Flesh in the Age of Reason (4 page)

Freud and his followers thereby opened up new horizons of selfhood, or rather plumbed the psyche’s oceanic depths, exposing a hidden world of secret desires and treacherous drives. Self-discovery thus became a voyage into inner space, colonization of which was
to have the profoundest implications for twentieth-century psychiatry, art and literature, notably in Surrealism or the stream-of-consciousness novel.

Critically, Freud claimed, too, that he had hit upon a decisive new truth (or one stubbornly silenced): the ultimate secret of the self was sexuality. Depth psychology thus gave a new edge to Polonius’s advice. Because the Freudian psyche might not be pleasant to behold – it harboured the incestuous Oedipal libido – ruthless honesty became more essential than ever: nothing should be concealed or rationalized away.

This truth imperative was no less fundamental to one of the key philosophical movements of the twentieth century, existentialism, whose oracle, Jean-Paul Sartre, required the combating of the ‘bad faith’ of the unexamined life, and all its duplicities. The movement which began with Renaissance autobiography culminated, it thus appears, in existential integrity or angst, the equivocal finest hour of subjective individualism. Meanwhile, on a less exalted plane, the twentieth century spawned scores of creeds and cults, nodding in the direction of Freud and other gurus, which claimed to help people understand and accept themselves, maximize their potential, express themselves and, of course,
be
themselves. The culmination was the post-1960s ‘me generation’, with its creed of doing your own thing.

Grand narratives of the kind just recounted – of how the West discovered, championed and honed a distinctive self unknown to earlier times, an inner, individualist psyche unfamiliar to the great civilizations of the East – underpin popular attitudes and public platitudes, and continue to carry a huge appeal. Furthermore, they mould familiar stereotypes of ‘alternatives’: the noble savage, the medieval peasant, the Romantic poet, the free spirit, the lonely crowd, the alienated intellectual, and so on.

Do they not contain a measure of truth? After all, much of our recent artistic and intellectual heritage involves celebration of the exceptional outpourings of mighty, self-absorbed geniuses, such as Beethoven. Yet the tale also has the ring of myth, and an air of
soap-box rhetoric, especially when recounted as an epic in which the striving, heroic self scales ridge after ridge until it reaches its peak of perfection in our own times, truly ‘authentic’ at last – a story flattering to ourselves, when the final twist identifies ours as an age of singular psychic crisis: the self in neurotic torment.

Yet aspects of this meta-narrative must be rejected as self-serving fiction, in particular its Hegelian or teleological assumptions about linear evolution. Belief in an inevitable ascent from some primordial collective psychological soup or swamp to the shining apogee of individual identity now seems a question-begging, self-congratulatory mirage, left over from Herbert Spencer and other Victorians. The horrors of the twentieth century surely demolished the assurance of earlier individualists that the evolution of individuality automatically brought moral improvement.

After all, psychological individualism has a problematic character. In the eighteenth century, Locke’s claim that identity is made not given (nurture not nature) served progressive ends – it underwrote political liberation. In the twentieth century, by contrast, the Lockean doctrine of malleability played into the hands of stimulus-response behaviourism, as developed by B. F. Skinner and taken up by totalitarian brainwashing regimes, and of other conservative exponents of social conditioning.

The tensions between self-knowledge and self-possession – the ambiguous implications of science for the psyche – were not lost on Freud. His wholehearted public commitment to pursuing (self-)analysis to the limit required that we be disabused of rose-tinted expectations that such new knowledge would indubitably bring freedom and happiness: in truth, the science of the self would flatten rather than flatter man’s self-esteem. ‘Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon naive self-love,’ Freud explained:

The first was when it realized that our earth was not the centre of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable; this is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus,
although Alexandrian doctrines taught something very similar. The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him: this transvaluation has been accomplished in our own time upon the instigation of Charles Darwin, Wallace and their predecessors, and not without the most violent opposition from their contemporaries. But man’s craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavouring to prove to the ‘ego’ of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind. We psycho-analysts were neither the first nor the only ones to propose to mankind that they should look inward; but it appears to be our lot to advocate it most insistently and to support it by empirical evidence which touches every man closely.

Freud thus overturned the Augustinian doctrine of ‘forbidden knowledge’: pursuit of knowledge about the self did not signal pride, rather it was its antidote.

Yet, for all his innovations and anxieties, Freud was in one crucial respect a traditionalist: he too believed there was indeed an inner core truth of the self – albeit one located in the terrifying subterranean battleground of the id, ego and superego – waiting to be discovered, analysed and even healed. Similarly, the reason why Shakespeare and others had been able to write romantic comedies of ‘mistaken identity’ was precisely because it was assumed that such confusions could actually be overcome and true identity eventually disclosed: deceptions would end, the masks would come off, all would be revealed. Faced with cases of ‘multiple personality’, psychoanalysis aimed to expose the false and reinstate the true one.

What has been especially striking in recent decades, however, is the rise of new outlooks challenging the very idea of a nucleated (if evasive) inner personal identity. Gilbert Ryle exposed the myth of the ‘ghost in the machine’, but crucial here have been the theories of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and more
generally of deconstructionists and postmodernists at large. Barthes for his part promoted the notion of the ‘death of the author’; in a series of books published over the course of twenty-five years, Foucault challenged liberal belief in individual intention and agency. The conventional humanistic understanding of subjectivity – the individual agent, writer or reader possessing a mind of his or her own and exercising free will through thought and action – was superficial and self-serving. Rather, such anti-humanist iconoclasts argued for the primacy of semantic sign systems, cognitive structures and texts. We don’t think our thoughts, they think us; we are but the bearers of discourses, our selves are discursive constructs. Within such frames of analysis, any notion of the ascent of selfhood is but idle teleological myth, a humanist hagiography.

