Georg Misch’s A History of Autobiography and the problem of self-esteem

Introduction

Within the contemporary research on self-esteem, the human quality of self-esteem tends to be studied in psychology or sociology. However, self-esteem is also a cultural phenomenon and therefore has a historical dimension. Georg Misch’s A History of Autobiography seems to be a valuable source for analysing aspects of self-esteem from the perspective of cultural history.

This enormous work of four volumes consisting of two parts each and encompassing more than 3000 pages was Misch’s primary concern for over six decades—from 1900 to 1965. The book was written in response to a contest launched by the Prussian Academy of Sciences to develop a history of autobiography. In 1904, Georg Misch submitted his first three volumes—Altertum, Mittelalter, and Neuzeit—a large amount of autobiographical documents such as reports, chronicles, letters, diaries, vitae, confessions and memoires, covering more than three millennia of culture, including European, Middle Eastern, Egyptian, Babylonian and Assyrian culture, and the culture of the Arab world. ^[1] A great part of the work is devoted to the history of autobiography in Antiquity, including the post-Homeric and Attic epochs, the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman worlds, and late Antiquity. The latter is followed by the history of medieval autobiography, focusing on the three spheres of Mediterranean culture, divided according to religion, country, and political organization. The last part (the fourth volume) was published posthumously and includes the history of autobiography from the Renaissance period and the main autobiographical works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Misch’s fundamental work on autobiography has received little attention among scholars. One of the many reasons for this, as Willi Jung suggests, is “partly its nature as a history of a genre and partly its often-times seemingly chaotic wealth of information, which itself results from a specific concept of autobiography and its roots in nineteenth-century positivism, especially the intellectual heritage of Wilhelm Dilthey” (Jung & Wimmer 1986, p. 30). In fact, Misch’s concept of autobiography is “specific” because it exceeds the scope of literary studies and can be interpreted as a hermeneutic study of the development of human personality against the backdrop of the cultural development of the human form of life. For Misch, autobiography is not primarily a literary genre, but a document humain, the “objectivization” of the highest form of life. This can confuse literary scholars and invoke a degree of scepticism in Misch’s methodological approach, with the result that Misch’s work is praised more than it is read. ^[2] On the other hand, such an approach allows for interdisciplinary investigation into the history of human subjectivity. The following brief overview shows how Misch’s work can contribute to an analysis of this type.

Misch’s concept of autobiography

Misch’s studies are based on the scholarship of Diltheys. Consequently, the history of autobiography should, first of all, reflect the progressive development of the human form of life. A quotation from Dilthey’s Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften in the “Introduction” to the first volume of A History of Autobiography is apt here: “Autobiography is the highest and most instructive form in which the understanding of life becomes approachable for us” (Misch, 1976, p. 10). Here, the term “life” does not mean an “individual’s life”, but the historical life of humanity. For Dilthey, history is the development of mankind’s spirit (Geist), and spirit is not a transcendental essence, but life which “interprets itself”, or the “objectivization” of life. History is, in other words, the life of mankind’s spirit in all its expression. Consequently, in Dilthey’s view, autobiography provides the human sciences with primary texts as it reveals not just the inner being of the author but historical life itself.

Recognizing this, Misch strives to comprehend the “variety of autobiographical writings within the universal historical context in which the human spirit manifests itself in Western civilization” (Misch, 1976, p. 6). One strong assumption underlies this research strategy. It is the idea that individual human self-understanding reflects the development of culture as a whole. How is that possible? Misch believes that self-consciousness and being conscious of the world are fundamentally interconnected and cannot be separated. Autobiography reflects this interconnection, since individuals think in and through categories and concepts emanating from their social environment. Misch calls the intersubjective concepts through which human beings articulate their thoughts the “categories of life” (Misch, 1976, p. 15). ^[3] In this way, the history of autobiography becomes the history of human culture as reflected through the prism of self-awareness.

Dilthey’s influence on Misch can, secondly, be seen in his interest in the problems of the individuation of human beings and in individuals developing and exercising freedom in relation to nature, social norms, institutions, and traditions. Misch focuses on the formation of the personality, believing it to depend on the social environment on the one hand and on the individual’s efforts on the other. This follows on from his conviction that human life is a relationship; its basic relations are those of the individual as a being aware of herself and of the world she lives in, which includes her natural and social surroundings. Both capacities contribute to and can be seen as factors of individualization.

