This chapter discusses the creation of the intelligible world, which comes to being through the formative activity of the Good on its first product. The Great Kinds are dynamically balanced principles, by virtue of which Intelligible Matter received form as Being, Movement achieves Rest, and Difference is united by Identity, thus establishing Intellect, the One-Many. The three crucial principles of the Plotinian metaphysics are outlined: (1) the principle of the microcosm, (2) the imaging principle, and (3) the principle of the triadic selfhood. In light of the first principle, at all the levels of reality there exist individual beings who exist within and are united with the great principles of reality by virtue of two forms of participation. The notions of vertical and horizontal participation are defined. The imaging principle relates to reality consisting of hierarchies of dynamically produced images of higher archetypes. What is expressed participates vertically in its archetype. The third principle is a triadic intertwining of loving and knowing with selfhood. The “negative” or “potential” aspects of the Great Kinds are described as the metaphysical seeds of evil and fall.

Pater acquired a copy of William Carew Hazlitt’s new edition of Montaigne’s Essays published in 1877. This chapter begins by drawing out similarities in the reception of Pater and Montaigne, both of whose writings were assailed for their egotism, scepticism, and sensuality. Such parallels laid the foundations for Pater’s adoption of Montaigne as a proxy for defending his own critical enterprise. Pater’s highly revisionist account of Montaigne hails him not only as a far subtler thinker and moralist than had hitherto been acknowledged in his English reception, but also as a model of aesthetic finesse, demonstrated above all in his engagement with literature. Rather than contesting the charge of self-centredness, Pater defends Montaigne’s incisive interest in his own various and volatile responsiveness as the essential precondition for any criticism worth having. Curious and sociable, the Selfish Reader as represented by Montaigne cherishes the opportunity to view things from different angles and to probe new possibilities for the self, which is never simply given but always at stake in its encounters.

This chapter argues that Cicero’s discussion of decorum in De Officiis (1.93-151) represented a striking innovation—both within Cicero’s Roman milieu and in the Greek tradition of his source, Panaetius—for its importation of an aesthetic term, to prepon, into the sphere of ethics. Panaetius’ adoption of this term for philosophical purposes was clever, and one of several innovations that foreshadowed important trends in later philosophy. For Cicero, writing during dramatic social and political upheaval, Panaetius’ innovation represented an opportunity that suited the times. Caesar’s accession had brought profound changes, encouraging a shift from the traditional activities of public self-display to a focus on private self-care and a self-display predicated on written works; as Cicero himself puts it at Off. 2.3, if Caesar had not abolished republican governance, he would still be delivering speeches, not writing philosophy. Moral behavior at Rome had long been governed by exempla, public acts by (usually) public men. By borrowing Panaetius’ suggestion that moral goodness could also be understood in private (and expressly literary/rhetorical terms), Cicero laid the groundwork for a remarkably durable idea in Roman culture, and one with particular resonance in the Augustan period, as Horace’s Ars Poetica shows.

Chapter 3 redirects the scholarly trend of characterizing Spenser’s works as defined by personal and political discontent, and it instead examines their relationship to sixteenth-century models of contentedness. This study of The Faerie Queene and the Complaints volume demonstrates that Spenser privileges a situational contentment. In Book I, neither Red Cross nor Una can maintain contentment at all times, but the emotion punctuates experiences like productive sadness and pious anger, and it protects against overly destructive passions. While Book I presents contentedness coexisting with other emotions, Mother Hubberds Tale imagines an uneasy alliance between contentment and complaint. Finally, through the character of Melibee in Book VI, Spenser makes his most explicit case for contentment, yet it is embedded in an episode that emphasizes the sway of sexual desire and the intense threat it can pose when unrestrained. In his last concerted representation of contentment, Spenser emphasizes its appeal and fragility. Thus, Chapter 3 highlights the affective continuities between the 1590 and 1596 Faerie Queene, and between Spenser’s major and minor works.

The introduction situates the book’s intellectual project within what scholars have described as an “affective turn” or “emotional turn” across disciplines and, more specifically, a recent attention to the relations between emotion, religion, and literature in the Renaissance. The introduction calls attention to a disproportionate scholarly focus on negative affect, and it provides the intellectual framework for the close readings of religious and literary texts in the chapters that follow. Theorists and literary critics have equated contentedness with passivity and resignation, but I reveal a model of contentment as dynamic, protective, and productive. Although Renaissance articulations were indebted to preceding philosophical schools, especially Stoicism, the English Reformation defined the ways in which writers constructed contentment from available texts and traditions. Reformers explored contentedness as an emotional means to preserve the self and prepare the individual to endure and engage the outside world. These efforts existed alongside representations and revisions of contentment by authors like Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, especially in their pastoral works.

