1. The Origins of Self/Me and I
Compared to the languages of the far east, european languages rely more heavily on inflection to organize sentences. With the development of languages, this complex inflectional structure has gradually been simplified. The process of simplification is particularly notable in English. Due to the significant simplification, the subject in English often needs to appear explicitly. For instance, the “I” in “I believe in God” is usually indispensable. Otherwise, “Believing in God” would no longer constitute a complete sentence, but would only exist as a component of a sentence, such as “Believing in God is the way we choose”. However, the sentence of “Credo in unum Deum“, which holds the similar connotation of “I believe in God”, does not explicitly express ego, but it is expressed through the conjugation of the verb credere. In other words, although “ego” as the subject does not appear directly, it is still showed by the grammatical structure. This is an absent presence. Some contemporary European languages still retain this feature. However, in English, except for some imperative sentences and special cases (like “see you” and “love you”), this kind of absent presence is impossible. English cannot merely demonstrate its subject “I” through verb conjugation.
Yet even English, together with many other European languages, still preserves a prominent feature, that is, the objectification of self subject (I use objectification here as making it an object, instead of exploitative objectification). The conception of “me”, as the accusative case of the self subject in European languages, is special: Whatever mich in German, me and mi in Romance languages and English, there is always an accusative case of the self subject. Here, it is necessary to first distinguish between the two different concepts of “I” and “self/me”. “I” refers to subjectivity in first-person experience, while “self/me” is different. “Self” or “me” always seems to exist as something that can be located and described. In other words, the concept of self itself already has a certain tendency towards objectification. The grammatical structure of European languages implicitly contains the possibility that “I” can appear not only as a subject but also as an object to be discussed. The distinction between “I” as the nominative case and “me” as the accusative case means that “I” can be objectified, becoming an object to be observed and reflected on. In this sense, European languages already contain the possibility of transforming the “I” into an object of thought. Compared to Far Eastern languages, this linguistic structure may have led Europeans to encounter the problem of “self” earlier.
This is precisely why Western philosophy has consistently revolved around the concept of self. This philosophical exploration of the self began as early as ancient Greece. Socrates’s finding of “Know thyself”at the Delphi presupposed that the self is an object that can be discovered and known. From Socrates onward, and indeed most Western philosophers after him, they tended to understand this self as some pre-existing entity. Especially given the long-standing Western tradition of aversion to the body, this self was often placed in a transcendental realm that is different from this material world. Therefore, for a long time, what Western philosophy studied was not the “I” in first-person experience, but a “self/me” that had been objectified. It was not until Descartes that Western philosophy truly began to present the “I” in the first person. By establishing the philosophical starting point of cogito ergo sum, Descartes, to some extent, broke through the traditional philosophical analysis of the “self/me” as an object and established the thinking activity of “I” itself as the foundation of philosophy. Unfortunately, Descartes was ultimately limited by the binary division of mind and matter. Although he established the subjective status of “I”, he did not delve deeper into the structure of self-consciousness itself. A true analysis of “I” may still have to wait for centuries with psychoanalysis and phenomenology.
2. Formation of Modern Subjectivity
If we further explore the meaning of “self” in the Western sense, the question cannot remain merely at the level of linguistic structure. It must delve into the formation of modernity. This is because Western modernity (or coloniality, from the perspective of racism study) not only signifies the formation of new political and new world order, but also the birth of a completely new subject structure. In other words, modernity not only redefined the world but also redefined “what is the self”.
In Charles Taylor’s discourse, the modern subject (self) is no longer an entity embedded in the cosmic order, but becomes a disembedded subject. Medieval people still lived in a world full of meaningful connections: family, church, nature, and the divine order together constituted the background of the subject’s existence.
“Embedding thus in society. But this also brings with it an embedding in the cosmos […] the spirits and forces with whom we are dealing are in numerous ways intricated in the world. We saw some of these in the discussion earlier of the enchanted world of our medieval ancestors: for all that the God they worshipped transcended the world, they nevertheless also had to do with intra-cosmic spirits…”[1]
“I” thus was not an isolated entity, but a node in a chain of existence. However, since the Enlightenment, the West has gradually developed (or invented) a closed subject structure. Taylor views this shift as a transition from the porous self to the buffered self. According to him, “to be a buffered subject, to have closed the porous boundary between inside (thought) and outside (nature, the physical) is partly a matter of living in a disenchanted world.”[2] Then the self is no longer open (porous) to the outside world. Modern West invented a subject that is capable of isolating itself from the world. Correspondingly, despite using different terminology, Mignolo also observed a similar process. He claims that we have self-fashioned ourselves “by cutting the links with ‘nature’ and by the eighteenth century with God, an act of degoding…”[3] The world then is no longer connected with us by a divine order, but is transformed into an object world that can be observed, named, and categorized by us. This progressivism was prevalent in the Enlightenment, “the radical Aufklärer had no use for the notion of providence, or a providential order; at least they thought they didn’t.”[4] Similarly, in his Meaning in History, Karl Löwith observes the same process during the Enlightenment. He finds its radical manifesto, “man has to replace God, and the belief in human progress has to supplant the faith in providence.”[5]
The essence of this radical thought is actually the disembedding/degoding of the self that Taylor and Mignolo discovered above. It is precisely because the self is no longer a part of nature that we need to establish our own order to replace God’s order. “I” thus separated from nature, and “I” no longer primarily meant an existence within a relationship around 18th century. It is in this sense that the self has the right to name, classify, and even to control.
[1] Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age. Harvard university press, p. 150.
[2] Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age. Harvard university press, p. 300.
[3] Mignolo, W. D. (2017). Racism and Coloniality: The Invention of “HUMAN (ITY)” and the Three Pillars of the Colonial Matrix of Power (Racism, Sexism, and Nature). In The Routledge companion to the philosophy of race (pp. 461-474). Routledge, p. 470.
[4] Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Harvard UP, p. 321.
[5] Löwith, K. (1949). Meaning in history (p. 52). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 62.