The Enlightenment Invention of the Modern Self

by Leo Damrosch

Twenty four 30-minute lectures on 12 audio cassette tapes, in two 6-tape packages (parts I and II), each package with its own course guidebook. In The Enlightenment Invention of the Modern Self, literary scholar Professor Leo Damrosch of Harvard University considers the time when modern ideas about the self first began to be worked out. Through the eyes of the Enlightenment's greatest writers, you follow the origin of new ways of thinking-which we today take for granted but which are startlingly recent-about the individual and society. These lectures are essentially about ideas, and about books-how great ideas are alive and powerful in the pages of significant written works. The guiding premise is that the best way to appreciate the thinking of a given period is to explore its literature.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Psychology

13 pages, Audible Audio

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Leo Damrosch is an American author and professor. In 2001, he was named the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University.[1] He received a B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. from Cambridge University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. His areas of academic specialty include Romanticism, the Enlightenment, and Puritanism.[1] Damrosch's "The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus" is one of the most important recent explorations of the early history of the Society of Friends. His Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (2005) was a National Book Award finalist for nonfiction and winner of the 2006 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for best work of nonfiction. Among his other books are "Symbol and Truth in Blake's Myth" (1980), "God's Plot and Man's Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding" (1985), "Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson" (1987), and "Tocqueville's Discovery of America" (2010).

Reviews

[Maru Kun · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read a decent amount of philosophy but as a bit of a narcissist (it’s my parent’s fault) I always want to know: What’s in it for me?

With Existentialism my existence precedes my essence, which makes me authentically absurd. But what's with shooting random people on the beach and always wearing a scruffy raincoat? I once smoked an unfiltered Gauloise, which is not an experience I want to repeat.

Every business meeting I go to I draw strength from Nietzsche’s maxim: “What does not kill me makes me stronger”. It’s a big help, but I don't have the genetics to grow a superhumanly large moustache.

In the family it's all Wittgenstein all the time. I tell the kids a hundred times a night that “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, but they still won't settle down.

So I have made some progress with my philosophical investigations, but after listening to “The Enlightenment Invention of the Modern Self” (‘EIMS’) I've begun to put the pieces together. EIMS sounds as dry as dust and if it wasn't for reviews on the "Great Courses" website saying how good it was I would have given it a pass. And I am glad I didn't, because it was quite excellent.

The lecturer is great to listen to and clearly knows his material. He picks a series of works written around the enlightenment period and relates the portrayal of the self in each novel or journal to the ideas of an enlightenment philosopher.

Great stuff, as you hit three targets at once: classic literature, philosophy and history. And then there is the added bonus of being able to compare how different schools of philosophy treat the idea of the self, illustrated with examples from how portrayal of different characters in the works.

Works chosen include La Princesse de Cleves, Candide, Boswell’s London Journal, Les Liaison Dangerous, poems of William Blake plus quite a few more. Philosophers whose work is covered include the all usual suspects: Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau and the rest of the gang.

I began to understand how drastically the concept of the self implied by Hume’s empiricism – all social roles and sense impressions – contrasts with the idea of the authentic, inner self (let’s call it the ‘Californian Self’) derived from Rousseau. The professor’s view is that Rousseau’s Confessions is one of the earliest examples of auto-biography and pioneering in its day for suggesting that events in early life may have later psychological significance. This is just one small example of a lot of great material.

The main problem with this course is that it was recorded before the rise of social media and the digital revolution. However a sequel is planned: “The “Post-Modern Invention of the Modern Selfie”. If it’s as good as EIMS then it should be well worth a look.

PS: Much as I hate to advertise for Amazon, if you buy a subscription to audible.com you can get these courses at a very reasonable price. They make for great listening in the gym.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Professor Damrosch narrates his lecture on the Enlightenment and its contribution to the modern idea of self. I will be listening to his other lectures.

[Jim Razinha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I do not do audio books, but I do do Great Courses lectures...exceptions to every rule, and all. And I usually do these on long drives, stretching a lecture out over months, but as these particular lectures are only about 30 minutes, I worked the last few in on local errands. That said, I found this...pardon the pun...enlightening.

Dr. Damrosh covers some works I am familiar with, and lot of works that I have not read, nor am ever likely to read. I like the exposure.

