Emotions and Selfhood

Recall the ‘Socratic condition’ (Section 1.1) that I, as a young undergraduate, decided to place on any decent theory of selfhood: Such a theory must be able to account for the emotional depth and complexity of Socrates' character. According to the ‘dominant’ self-paradigm that I take to task in this book, emotions are peripheral rather than essential to selfhood. Such an assumption does violate the ‘Socratic condition’. Yet it would be premature to reject it out of hand; before advancing my view of the self-relevance of emotions in Section 4.2, I want, at any rate, to consider how this assumption came about.

From the Enlightenment onwards, much of the learned world started to celebrate the ‘modern individual’ – a secular, scientific, rational, self-interested but self-controlled social actor whose selfhood had been freed of emotion (Reddy, 2009). Nevertheless, at the turn of the twentieth century, the pioneers of psychological self research such as James (1890) and Cooley (1902) included self-feelings as salient facets of the self. James made it abundantly clear that the self is not ‘cognized only in an intellectual way’, but rather that when ‘it is found, it is felt’ (1890, p. 299). As explained in Chapter 2, however, psychologists have recently tended to equate self with identity and to understand it exclusively as a cognitive construct.