the individual. Yet,
despite their commitments to individualism, both Emerson and Kierkegaard
saw the ethical limits of self-conscious exploration and recognized the critical
turn that must occur to avoid moral solipsism. They offered a theological
answer, one focused on the personal religious concerns of mending the scar
of secularism and the rise of an objectivity that seemingly had no limits. By
turning reflexivity outward to engage another, a bond is established. The self
is either ‘dependent’ on an Other (Emerson), or it is in enduring relation with
that Other (Kierkegaard). In either case, an ethical metaphysics holds the self
and other together in a dyad that defines the subject. But neither Kierkegaard
nor Emerson applied that understanding to the relationship of the individual
and the community and this, we must admit, is a failing, or perhaps, more
generously, a place for expected expansion.
Indeed, what is an ethics of individuality that does not account for the
placement of the individual within the collective? We might well question
whether the reflexive turn can emerge from its own recursive spiral, where in
the end only the Unknowable resides. Where does that call leave the more
immediate others? The challenge posed by a philosophy of self-identity based
on notions of individuality and independence leaves the complementary
requirements of social coherence and governance at risk (Tauber, 2001:
188–94).
Emerson and Kierkegaard might have suggested how the religious structure of relationship might be secularized, but this was not their central
concern. However, an influential line of 20th-century philosophers
responded to this challenge by employing two critical elements of the earlier
formulation: (1) personal responsibility of choice is the determinant element
of personhood; and (2) selfhood is authenticated in relation to the Other, and
in that dual relationship, the ability, and responsibility, to turn the self
towards the other establishes the fundamental dyad of moral encounter.
Accordingly, the individual exists only as one part of that duality, and in this
construction, a social ethic beckons. This is the point at which Martin Buber
and Emanuel Levinas sought a philosophy that begins with ethics and an
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ethics that begins with the face of another. Another trajectory, less direct (by
exhibiting a much mooted religious sensibility), joins the Hegelian–Marxian
tradition, where selves are formed, and authenticated, within the social.
Neither of these 20th-century lines of moral philosophy preserves the
Emerson–Kierkegaard ideals of personal individuality, but at least we can
trace these later developments to their earlier expressions.
Let me conclude with a comment about how reflexivity, as a ‘currency’,
was spent by Emerson and Kierkegaard. Following the road of selfconsciousness, they each outlined the boundaries of self-knowledge, revealed
the irony of self-reliance, pushed towards the limits of individuality, and
flung open the portals of self-responsibility. But Kierkegaard, during a period
still infatuated with the promise of Reason, went further by explicitly recognizing the ‘impossibility’ of philosophy’s fulfilling its own ambitions. Critically commenting on the pursuit of self-reflection, on the role of
consciousness, and the greater pursuit of the eternal, he understood the implications of his own leap for philosophy:
The individual philosopher must become conscious of himself and in this
consciousness of himself also must become conscious of his significance as
a moment in modern philosophy; in turn modern philosophy must
become conscious of itself as an element in a prior philosophy, which in
turn must become conscious of itself as an element in the historical
unfolding of the eternal philosophy. . . . [Philosophy] wanted to permeate everything with the thought of eternity and necessity, wanted to
do this in the present moment, which would mean slaying the present
with the thought of eternity and yet preserving its fresh life. If he
[Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym] were to have an
opinion about the implications of the thesis under discussion, it would
be this – that it was an impossibility. Yet he did not have the courage to
believe this. (Kierkegaard, 1985c[1844]: 140, 143; original emphasis)
And thus consciousness, which ‘presupposes reflection’ (ibid.: 169), faces the
impossible and proceeds, knowing its pursuit as ceaseless, to probe for the
eternal. We know his resolution: philosophy fails, or, as Kant had already
observed, reason must make way for faith. Perhaps the authority of reason –
so clearly articulated already in the 1780s with the Jacobi–Mendelssohn
debates (Beiser, 1987) – is the true focus of Kierkegaard’s inquiry, and in his
self-admitted failure to find firm foundations for Reason and a self-sufficient
structure for selfhood, he left us with the same irony and anxiety he so
eloquently elaborated. And thus we draw another braid, the Golden Thread,
into our tapestry.
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NOTES
I gratefully acknowledge the critical reading and helpful suggestions made by Klaus
Brinkman, Dan Dahlstrom, Roger Smith, and four anonymous reviewers. Parts of this
essay concerning Emerson appeared previously in somewhat different form (A. I.
Tauber, 2003).
1 This précis takes no account of the criticism dealing with Kant’s construction
(e.g. Tugendhat, 1986: 55–60, 133–43; Keller, 1998: 103–5; 252, notes 19, 20).
