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The Birth and the Collapse of the Western Idea of Self
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15322 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1989 |
4,902 Words |
| Author
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Rollo May
Rollo May is a training analyst emeritus of the William
Allanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and
Psychology. He received the award of the American
Psychological Association in 1988 for his outstanding
contributions to the profession of psychology. He is the
author of Love and Will, The Meaning of Anxiety, The Courage
to Create, and numerous other books and articles. |
One of the dramatic changes in world history occurred during the Renaissance, with the shift from medieval feudalism in Europe to the society of the self of the modern age. The Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt wrote that in the Middle Ages, a person was "conscious of himself only through some general category, such as his place in the feudalistic structure, in the family pattern, and in the moral and spiritual structure of the church." The "self" as we know it was hardly discernible.
This can be seen clearly in the art of the period. The medieval mosaics look out over the viewer's head representing not selves but eternal power and forgiveness, the spirit of God, the church, and eternity.
In the cathedrals such as Chartres, one sees all of the signs of the community and scarcely ever an acknowledgement of the individual. In the famous rebuilding of Chartres Cathedral after it was destroyed by fire in the twelfth century, every person in the village worked together in one effort, hauling stones across the fields, carving the statues, placing the beautiful glass windows. No sculptors' names adorn the different statues; no one knows who was responsible for this or that portion of the great church. Individual selves were not recognized; the village acted and reacted as a totality.
But with Giotto in the fourteenth century came intimations of the Renaissance. We see a new mood--namely, that the human individual self, formerly ignored, becomes paramount. Giotto for the first time depicts individual emotions, such as the joy of a father kissing his daughter, or the mourning of the mother of Jesus at the foot of the cross. The individual self is born into its own.
We see the same radical change in the writings of the Renaissance. In his Oration on the Dignity of Man, the Italian Renaissance scholar Pico della Mirandola wrote that God says to Adam: "Thou, restrained by no narrow bounds, according to thine own free will, in whose power I have placed thee, shall define thy nature for thyself…; thy own free moulder, shouldst fashion thyself in what from may like thee best."
The new emphasis on the individual self can be understood partly as a reaction against the feudalism of the Middle Ages. The self of the Renaissance was a defiant one: "I have no friend, nor do I want any," proclaimed Michelangelo. This individualism expressed the power of the individual self in the Renaissance. "Capacity might raise the meanest monk to the
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