The Social Imaginary and the Modern Self

The history of the development of the modern therapeutic self is a long and complicated one. Volumes of dusty books about the self now occupy incalculable shelf space. So, I don’t expect to make any real contribution to the public body of knowledge in this post. I do hope, however, that in a few short paragraphs, I can mark out a couple of significant stepping stones that can be added to later, stones that will ultimately allow us to cross safely over the turbulent waters of the modern obsession with ourselves (i.e., safe spaces, “my truth,” trigger warnings, “I’m a victim; you’re an oppressor” narratives, etc.).

The idea of the self is most puzzling, and at the same time, paradoxically familiar. It can be explained as that part of ourselves we call I, as in “I think; therefore, I am.” I think; I doubt; I experience; I know; I hope; I work; I play; I love; I am Scott Postma. The self is what is thinking, doubting, experiencing, knowing, hoping, working, playing, and loving. But it is not that name that I call myself that is my self. It is the I to which my name refers. If I were to change my name, it would be I who was changing it and the new name would still refer to the self who gave myself a new name. Or, if I were to lose my memory, contract amnesia, say, it would be I who could not remember the experiences I, myself, once recollected. 

Although, in distant history, there were the occasional treatments of the inner lives of men in literature—St. Augustine’s Confessions come to mind—such treatment of the self was the exception, and always understood within the context of the larger collectives, the cosmos and the polis. This is because as human beings, the way we tend to know is to unconsciously absorb the culture around us and intuitively pick up our beliefs, practices, and mores from the society we live in. Moreover, we also gain our sense of self from society because we possess our selves in constant dialogical relationships with other selves in that society. Charles Taylor refers to this as the social imaginary and explains that, historically, our sense of self was mimetic in nature; that is, we found meaning from without. Essentially, we unconsciously picked up cues from the society we were born into about how to think and behave so we could fit in and subsequently flourish within the society that gave us meaning and purpose. 

As I’ve already noted, the development of the shift from mimetic (meaning derived from imitation) to what Taylor calls poietic (meaning derived only from creating) is a long and complicated one and so I must leave out a number of important contributing philosophies and pathologies that contributed. Notwithstanding, we can thank (or blame, if you prefer) René Descartes for psychologizing the self and effectively bringing the contemplation of the same into a new centralized dimension of reality. Instead of reasoning from first principles to a comprehensive understanding of the cosmos, Descartes reasoned from his doubts. He postulated that because he doubted, it was proof that he existed (cogito ergo sum). His famous maxim would become in the modern world the new basis for knowing and understanding reality. I exist and everything else follows from that—meaning, significance, purpose, dignity, etc. 

Drawing from Charles Taylor, Carl Trueman in his work, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, insightfully reveals what this shift ultimately means for us in the modern world. He writes,

The psychologized, expressive individual that is the social norm today is unique, unprecedented, and singularly significant. The emergence of such selves is a matter of central importance in the history of the West as it is both a symptom and a cause of the many social, ethical, and political questions we now face…this new view of the self also reflects and facilitates a distinct move away from a mimetic view of the world as possessing intrinsic meaning to a poietic one, where the onus for meaning lies within the human self as constructive agent.

Thus, instead of recognizing we each exist within a society that has a particular culture and subsequently must, to some degree, conform to the shared cultural norms in order to flourish, the individual’s truth and feelings are now paramount; they are the source of one’s identity and now all of society must affirm those truths by conforming if it is to flourish.