Some have argued that he held an incoherent theory of self-consciousness as
understood on the subject–object model (the so-called reflection model, whereby
reflection is analysed by a two-termed relation between the subject of consciousness and the object of consciousness), because this theory presupposes the selfconscious awareness it attempts to explain. Others dispute that Kant even held
that position, and instead maintain that a subject/object structure does appropriately apply to an understanding of self-knowledge, which of course is a
different problem altogether (Keller, 1998). This issue becomes particularly
pertinent in the formulations presented by Hegel and Kierkegaard (see below).
A second focus of controversy concerns Kant’s notions of autonomy. When
he turned his attention to the moral agency, he focused upon the workings of
reason, which he understood as autonomous. Indeed, he did not mean by
‘autonomy’ a ‘self-determination of the person as a person or of the I as an I, but
a self-determination of reason’ (Tugendhat, 1986: 133–4). Kant never refers to an
autonomous self or an autonomous person or autonomous individual, but rather
to autonomy of reason, the autonomy of ethics, the autonomy of principles, and
the autonomy of willing (O’Neill, 2002: 83). Hence, so-called ‘principled
autonomy’ is not something one has, nor is it equated with personal independence or self-expression. Rather, it is the self-legislated moral behavior prescribed
by principles that could be laws for all (Kant, 1964[1785]: 100). Autonomous
individualism, associated with a liberated self, freed from political, religious, and
social bonds, is a distinctly post-Kantian modification attached during the
romantic era (Tauber, 2001). (These issues are extensively discussed in A. I.
Tauber, 2005.)
2 ‘As the cognitive counterpart of a fragmented world and the intellectual
expression of divided selves, reflective philosophy separates [entzweit] but
cannot integrate, divides [trennt] but cannot integrate, alienates [entfremdet] but
cannot reconcile’ (M. C. Taylor, 1980: 43).
3 This schema sets the stage for later dialectical constructions. Generally, ‘alterity’
refers to an understanding of the self as defined in opposition to, or engaging
with, an ‘other’ – God, man, nature, self-reflection, society – and in the self’s
response to the other, identity is configured. Briefly, the self, to the extent that it
can be actualized, is defined by the other, a view continued in the 20th century
through many paths (see, for example, Theunissen, 1984; M. C. Taylor, 1987).
One might trace the self’s dependency on the other, and more specifically its
radical social contingency to Hegel’s social theory (Neuhouser, 2000), and more
deeply to his metaphysics (M. C. Taylor, 1980), which in turn was pre-figured by
Fichte’s account of mutual recognition.
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4 Recent critics dispute such a radical distinction and see in Kant’s ethics a deep
social commitment. John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (1999[1971]), like Kant,
builds an ethics on a purely rational moral agent, who makes choices behind a
‘veil of ignorance’ (1999: 118ff.). Accordingly, individuals must be blind to their
individual desires, interests, and objectives, and in such a just society, reason thus
dominates selfish desire. Autonomy arises from this common stock of rationality
shared by moral agents, because in the original position persons choose and abide
by a moral law, which is characteristic of their rational, independent, and disinterested human character. There is a deep social cohesive quality to Rawls’s
construction, inasmuch as he places a premium on the cooperative nature of
morality from which justice must derive, and he thus limits individual autonomy
by disallowing even the most conscientious actions if they violate public principles. Christine Korsgaard extends Rawl’s position by moving private morality,
governed by some private, atomistic individuality, to a public domain in which
autonomous individuals buy into public reason and cash out ethical behavior
(1996). The emphasis thus shifts from morality focused on the individual to a
morality centered on the individual’s abiding relationships to family, community,
the state and its various organs. Autonomy remains, inasmuch as the faculty for
determining those responsibilities and exercising the freedom to choose whether
to follow them or not, is the choice of the individual person, but when public
reason is factored into the calculus of choice, then private reason is engaged in a
social exchange. Finally, Barbara Herman complements this interpretation of the
social character of Kantian ethics by arguing that Kant’s project is better regarded
as ‘a correct analysis of “the Good” understood as the ultimate determining
ground of all action’ (Herman, 1993: 210). Shifting from a rule-based ethics,
centered on duty, to a value-based morality, focused on defining the Good,
Herman is flying against the historical tide of traditional Kantian scholarship, but
she and Korsgaard are seeking to rescue Kant from the atomistic individualists
who would claim autonomy as the motive force of morality. In contradistinction,
Herman and Korsgaard argue that autonomy is better regarded as in the employ
of finding the common good: the responsibility of each person answers to the
commonality of public reasons, or, in other words, to the claims of the
community on each individual’s finding and following a common morality.
