How Germans Invented Self-Tracking: The 18th-Century Roots of Introspection
Historians have discovered that self-observation practices in 18th-century Germany transformed from therapeutic tools into scientific methods, reshaping how people understood their own minds. This shift helped establish the modern concept of the individual self and has implications for how organizations today approach employee wellness, self-improvement programs, and data-driven personal metrics.
Originaltitel: Self-observational life in eighteenth-century Germany
<p>In recent decades historians of science have argued that observation became something of a way of life in the early modern period. This article expands this analysis by shifting focus from observational practices within natural and experimental philosophy to a number of discourses and practices of self-examination and self-observation in eighteenth-century Germany. While the initial aim of these was therapeutic rather than scientific, therapeutic connotations were partly replaced by epistemic virtues and techniques adopted from natural and experimental philosophy toward the end of the century. The article further argues that the subordination of self-observation to scientific modes of procedure reflected the increasingly radical interest in human subjectivity and, by extension, the emergence of a modern civic and individual self. </p>