Chapter 5 illuminates the literary, political, and ecological significance of Milton’s depiction of contentment. In Eikonoklastes, Milton responds directly to the appropriation of contentment discourse in Eikon Basilike. Charles I had identified his opponents as malcontents and positioned himself as a contented martyr-king. By contrast, Milton describes Charles’s discontent as the immediate cause of the English Civil War and as the epitome of tyranny. In Paradise Lost, he adds an environmental dimension to the religious and republican significances of content and discontent. The language of self-containment has limited applications for unfallen Adam and Eve, who interact harmoniously with their environment. Satanic discontent reconstitutes the experience of selfhood as a space defined in opposition to the natural world. Satan perverts contentment and finds it impossible to relate to the world around him in any way other than as a conqueror. When Adam and Eve choose to sin, they emulate diabolic discontent and subject all of creation to imperialism. Milton’s revision of Christian contentment reveals his efforts to endure, lament, and resist the Restoration.

While the five chapters examine aspects of early modern contentment that often challenge reigning critical and theoretical assumptions, the conclusion revisits the significance of those assumptions. In this way, the book not only provides a literary and intellectual history of contentedness in the Renaissance, but it also explores the merits such contentment might have in a contemporary context. Just as an emergent Protestant culture and an outpouring of English literature on page and stage precipitated widespread interest in contentedness, subsequent shifts in philosophy, science, global affairs, and artistic sensibilities led to yet another reappraisal. The consequences of that reappraisal, the deformation of contentment, persist to the present day.

This chapter introduces the idea of a distinctively moral form of recognition by considering J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, a work of literature that exemplifies the recognitive tensions in which Hegel is interested, showing how moral disagreement can undermine the experience of the integrity of one’s own selfhood. I then turn to presenting a general account of the issue of recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, by situating the role that the idea of the self plays in addressing that issue. I show that recognition addresses a challenge about self-knowledge, so that an adequate conception of what the self is is necessary to secure relations of recognition. After clarifying the interpretive method that I follow in the book by contrasting with my own approach to extant interpretations, I conclude with a chapter-by-chapter outline of the rest of the monograph.

This chapter begins by setting out the central elements of the distinctive idea of “the self” (das Selbst) that we find in Hegel’s Phenomenology. It demonstrates that the self must be understood as a determination of “spirit,” of the reciprocal interaction between self-conscious beings and their shared social world, so that Hegel defends a “social constitution” conception of the self. Conceptions of the self prescribe determinate relations of self-conscious beings to their actions and to one another, and depend on distinctive forms of language. It tracks the first two conceptions of the self that emerge in the text, that of the person, and of absolute freedom, and unpacks the criticisms of these conceptions implicit in Hegel’s account. While personhood can be affirmed universally of everyone, it is alienating since it cannot include individuals’ particularity. While individuals can understand themselves in terms of the norms of absolute freedom, that conception of the self undermines the bases for relations of reciprocity among them. It concludes by considering the implications of Hegel’s critiques for Stephen Darwall’s conception of recognition.

This chapter presents the resolution to Hegel’s account of the problem of recognition by considering the “moral” self, that of “conscience” (Gewissen). It begins by showing that “morality” is the stance that adequately countenances the self-productive character of self-conscious beings, so that the self is understood to be constituted through activity. Only conscience, however, acknowledges the social character of this constitution of the self, the fact that, to count as a self, I must realize my moral knowledge both through my actions, and through participation in moral discourse along with others. For Hegel, successful recognition as a moral self requires the development of particular social practices, confession and forgiveness, through which we can respond to moral disagreement, and I demonstrate that recognizing one another as conscientious requires a continuing dependence on practices like these.

