ABSTRACT
So, if I ask, ‘What am I?’ my first-shot answer will express the formal difference of myself from other things – ‘I am me, not you nor it’, which is to say I shall apply to myself the formal concept of a person: ‘I am a person’. Why is this of any interest, still less important? Hegel believes, and to modern ears this should be a striking claim, that there are other, different, ways in which we might immediately identify ourselves. I might, for example, not think of myself as distinct from others. The first way that I think of myself may be as the appendage or instrument of another, as a slave, ascribing to myself no independent status. Or I might identify myself with some social group, a family or a clan or a nation: I am one of the Knowles family, or a MacKnowles or English. It is Hegel’s interesting thesis that folk have not always thought of themselves as persons. He thinks the light began to dawn in the Roman world, but of course the concept was not applied universally since there were slaves. The concept of a person developed with Christianity and particularly with Protestantism which emphasized each person’s unique relationship with their God. To us, having done some philosophy, it is perhaps most familiar from the natural
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rights doctrines of the seventeenth century – but more on rights later. Humanity has had to learn to apply to itself this conception of the self as a discrete, bounded individual. That it has succeeded so well is indicated by the very strangeness of thinking of ourselves in other terms. That I am, in the first place, different from you may seem so obvious that it is not worth saying. But it is a truth that the well-treated, acquiescent slave, for example, may miss (§57).