This is a targeted look at what we call The Enlightenment, only "the self", and while I think some of the questions asked by his subjects didn't need asking (philosophers are really good at coming up with unanswerable questions; some even think they've found answers), I really respect his analyses. In my 63 years (59 of those as a reader), I don't get "meaning" of literature (sometimes not even when hit in the face with a detailed rationale), so I appreciate when someone does explain such. It gives me material to ponder and more pieces to a puzzle I don't understand. He is a good speaker with a keen sense of humor, and as with nearly every Great Course I've listened to, recommended.

[Brett Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

This course of 24 lectures by Harvard literature Professor Leo Damrosch (nonfiction National Book Award finalist for Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius) is a thrill. It examines how the view of what humans are to themselves changed since Medieval times. It was then that life was provincial, insular, immobile, and immersed in an extended family, filled to the brim with superstition, poverty, and a social hierarchy that fostered ignorance. After all, knowledge was as dangerous as Adam and Eve proved it to be when they ate the apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Traditional religion validated this misery. If God wanted you to be prosperous and happy, he’d have made you a Noble. By 1500-1700, with the Renaissance rediscovery of ancient Greek knowledge and humanism on the rise in concert with individualism of the Reformation that said each person had access to salvation through the Bible without need for the Pope as an intermediary, all this began to change. New inventions spurred by the Scientific Revolution eventuated in new inventions driving economic growth, social mobility, spatial mobility, and disconnections from the old community. The Enlightenment to follow then elevated the individual, thinking for themselves, free from authoritarian beliefs while its governmental options expanded freedom - though often not sure what to do with it. Eventually, one way of thinking affirmed an inner core of authentic selfhood that sought to gain access to “a true self,” striving to be faithful to it (Rousseau). At the same time, another perspective saw the self as socially conditioned, nothing more than a series of roles we learn to play (Hume). The perceptions we have of ourselves and the tensions between our social animal nature on the one hand and the drive for autonomy on the other come from this era of psychological transformation. There are many “aha” moments in this series. Fun stuff.

[sch]

Oct 2019. Followup to Kors, "The Birth Of The Modern Mind: The Intellectual History Of The 17th And 18th Centuries." Damrosch is a literature professor, not a historian.

After 13 lectures, I'm not going to finish. It's very good, but not what I was expecting, and not suitable as an audio lecture series (in the way I consume them, anyway). Most GREAT COURSES "audiobooks," in my experience, are pitched at the undergraduate or popular level. This is undisguisedly a graduate-level course in English and French literature of the "long eighteenth century": using a pretty broad definition of "literature" (philosophy, history, biography, moralism, drama, fiction). I'd need to read the primary works analysed in each lecture to truly profit from them, and I don't have time for that. In addition, I find it hard to grapple with the whole course because of the vagueness of the term "self." I understand the "character type" vs. "personality" distinction, but I don't quite see how these new notions intersect with the other abstract concepts used to organized the series: Enlightenment, epistemology, empiricism, psychology, etc. I don't know enough about Freudian psychology to interact with the lecturer's assumptions, and honestly I don't care to learn.

Maybe I'll return to this some day, but for now I'm trying to study straightforward philosophy in the Baconian, Cartesian, and Lockean traditions.

[Pierre Jacomet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful set of lectures, which dives into the formation of the modern concept of self through the exploration of the ideas of enlightenment philosophers. I don't know whether I will ever read the works of the philosophers mentioned, as they are hard to read and takes time. I did however start reading some of works of Diderot and they are well represented by the views expressed by Damrosch. This is not a self-help book, but the variety of ideas about the self presented is so vast and varied that it could very well count as one. I really enjoyed all the points of view as each one of them enriched my own thinking.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

As Damrosch tells this story through these lectures I can see quite clearly that our modern dance with rabid individualism is what we ought to expect coming out the Enlightenment. One can only hope there is a "next" that might acknowledge we are not quite so smart as those Enlightenment thinkers believed we could be - the future looks somewhat murky.

[Bryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The two five-star subjects for me were empiricism and Rousseau. in addition, the course theme was five star, as was the instructor. The rest of the course material wasn't to my liking, which is pretty significant, hence the four stars instead of five. I recommend this course to people interested in the subject matter.

[Elissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good. It explains how philosophers have arrived at a description of the human self, post-renaissance up to the transcendentalists. The author uses the great thinkers and literature of the enlightenment to trace the development of ideas. It was quite interesting. In addition Leo Damrosch is an excellent lecturer, clear and easy to follow without being over-simplified.

