The Long Way Back to Ourselves

8.1

The Invention of the Individual

This episode asks whether the modern individual is a core that was always there or something historically assembled. It corrects Jacob Burckhardt's 1860 image of a veil falling from the individual in Renaissance Italy: Augustine's Confessions, from the late fourth century, already show introspective self-examination long before Descartes. What is new is not self-consciousness but its status, the rank the inner self gains, starting with Descartes' cogito, as the final authority for truth. As the price, the episode names Alain Ehrenberg's diagnosis of the exhausted self, echoed by the World Health Organization's 2019 classification of chronic workplace exhaustion.