Technology and the Self: From the Essential to the Sublime

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Abstract
Psychological essentialism—adherence to the view that individuals possess specifically mental processes or mechanisms—has long served as a pivotal feature of the Western cultural tradition. Already in Aristotelian philosophy there was an elaborate formulation of the workings of mental life. Platonic theory of knowledge, and its central concern with the reality of pure ideas, was also forged from a preliminary belief in the preeminence of the psychological interior. Such offerings from the Greek cultural world, when coupled with the Judeo-Christian conception of the soul, lent a solid palpability to the presumption of an inner world—identifiable, ever present, transparent, and central to the understanding of human action. As ...

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