The methodological basis on which the themes are clustered, revolving around the problem of individual development, is Misch’s distinction between “self-consciousness” and “the consciousness of personality” (Bewusstsein der Persönlichkeit). Self-consciousness is a purely biological feature of human beings. This means that human life is not simply a natural process or the continuity of actions, feelings, wishes, and reactions, but lived consciously. Consciousness of the self and consciousness of the outer world are primordial: they are the products of one and the same mental activity. In Misch’s terms, self-consciousness is the natural “root” from which self-understanding grows (Misch, 1976, p. 11). Therefore, it can be seen as a necessary condition of the possibility of the consciousness of the self and, hence, of autobiography as the expression of it.

The consciousness of personality is, according to Misch, the cultural correlate of biological self-consciousness. In contrast to self-consciousness, personality is not a natural phenomenon but rather a result of attending to both the inner being and cultural influences. Misch’s hypothesis is that the human personality is constituted and revealed as humanity develops historically. In this process, there is a shift away from the deterministic necessities of nature and society and towards the consciousness of one’s freedom as a person. In other words, it progresses from the simple morphological diversity of individual psychological life to the diversity of cultural types of personality. For Misch, the culmination of the development of the personality consists in the individual’s ability to shape her life “based on the consciousness of personality” (aus dem Bewusstsein der Persönlichkeit) (Misch, 1976, p. 18). Thus, he advocates that people are free to define themselves.

Here I wish to emphasize that Misch’s conceptualizing the essence of the person is relevant to further investigations. Unlike the biological individual, the person is understood in terms of “freedom and independence” (Misch, 1911, p. 84) and her principle goal is “overcoming the reality” and achieving autonomy. Personality, thus, culminates in the individual’s freedom to self-determine. From this, it is clear that Misch does not consider personality to be only conditioned by the society to which the person belongs, rather it is the product of the human being working on herself. Misch’s ideal is a person whose way of life—of thinking and acting—reflects the epoch in all its achievements and contradictions. This ideal can be achieved, depending upon the extent to which the person possesses the power to influence the world around her a product of which she is. Moreover, Misch believes that the person is able to step outside temporal boundaries and existing norms, since she is always aiming at a transcendental ideal. The development of personality therefore enables innovative cultural development. From this perspective of humanist scholarship, the concept of the person should become the “highest instance for the historically oriented idealism” (Misch, 1911, p. 120).

Misch assumes both an infinite natural multiplicity of individual life and a “historically determined multiplicity of its forms of self-presentation” (Misch, 1976, p. 7). In this respect, autobiography appears to be a valuable resource. For Misch, autobiographies are documents that demonstrate that human nature is not fixed and identical everywhere and at all times. They can be used to find individual development that is accessible for use in psychological analyses, but also cultural studies.

To sum up, Misch’s study of the history of autobiography is aimed at achieving two things: a philosophical study of humanity and a history of the spirit of the human being through the development of self-awareness. Its second goal is to show how the modern personality evolves in the Western world. I can only add the following quotation to prove this claim: “Both in regard to its sources in human self-awareness and in regard to its contribution to the understanding of life, autobiography appears to be not only a special kind of literature but also an instrument of human self-knowledge” (Misch, 1976, p. 13). Autobiography is therefore not merely, as its modern name might suggest, a literary genre, but a key resource for general theory of knowledge. Indeed, Misch claims that autobiography can give us an “objective knowledge of humanity” (Misch, 1976, p. 7).

This view of autobiography allows us to characterize Misch’s history of autobiography as literary anthropology. It can be seen as an attempt at a systematic understanding of recorded expressions based on the assumption that the text reflects life. Misch’s work could be used to reconstruct forms of subjectivity contained within the documents.

Autobiography and self-knowledge

Misch studied full-length autobiographies—in the strictest sense of the term—in the Greek and Roman literature stretching back to the time of St. Augustine as well as underlying developments in the literature of the ancient Orient. He justifies this approach on the grounds that, unlike other forms of literary composition, autobiography has very fluid boundaries and has relied upon the most diverse forms of literary expression throughout its history. Misch found “unexpectedly numerous” (Misch, 1976, p. 21) examples of embryonic autobiographical writing in Egyptian autobiographical epitaphs, reports of heroic deeds by rulers of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, and first-person narratives in autobiographical poetry and fables. The biographical inscriptions can therefore be traced back to around 3000 B.C.

Some typical examples of these types of self-representation can be found in the fairly length inscriptions on the famouse tomb of Inni, recording his life under the four Egyptian kings he served. These inscriptions describe how Inni inspected the treasures of the temple of Ammon, supervised the weighing out of the monthly ration of incense for various sanctuaries, watched over the grain harvest and cattle drives, and received the king’s gifts for the god Ammon, including prisoners of war, among other things (Misch, 1976, p. 29). This record of his life documents his public activities, especially his relations with the king, who was seen as a god, and with the gods. It details his promotions and rewards, the lands given over to him, the slaves that were the spoils of war, and so on.

