Artificial selves

Discussions of the postmodern self often trace a genealogy from Descartes to Locke to Kant to Nietzsche to Heidegger to Foucault. But though philosophers no doubt have some influence on the daily experiences of normal humans, this sort of treatment doesn't quite get to the ground level. In 1991, Paul Leinberger and Bruce Tucker published their study based on interviews of the subjects of William Whyte's 1956 Organization Man and their descendants to see what had happened in the meantime. The children of the stable, security-conscious, risk-averse organization men were what Leinberger and Tucker called "new individualists," but defined their individualism not in political but in psychological terms:

"As the organization offspring came of age in the sixties and seventies, they were exhorted to find themselves or create themselves. They undertook the task with fervor, as self-expression, self-fulfillment, self-assertion, self-actualization, self-understanding, self-acceptance, and any number of other self compounds found their way into everyday language and life. Eventually, all these experiences solidified into what can only be called the self ethic, which has ruled the lives of their parents." Leinberger and Tucker insist that this is not merely egoism, but a self ethic, implying the moral duty "to express the authentic self."

For several reasons, this new individualism is decaying into what they call the "artificial sel," a different form of individualism. While those who came of age in the 60s and 70s shared a Romantic faith "that individuality consists of a pristine, transcendent, authentic self residing below or beyond all the particular accidents of history, culture, language and society and all the other 'artificial' systems of collective life," they have come "to see that the attributes they previously dismissed as merely artificial are what make people individuals - artificial, to be sure, but nonetheless persons, characterized by their particular mix of these ever-shifting combinations of social artificiality of every variety." This self mayb be "artificial," but at least it is "particular"; the earlier individualist was "authentic but empty."

Once the artificiality is recognized, the "organization offspring" draw close to Richard Rorty's "ironic" selfhood: They "are never quite able to take themselves seriously because [they are] always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabulary, and thus of their selves."

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, November 07, 2006 at 02:56 PM

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