Self-awareness early philosophical discussion of self-awareness is that of John Locke. Locke was apparently influenced by René Descartes' statement normally translated 'I think, therefore I am' ("Cogito ergo sum"). In chapter XXVII "On Identity and Diversity" of Locke's "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1689) he conceptualized consciousness as the repeated self-identification of oneself through which moral responsibility could be attributed to the subject—and therefore punishment and guiltiness justified, as critics such as Nietzsche would point out, affirming "...the psychology of conscience is not 'the voice of God in man'; it is the instinct of cruelty ... expressed, for the first time,
Cogito and the History of Madness his point of departure for "Cogito and the History of Madness" is Foucault's 1961 book "Folie et déraison". Derrida's paper primarily relies on two sections of Foucault's work, the original 1961 preface in which Foucault makes a number of general comments about the book, setting forth his intentions and methodology, and two and a half pages at the start of the second chapter where Foucault links Descartes to an historical event that silenced madness at the end of the classical age. Foucault's 1961 text was heavily abridged for a popular edition in 1964 that formed the basis for Richard Howard's