Winter is a bad time. Whether for a season or for a life, it dampens the self. Or so a recent writer claimed. “Mankind endured a long winter of the Dark Ages” for a thousand years, “repressing” the human spirit in a barren season that lasted centuries. The human individual, as fate would have it, was at last reborn in the sun-filled Renaissance. One can trace this common claim at least to Jacob Burckhardt, the nineteenth-century Swiss art historian. People still quote his assertion in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy that, before the Italian humanists discovered the self, “Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category.” By contrast, as the cold cloud of medieval collectivist consciousness lifted in the fourteenth century, “Italy began to swarm with individuality; the ban laid upon human personality was dissolved.” From that time onward, as history strode along an ascending path, there followed democracy, human rights, expressive genius, personal worth—light.
Serious historians no longer accept this particular genealogy, despite its hold on the popular imagination. But other equally inadequate genealogies proliferate. If not the noble Greeks of Athens, then Augustine, with his peering self-scrutiny, invented the “Western individual,” dormant through those long dark winter ages but then awakened by the striving souls of Protestant reformers and their pietist progeny. Or perhaps the individual self awaited the gloom-dissolving Enlightenment and the unshackling of autonomous reason. Then again, perhaps it took a good British liberal such as Locke to give responsibility to the individual to construct knowledge, formed by personal experience. Despite the variation of histories, the consensus is that there is a “modern self,” distinct from a “premodern self,” and that something called “individualism” arose.