[Peter Burns · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Leo Damrosch’s voice, he is a comforting lecturer. I have noticed that lecturers make mistakes every once in a while, saying one thing when they mean another. That happens less frequently when a book is read aloud. William Blake is the last writer covered by Damrosch. I have memorized some of Blake’s poems. I might read a biography of Blake.

[Igor · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a 'beginner' in the subject, this audiobook and PDF file have been very interesting.

Off course, someone has to read much more to have a minimal understanding of ideas of the Age of Enlightenment.

[Alexander Serban · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leaned more heavily on the literature perspective than I would have liked, but interesting nonetheless.

[S. Kallahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much more interesting and detailed than I thought it would be.

[Tom Axworthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leo Damrosch delivers 24 lectures on 17th and 18th century intellectuals that are erudite and entertaining. He explores the birth of the Enlightenment with thinkers like Voltaireand Hume( the famous Age of Reason,now so much under attack in our age) and then expands to critics like William Blake and the coming age of romanticism.Intellectual history can be difficult to make entertaining as well as substantive but Damrosch has a gift for the personal anecdote that illuminates large ideas.

[Helen]

The self in Enlightenment works of literature.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I was listening to this lecture series I was telling my wife why I thought it was so important for us to understand the nature of our self. She responded "the Greeks gave us the concept of the self". This lecture starts off with the fact that when the Oracle at Delphi says "know thy self" what they really meant to ancient listeners would have been entirely different from our modern interpretation and would have meant something more like know your proper place in society and don't rise above your station and most of all play your role that society expects of you. Yes, a concept of the self but not necessarily how we see our self today.

The lecturer likes to put everything in its proper historical context before delving into a thinker or work of literature in detail. He starts with what I would call two anti-self thinkers, Pascal and John Bunyan (author of "Pilgrims Progress"). What do I mean by anti-self? Pascal with his Jansenism ultimately will conclude that one must hate oneself before one can love God, Bunyan will similarly conclude that wisdom starts with the fear of God. At this point in the lecture I ended up listening to "Pilgrims Progress' to see for myself the points he was making in the lecture. Pascal and Bunyan think in terms of a soul being attached to the body but not quite part of the body and thus something different from us. Psychology in its original meaning is "the study of the soul", more of a branch of theology than of science. It's going to take an Enlightenment to change that viewpoint.

The world dodged a bullet because the Enlightenment took us away from that brand of self to realizing that Philosophy (and natural philosophy, science) is not complete when it thought of itself as the search for wisdom instead of the search for knowledge and the understanding of the self beyond the soul.

The philosophers of the time period are covered in detail and some books considered as literature which I had never heard of are covered in detail by way of explaining how we are learning to see ourselves differently. Hume would say we should never look introspectively, but, rather we should let our social milieu be our guide. The Enlightenment is guided by logical positivist thought (the world is made up of things which the senses experience and they are the ontological foundation for the world and are the absolute ground for our being thus leading to universal, necessary and certain knowledge) and they want to try to apply the same kind of thinking to the psychology of individuals and of course that doesn't quite work. Diderot (and others) think we are always actors and are just playing a role as if we are in a play. (That statement finally lets me know what Sartre was getting at in "Being and Nothingness" when he said "Pierre is not a waiter he is only playing at being a waiter" or when Gore Vidal said "there is no such thing as homosexuals only homosexual acts". See even that kind of neanderthal thought stuck around way past the Enlightenment and still lingers around today). The reality of our unconscious mind only gets developed slowly over time.

To me, the lecture started getting exciting at Boswell and that leads to the real focal point of the whole lecture series, Rousseau. There's a line of demarcation between those two thinkers (Boswell mostly with his diaries only discovered and published in 1960, and Rousseau with his many published books) which lead to how we think about our modern self differently from previous thinkers. Before them, we would think in terms of 'character' and 'sincerity'. Character is what others give to us. In Aristotle's Ethics he'll define character as the values we have coming about through the right action of our habits and the emulation of experts and that's how we build 'character'. As for 'sincerity' one can always say that 'sincerity is the easiest thing in the world to fake'.

The turning point was going from 'character' to 'personality' and from 'sincerity' to 'authenticity'. There is a realization that sometimes our desires aren't really our own. That we might know what we want but we don't always control wanting what we want (there's an unconscious mind in play, the id in Freudian speak). Our true selves are often in conflict due to external and internal demands put upon us. (It was near this point, I ended up listening to Hume's "Dialogues on Natural Religion" because the lecture had been previously discussing it in great detail and was starting to make sense to me).


