Selfies in the age of selfies

Montaigne’s Essays were the start of a new age: the Age of Man. We could also call it the Age of the Self. This age appears to continue till today. Look around: Nearly everybody today makes photographic self-portraits or “selfies” as we call them, and many people share them in Facebook, Instagram and other social media. Isn’t this symbolic for the era we live in? One thing that strikes me is that many people do not upload selfies showing themselves in different activities and situations but that their selfies are almost all the same: taken from almost the same position with almost the same facial expression. Why? Do these people love to have themselves seen so much that they don’t have the imagination to show at least different pictures of themselves? A kind of narcissism? The Age of the Self.

One can say – and with right, I think – that it is not Montaigne who is the father of the modern selfie, but that its forerunners are to be found among painters and not among writers. Although making self-portraits may be as old as the art of painting, it’s not before the Early Renaissance that it begins to develop as a special genre. Jan van Eyck’s painting “Portrait of a Man in a Turban” (1433) is perhaps the earliest Renaissance self-portrait. Two centuries later Rembrandt made even more than hundred self-portraits, as a kind of modern selfie taker. However, I am not here to talk about the art of painting, but I want to talk about philosophy.

Montaigne was not the first who wrote about himself. Already thousand years before him Aurelius Augustine (354-430; bishop of Hippo) had written autobiographically. However, there is one important difference: Augustine actually wrote about God while Montaigne wrote really about himself. Therefore we can say that it was Montaigne, and not Augustine, who started a new era. We might also say that the Renaissance self-portraitists – say Jan van Eyck – started the new era, but the difference between what these painters did and what Montaigne did is that the self-portraitists showed the new era while Montaigne put it into words. In the end images need a lot of interpretation: Were these self-portraits really a way of showing oneself or were they something else? The meaning of the Essays is clear: Yes, it is me and only me whom you see here. I have no other intention, so Montaigne. Maybe after having read Montaigne’s “To the reader” you would expect a kind of autobiography or perhaps a systematic treatise of his thoughts, as a modern author would write it. It’s not what Montaigne did. The Essays discuss many different themes and often the coherence seems to be missing, even within the individual essays! Where is the self? Where is the I? One often tends to ask this question. That’s one reason why these essays are often so intriguing and force you to continue reading; not only the clear statements and clearly autobiographic passages do. But Montaigne was a master in connecting personal experiences with lessons of life. Already during his life the essays had become popular and they still are, four centuries later.

Many philosophers after Montaigne have written about themselves. Descartes, Pascal, Weil, Wittgenstein, Nussbaum are cases in point. Nevertheless for most of them writing autobiographically was not a way of writing about themselves but a means to write about something else. Descartes used autobiographic elements for laying the foundation of philosophy. Pascal, who also wrote about himself, even called Montaigne’s Essays foolish! But, like Augustine, Pascal actually wrote about God. Etc.

Till not so long ago only few people had the time and means to make their self-portraits, written or in pictures; to be a “selfist”, so to speak. The arrival of the computer and the Internet changed this. Via the Internet or via the printing-on-demand system everybody can publish about him or herself. By the development of digital cameras everybody can take and publish selfies. Especially the latter has become popular. Just a click and you have a picture of yourself. Just a few clicks more and everybody can see it. Even more, today the slogan seems to be: Be yourself, take a selfie, so be a selfist. And so, in this age of individualism and ego-expressivism, the most of us do. For in an era in which appearance has become so important, you have no choice (or so you think). And isn’t it so that your picture is who you are? So show it! But as said in my last blog, each person – how honest s/he may be – always gives a self-subjective description and leaves things out that s/he considers not really important; that s/he feels ashamed of. And so it is with selfies. Selfies are selected (we upload only those we like); selfies are edited in order to improve our appearance; etc. But when everybody has become a selfist, what do we see then? Can we still see the individual? Can we still see the separate trees or do we see only the wood? Or do we now just belong to a category and is the individual self no longer important, as it was since the Renaissance, since Montaigne? If so, how contradictory it seems, but then the selfie stands for the end of an era.

I should upload a selfie to this blog, but instead I’ll put here a shadow of myself.