The Invention of the Self: The Hinge of Consciousness in the 18th Century

by John O. Lyons

The absence of self in Classical litera­ture and the emergence in the eigh­teenth century of the concept of the unique and individual self asserting its existence and seeking its truth in pri­vate experience and feeling is often touched upon in cultural histories but little explained. Seeking the reasons for and the effects of the change of attitude toward one’s concept of one’s self in the “new” eighteenth-century attitude to­ward history, biography, travel litera­ture, pornography, and the novel, Lyons finds, first, that the term self is deceptively vague. It evolved, he notes, to fill the vacuum created by doubt about the existence of the soul.
 
Second, Lyons finds that without a concept of the self—that ineffable something in a human being that to its inventors and their followers was an abstract of pure and intuited natural laws—the revolution and romanticism of the modern age would have been very different from what it has been. More importantly, Lyons concludes that the concept led to monumental error and to bitter disappointments rooted, as his il­luminating history shows, in the im­possibility of defining that which never was.

280 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

John Ormsby Lyons, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Wisconsin.

Reviews

[Kevin K · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book for more insight into the origins of the modern self. Unfortunately, this is a work of literary criticism that hardly mentions the self at all. The main authors covered are: Boswell, Locke/Hume, Rosseau, Casanova, early travel writers, 18th century pornography (Fanny Hill), Goethe, Fielding, Sterne, and Dickens. Points that stuck with me regarding the self were: 1) the modern self arose in some sense as a secular replacement for the soul, 2) its origins are closely connected with Romanticism, Rousseau in particular, 3) the authentic self doesn't really exist and the Romantics' search for it was fruitless and disappointing — leading (it seems to me) to today's more robust forms of self-creation.

The end of the book has a beautiful quote from Rilke:

Other people change their faces over uncannily quickly, one after the other, and wear them out. At first they think they have enough of them to last forever, but hardly have they reached forty than they’re on the last one. There is something tragic about that, certainly. They aren’t used to looking after faces; their last wears through in a week, has holes in it, and in many places it’s as thin as paper, and then gradually the base layer starts to show through, the non-face, and they go around wearing that.