It is perhaps not inappropriate to begin the introduction to a volume on the history of the self in an autobiographical vein. The two editors happened to meet at a workshop and discovered a shared interest in Charles Taylor’s groundbreaking and challenging narrative of how the modern sense of self emerged as a defining feature of what he calls the “modern identity.” We discovered that each of us deeply admired Taylor’s narrative, its boldness and scope, but at the same time had significant questions about some of his key claims, as well as the particular historical arc that he chose to emphasize. Serendipitously, we were subsequently able to submit a successful grant application to the National Endowment for the Humanities to organize an interdisciplinary workshop to explore the sources of the self in the ancient, medieval, and early modern periods. That workshop, which we ended up having to hold virtually in April 2020 because of the pandemic, sowed the original seeds for this volume; we followed it with another unavoidably virtual workshop in September 2021. It is a pleasure to thank the NEH for their support.

What emerged from the workshop and subsequent discussions with contributors and attendees was a collective sense that the history of premodern ideas of selfhood needed a more expansive approach than it had received from Taylor and others. This introduction will begin by setting out some of the general themes that frame the varying contributions in this book, before going on to introduce the individual contributions.

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In 1989, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor published an extraordinarily ambitious and far-reaching exploration of modern selfhood and its historical origins. He set out to express and clarify what he describes in the Preface as “the ensemble of (largely unarticulated) understandings of what it is to be a human agent: the sense of inwardness, freedom, individuality, and being embedded in nature which are at home in the modern West.” These are topics that go to the heart of the enterprise of the humanities, and indeed are relevant to all of us.

Taylor’s analysis of the modern sense of self in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) is intimately connected to the historical analyses with which the book opens. In particular, he explored the origins of the modern self in three distinct aspects:

The building blocks of this exploration, especially for the premodern periods, were an unabashed selection of “great books” from the philosophical tradition: Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s Confessions, Descartes’s Meditations, Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and so on. The range alone of the selection, and the adventurous readings of it that Taylor essays, are part of what has made the book so influential across the academy (and also one of the few academic books that has captured the attention of the wider public).

In many ways, however, Taylor’s most significant contribution comes in the first hundred pages or so of the book. The lengthy section entitled “Identity and the Good” sets a paradigm well ahead of its time for talking about the self in the intersection of philosophical exploration and lived experience. The observations that all selves are formed in “webs of interlocution” (p. 36), for example, or that “one cannot be a self on one’s own” (p. 36), are important reframings of a longstanding tradition of defining the self in isolation from others. These observations have several equally important corollaries: that every self is situated within a – generally unarticulated – moral framework that entails constant qualitative judgments; that these judgments might be incommensurable with those of others; that part of the work of being a self, therefore, is to attempt to narrate this moral framework to others. As a consequence, we need to make sense of ourselves to others within moral space. Universal categories and universalizing claims may not be either necessary or justifiable in this context. Likewise, one cannot make sense of the demand that we should step outside our moral intuitions to essay an “objective” view from nowhere. Particularly striking is the observation that our condition “can never be exhausted … by what we are, because we are always also changing and becoming” (p. 47).

In an important sense, however, we feel that the project that Taylor announces calls for a more radical and ambitious historical sweep than he was able to offer. It is unfortunate, for example, that Taylor ignores almost entirely the writings of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Moreover, while he brilliantly characterizes the “interlocutionary self” in “webs of relation” with others, he remains wedded to the preeminence of interiority in the conception of the self. And his interlocutionary selves remain strangely disembodied. The others with whom they are in relation are other selves, not other people. Finally, although a whole section of the book is devoted to “The Affirmation of Ordinary Life,” that affirmation remains grounded in canonical philosophy. Ordinary life may be affirmed, but ordinary sources – the traces of embodied everyday lives – are not.

For these reasons we, together with the scholars represented in this volume, feel that Taylor’s historical narrative needs to be developed in four crucial directions:

• Studying the evolution of the idea of selfhood in the Western tradition, from the Greek thinkers to the early modern period is a fundamentally interdisciplinary exercise, and so should include voices and perspectives from a broad range of academic disciplines across the humanities. Our contributors include scholars whose primary training and expertise are in classics (Goldhill and Conybeare), philosophy (Bermúdez, McCabe, Perler, Connolly, and Chamberlain), medieval studies (Zak and Firey), theology (Torrance), and comparative literature (Kallendorf). At the same time, and as will be detailed in the second part of this introduction, several of the chapters in the volume straddle multiple genres.

• Scholarship over the last 30 or so years has raised interest in figures who lie outside the standard canon – and indeed, in entire schools and periods of thought that were hitherto largely neglected. These are rich veins to mine for understanding how thinking about the self has evolved. While several of the contributions here are focused on figures, such as Plato, Augustine, and Locke, who are squarely in the grand tradition that Taylor discusses, the essays in this volume reach more widely than The Sources of the Self. Perler explores ideas of selfhood in late medieval philosophy, while Torrance looks to Byzantine theology. The Renaissance is represented by Zak (on Petrarch and Boccaccio) and Kallendorf (on Spanish dramatists in the Golden Age).

