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reflecting
Reading Gergen (1999)ref who talks about the importance - at the beginning of the Enlightenment - of the shift to individuality:
...Most particularly they gave intelligibility ot the idea that each individual is capable of observing the world for what it is, and deliberating about the best course of aciton - that is, the capacities to observe for oneself, to think, evaluate, and then to choose one's actions. Neither royalty nor clergy could declare themselves superior in these universal capacities.
...Knowledge was thus defined as private and personal, and not dictated by decree from on high... There is no authority that is not reduced to the minds of individual citizens...
...Today the echoes of the Enlightenment conception of the self are everywhere in evidence. The very idea of democracy - each individual endowed with the right to vote - derives from Enlightenment presumptions. Public education also owes its existence to the same investments... (Gergen 1999: 7)
there is more, but my point here wanted to be around the political implications of shifting away from this interpretation of the self, or, perhaps not quite so basically, from questions around the observational capacities of such a self. Generally (and I presume Gergen will go here): if I argue that the self does not hold such observational capacities, ones that can be trusted to the degree that we have taken, then what happens to the other roles and potentials of the self? e.g. what about democracy, then?
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2003 - 2007