Humans have always attempted to define themselves individually and collectively. Merely listing some essentially human characteristics evokes primeval memories of what we once thought of our selves. From ancient times, the individual has been ultimately defined by inexplicable or observable functions, remnants and fantasies of the bodily self. The human may be a “shade” inhabiting a body, a divine spark giving life to the body, a breath whose presence assured that life was present, or a psyche or mind that accounted for the individual's experience of mental reality. During the Christian era, many of these essences, purified of organic vestiges, came to be located in the idea of a soul, that totally spiritual entity that gave each person his or her individuality and transcendent existence.

After the Cartesian critique and the Enlightenment reformulation, the human person came to be thought of as a thinker of reason or a machine of matter. At the turn of the nineteenth century, American social thinkers, influenced by German romantic philosophers, adopted the language of the self to refer to the uniquely human component of such members of the animal kingdom. After the Darwinian impact, self was seen as emerging by the same natural laws operating in the rest of the biological world; and yet, with language and culture, humans acquire a different kind of consciousness – namely, self-consciousness. The social self is a concept that has been variously acceptable and unacceptable to both idealist and materialist interpreters of the human person.