• Although questions about the nature of the self have often been conceptualized in metaphysical terms, for example as questions about the nature of the soul (psuchê or anima), we were interested in pursuing a much broader range of topics. In particular, it is important to explore how ideas of selfhood are articulated in forms and genres besides philosophical and theological treatises. Goldhill expands the conversation to include Greek tragedy and the epigrams of Gregory of Nazianzus. Firey explores the role of the psalms in early medieval religious life, while Zak engages both with Petrarch’s famous letter describing his ascent of Mont Ventoux and with Boccaccio’s Decameron. Kallendorf introduces the rich and largely untapped corpus of Spanish Renaissance drama.

• It is becoming increasingly clear in modern scholarship that throughout our periods there is an insistence on the self as something that can only be properly understood within a corporeal context. This in turn entails consideration of the important – and hitherto ignored – aspect of gender in relation to ideas of the self, and more generally the external allegiances and identifications of the self in the world. These themes run in one way or another through all the chapters in this volume, but are particularly prominent in Conybeare’s discussion of Augustine on the beginning of life and Goldhill’s exploration of different attitudes to self-harm and suicide in ancient Greece and in Christian and Jewish late antiquity.

We’d like to conclude this part of the introduction by emphasizing that our project is not so much to criticize Taylor as to broaden the discussion more widely to do full justice to his deep insights into how to study evolving historical conceptions of selfhood.Footnote ¹

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Notwithstanding the expansive and revisionist program of the volume, we start in the same place as Charles Taylor: with Plato. Taylor echoes the conventional view of the self in Plato as turning away from ordinary life towards a vision of the good. M. M. McCabe, however, nuances this view with a reading of Plato that takes his dialogues seriously as dialogues, that is, as interlocutionary events involving two or more persons. This leads McCabe to focus on the use of personal pronouns in the dialogues, particularly on the relation of “I” to “we,” and hence on the embodied standpoint of individual subjects as they develop an epistemology in relation to others. She concludes: “If for Plato the self is as embedded in the first-person plural as in the singular, that may be because progress in knowledge is embedded in conversational dialectic.”

José Luis Bermúdez explores works of Aristotle less widely read outside classical philosophy to catch glimpses of a very different conception of the self from those familiar to readers of the Nicomachean Ethics (which is what Taylor focuses on). There, it is customary to remark on the abrupt shift from the social self of the first nine books to the contemplative self of the tenth. Bermúdez looks instead to the Metaphysics, to the De Anima, and – perhaps most innovatively – to the De Generatione Animalium, and detects in these works traces of a self which “has its source in the intimate connection between a psuchê and the particular body of which it is the form.” The possibility of this type of biologically grounded self is created by an ambiguity in Aristotle’s thought, exposed by Bermúdez, which hovers between a universalist and a particularist conception of the self. The former is more generally recognized; but the latter is present too, and both complicates and enriches the history of the self that this volume begins to sketch.

Simon Goldhill’s contribution extends from the world of ancient Greece to late antiquity – including the Jewish late antiquity of the Talmud. It also represents a move from philosophy into the intersection of literature and social history. Goldhill poses the trenchant question: why are self-harm and death by suicide not regularly part of inquiries into the nature of the self? Of Christianity, Goldhill writes “the self is in constant deferral.” The imitatio Christi of martyr narratives offers a self guaranteed (in a sense) by pain and suffering, while epitaphs construct a vision of the Christian self: in both genres, conventional temporalities are disrupted, to look to an authentic self that will be realized after death. Goldhill concludes, “It is indeed telling that Taylor’s interrogation of (dis)enchantment and the secular self does not engage with the diminishing power of the promise or fear of an afterlife as a motivation for action in modernity.”

Catherine Conybeare, by contrast, looks not to the death of the self but to its origins. She focuses specifically on the various accounts of the origins of the self to be found in the works of Augustine, who is Taylor’s second historical reference point (after Plato). However, she diverges markedly from Taylor’s emphasis on radical reflexivity, the self discovered through introspection. She focuses in particular on two aspects of the self for Augustine: first, its formation in what Taylor himself calls “webs of interlocution”; second, and more innovatively, on the pre-natal self, and the mystery of the moment at which soul combines with body to become a human person. Augustine ponders this mystery but never makes a declarative statement on the topic, and Conybeare suggests that we should listen to this Augustinian nescio, instead of the Cartesian cogito, as we think about the nature of the self.

Abigail Firey, in an essay that complements Goldhill’s, returns to defects of the self, probing scriptural, late antique, and early medieval traditions about sin and the self and defying Taylor’s preoccupation with the self as existing essentially in relation to the good. She looks in particular at exegesis of the prodigal son, which takes the story as emblematic both of the wandering soul, or self, and of the misuse of free will. Firey goes on to explore the grief of the individual self in not just a penitential but a liturgical context. The eighth-century figures of Bede and Alcuin are particularly important here. Firey dwells on the vulnerability of the self, and its “metaphysical permeability.”

