Self-discovery versus Self-transcendence
Jonah,
I wanted to move your question here because I think its an important one and I don’t want it to get lost inside the other two conversations growing within the original thread about feminist Mormonism on Patheos. It may end up with just the two of us talking, but that’s fine. I’m intrigued by the question and interested in seeing where the conversation leads us.
Your question was about if it more important for us to engage in self-discovery or to engage self-transcendence? Forgive me if my paraphrase is inaccurate. It was longer and probably a little more complex than that, so please correct and clarify as needed.
I have already answered your question elsewhere, but let me expand upon that answer by providing some personal information, which I hope will serve as an anecdotal example to support my thesis.
I have had two wives and a brother tell me I am a narcissist. These are important people to me. They know me more intimately than most, and the accusation troubled me. I don’t have the personality that allows me to blithely reject their judgment, but I do nonetheless have the sense that their judgment is somehow flawed. Perhaps this is born of a natural desire to exonerate myself and stand innocent of the accusation, but I don’t think so. I don’t think so because I also have a sense that I may not be innocent and the sense that the question of my innocence depends upon what it means to be a narcissist.
So my mind naturally turned to examine what they might have meant by the accusation. The second wife wasn’t familiar with the word, but she read it in a journal the first wife had written in rehab and it stuck. They understand the term to refer to a self-love that prevents one from caring about others. The accusation was meant by both of them to hurt rather than to instruct, so I think it reasonable for me to see the accuracy of their accusation as damaged by the motivation behind it. My brother, on the other hand, understands the term differently than it is understood in popular parlance. Nevertheless, I don’t know if he is accusing me of being unconditionally selfish or if he is employing the term as metaphor, drawing an analogy between me and the Greek youth who fell in love not with himself, but with a mediated (and, therefore, inauthentic) image of himself. He gets cagey when I have tried to discuss the subject with him, so I am not certain as to the nature of his accusation. As to the intent behind it, I suspect it too was meant to hurt rather than instruct, but I cannot be sure.
Understanding human nature allows me to understand that I am genetically predisposed to be self-interested, but not just self-interested. I am, as all humans are, more complex than that in that I am also genetically predisposed to suspend my self-interest (at least temporarily) in the interest of another or to see my self-interest and conjoined with the interest of another. Am I selfish? I am. But am I selfish to an extent beyond that to which I am innately predisposed. I don’t think so. But if this denial is merely self-protection, if I am, in fact, selfish to an unnatural degree, to an unhealthy degree, then that would most likely a product of my environment. It would also be something with real moral weight and something I should struggle to transcend. But, let’s continue on to the other sense of narcissism.
After a great deal of painful introspection, I have come to the conclusion that I am a narcissist in the metaphorical sense of the word. I don’t, however, see myself as born this way, genetically predisposed to invent, adopt, and protect an inauthentic self-image. (I don’t think anyone is. I can’t see the evolutionary pay-off for such thing.) As I stated elsewhere, I grew up in the paradoxical nexus of feelings of inadequacy and delusions of grandeur, and what is the narcissist but one who doesn’t know who he is or what his place in the world might be? I suspect those questions of identity are answered for most of us by our environment, but I also believe there can exist simultaneously other environmental forces that interfere with the transmission of that hypnopaedic message of self-identification, producing sometimes the psychic dilemma: “Am I shit or am I God?”
I don’t see this as true for everyone. Sure, everyone suffers moments of self-doubt, but this doubt, I think, is more particular than universal, manifesting itself in questions like, “Am I doing the right thing?” not “Am I worthy of love and respect?” Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the people I know who seem to have a strong clear sense of themselves really don’t. But if everyone is plagued with the latter kind of self-doubt, then that would imply a nativist origin, and as I said before, I can’t see the evolutionary pay-off for a species to be born to such a predisposition. Of course, this psychic dilemma could be instead a social meme that is passed down generationally to one extent or another through social interaction and not through our DNA. Whatever the case may be, I don’t feel understanding the origin of the dilemma is all that important.
What is important is that I gained a valuable insight about myself that I don’t regret despite the fact that the acquisition and possession of it was painful in the extreme. I had thought of myself as someone with a strong, clear sense of self and I was ashamed to discover how much of that “self” was role-playing. I was also deeply embarrassed by the thought that others had seen it before I did. I didn’t want to be that guy. Not at my age.
