A likely objection to the present framework concerns its apparent historical exclusivity: namely, whether the psychic structure here designated Born Man admits of premodern or non-modern analogues, thereby undermining its claim to modern specificity. Traditions such as Stoicism, late antique inwardness, Indian non-dualism, Buddhist reflexivity, Greek tragedy, or medieval mysticism may appear, at first glance, to exhibit forms of interiority, reflexive self-awareness, or withdrawal from cosmological meaning.
However, this objection rests on an equivocation between interiority as such and the historically novel configuration of subjectivity operative in modernity.
In premodern contexts, interiority functions as a site of alignment, dissolution, or participation: the self turns inward in order to conform to a rational cosmos (as in Stoicism), dissolve into an absolute beyond the ego (Advaita and Buddhist traditions), reconcile itself with fate (Greek tragedy), or serve as the locus of divine presence (medieval mysticism). In each case, inwardness remains referential—its meaning is grounded in an order that precedes and exceeds the subject. As Charles Taylor has shown, premodern inwardness operates within a “porous self,” embedded in cosmic, moral, and metaphysical frameworks that are not generated by the individual subject (Taylor, Sources of the Self).
By contrast, the structure described here as Born Man presupposes the historical evacuation of such external guarantees. What distinguishes modern subjectivity is not inwardness per se, but the necessity that the subject become self-grounding: epistemically isolated, reflexively certain only of itself, and burdened with the task of generating meaning in the absence of cosmic, theological, or mythic intelligibility. This necessity is rendered explicit in Cartesian method, which systematically brackets the world as a source of certainty and installs the thinking subject as the sole indubitable ground (Descartes, Discourse on Method; Meditations on First Philosophy). Descartes does not invent interiority, but he renders it unavoidable by methodologically stripping the world of inherent sense.
Subsequent analyses of modern subject formation confirm this shift. Foucault’s genealogies of subjectivity demonstrate that modern forms of self-relation emerge alongside practices of abstraction, normalization, and reflexive self-surveillance, rather than through continuity with premodern cosmologies (The Order of Things; The History of Sexuality, vol. 1). The modern subject is constituted not by participation in a meaningful order, but by its positioning within regimes that presuppose the subject’s epistemic isolation and responsibility for self-interpretation.
From a psychological-philosophical perspective, this condition is further clarified by Giegerich’s account of the soul’s historical development. Giegerich argues that modernity entails not a loss of soul, but its logical interiorization: meaning withdraws from the world and takes up residence in abstraction, negativity, and self-referential thought (The Soul’s Logical Life). On this view, attempts to locate premodern analogues of modern subjectivity mistake symbolic inwardness for a historically unprecedented burden—the obligation for the subject to bear meaning once meaning no longer inheres in the world.
Accordingly, the absence of premodern instances of Born Man does not weaken the argument; it specifies its scope. The concept does not name a timeless anthropological possibility, but a historically singular response to the collapse of transcendence under conditions of epistemic doubt, abstraction, and rationalization. Cultures may anticipate individual introspection, ethical self-discipline, or symbolic reflexivity, yet none confront the full burden of self-grounded meaning-generation characteristic of modernity.
The framework is therefore falsifiable in principle—were a non-modern culture shown to sustain a reflexively self-certain subject that generates value without appeal to transcendent, cosmological, or mythic orders—yet historically constrained in fact. The lack of such cases is not an oversight, but a consequence of the conditions the concept is intended to capture.
Brenton L. Delp
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