Later the moral qualities of the deceased were described in funeral inscriptions. These were often self-congratulatory: praising the individual for having been a father to the fatherless, a husband to widows, and a support to the humble. One official’s inscription read:

No minor have I oppressed, no widow afflicted, no peasant or shepherd evicted or driven away; from no master of five hands have I taken his men for drudgery. No one suffered want in my lifetime, no one went hungry in my day; for when there was dearth I had all the fields in the region tilled […]. Thus I saved lives of its inhabitants. I gave away whatever food the region produced, so that there was no one hungry in the land; I gave the widow as large a portion as the woman who has a husband. I did not prefer the great to the small in aught that I gave. And when the inundations of the Nile were abundant and the farmers rich in all things, I did not impose a new tax upon the fields (Misch, 1976, p. 30).

Occasionally there is self-praise merely for “having borne God in the heart.” As one of the worthies of the twelfth dynasty declares, “I went forth from the door of my house with benevolent heart, I stood there with bountiful hand […]. Kind was my heart, empty of passionate wrath” (Misch, 1976, p. 30).

In these ‘autobiographical’ inscriptions, the narrative begins in the first person singular without any further introduction other than the sacrificial formula, or date, or the opening phrase “N.N. speaks: ‘I …’” (Misch, 1976, p. 30). The extent to which those described in the inscriptions were involved in their composition can be ascertained only rarely. But even if they are not actually personal representations of life events, they are usually given in self-narrative form. There is some dispute over whether ancient inscriptions narrated in the first person but that were probably written by someone else can in fact be considered autobiography. In general, the contemporary literary research distinguishes between two different types of autobiography, memory and confession. The first is grounded in a description of objects and events, the second in explicit self-reflection and introspection. Misch considers even rudimentary texts beginning in medias res to be autobiographical writing, since autobiography implies the description (graphia) of an individual human life (bios) by the individual herself (auto-) (Misch, 1976, pp. 5–7).

Why might this primitive type of self-representation be interesting in the context of the problems of self-esteem? My argument is that by analysing these texts we will be able to reconstruct a significant aspect of “self-esteem” that is rarely addressed in contemporary discussions: the connection between self-esteem and self-knowledge.

There is a long-running debate on self-knowledge and self-esteem, and there is little agreement about what precisely these concepts mean and how they should best be approached. In this context, Misch’s conception of autobiography may be a useful analytical tool, since it does not separate the individual from the written corpus. Misch writes: “The spirit [of the author] is reflected in the events and persons of the autobiography” (Misch, 1976, p. 13). Here, he posits the principle of identity between the writer and the reported experience. From this, it follows that it is possible to interpret any memories, even simple representations of the facts as the expression of self-knowledge.

Misch stresses that the object of autobiography is human life; it is not simply a record of the things that people have encountered. In memories external facts are translated into the conscious experience of the individual, since they attain the meaning of personal value, derived from that particular individual’s understanding and world-view. In this case, external reality is not the realm of brute facts, but is embedded in the person’s self-consciousness as individual, lived experience. If life is the interplay between the self and the world, then its record should be more than just an account of things. A human being’s individuality is expressed as “a whole” through the construction, selection, structuring, emphasis, and evaluation of facts and events. Thus, her inner world is expressed in her description of the outer world in autobiographical accounts.

According to Misch, what matters is that the author “himself knows the meaning of his experiences, whether he emphasizes it or not. He understands his life only through the importance he attached to them” (Misch, 1976, p. 10). Even if the author’s attention is focused less on the inner experience than on the external realm of facts, her memories reflect her self-knowledge. An example may help us understand this less than self-evident claim: when we read in an autobiography that the person regularly listened to classical music, it is correct to conclude that this person could also say I love classical music. Thus, autobiographical descriptions may be considered manifestations of self-knowledge as posited by Misch.

Now, let us return to the analysis of the ancient inscriptions given above. One of the striking features of these documents is that they exhibit a static type of biographical conception: in it the writer’s review of his life is determined by what he considers worth permanently recording. This could be, above all, the sum-total of power and glory and pleasure, or the socially valuable features of her character. A life-description contains the best moments the person experienced and there is no idea of personal development at all. Even chronological narratives only set out the details of what is commonly considered to be enjoyable and valuable in life.

