Getting a grip on your self

The central paradox of our times is that the triumph of individualism has been accompanied by a deep insecurity about what it means to be an individual. No age has placed such a high value on the "self". The importance of self-expression, self-esteem, self-motivation, self-fulfilment is assumed to be, well, self-evident. At the same time, however, contemporary art and philosophy have viewed this "self" as an illusion. The demise of the nuclear family, the vast increase in the number of living human beings, the mapping of the human genome, the rise of technology and the replacement of personal identities with brand loyalties have all, in different ways, undermined belief in the free, self-willed individual.

One of the great themes of late 20thcentury art is the difficulty of sustaining the notion that the same person persists from day to day. One of the constant threads of contemporary theory is the death of subjectivity, the end of the autonomous individual. Some theorists suggest that the conditions of late capitalism have destroyed a kind of individuality that was created by the industrial revolution and the nuclear family. Others (the post-modernists) argue that this stable individuality never existed at all and was just an ideological illusion.

In one of the most ambitious and impressive philosophical works to come out of Ireland in recent years, Ciaran Benson, Prof of Psychology at UCD and former chairman of the Arts Council, tries to reconcile these apparently contradictory impulses. On the one hand, he wants to hold on to the idea of the "self" as a necessary notion for the understanding of humanity. On the other, he locates it in the shared world of cultural inventions - language, emotions, stories, morals - that are none the less real for being invented. In essence, he sees the "self" as both a necessary and a justified fabrication.

Running through The Cultural Psychology of Self is the notion of individuality as a way of locating oneself in the world. "Having a sense of self" , Benson writes, "requires the idea of being `in place'. . . The idea of the self-as-a-story-told, as a narrative structure, functions to place oneself as a moral agent in and across personal time. Kinds of moral and symbolic placement also depend on the repertoires of cultural-historical options which are valuable to people and their communities. Powers of self-creation and self-responsibility need to be considered as do linguistic ways of placing ourselves in the conversation that is human life."

At one level, Benson's book is an attempt to reconcile the old conflict between "nature" and "culture" as the key to understanding humanity. Benson gives the evolutionary biologists who are currently in the ascendant their due, accepting the primacy of our genetic inheritance in determining our ability to function in the physical world. But he also insists that "evolution did not produce scripts for writing, maps, signposts, laws, codes of manners, moral codes, political organisations for the distribution of power and privilege and so on. Culture did." Culture should be seen, not in opposition to our genetic nature but, in a sense, as the smartest evolutionary trick of all.

At another, darker level the book is very much a contemporary response to the consequences of the loss of a sense of self in the late 20th century. If there is no self, there is no responsibility, and if there is no responsibility, there is no morality. The annihilation of individuality in the Holocaust haunts Benson's speculations and his general endorsement of the centrality of culture does not blind him to the "brutality, egoism, oppression and greed" that also lie within its domain. The role of a fellow-psychologist, Radovan Karadic, in using national myth to dehumanise an imagined enemy might be seen as giving a special urgency to Benson's desire to rehabilitate the notion of the moral, responsible self.

One of the pleasures of the book is the sheer range of reference that Benson deploys. Though not entirely free of jargon, it lets a great deal of natural light into the enclosed spaces of academic discourse. Appropriately for a book that insists on the centrality of a sense of place in the creation of our selves, it is laced with very specific references to the author's own place: Ireland.

Introducing his discussion of the relationship between our inner selves and our outward actions, Benson describes a traditional Irish builder choosing stones to fill particular spaces according to his conception of what the house should look like. The sign on a hotel lawn near Dublin works its way into his discussion of names and personal pronouns. The role of national identity in locating the self is examined in large part through the prism of Ireland's relationship with England.

There is, though, a more profound sense in which this is a very Irish work. Benson's thinking reflects in a profound way the experience of Irish identity as a set of negotiations between the desire for fixed certainties and the realities of dislocation and instability. His notion of the self as a way of placing ourselves in the world, as a "navigational system" for journeys into an unpredictable world seems especially appropriate in a culture that has been created by the displacements of emigration and economic transformation.

It is a pity, though, that Benson does not address those economic transformations more directly. The contemporary crisis of the "self" is rooted in economic, social and cultural changes that manifest themselves in the nature of urban space, the dominance of electronic technology, the ubiquity of the mass media. Developments in reproductive biotechnology - cloning, for example - have the most profound implications for the whole notion of human individuality.

For some contemporary thinkers who have addressed these economic and technological changes, Benson's solution to the problem of the self - seeing it as a way of navigating ourselves through the physical and imagined worlds - is precisely where the problem lies. Fredric Jameson, for example, points to the root of the dilemma as being "the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects".

Because he does not fully engage with either the nature of the contemporary economic system or with such notions as virtual reality and genetic engineering, it is not quite clear what Benson's answer to this fundamentally pessimistic prognosis might be. What is abundantly clear, though, is that such answers can only come from the ranging of open minds through the wide domain where science, art, history and philosophy meet. Ciaran Benson has mapped that terrain brilliantly.

Fintan O'Toole is an author and an Irish Times journalist.