What makes this intuition so persistent is a sense of innerness. Virginia Woolf was fascinated by the feeling that there is something resolutely private about the self—a kernel that cannot be fully shared. As Joshua Rothman notes, Woolf thought we become most aware of this inner core not in solitude, but in moments of exposure, when we are forced to shield something inward against the outside world. Privacy, in this sense, is not withdrawal; it is the condition under which the self becomes visible to itself.
Modern morality still relies on this inner self as its basic anchor. Responsibility, guilt, agency, and integrity all presuppose a someone to whom actions belong. But this anchor is also a burden. Obligations to children, dependents, families, and communities strain the fantasy of sovereignty. They reveal the self not as a sealed unit, but as something entangled long before it is autonomous. The self matters morally precisely because it cannot escape responsibility.
American Transcendentalism transformed this burden into something closer to divinity. Emerson’s transparent eyeball, Thoreau’s retreat to Walden, and the idea of the Over-Soul all promised a universe in which the individual mind was both sacred and sufficient. “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind,” Emerson wrote, collapsing authority inward and sanctifying originality, genius, and self-trust. The self became not merely a moral subject, but a source of moral authority.
The promise was intoxicating. If the universe is already aligned with the inner self, then all that remains is courage—nonconformity, authenticity, refusal to bow. “All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do.” But embedded in this vision is a fatal ambiguity. If moral greatness is measured primarily by iconoclasm or intensity of self-assertion, then distinctions begin to blur. Revolutionary science, artistic rebellion, political liberation, and egoistic spectacle start to look morally equivalent.
Emerson sensed this danger and tried to address it with his idea of two confessionals. At one, we clear our actions in the mirror, trusting ourselves. At the other, we account for our obligations to family, neighbors, community. But he ultimately tips the scales toward the first. “I have my own stern claims and perfect circle.” The self remains sovereign. Obligation becomes secondary. Moral evaluation shifts from what is borne to how fully one inhabits oneself.
That unresolved tension—between the necessity of the self and the danger of its apotheosis—is where our moral confusion begins.
