An idea · Late Antiquity · first attested 400 CE
The Inner Self
I have become a great question to myself.
Augustine's Confessions invents the inner self as a literary and philosophical category. Before him, ancient philosophers had souls and characters; Augustine has an interiority — divided, opaque, restless, addressing itself in solitude to a divine listener. Modern subjectivity, from Descartes to Rousseau to therapy, is downstream.