Philosophy: Eighteenth-Century Theories of Contingent Selfhood

In this chapter I provide the theoretical and historical background for the Romanticism of the contingent self. Eighteenth-century philosophers were deeply interested in the question whether the self existed. While many philosophers insisted they could prove the existence of the self, others proposed a sceptical view. All, however, explored what it would me to lack a self. The chapter proceeds chronologically, as I explore connections between philosophical arguments in the eighteenth century and portrayals of selfhood in Romantic literature. In Sect. 2.1, I consider the opposing views of John Locke and Mary Astell, who disputed the value of sensation in self-constitution. In Sect. 2.2, I consider the opposing views of Adam Smith and David Hume about the nature of passion. In Sect. 2.3, I show how Kant systematised Rousseau’s doctrine of the will to explain how the necessity of the self can be a choice. In Sect. 2.4, I show how William Hazlitt, Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft explored the construction of the self in language and the imagination. Throughout the discussion, I show how the philosophers developed an understanding of the challenge of representation. In the eighteenth century, philosophers were increasingly perplexed about the meaning of words such as I and self. In the Romantic period, philosophers embarked on a full-blown critique of the language of selfhood, in which some thinkers—notably Hazlitt and Schopenhauer—essentially rejected the language of selfhood altogether. This philosophical analysis of the linguistic construction of the self provides the basis for the digital analysis of language in later chapters.