Rousseau understands (and without the sexual baggage and denial of repression nonsense that Freud brings to the table) and starts the formulation of the modern self, with its focus on the modern personality and the authenticity of the self. There is a direct line from Rousseau to Nietzsche and then Freud. (At this point, I ended up listening to Freud's "Civilizations and Its Discontents"). I don't think the lecturer mentioned Heidegger or Kierkegaard, but their focus on our authentic self obviously partly comes from some of Rousseau's thoughts too. The lecturer also devoted a lecture or two on the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and he mentions that Franklin saw "Plutarch's Lives" as a model in order to shape his own life thru his behavior, but Rousseau saw it as a noble period of a bygone era that had no relation to his time period and we must not shape our self but shape the world instead. Both ways of looking at the self and its formation are valid.

He ends the lecture with William Blake. A romantic who is not within the Enlightenment period as such, but is interesting in his own right and acts as a summary character for what was learned within the lecture. I'm not a poet but I did love hearing the lecturer explain Blake's works of art and poems, and loved the lines "prisons are built with stones of law, bordellos with bricks of religion" and how he related that to the whole lecture series. Wonderful stuff.

Most of this lecture series is talking about works of fictional literature. I seldom read fiction, because I have such a hard time understanding it, but this lecture told me why it was important and I could understand while he was explaining their relevance. This lecture flows like a book since it has not only a consistency within each lecture but a coherence of a narrative to tie them all together. That doesn't always happen with a Great Course Lecture, but when it does it makes for one of the best listens available.

[Jim]

I had just finished the excellent lecture series about the philosophical evolution of the Enlightenment by Dr Kors (Birth of the Modern Mind: The Intellectual History of the 17th and 18th Centuries), and was interested in finding out a bit more from a different set of eyes...literary eyes in this case. I was initially a bit disappointed and lost in the first two lectures, until I read more thoroughly the scope of the course and got out of the Kors-inspired materialistic mode and tried to think more like a poet/author.
This was a time (1670-1790) in which there was a great deal of change in the air...the world was struggling out from under the yoke of oppressive religious dogma and turning to nature and the mind of man. The world was being defined by from a purely empirical point of view...everything involved employing the scientific method of observation and replication of experiments. Descartes gave way to Newton, Pascal and Bunyan to Diderot and Voltaire. The world had changed. These new ideas flew in the face of the establishment.

But for some this materialistic philosophy just didn't cut it...what about the individual...the self? The truly enlightened rejected the dualism of mind and body...the mind, they said, was just another part of the body, deeply rooted in the physicality of the whole. This concept flew in the face of a few (and growing) groups of individuals who became quite influential...folks like Rousseau, Boswell and our old friend Diderot began to produce literary works that proved that the immaterial mind...the self...is very much alive and well, thank you very much. It's here in the lecture series, starting with the discussions about Boswell, Diderot and Rousseau where Dr Damrosch hits his stride and really captured my attention (I'll admit here that I will re-listen to the first few lectures with a much more discerning eye). These were truly gifted writers whose stories are as interesting as the works they create.

The series end with fascinating discussions about Ben Franklin, Adam Smith and Choderlos de Laclos, the author of 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses' ('Dangerous Liaisons'). Needless to say, these authors have created works, both in life and literature, that flies in the face of our ideas about the enlightenment and leads the world into the Romance period.

Highly recommended...Dr Leo is the perfect lecturer...witty and articulate.
Avoid those flies and get this one on sale with a coupon.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

The late Leo Damrosch is an excellent lecturer. I'm not that much into philosophy, but I'm glad I learned about the origins of the Enlightenment. Damrosch does a good job of putting the players and ideas in context, from which you can draw a line all the way to modern times.

[Matthew Royal · Rating 4 out of 5]

This course systematizes much of the sense of self you've collected from pop psychology and casual reading of classic novels. It feels highly selective rather than comprehensive, but it was a semi regular sequence of interesting moments, the best of which were Damrosch's synthesis, rather than his analysis of individual works.

It ended very much with the sense that there is no consensus on "self," but at least 3 competing models of self, with mild criticism of an unidentified modern perspective. Rather than illuminating the "correct" idea of self to guide the listener in their own analysis, this material serves best as giving you stereotypes of "self philosophy" which you can use to categorize.