Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (review)

This is a large book, but it has a straightforward thesis, enunciated clearly in the first three pages: the concept of a separate, private individual, of a self free and independent in its will, intentions, and choices, was not even conceptualized until the beginning of the first or second centuries AD at the earliest, and was considered aberrant until well into the seventeenth century. Instead, Reiss argues, personhood was commonly believed to have been grounded in the material world, society, family, corporality, rationality, and the divine: these "circles," as they were understood then, did not surround an individual who somehow fit into them, but they were the person, who was embedded in and acted upon them. In other words, consciousness did not precede or exist apart from social relations; instead, person and society were mutually constructed.

The 525 pages that follow flesh out this thesis, devoting roughly equal attention to its appearance in antiquity and its articulation from Petrarch through Descartes, in such a way that on this topic at least, writers as diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Cicero, and Seneca end up saying essentially the same thing. This common understanding of "who-ness" included everyone, even women and slaves, for in spite of what Aristotle appears to say (in some places at least), the dominant view was one of sexual or class difference on a ground of human sameness. In later antiquity, Galen and the Arabic interpretive tradition stressed the human and material aspects of this unified vision, Justinian the sociolegal, and Augustine the divine and rational, producing a structure that was reflected in medicine, law, and theology, the higher faculties of the medieval and Renaissance universities. Everything continues in more or less the same way with (for example) Alberti and Loyola, but fissures began to appear, first as a feeling of decay and a difficulty in sensing how the person fits into the world, exemplified by the now-famous Martin Guerre incident. This doubt and discord is articulated more clearly, if perhaps still provisionally, in Hélisenne de Crenne, whose position as a woman leads to an anger that demands the right to dissociate itself from social norms, and in Montaigne, who recognizes the existence of a fantasie privée that is all right in the library but threatens to destroy society if it is let out. As we might expect, this leads in the end to Descartes, but not quite in the expected way: according to Reiss, the self-conscious subject agent who resolved conflict rationally began with Descartes and ended with Hobbes and Locke, but in losing its roots in the old order, it eventually became un-Cartesian.

In a brief review, it is impossible even to begin to engage the complexities of an argument like this. Reiss's thesis does offer a reasonable explanation for a number of different phenomena, ranging from the widespread belief in astrology (merely another demonstration of the fundamental interconnectedness of everything) to Petrarch's notorious inconsistency (if there is no essential self that precedes the social context in which the self is articulated, then as that context changes, the self must change, too). It also offers additional paths for further reflection: Christianity, for example, injected itself into the old world view, and if will connoted the faculty by which people adapted to the demands of the world, allowing intelligent assent to them, then wouldn't prayer involve more the effort to accommodate the will of the individual to the will of God ("thy kingdom come. . .") than to bend His will to our own ("give us this day . . .")? Not everyone will like everything they read here: Reiss's argument is not nearly as relentless as it appears when reduced to a short summary, but in the end, it argues the essential unity of a very long period indeed, and it swims against a number of scholarly tides, ranging...