Another characteristics is that the individuals try to represent themselves by using typical “poetical phrases” (Misch) and cultural stereotypes to distinguish themselves. They do this by highlighting their socially constituted qualities that have social value. Each stresses his distinctions, but with the result that every human being’s life is represented as having achieved an eminence no other has, and here the relation to an authority such as a king or god is key. The individual human life is recorded in detail with reference to typical situations—how the person occupied and amused herself, displayed her abilities, was rewarded by the king, and so on; nevertheless, in this homogeneous narrative, the individuals are scarcely distinguishable from one other except in name and rank.

These life-descriptions give a highly idealized picture of the self and demonstrate a regularity, which is, according to Misch, typical of the type of autobiography determined by social practice: “a ruling ideal of morality is accepted and guides the course of the biography” (Misch, 1976, p. 31). That means that the moral qualities people ascribe to themselves are, in part, virtues that are generally recognized as having religious or social merit. If we generalize Misch’s rule, we can formulate a composition rule that applied to early autobiographical writing: the acts of the individual life reveal something typical or general, but it is through the use of narrative in the first person singular that they take on the character of personal experience. Ancient autobiographical texts are a kind of “stereotyped” or “collective autobiography” (Misch, 1976, p. 22). In all this abundance of material they typically show an extreme poverty of individual character. The human being’s awareness of her actions and thoughts had not yet to be accompanied by a sense of personality, or personal individuality (Misch, 1976, p. 19). To summarize this discussion, it can be said that here the self-knowledge is constituted using the pars pro toto principle: individual self-awareness depends on or is individuated by external social environment.

Autobiography and Self-Esteem

When analysing ancient inscriptions that take the form of self-descriptions, one encounters a motif that forms the starting point of autobiographical literature—self-praise. Misch emphasizes that some documents employ a uniquely unashamed, even brutal level of self-glorification: “Self-glorification has never since appeared with such naiveté or with such entire exclusion of all else” (Misch, 1976, p. 23). How can this phenomenon be explained?

These documents can be read as revealing a universal human need for recognition and as emerging out of a concern to ensure the person’s life after her death that was disseminated among ancient people and had the practical purpose of avoiding severe penalties and ensuring a dignified life after death. Misch, in contrast, defines this self-glorification of the simple Dasein of the human being, resounding in all these documents, as a manifestation of a primitive form of self-knowledge, namely “the sense of the self” (Selbstgefühl) (Misch, 1976, p. 23). Misch consider the sense of the self an early historical form of a key invariable part of the personality he calls “effective power” (Wirkungskraft) (Misch, 1911, p. 83). He understands “effective power” to mean the person’s capacity to influence life and to shape human reality.

In fact, the ancient inscriptions demonstrate a very specific “sense of self”, namely, that the highest distinction that can conferred on a human being, apart from the ability to obtain wealth, is measured in terms of gaining office and rank for serving a god or king. These inscriptions, characterized by a lack of individuality and rigid adherence to a formalizing canon in which the fundamental motive is self-praise, are merely a stereotypical kind of self-presentation mediated by social standards. The message about the person is conveyed in the value attributed to the deeds performed and to a lesser degree conscious reflection on the inner meaning of these acts for the human being.

Nevertheless, those who share Misch’s hermeneutical approach are no longer restricted to a simple empiricist description of facticity, but can assume that, among the special relationships in life, political activity and moral self-perfection have become the normative framework within which human self-esteem has been primarily constituted. The growth of self-scrutiny seems to have occurred most directly out of a desire for self-esteem, expressed in terms of the individual’s formative influence upon life and social significance. Thus, self-esteem appears to be the foundation of autobiography.

Self-esteem could be the starting-point of ancient autobiography simply because it was the first form of self-knowledge documented in writing. On the basis of Misch’s research self-esteem may be characterized as the self-knowledge in the categories of “the Other”. This means that self-esteem appears to be self-knowledge derived from the social perspective regarding the individual. In all kinds of ancient inscriptions employing the self-praise model, such aspects of “self-esteem” can clearly be identified as the authors’ belief that their main actions and qualities have positive value; a belief that their goals are worth achieving; the belief that adequate steps were taken to achieve those goals; and that the accomplishments were appreciated and confirmed by others who are likewise esteemed, or socially worthwhile.

Self-knowledge, self-esteem and truth

Let us reiterate that autobiography as broadly construed by Misch and which includes all types of texts written in the first person is understood as a manifestation of a human being’s knowledge of herself. The texts demonstrate that the human ‘I’ is not an ahistorical universal natural identity. On the contrary, it is a permanently developing cultural being. Humans build images of themselves based on reports, self-ascriptions, self-scrutiny, and introspections. The source of this self-presentation is the fundamental psychological phenomenon we call self-consciousness and it expresses the development of human self-awareness, or self-knowledge. This self-knowledge, which enables the author to conceive of her life as a single whole, is acquired throughout life experience. The rudimentary form of self-knowledge documented in the ancient inscriptions appears to be self-esteem.

