Self:

 

Martin, R. & Barresi, J. (2006) The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self. New York:

Columbia University Press

Outlines theories of self from pre-Greek to modern day. Pre-Greek thinking largely focused on religious myths. It was not until the Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, Aristotle that Western philosophical thinking was born. The Greeks discussions centred on the divisibility of body or the material and the soul largely within a secular this-world perspective. The Christians, Jews and Islam embraced these ideas and developed them into a religious model.

 

More to be read…

 

 

 

Freeland, C (2010) Portraits and Persons. Oxford University Press.

Freeland offers an overview of thinking from the late Renaissance to the 20th Century, on the theories of identity that informed painters through the centuries.

 

Descarte, E (1649) Passions of the Soul.

This was the treatise upon which Charles Le Brun, the court painter of Louis XIV, based his theories. (And that Bill Viola based his video work The Passions, (2000)) They became the guide for portrait painters for at least the next 100 years. He followed Descarte in claiming the centre of the soul-body interaction was in the pineal gland which makes its feeling most apparent in expressions in the face, particularly the eyebrows.

 

Lavater, J.C (1775-1778) Essays on Physiognomy: Designed to Promote the Knowledge and Love of Mankind.

Lavater, believed each face had a physical semiotic code with a message. His theories had a great influence on portraiture across Europe and America into the modern period with Manet and Degas, with many artist’s manuals being based on his theories at the time.

 

Gall, F.J. (1810) Physiology of the Nervous System in General, and of the Brain in Particular.

It was upon this work that the ‘science’ of phrenology was developed. Gall developed a system whereby he believed the bumps, shapes and proportions of the face would show the level of moral virtue, vice, intelligence, vanity and pride of their owners. In this way, merely by portraying accurately a face, one could be said to be revealing the deep psychology, the true ‘self’ of the subject.

 

Bell, C. (1806) Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting

Phrenology was quickly overtaken by new theories of psychology for explaining and understanding the character and emotions of a sitter. His ideas influenced artists, particularly the Pre-Raphaelites.

 

Boulogne, G.D de. (1862) Mecanisme de la physiognomie humaine

Boulogne followed through Bell’s work with his photographic experiments on the faces of mental patients

 

Darwin, C (1872). The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals

Darwin was the first to undertake scientific studies to determine conclusively the facial expressions of emotion. He concluded that some expressions are universal across cultures and even across species.

 

Ekman, P. (2003) Emotions Revealed: Recognising Faces & Feelings to Improve Communication & Emotional Life. New York: Times Books

and

Wallace, V. & Friesen. (2003) Unmasking the Face. Cambridge, Mass: Malor Books

With the 20th Century came a more sophisticated understanding of human emotions, repressed emotions, unconscious desires and deep psyche with psychoanalysis and other psychological theories. Both Ekmen and Friesen followed and expanded on Darwin’s studies on the expressions of the face, exploring the emotions of sadness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, happiness as well as deceptive facial expressions, moods and expressions of love and hatred.

 

Reiss, T. J. (2003) Mirages of the Selfe. Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe. Stanford California: Stanford University Press.

A fascinating exploration of the changing definition of personhood / self from the Early Greeks to Descarte’s Cartesian man, from which came the beginnings of modern psychology; his motive essentially to illustrate how modern Western ideas of self, the moral concepts of ‘self’ ‘will’, ‘intention’ and ‘action’, cannot be applied to antiquity. In the ancient world there was no idea of a self free to use will, intent and choice; there was no private individual separate from community. Not until the 2nd Century was this concept considered, and not until the 17th Century, the Renaissance, that it became acceptable to think in these terms.

 

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle

Souls are given to bodies and so via the souls are they given life. A human self is made up of both soul and body and because of the soul, a human self was not individual but rather part of or embedded in, the reason of the universe. A person was inseparable from their soul, their body and the environment that they existed in. Persons, by nature of their bodies (their embodiment) and their environment, were essentially ‘passible’ (no self determined action only affected, passive relationship to their environment) however their souls were impassible as was God. The ideal for the ancients, was to become as impassible (as close to the divine soul) as possible because acting from personal will, intention, knowledge without divine grace was seen as being influence by the passions – and passions, by their personal nature, were bad. The ancient mind was not private; all contents of the mind were public, common to all, and open to discourse. To speak of ‘I’ was to speak of the soul. To know oneself was to know one’s soul – to grow closer to the impassivity of divine grace.

