On the History of the Self
I've just finished Carl R. Trueman's important book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self , and I wanted to offer some reflections on that book here. Trueman's argument can be summarized briefly as follows: through figures like Rousseau, Shelley, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and others, our common conception of what it means to be a 'self' has been fundamentally changed. What the change has looked like can be thought of in terms of Phillip Rieff's terminology: our culture has moved from a second-world culture where the sacred has been institutionally rooted to a third-world anticulture where the previous era's institutions and norms are in the process of deconstruction. This is similar to the account offered by Charles Taylor in his work, A Secular Age and Sources of the Self . What makes Trueman's work distinct is its tracing of the narrative arc of this change, and the specific focus on the LGBTQ+ phenomenon. Trueman argues that in the last few centuries...