I hope I am not misunderstood here as spouting New Age, self-help bullshit. I don’t expect to know my authentic, original kernel-self before I die. No one can do that. I also don’t care about discovering what the forces were that prevented me from organically acquiring a strong, clear sense of myself. I simply care about examining each aspect of me I have carried with me for so many years, determining if it is authentic, and casting it aside if it is not.
My leaving the church was in some sense part of this process. I am not saying that the church made me inauthentic, but I was inauthentic while I was in the church. And that fact makes irrelevant, at least for me, the discussions we have had about staying engaged with the church in order to exert change from within. That’s not me. I am not an agent for social or moral change. I liked the costume once, but I took it off. It didn’t fit. I know there are people who are sincere and effective agents for social and moral change. I’m just not one of them and I value that discovery about myself.
The comments I made about Mormon feminism specifically and feminism generally are in some sense part of this process. In years past, I would have bent over backwards to be seen as fair-minded about the repression of women by men. It wouldn’t have felt like an act to me. It would have felt like a true display of my fair-mindedness, or rather of what I perceived others to define as fair-mindedness. My opinions on the subject today may be flawed, but I am no longer going to measure my words in order to be socially acceptable. I am instead energized by the argument the expression of those opinions produced. It is a valuable argument that offers to persuade me to refine my opinions. I would be a fool to avoid it for the sake of maintaining “polite discourse.” Those who know me and love me will continue to love me despite my boorishness. Those who can’t get past it, didn’t love me to begin with, so fuck ‘em.
I have spoken of the compensatory habit I have of speaking my thoughts out loud so I could hear how they sounded and in hearing, discovering if they are rationally sufficient. This habit is in a weird way helpful to this process of self-discovery. My writing this now is also my way of hearing my own thoughts about having been accused of narcissism, and thus, in some strange and ironic sense, a part of this process.
I keep speaking of these activities as being only “in some sense” a part of this process because I don’t want to over-determine the origin, nature, and purpose of these activities.
So back to your question: “Is it more important that we seek to understand ourselves or that we seek to transcend ourselves?” It seems to me this question poses a false dichotomy. I do not see these two struggles as mutually exclusive. I see them instead as roughly sequential, while also being recursive rather than linear.
At first, I have felt angry, ashamed, and depressed by the discovery that I am not the cinematic image I had created for myself. I think it took me a few years to get past it, but now I feel liberated and something close to exultant. The opportunity to unpack the authentic “me” by divesting the inauthentic could end up being both a gift of self-discovery and of self-transcendence.
How could it ever be an either/or proposition?
Nahum
Appreciate the great post, Nahum. It’s a bit intimidating to reply to, not only because I don’t have it in me at the moment to match the personal nature of your post, but also because I have tons to do before leaving for four days tomorrow. Given that, probably best to simply add some clarifications to the question I posed during our email thread that prompted this.
You talk about there being a false dichotomy in the question, “Is it more important that we seek to understand ourselves or that we seek to transcend ourselves.” Agree there is one, especially if phrased that way. That wasn’t how I phrased my question, however. What I wrote was a query for each of us to ask of ourselves which way, out of those two, we lean most. My question was for personal responses to: “Are we driven primarily by the effort to try to understand ourselves, or are we driven more by the ideal of trying to transcend ourselves?” In addition to that question, I also added that either choice would carry with it things that we’d probably both like and not like in terms of what our answer would say about us. In adding that, I was trying to convey that I realize this is a complex question with interesting implications (clearly more than just an either-or dichotomy). My thought was that the question would be a good self-reflection starter, which I’m excited was true in your case.
So what is it about me that would lean more toward the self-transcendence side of the scale? For me, I think it comes down mostly to pragmatism. I recognize the urge to grow beyond my biology and don’t find it all that productive to worry how much of that urge comes from my DNA and how much comes from something that I might call my spirit. Whatever the percentage turns out to be (or even if it turns out to be 100% gene driven), I’m focusing on the experience of wanting to transcend and actively trying to grow in that direction. If I’m actually not free and am following a purely biological script, since I don’t experience that, I lean into what I feel in my experience/cognition/guts to be true.