One important question cannot be ignored when discussing the problem of knowledge, including self-knowledge and self-esteem, and that is the problem of truth. The question here is whether, or to what extent, we can trust, for example, the ancient epitaphs glorifying the deceased. Misch is convinced that autobiographical writings “cannot be other than true” (Misch, 1976, p. 15). He assumes the genuine effort involved in writing an autobiography is guided by the desire and need for self-revelation. From this it follows that nobody would want to lie when writing their autobiography; that would be a performative contradiction. There is no doubt historical fact can prove a person wrong, yet it seems impossible to assess autobiography on the basis of historical accuracy, as it deals not with the world as such, but with the human experience of the world. The criterion of truth is, then, not whether the narrative is a precise depiction of the “objective” world, but the sincerity of the author striving to express her knowledge of the life, or of the self.

According to Misch, there is no way of measuring the truth of an autobiography, other than the author’s sincerity. Subjective truth—sincerity—may not have the status of objective truth, but it can be effective in analysing autobiographical texts. But how can we know whether it is a useful criterion? How can we measure sincerity? One possible solution to this problem is the concept of coherence: the idea that the sincerity reveals itself in the coherence of individual experiences. This coherence, evident in the way the person composes the narrative, selects the details to emphasize, and places weight upon events and people, is expressed in the style, in the broadest sense of the word.

Misch uses the term “style” in his analysis of personality. He accepts Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon’s famous aphorism, “Le style c’est l’homme même” (Misch, 1911, p. 123) and claims that the uniqueness of individuality is the uniqueness of style. Shared elements might make up the style, but these are arranged by the individual in a specific constellation. This concept appears to be fruitful for solving the problem of truth in autobiography. The personal—and, therefore, epistemologically ‘subjective’—description of life is true if it constitutes an authentic portrayal of the author, or paints a consistent image which is reflected in a unique style. The following rule should be valid: “The more style the autobiography has, the farther it is from mere stylization” (Misch, 1976, p. 15).

Misch argues that even where the person is suffering from self-delusion, autobiography does not cease to be true in the sense it represents the person deceiving herself. Self-evaluations are often inaccurate and inadequate, but the truth of autobiography somehow escapes this fate, since it is the style—the selection of facts—that shapes the individual and reflects her self-knowledge. “Style” expresses “authenticity” and it seems to be a helpful concept in furthering the discussion on truth in autobiographical reconstructions. ^[4]

Conclusion

Recognizing the historical dimension of humanity’s life as Misch did presupposes that the modern concept of self-understanding as personality—individuals exercising the highest degree of autonomy through self-given or self-accepted laws—can be traced back to its rudimentary forms through the history of autobiography. Autobiography has therefore obtained an epistemological function it did not have before: it has become the literary form in which an individual can account for herself and which helps us to understand mankind’s life as a continuous process constituted by different chronotopes. ^[5] Rooted in psychology, the self-revelation of the human being takes on various cultural shapes according to the epoch and the social situation.

In this view of the historical dimension of individuality, concepts such as self-knowledge and self-esteem take on different meanings over time. Analyses of ancient autobiographical epitaphs and reports of heroic deeds have led to an important finding: that we can reconstruct one of the primeval cultural forms of self-knowledge. Even a totally inadequate form of self-knowledge which guided the autobiographic efforts reveals its distinctive feature— relationships between self-knowledge and the nature of the society in which it is found. When the individual is firmly embedded in the social realities and only a very limited degree of differentiation prevails, the “personality conception” tends to be a prolongation of pervasive social realities. Self-knowledge is revealed through self-esteem, emerging out of the projection of socially valuable human qualities in the account for oneself.

Misch’s “self-glorification” is illuminating, as we can consider it the self-esteem that is based on the individual’s compliance with social norms and a positive social role. This type of self-esteem hinges on the identification of the dominant social instances. To this extent, it is not personal, but a collective experience adopted by the individual. Self-esteem is expressed uniformly by different individuals, reflecting the established traditional forms of self-representation. This uniformity shows that, in this ancient epoch, individuality was mainly constituted through membership of the society and culture and that there was no call for inner-direction. Society becomes, then, the primary mode of both self-knowledge and self-esteem.

The examples of self-esteem and self-knowledge with the absence of the inner experience, of the sense of personality and the individual standards of evaluation are the earliest we have, and they extend back into the second and third millennia B.C. Misch’s study of autobiography provides considerable evidence of this, if one accepts his view that autobiography is a form of self-reflexion of human life.