Christian West

Augustine (354-430)

During this time, the definitions of personhood were essentially similar to the Ancients; personhood resided in the divine soul (universe), but with the Christian West the soul becomes God. The human soul was still bound to the divine and the environment. Knowledge, language/signs all were pre-existing gifts from God.  Even human memory was given by God and the meaning of those God given seeds of memory were released by language. The person was a trinity – being (matter and life), knowing (mind and divine memory), willing (divine guidance and essence) From Aristotle, through Stoic debate, Cicero, Seneca – these elements that make a human – divine, rational, social, environment are of equal value. The early Christians however, shifted the weight and the soul’s bond with the divine (God) became most important ground of a person.

Hildeguard (1098-1179)

Saw personhood as within circles. These circles were related to the divine (soul) their rational minds and their social roles (embeddedness in the material world) Their individual wholeness was represented as being within these circles.

Passions

The true nature of persons is within. The ancients and Christians saw man as being ‘out of himself’; lost in bodily sin, constantly searching for brief joy, idle pleasure – the passions of the mind. The goal of human life was to return to itself, its soul. Bodily passions like love, are external events that disrupt the self. Motions of the soul are suffered. Plato, Aristotle, Stoics saw them as a disease that had to be controlled. Passions disconnect the soul from reason. Passions are endless movement – unable to offer any foundation for a being. It was not until Descarte’s writings “The Passions of the Soul” that passions were seen as an integral, and not bad, part of a person.

Montaigne (1533-1592)

Was almost a bridge between this thinking and the shift that came with Descarte. He was caught between the ancient ideas of body and soul and the Cartesian subject that was to follow Descarte. He saw a separation between one’s quiet centre of being (soul) and one’s passions, education, social expectations; the former being private and latter all public. However his idea of soul was balanced between the ancient idea of the soul as divine and the internal, unchanging, private man of Descarte. It was still weighted in favour of the ancient; he believed conscience was born and trained by custom and not an innate personal moral sentiment present to itself, as it became after Descarte. Montaigne denied any inner identity that could reflect on itself because he believed (as the Ancients) that it could not be stabilised enough from the onslaught of external event causing passions and disorder away from God’s universality. He saw two selves – the ordered public self embodied by the monarchy and public officials; and the private self characterised by disordered passions.

Until the 16th Century, this ordered public sphere was reasonably stable. However the 16th Century brought unparalleled loss of external order – civil wars, famines, loss of feudal bonds, breaking down of the monarchy – and this created a growing tension in the sense of self definitions. The question is unanswered - what came first – the breakdown of social norms and expectations or the growing sense in the West of a definition of oneself as a self determining, wilful individual with choice and intent.

The 17th Century saw a response to the societal breakdown in a changing definition of personhood. There was a growing sense of a wilful, singular individual who could act in isolation and not only in and through social interaction. For the Ancients, the only way of discovering the true nature of man was through social dialogue; social intercourse defined the individual. For Aristotle, man’s idea of ‘self’ were seeds placed there by God and only through inquiry could the true self, the divine, be uncovered.

Descarte (1596-1650)

And so to Descarte. Descarte didn’t create the precurser to ideas of the odern self. Rather he reacted to  and exemplified the changing society and mirrored its social disarray. Had society not been in disarray, his cognito may have led to community still being the outcome of his definition. Instead cognito led to a continuing separation of persons away from community and in to individual subjects. Free will was central to his thinking – the ability to act well when reason was clear; a will that could abstain from believing things (even in God); a will that was equivilent with God’s will; a will that exempts us from being subject to him. This was a radical shift – away from religion and community. This divided subject from community and was the start of the modern self interested thinking of today.

