I and mine

pp. 85-96

in: Bernard Dauenhauer, Elements of responsible politics, Berlin, Springer, 1991

Abstract

For centuries, one of the staples of Western thought has been a rather specific conception of what a human person is. On this conception, the person is understood, as Clifford Geertz has put it, as "a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background."¹ Though Descartes was by no means the father of this conception of the human person, the self, the Cartesian cogito provided it with a powerful and influential articulation. In the wake of Descartes, Enlightenment thought in its various dresses has often exalted the self to quasi-divine status, or at least ascribed to it an angelic independence from the physical and cultural context in which it acts.