5 In the early 1830s, individualism was independently coined by two French
commentators, Alexis de Tocqueville and Michael Chevalier, to describe
Americans. De Tocqueville observed how individualism embedded conflicting
social values: on the one hand, Americans prided themselves as independent in
their psychological and political personas; and on the other hand, because of the
loss of strong government or social hierarchy, they also exhibited a strong sense
of social dependence (Shain, 1994: 90–2; see also 112ff.).
6 Later architects of self-identity exposed a misplaced confidence in any such entity
as a self, and, instead, shifted the vector of inquiry to another course. This line
of inquiry turned in diverse directions, because the search for the self was
concluded as either endless (and thus futile), empty (and consequently divorced
from personal experience), radically indeterminate (and thereby rendered irrelevant), or, as in the cases discussed here, misdirected. Postmodernists (more
specifically, poststructuralists) highlighted the contingency of the self’s
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construction. From this perspective, there is nothing ‘natural’ about cultural
structures (e.g. language, kinship systems, social and economic hierarchies, sexual
norms, religious beliefs), no transcendental significance to limit ‘meanings’, and
only power explains the hegemony of one view over another. Similarly, ‘the self’
is best regarded as constructed by arbitrary criteria, and thus occupies no natural
habitat. Indeed, as an artefact of social and historical contingencies, the self’s
autonomy has been rendered meaningless and any construction of the self is
regarded as arbitrary. Late 20th-century voices spoke of the self’s ‘indeterminacy’
– a ‘de-centered’ subject – no longer an origin or a source, it becomes only the
contingent product of multiple historical, social and psychological forces (Mauss,
1985 and commentaries in Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes, 1985; Rose, 1998 and
1999). So what began in the Romantic period as a trial of self-examination, culminated with postmodernism finding only an empty ‘space’ where identity once
was grounded. Further, autonomy and individualism, those crucial characteristics of the Romantic self, are thereby rendered impotent as the self as entity is
deconstructed (Tauber, 1994: 201ff.). (From quite a different orientation, the
analytic tradition also regarded ‘the self’ with much skepticism [see, for example,
Johnston, 1993].)
7 This existentialist theme has been traced by Kojève to Hegel (1980[1947]), based
on a very different orientation (and some would say a very idiosyncratic reading).
8 For Emerson, like so many of his Romantic contemporaries, nature was the
necessary expression of the divine (Emerson, 1970: 71). Both the activity of
natural forms and the laws of their activity perfectly express the supreme mind,
and, indeed, ‘nature is a metaphor of the mind’ (ibid.: 21). Thus to know the
divine, Emerson rejects materialism and seeks a form of idealism, which grants
primacy to the spirit while acknowledging the objective reality of the world
(Duncan, 1973). Although Emerson distrusts sense impressions, he cannot accept
his own suggestion that perhaps nature is simply an ‘apocalypse of the mind’
(Emerson, 1971a: 29). Our role, as knowing creatures, is to articulate nature by
our own witnessing of it. He asserts a teleological natural religion, where nature
exists not for its own sake but as a means to an end: ‘It is the great organ through
which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the
individual to it’ (ibid.: 37). And how does Nature speak? Natural phenomena are
the symbols of the spirit, for in itself, nature is ‘deaf and dumb’ (Emerson, 1971a:
28). But as symbol, nature provides us with a language, by which we might gain,
through correspondence, insight, meaning, and signification. The distinctly
Romantic construction appears in the sublimity of individualized experience, the
acute sensitivity of the beholder, and the creative sophistication of his or her
‘reading’ of nature. The attained insight thus depends on human imagination and
effort, so when Emerson ended Nature with the proclamation that each person
must create his own world, he meant precisely that.
9 This view of the self is recurrent in Emerson’s writings and not just the product
of a tormented man attempting to deal with a personal tragedy. For instance, in
1837, 5 years before his son’s death, Emerson confided in his journal: ‘Man is
insular and cannot be touched. Every man is an infinitely repellent orb, & holds
his individual being on that condition’ (1965: 329); also, ‘all parties acquiesce at
last in a private box with the whole play performed before him solus’ (1971b: 236).
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10 ‘Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the
measure of good by the degree in which it enters lower forms’ (Emerson, 1979b:
40); ‘a self-trust which is a trust in God himself’ (Emerson, 1883a: 67); ‘selfreliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God’ (Emerson, 1883b:
222).
11 What in Nietzsche became the Will to Power (Stack, 1992), is in Emerson a more
muted declaration of self-reliance and growth: ‘Nature suffers nothing to remain
in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. . . . [T]he vital resources of every animal
and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore self-relying
soul’ (Emerson, 1979b: 40–1); man ‘must learn to walk alone’ (Emerson, 1883c:
118); ‘Man was made for conflict, not for rest. In action is his power; not in his
goals but in his transitions man is great’ (Emerson, 1883d: 55).
