anyone know it well enough to provide some quick and dirty thoughts, apparently there's a revised version out... Alan Rudy
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I just scanned the book outlined at the link. I think I recognize something like the argument or premise. It says that the modern existentially self-conscious individual made its appearance with the arrival of modern history. Modern history here means the modern national states. This is probably not the argument in the book, but I want to rift on a more general idea of individuals and history anyway.
There is a good, short collection of Ernst Cassirer essays on this idea called ``The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy''. In this book Cassirer argues basically that the prototype was forged earlier, say about the time of Giotto. Here is a quote. The word `they' refers to works, and the individual Cassirer is talking about is the modern `intellectual'.
``Nevertheless, they all have one negative result in common: they loosen up, so to speak, the earth out of which will come forth the new, specifically modern view of the relationship of `subject' and `object'. There is scarcely a single branch of Renaissance philosophy that did not participate in this work---not only metaphysics but natural philosophy and empirical knowledge of nature; not only psychology but ethics and aesthetics...'' (123-4p)
Giotto for those who didn't take art history is considered the dividing line between Late Gothic and Early Renaissance art. He was also famous for putting portraits of his Florentine contemporaries in the crowd scenes.
There is definitely a line of thought coming out of late Gothic that starts to form a model for a modern concept of the individual (together with subject-object problem), I followed the visual arts on this, rather than the literary works so I have big gaps of ignorance on the writing side. If I was going to put start on this theme, it would be the earliest portraits of Dante by Giotto and reciprocal mention by Dante of Giotto's contemporaries Boccaccio and Sacchetti. The point is we get a multidimensional view of individuals, their work, their times, their names, their `persona'. or reputation, etc. The Inferno, is a symbolic society peopled by individual portraits who have characteristic personalities...and are paying or rewarded for the deeds, measure for measure.
In the high renaissance there is a beautiful example where what Cassirer is talking about shows up in Raphael's School of Athens, which also contains, Mister Ego himself.
Next, crudely dated by Descartes, Spinoza, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Caravaggio, we get a kind of explosion of this impulse, a kind of panoramic view of individuals from all classes depicted within the larger concept of society. I think we could put Shakespeare in as another example at least in some respects. There is a whole slew of writings on Hamlet as an existential subject. I sure wouldn't go as far as Harold Bloom and claim Shakes invented modern psychology.
Then on the other hand, I can pull out specific individual portraits from several periods in western antiquity and match them to literature of the period. Say roman bust portraits from late republic to early empire. Although I haven't read much of famous roman writers, I think you can make a case that their society had plenty of models for the modern individual, writers, political figures, etc
Then I think I can turn around and say that part of the inspiration for both the intellectual class in the Renaissance and later the Enlightenment came from these same periods in antiquity, going back to at least Plato. The pre-Socratics get pretty dim and it fades away.
Then I took myself back further and started looking at concepts of individuals, intellectual class and views of the cosmos in ancient Egypt. The period I think reflects this best is when the first funerary portraits appear (among merchants) in the middle of the New Kingdom. The most famous portrait is the bust of Nefertiti. But if you look around you'll find upper class merchants pot belly and all. These lower tier tombs also contain a stylized biography, known also a negative biography in which are recorded all the bad things our departed didn't do, when they were free to. These negatives count as `goods'. So then in the interpretation, this becomes something of an existentialist portrait.
The only reason I came up with all this is because I was attracted to the question of when did something like our idea of an individual show up in the historical record. I was looking around to counter Harold Bloom's idea that Shakespeare invented modern psychology or something like that... So if the above doesn't appear relevant to what the book is about, that's the reason...
CG