ABSTRACT
Postulations and hypotheses about the nature of the person, the soul, or the self have interested philosophers and religious thinkers for centuries, from Plato and Augustine, Maimonides and Aquinas, to Descartes and Locke. The historical and cultural specificity of the concept of the “self,” evident in earlier notions, has bequeathed a modem notion in the West that holds distinctive new emphases. The moral philosopher Charles Taylor (1989) points out that any exploration of the self in modem thought must recognize the intertwinement of self with the notion of the good. In particular, modem moral philosophy has focused on “what it is right to do rather than on what it is good to be” (Taylor 1989: 3, emphasis added). Selfhood and morality have been coupled in modern thought with a significant emphasis on human doing over human being. This emphasis is in manifest congruence with industrialism’s penchant for production. The silent legitimacy of productionism has generated dominant discourses on selfhood that both shape the character of the modern self throughout modem industrialism and delimit the context of our thinking on self that I explore in this chapter.
