Patrick Lee Miller

Research Interests

I am interested in problems of the self, especially self-knowledge. Here are the sorts of questions I investigate. First of all, what is it to have a self? What is to have a sense of self, and what is it to lack such a sense -- that is, to suffer a malady of the self? Secondly, how has the notion of selfhood been related to reason, the emotions, and the body? Why has the self so often been understood as something pure, especially pure reason or a spark of divinity? What consequences does this traditional view have for the humanity of our selves? Tradition aside, what are the actual relations of a self to reason, the emotions, the body, humanity, and divinity? Finally, what contributions do other people, especially those closest to us, make to our self? What happens to this self when these people themselves suffer maladies of the self? And how can such maladies be treated?

Investigating these questions, I have drawn upon the three fields of my graduate and professional training (philosophy, philology, and psychoanalysis), which are more intimately related than their practitioners often recognize. For example, I continue to investigate the pictures and theories of the self developed by the ancient Greek philosophers, not only because their ideas are fascinating in their own right, but also because they continue to exert influence upon present discussions of selfhood. I have also considered how the self was depicted by the Greek philosophers' counterparts in tragedy, taking particular interest in Oedipus's tragedy of self-knowledge. Oedipus does not know himself, and is impure; by coming to know himself he suffers but is purified. What role do self-knowledge and purification play in the restoration of damaged selves such as Oedipus? Thus, finally, I consider how problems of the self are understood and treated by clinical psychoanalysts. Of their competing theories, I am most interested in the Self-Psychology of Heinz Kohut and the theory of mentalization promoted by Peter Fonagy.

In sum, I try to address problems of the self in as broad a way as possible, while nonetheless striving to meet the unique standards of my separate disciplines. For the foreseeable future I will be working on self-knowledge in antiquity. I am now finishing my first book "Becoming God: Pure Reason in Ancient Greek Philosophy" (Continuum, 2010). This is the first stage in my self-knowledge project, after which I plan to work on a second stage, calling it "Becoming Human." The first book contrasts two approaches to the self -- one that sees it as embedded in time (Heraclitus), the other seeing it as essentially eternal (Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus). I would like to develop the Heraclitean approach through research in ancient philosophy and tragedy (Oedipus again, but also the Stoics), as well as more recent schools of thought: particularly psychoanalysis and existentialism, but also Proust and Dostoevsky. This interest in more recent philosophy and literature is by no means a parallel track, however, since I consider these movements and authors the best modern exponents of the ancient philosophical quest, exemplified by Socrates, to know thyself.