The History of the Self

In Western thought, the intellectual tradition of the self divides into two principal and opposing conceptions. One construes a self which pre-exists its mortal body and generates its experience of the world. The other defines a self which is exclusively a product, or receiver, of this same experience. The two conceptions have existed in parallel throughout a history which is traditionally taken to have its roots in the contrasting formulations of the Ancients. Throughout the development of an increasingly demystified and empirical view of the self, opposing currents of thought resisted the exclusiveness of its analytical, sceptical and mechanistic parameters. Throughout the history of the self, formulation of the nature of the self as generator or receiver of its experience vary, dualist or monist; empirical or metaphysical; material or spiritual, but the search remains the fundamental philosophical one for order and explanation.