12 We might understand such choice as following a ‘procedural’ theory, which
employs a structural description of the self – a hierarchical organization of
various desires, emotions, traits, values, objectives, and the like – to describe how
autonomy is exercised. Influentially promoted by Harry Frankfurt (1971) and
expanded by Gerald Dworkin (1988), this understanding of autonomy is based
on a conception of a person as having potentially conflicting forces that must be
aligned and coordinated by higher-order desires to achieve morally autonomous
actions (Christman, 1989: 6–8). In other words, as rational beings, humans are
endowed with the capacity to reflect on their wants and beliefs, and ultimately
these yearnings must be stratified, so that some impulses will be acted upon
immediately, some deferred, and some ignored (Lindley, 1986: 64–6). I may want
a candy bar, but I more powerfully want to lose weight in order to be healthier,
in order to live a longer and more productive life, because I have aspirations that
require longevity, and on and on. I monitor my craving, and choose to deny my
hunger for the chocolate. There is perhaps no end to how many higher-order
desires might be invoked, and one need not identify them all to act. The point is
not the number, but rather recognizing the hierarchy of desires and the ability to
act on the highest ones, and, most importantly, assuming responsibility for those
choices.
13 It seems self-apparent, despite much debate, that Kierkegaard has thoroughly
internalized Hegel’s thinking, but dispute lingers on the extent to which
Kierkegaard engages Hegel; where Thulstrup (1980[1967]) and Stewart (2003) see
the Dane pursuing his own agenda quite independently, M. C. Taylor (1980)
concludes otherwise. I follow the latter, who argues that Kierkegaard challenges
Hegel at a deep metaphysical level, as already discussed.
14 Dylan Tauber has referred to this reflexive process as ‘double mirrors’ to depict
the idea in photographic representation. In the setting of perfectly aligned
mirrors facing each other, the repeated reflection of the subject would be superimposed on itself, but if the mirrors are slightly askew, the subject is shown
reflected upon itself (Tauber, 2005).
15 ‘The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself
to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation relating itself
to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the
temporal and the eternal, of freedom and of necessity, in short, a synthesis. A
synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way, man is still not a
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self. . . . Such a relation that relates itself to itself, a self, must either have established itself or have been established by another. If the relation that relates itself
to itself has been established by another, then the relation is indeed the third,
but this relation, the third, is yet again a relation and relates itself to that which
established the entire relation. The human being is such a derived, established,
relation, a relation that relates itself to itself, and in relating itself to itself relates
itself to another’ (Kierkegaard, 1980[1849]: 13–14). A comprehensive treatment
of this passage is given by Arnold Come (1995), who compares the various
English translations and offers a detailed analysis in the context of several of
Kierkegaard’s key works.
16 Implicit to this discussion are the interplay of two models of self-consciousness
– the substance model and the subject–object model. The different inclinations
of the person are understood as the determinations of the ego (substance model),
which might also include self-reflection, by which the subject becomes the object
of consciousness (subject–object model). Kant’s use of either model is disputed
(see note 1), but most would agree that each is represented in Hegel’s philosophy:
the Will serves as a primal inclination, coupled to myriad desires and choices (self
as ‘substance’), while self-awareness is both necessary and sufficient for one to
be (or to have) an I (‘self’ essentially as self-reflexive). Combining the two characteristics, we might consider Hegelian reflexivity as supplemental to the substance
notion of selfhood, where ‘will’, and its exercise, is coupled to self-consciousness
in the mode of subject–object relations. On the reading of Ernst Tugendhat (1986:
132–43), neither formulation, nor the combination of them, makes sense, but he
regards Kierkegaard as moving towards a Heideggerian solution by having ‘the
self’ relate itself not to itself, but to its existence. Through a critique of reflexivity he thus paves the road towards a phenomenological account of selfhood,
which presents an understanding that ‘a relation of oneself to oneself can be
found precisely in the relation of oneself to one’s own existence’ (ibid.: 143). On
this reading, Heidegger discovers the foreground of his own existentialist and
phenomenological account of selfhood in Kierkegaard.
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
ALFRED I. TAUBER is director of the Center for Philosophy and History of
Science, Professor of Philosophy, and Zoltan Kohn Professor of Medicine at
Boston University. He is the author of The Immune Self, Theory or
Metaphor? (Cambridge, 1994), Confessions of a Medicine Man (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1999), Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of
Knowing (Berkeley, CA: 2001), and Patient Autonomy and the Ethics of
Responsibility (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). His recent interests have
focused on the fact/value distinction and the pursuit of a ‘moral epistemology’.
Address: Department of Philosophy, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
02215. Tel: 617-353-2604; fax: 617-353-6805. [email: [email protected]]
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