I guess my bottom line is fearing “paralysis from analysis” and all the potential traps of too much introspection, but at the same time I hope that my pragmatic sensibilities are heightened enough to recognize when I’m not getting places the way I want to get and will then drive me for a time more into the self-understanding part of the dance.
Jonah
Jonah,
I apologize for misrepresenting your question. I knew I might have had it a bit wrong, but allowed laziness to overcome the impulse to double-check, and presumed I was close enough. I wasn’t, and I appreciate your kind clarification.
Nevertheless, even with the clarification, we return once again, to what feels to me like an either/or choice enforced by your worldview and not mine. From my perspective, I see the question as an examination of two lobes of the same fruit. How could one be “driven primarily by the effort to try to understand” himself without that being an effort to gather the information needed to transcend himself? I don’t see the struggle to understand oneself as “analysis paralysis.” To me, stranding oneself in an endless loop of navel-gazing, self-examination is an effort to avoid understanding oneself.
We so often return to an underlying presumption that ones biology is somehow of less value than one’s soul, or perhaps it would be better to say an underlying presumption that I have denied the existence of the soul. While I am open to arguments against its existence, I am not necessarily convinced. So, let me state categorically that I do not see one as more valuable (or more logically viable) than the other. I have never claimed a positivist interpretation of the world, nor have I ever claimed a dualistic interpretation. Instead, I see the body and the mind (or, if you prefer, soul) as existing in some kind of mutually influential dance. I see them both, then, as of equal value. This means that we cannot dismiss the importance of brain chemistry on experience and cognition. Nor can we dismiss the “mind” as being nothing more than the sum of physical, bio-chemical processes.
But back to the notion of transcendence. Can one actually transcend oneself? Isn’t the transcendence of which you speak merely an increased understanding of oneself? I want to believe, I guess, that we can solve our disagreement by stipulating to terms.
Nahum
Nahum,
Thanks for the thoughtful reply and invitation to keep the discussion going. Some responses:
First, I don’t really see the question I asked as an “either/or” driven by my worldview and not yours. I’ll admit to a bit more openness to the idea of a soul/spirit that exists (or is capable of existing) outside the body than you do, but in my explanation of the pragmatic reasons I choose to lean toward self-transcendence I revealed that I’m not committed to that as an absolute position and suggested that even if I were a 100% biological being, I’d still choose the same path. Again, my question about our individual “leaning” one way or another was for “self-discovery,” as a jumping off point for reflection, not as a statement about the final facts of the existence of the soul or not.
Of my “analysis paralysis” statement, I was thinking more in terms of Buddhist concept of skillful means (upaya), which basically suggests that we can really impede our way to enlightenment (ending suffering, in the Buddhist case) by too much thinking and worrying about the ultimate and full-facted nature of things. So, for instance, on the question of whether or not we have a soul, Guatama would often refuse to answer, saying something like the person who focuses on this question is like a warrior with a potentially fatal wound from an arrow who will not let the doctors remove the arrow from his chest until he has learned what type of wood the arrow was made of, what type of bird the fletching had come from, what is the name of the man who shot him, wwhere this person was in the birth order of his family, what caste he had come from, etc. The dude needs the arrow removed! Who cares about the rest of those questions! This is what I meant by “paralysis by analysis.” Sometimes we simply need to get out of our own way and on to growth.
Because of this propensity to overthink, on the question of the existence of a soul Guatama would most often say that we don’t have one. However, he never claimed to be making a statement of fact, but one of expediency. Because it was more useful for helping people on the way to enlightenment (to cease clinging to the idea of permanence, that they are their thoughts, and/or other illusions of the world) to think that they do not have one, he would angle his teachings in this direction.
In somewhat this same way, I make the pragmatic choice to believe that I’m more than my biology, that my felt call to transcend my current state of being and understanding is more than a biological imperative at work, as that better matches my experience. It saves time and keeps me in a forward press. Yet, I also acknowledged in my reply that I believe my pragmatism serves to me as a check to going off the deep end in this direction, as it provides me with feedback on my progress (or lack thereof). If I’ve stalled or regressed, it’s time to really figure out why—and that’s when I refocus on the self-understanding part of the dance. What’s going on here? Why did this seem to work or be self-transformative before but not now? Does my theory need adjustment? My praxis? Etc.
