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Articles

Self and Symbolization

Dan Fleming suggests that culture has turned outside in.

The nature of personal identity, of our idea of ourselves, has been a subject of debate since the days of Descartes and Kant. In most philosophical treatments, three aspects of the ‘self’ are interwoven: the subjective, experiencing self, the social self and the self as agent. In this speculative piece I want to argue firstly that in the middle ages the social self was paramount and was defined by what I will call ‘extrospection’, secondly that by the twentieth century an introspectively subjective self had been formed by a turning outside in of culture (creating an inner landscape of symbols where previously symbolization had been external), and finally that a process of reconstruction may be called for (self as agent) in which the self deliberately re-makes its relationship with cultural symbols. To clarify the latter, I will take the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, not as a source of objective knowledge, but as an historical subject.

Felipe Vigarny’s altar relief in the Royal Chapel, Granada, was carved in 1520 to depict the surrender to the Catholic sovereigns Ferdinand and Isabella, nearly thirty years previously, of the last Moorish king.

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