How Ideal Is the Ancient Self?
James I. Porter
Abstract
Heraclitus is typically thought to have ushered in the concept of the individual self as a subject of experience that is endowed with the core attributes of singularity, integrity, mental and psychological coherence, and autonomous agency. A close look at his fragments along with some of the best nineteenthcentury readings of him (Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Nietzsche, and then the early Bruno Snell in their wake) provides evidence that such a conception of the self was alien to Heraclitus, not because he was a primitive thinker, but because he had strong ontological and ethical commitments that led him in a different direction. Heraclitus did not pave the way for the modern liberal individual, which is how he is usually understood. Rather, he is best seen as a forerunner of the new posthumanism in contemporary ecology.