Birth of the Modern Self?

Seigel views with “considerable skepticism” the notion that Descartes constructed “a general theory of the human self and subject on the basis of the cogito .” In his treatise on the Passions of the Soul , Descartes claimed that the soul was linked with the body, which acts on the soul “more immediately” than anything else. Despite his efforts to find a juncture of body and soul in the pineal gland, he also claimed that the soul is “truly joined to the whole body, and that one cannot properly say that it is in some of the body’s parts and not in others.” It is arguable that “Descartes had no single theory of the self or ego.”

Still, Seigel admits that “there was something in Descartes that led him to regard these multi-dimensional images of the self as inferior to the one-dimensional notion to which the cogito gave voice.” Seigel, picking up on one of the major themes of his book, says that what motivated Descartes was “his penchant to make knowledge a matter of all or nothing, and thus to conceive it as grounded in purely deductive reasoning.” This “lurch from allness to nothingness” is the characteristic “dialectic of pure reflectivity, alternately identifying itself with its objects and finding itself at a distance from everything that is not itself.”