Such a Romantic fallacy had peaked in the nineteenth century (argued Foucault) before collapsing in our own era, partly thanks to the devastating critique mounted by Nietzsche. The death of God, Foucault held, reversing conventional interpretations, entailed the death of man as well: man was decentred or dissolved.

Postmodernism thus maintained that the conventional story of the triumph of the self was no more than an anthropocentric fallacy. Even more scandalously, Foucault and his followers argued that the new individualism heralded in the Enlightenment was in truth – contrary to the claims of its champions and to later apologetics – not an emancipation from social fetters but the very means by which state power cunningly locked subjects into bureaucratic and administrative systems, by stamping them with a clear and distinct identity. Subjectivity was thus a new tool of subjection. Such developments as civil registration required the documenting of names, births and deaths; police mug-shots and fingerprinting were introduced – unique to the individual, and useful mainly as a means of social identification. Continuing controversy in Britain today over the proposed introduction of compulsory identity cards illustrates the point: what has been truly difficult to achieve in modern times is not identity but anonymity.

Traditional tellings of the ascent of man have thus been criticized
by those who hold that the prized liberal self is just a rhetorical construct, a trick of language, a ruse or sham. New historicism has thus portrayed Renaissance man as not ‘self-discovering’ but rather ‘self-fashioning’, as if – how Jonathan Swift would have loved this – the self were but a suit of clothes. The much-trumpeted Renaissance ‘discovery of man’ is thereby reduced to yet another stratagem, or at least to a mode of ‘social construction’.

Liberal pieties have been further assailed by feminist critiques. The telling of the ‘discovery of the self’ has been mystificatory, these contend, because it has taken the male sex for granted as normative. Not least, the standard image of the hard, thrusting and self-sufficient ego reflects and has served to legitimate crudely macho stereotypes. The customary saga of the self thus mirrors and reinforces myths of masculinity.

Thus, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the sense of self needs rethinking. The Lord told Moses: ‘I
AM THAT
I
AM
’, but few of us mortals these days feel so confident about who or what we are. True, right-wing governments in the United States and United Kingdom which champion market-place individualism have the backing of sociobiologists and psychological Darwinians who insist that the selfish gene is Nature’s way, and there is no shortage of publicity for a galaxy of styles of self-fulfilment, self-expression and psychotherapy. But such nostrum-mongering is advanced against a backdrop of the erosion of established identities, associated with the disintegration of traditional patterns of family life, employment, gender roles, education and other social institutions. The acceptance of such designer drugs as Prozac, Viagra and Ecstasy heralds a new age in which the chemical modification of the brain calls into question old assumptions about the sovereignty of individual character. Indeed, the explosive controversy in the United States about repressed and recovered memory syndrome – the multiple personality held to follow from childhood sexual abuse – hints at a future in which traditional models of a relatively permanent personality may lose applicability.

Not least, we live in the age of the computer, of artificial intelligence
and virtual reality. If robots and androids (in actuality and in science fiction) will think (and feel?) like us, if cyberspace supplants the inner space of personal consciousness, what will happen to the privileged realm of our psyche; indeed, what will happen to the human in us? Will all that be dismissed as ‘speciesism’? Will there follow a decisive dissolution of the traditional ego-boundary consciousness, with perhaps a ‘reversion’ to a ‘tribal’ – but now electronic or chemical – consciousness?

Bearing in mind these heroic narratives of the odyssey of the self and their recent critiques, this book will concentrate on transformations of the sense of self in Britain in the ‘age of reason’. In the ‘authorized version’ endorsed by the Churches, a person was a familiar paradox: a miserable sinner, promised an eternal destiny beyond the grave. The young Dissenter Isaac Watts could thus, around 1680, insert himself in a scenario familiar ever since St Augustine:

I am a vile polluted lump of earth,
S
o I’ve continued ever since my birth,
A
lthough Jehovah grace does daily give me,
A
s sure this monster Satan will deceive me,
C
ome therefore, Lord, from Satan’s claws relieve me.

Watts was a sinner of course, hoping for salvation:

W ash me in Thy blood, O Christ,
A
nd grace divine impart,
T
hen search and try the corners of my heart,
T
hat I in all things may be fit to do
S
ervice to thee, and sing thy praises too.

His very name, or self, was inscribed and subsumed in the Christian story of sin and salvation.

Sturdy scriptural fundamentalism steadily lost favour, however, at a time when opinion-shaping élites were ceasing to subscribe to and govern their lives by stern Protestant teachings backed by Bible literalism. New scripts of life were to promote variant readings of a
self strutting on a terrestrial, this-worldly stage. Such new concepts of the ‘I’ were defined less by the transcendental soul than in relation to the body. This book will examine them through exploring how educated élites – opinion-makers – grappled with anxieties as to their nature, individuality and destiny as thinking and feeling humans. In the process they often developed stances at odds with entrenched Christian doctrines, now rejecting, now reinterpreting them.

Christian orthodoxy comprised elements gleaned from the Gospels and given an
imprimatur
by the Churches. The scriptural story of Original Sin, the Fall and the Expulsion from Paradise, and man’s subsequent redemption by the Son of God made flesh and crucified at Calvary – these were truths endlessly reiterated not just in
summa
and sermons, but through the liturgy, ceremonials and icons first of the Catholic Church and then of the various Protestant confessions. In England they assumed epic expression in Milton’s
Paradise Lost
(1667) and
Paradise Regained
(1671).