In this concluding chapter, I summarize the argument about the conditions for the achievement of recognition that Hegel sets out from Chapters IV-VI of the Phenomenology. I consider the ways in which the conclusions of this argument are significant for the project of the text as a whole, pointing to the role of the idea of the self both in the Phenomenology’s “Preface” and account of “Absolute Knowing,” and in the Science of Logic. At the same time, I also argue that the account of reciprocal recognition is completed in Hegel’s account of “spirit,” and so does not depend on the subsequent accounts of religion or philosophical science. I conclude by stressing the precarity of relations of reciprocal recognition which are dependent on the achievement of moral agreement.

The work of David Foster Wallace can be seen to critically renew ideas and concerns from existentialist philosophy and literature. Wallace repeatedly expressed his admiration of existentialist authors, and his fiction contains many explicit and implicit references to their writings. This chapter will provide an overview of the main themes and intertextual connections that Wallace’s work shares with the existentialists, such as a comparison with Sartre’s view of consciousness, Kierkegaard’s critique of irony, and Camus’s relation of meaningful existence to community; also, a brief comparative reading of the opening of Infinite Jest and Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” of “The Depressed Person” and Beauvoir’s “The Monologue,” and of “B.I. #20” and Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. Overall, Wallace shares with these authors the conviction that philosophy and literature are partially overlapping activities, that some philosophical problems are best approached through literature, and that their works therefore blur the boundaries between these modes of writing.

This chapter develops a conception of freedom that is at once rationalistic – our thought and action are free insofar as we follow our best understanding of the reasons relevant to the situation at hand – and compatibilistic – we are no less free if our thought and action also have their place in the causal order of nature, where by “nature” is meant the totality of all physical and psychological facts, which constitute the domain of the sciences. Both components are defended. But in addition the problem is confronted of how they can be combined, given what reasons are actually like. For reasons themselves are essentially normative in character and so, as such, not part of nature. How then can our thought and action be free in responding to the reasons there are and yet at the same time be shaped by the causal order of nature? The problem has to do with how reasons (not simply our ideas of reasons) can be causes, and this chapter explains how it is possible.

an overview of the main themes of the book: metaphysics, morality, reason, freedom, and the self.

This chapter presents a detailed argument against a conception of self-knowledge that continues to dominate much of philosophical thinking today. It holds that we have an immediate and infallible access – a “privileged” access, as it is often termed – to the contents of our own minds. In reality, there does not exist any self-knowledge of this kind. The conception in question arises from a misunderstanding of the nature of the intimate relation that we bear to ourselves in virtue of which we are selves at all. A second central claim of this chapter is, then, that this essential relation we have to ourselves is not cognitive in character, but instead practical. It consists in our aligning ourselves on what appear to us to be pertinent reasons in all that we think and do. As a result, the self-knowledge that matters philosophically is not, as the Cartesian tradition has held, the supposedly first-person, immediate knowledge we have of our own mental states. Instead, the self-knowledge that truly matters is considerably difficult to achieve and is best understood along the lines of Plato’s ethics-centered idea of self-knowledge.

Katherine Ibbett analyses the place of the self in compassion as explored by three key writers of the European Catholic Reformation, and suggests that attention to the contours of the compassionate self provides an important perspective on the relation between the Christian and the world. The chapter focuses on three texts: the French devout humanist François de Sales’s Introduction à la vie dévote / Introduction to the devout life (1609), the Italian Jesuit Roberto Bellarmino’s De gemitu columbiae, sive de bono lacrymarum /The Mourning of the Dove, or the value of tears (1617) and the French Jesuit Pierre Le Moyne’s La dévotion aisée / An easy devotion (1652). The writers of the Catholic Counter-Reformation looked to draft a new understanding of compassionate social interaction. This model pointed to a new and more worldly form of Christian civility, generated and underwritten by a sweet management of our own self.

Chapter 5 explores transhumanist conceptions of the self. Transhumanist conceptions of the self have been variously described as “informatic,” “quantified,” or “data-based,” and a number of scholars have shown how these conceptions of the self have emerged from a cross-fertilization between the fields of neuro-science, computer science, and artificial intelligence. However, in this chapter, I put transhumanist conceptions of the self in conversation with Alfred Irving Hallowell's work on “The Ojibiwa Self and its Behavioral Enviornment.” In so doing, the chapter provides some new insights into the way transhumanists conceive of the self and the future behavioral enviornments in which posthuman descendants will dwell. The chapter argues that like the Ojibiwa, transhumanists also envision a future in which personhood will not be the sole domain of humanity, but rather, distributed among an array of “other-than-human” powerful beings.