Then Dominik Perler moves us forward to the later Middle Ages. He observes that, while the Augustinian tradition of interiority remains strong and links the self with the soul, a significant strand of thought described the self as something disclosed in relation to the outside world rather than through introspection. He traces this outward-turning self in both Aquinas, who finds it in everyday activities grounded in the body, specifically perception, and in Peter of John Olivi, who finds it in the emotions. A key passage of Aquinas sets the tone: “It is … on the basis of apprehending other things that [the mind] arrives at a cognition of itself.” Moreover, Aquinas sees the soul as involved in every activity of the body, not just introspection. Olivi, meanwhile, finds the self not in the individual’s capacity for perception but in their ability to feel emotions. Again, this fundamentally involves turning outward, for the emotions are felt towards other human beings who, having free will, can make the choice to behave well or badly, to interact with others in constructive or destructive ways. Both Aquinas and Olivi envisage an embodied soul that is fully realized in turning outward: for them, the soul/self is always relational and dynamic. “Scholastic authors,” Perler concludes, “clearly realized that there can be no self without other selves.”

With our next contribution, we stay in the later Middle Ages but move east. Alexis Torrance reads the fourteenth-century Byzantine theologian Gregory Palamas to discover a vision very similar to that of the thirteenth-century Aquinas and Olivi: that the body is indispensable to understanding the human subject and the human self. Indeed, Torrance situates his discussion within a narrative of intellectual exchange between east and west, the Greek and Latin traditions. Palamas insists that we should not try to detach or suppress the feeling part of the self: the right orientation of our natural faculties is an essential part of our love of God and our full realization of selfhood. This is concomitant with Palamas’s response to Christ’s incarnation, and also with his belief (which recalls Augustine’s thoughts on the origins of the self) that soul and body come into existence simultaneously.

We stay in the fourteenth century with Gur Zak’s chapter, who explores the border area between Latin Middle Ages and Italian Renaissance with his essay on Petrarch and Boccaccio. In particular, he pursues and nuances the notion of Renaissance individuality, showing how each man develops a very personal, earthbound concept of a relational self. Zak writes of Petrarch, “dependence on a human and worldly other inevitably renders the poet’s self vulnerable and precarious.” Meanwhile, he shows Boccaccio developing a notion of the self that, while also relational, operates more prominently in the social, civic arena: on the one hand, self-assertion is prized; on the other, it may run disastrously counter to the civic fabric. The self in these texts shows both the possibilities and limitations of individualism.

A quite different genre of text grounds the contribution of Hilaire Kallendorf, who traces notions of the self in the plays of early modern Spain. Drawing on a vast corpus of unpublished plays with the technique of “distant reading,” she examines the relation between self and free will in a period of increasing authoritarian control by both church and state. These plays demonstrate a deep preoccupation with maintaining a sense of personal freedom and choice despite the pressure of external constraints: Kallendorf proposes that the self is conceived as a “fortress” within which some sense of personal autonomy can be retained. This is very different from the more free-form relational concepts of the self that we have seen developed in the volume up to this point: the self remains grounded in the body and operative in society, but society places the body under heavy restraint.

For the closing essays of the volume, we move from Spain to the early modern period in England. Patrick J. Connolly takes on the standard Enlightenment figure of Locke, while Colin Chamberlain explores the work of a philosopher a generation younger than Locke, Mary Astell. Locke has generally been held to argue that the self is identical with consciousness. Connolly shifts the conversation, however, to look at Locke’s views on the psychology that supports consciousness: he argues that Locke’s notion of human understanding – embedded as it is in individual humans and their bodies – “can be read as a description of the self.” Chamberlain’s discussion of Mary Astell, meanwhile, forms a fascinatingly contrarian close to this volume, for it emerges that Astell – as the only female thinker discussed here – is very differently invested in notions of the body as partially constitutive of the self. Writing in the context of a tradition that belittled women as enslaved to the body, Astell finds the idea of the human mind as disembodied liberating: this offers some grounds for gender equality, and she takes the mind as equivalent to the self. At the same time, she recognizes that minds are housed in bodies, and accepts the body in her notion of personhood – so long as the correct personal hierarchy is sustained, and mind remains superior to body. The fact that Astell, writing from a female subject position, ends up reasserting a traditional mind–body hierarchy demonstrates in sharp relief how we should always attend to the social context in which thinkers develop and promote their ideas. Our conception of the self is fundamentally connected to our own experience as selves in the world. When we attend only to thinkers that are already established as carriers of the interpretative tradition, it is easy to occlude their context and consider their ideas as somehow uninflected by personal circumstance. It is only when we move beyond the received contours of tradition, as we have done in this volume, that we begin to question how all ideas about selfhood are formed.