 

 

Seigel, J. (2005) The Idea of Self. Thought and experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century. UK: Cambridge University Press.

Jerrold Seigel in his book “The Idea of Self” offers a detailed and thorough overview of the main elements of the ‘self’ which thinkers from Pre Greek to present day have been grappling with in an attempt to reach a more complete understanding of what it is that distinguishes you from me and everyone else; what it is that portraitists have been aiming to capture as that special distinguishing element in the portraits that have been created throughout human history. Essentially the ‘self’ has been sought by philosophers in varying degrees within the three elements of an individual - the body, the relationships and the reflective ability.

“One reason why human selves must be reflective is precisely because they are simultaneously corporeal and relational. Since they are both they can never be wholly one or the other; they must take a certain distance from each, which is the capacity that reflectivity brings” (pg 17, 2005)

 

Portraits through the ages have reflected this pre-occupation.

 

Plato and neo-Platonists saw the essential defining element of the individual as that which survived earthly life. Bundled with this soul came  the corporeal and relational, making up a cosmic integrated whole: an idea that would be taken up by later Christians.

Descarte later separated the reflective from the body and social with his famous sentence “I think therefore I am” Philosophers and artists since have been speculating on the proportions and modes of action of these three elements that make up a complete picture of an individual without really changing the three core elements of body, reflection and relational.

Nietzsche and Heidegger recast and renamed the elements to suit their ideas, to appropriate their powers under other designations. The postmodernists such as Foucault, Derrida and Barthes again recast the elements essentially claiming that the very reflective powers that human individuals consider offer them free agency are actually constructed by the very society and culture that restricts them. Our reflective ability does not lead to a freedom of thought and self-definition, rather we as human individuals are largely and determinably relational with little freedom. Foucault states ”What was formally a visible fortress of order has now become the castle of our conscience” (“Madness and Civilisation”, trans, Richard Howard New York, 1965, pg 21) Derrida and Barthes carried this focus on the forces of society and the language that society speaks and writes, to control our thinking and creation, into his essay “ The Death of the Author” (1977). He states “The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture” (pg 147) thereby claiming that there is no individual author or creator behind the work of creation, it is rather, a creatin of the social culture within which he exists". He could just as easily have stated “The portrait is a tissue of quotations…”, as is the subject of the portrait.

 

Whatever tissue of quotations we choose to inhabit, whether it be an idea of self and the artist as largely determined by thought, society or biology, artists have sought to illustrate the physical characteristics of the face and body in some form. Many have included within the limitations of the medium, an illustration of the relationship of subject to their family, their cultural and social interactions, their shared connections, values, language, idioms - in other words, what our lived world allows us to be and what we choose within those strictures; and finally our reflective ability – our capacity to stand apart from ourselves to observe our bodies, our relationships and a deeper sense of active consciousness seeking answers to the questions of who we are or are not.

 

 

 

Transactional Analysis:

 

Berne, E. (1961). Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy. Castle Books

Transactional Analysis or narrative theory, is particularly interesting to me as a digital time based portraitist, as a way of revealing the identity of a subject as they, through their recorded stories, define themselves. Berne and others, talk of the ego states and how their expressions create our “life script” or the story that defines us. Much like a film script, this story directs our self definition and our reactions to the blocks that are placed in the way of fulfilling our ‘script’. Our early experiences and dramas create our ‘protocol’. This later solidifies into the ‘script proper’. The ‘script proper’ must at times be compromised by actual reality and this becomes the ‘adaption’. The adaption is what we play out in real life.

 

Burbea, R. (2014) Seeing That Frees. Hermes Amara Publications.

A Buddhist view of narrative theory is offered by Burbea. We are essentially empty – there is no ‘self’. However there are times we need to access ourselves as individual and different to another ‘self’. The way we do this is to create stories about ourselves; the story we tell and the identity we adopt go together and effect how we define ourselves. Because they are only stories, they are, if we allow it, in continual flux, and at any moment, we can adopt another story, another ‘self’.