You want us to define terms, and I’ll do my best. But first I have to say that your statement, “To me, stranding oneself in an endless loop of navel-gazing, self-examination is an effort to avoid understanding oneself,” is not a kind or generous characterization of anything that I’m talking about. Yes, I like many things about Eastern approaches and the insights that come via practitioners of meditative disciplines, but that statement neither fits me and my pragmatism nor the practice and level of dedication to growth of those whose insights I value.
Re terms: You ask above,“Can one actually transcend oneself? Isn’t the transcendence of which you speak merely an increased understanding of oneself?” To me, I don’t see what I’m suggesting as self-transcendence as transcending “myself” so much as not settling for the purely biological as an explanation, definition, or limitation for all that I am or may become. I don’t know that the biological doesn’t fully handle all those things, but since I feel like I’m more, I’m going to “lean” toward acting in ways that I feel are true and see where it takes me. On the second half of your question, then, “Isn’t the transcendence of which you speak merely an increased understanding of oneself?” I would have to say no, as I really am not trying to “understand” myself so much as to “become more” of myself (if anything more of myself really does exist and is accessible in ways not approachable by the hard sciences).
Helpful at all?
Jonah
I was not insinuating that you are engaged in or prone to be engaged in “navel-gazing, self-examination” let alone that you are one who tries “to avoid understanding oneself.” Yes, to speak of you like this would be ungenerous, but I assure you; I was not. This it is not at all how I think of you. I see you as an admirably outward-turned individual.
We began this conversation with your question to the rest of us: Do we individually see ourselves as primarily driven toward the goal of self-understanding or self-transcendence? My original post here was an attempt to explain how I saw both drives operating synchronously in my life. In your comment, you brought up “analysis paralysis,” and I assumed you might be seeing my effort to understand myself as something like someone stuck for years in psychoanalysis trying to ferret out the roots of his unhappiness. The intent behind my response was to reassure you that I didn’t see the practical value of such passive analysis. I was trying to say that I see the goal of self-understanding as other than this dead-end into which some people become trapped.
Thanks, Nahum.
A way that I think of both drives is from William James who writes of the two commandments of “would-be knowers” as Believe Truth and Shun Error. Both are vital, but for James (and for me) I see the Believe Truth one as ultimately more important as it suggests more of a intellectual and spiritual life of adventure. I also like a quote by a theologian named Bernard Loomer that it’s more important for something to be interesting than it is for it to be true. His angle is that the truth stuff takes care of itself as you continue to live with ideas long enough and see if they have staying power, if they continue to reveal connections with other truths, etc.
In many ways, I think this issue of which drive takes precedence is one of temperament and not always autobiography. But sometimes I nevertheless see people who have been burned by having given too much of themselves over to an idea or set of ideas that turn out to stagnate or feel destructive to them. As a result, they will go into protection mode and miss out, I think, on great adventures. Hence my question to all of us is perhaps a chance to also reflect on how much we feel the “lean” toward one or the other of these drives comes from our basic life orientations formed super early in our development (or pre-earth life, if so inclined to entertain that idea) and how much from our adventures with Mormonism or other things that ended up becoming very complicated for us.
But, by definition, believing truth is to have simultaneously shunned error. This seems to be so whether or not the error shunned was consciously seen as in opposition to the truth being examined and eventually believed. We could then say that the opposite is also true—an error shunned is simultaneously a truth believed. Perhaps I am now the one being too dichotomous in juxtaposing one truth to one error. I can imagine the belief in a truth causing the simultaneous rejection of many errors. Perhaps the opposite is also true. Nevertheless, I cannot think of an example where a truth has no equal and opposite erroneous alternative, nor can I imagine the reverse. Can you?
But I am unsure how this intriguing but equally either/or proposition from James has anything to do with your original question. Do you see a tendency toward self-discovery as a tendency toward shunning error rather than toward believing truth?
Your description of those who have been burned by “having given too much of themselves over to an idea or set of ideas that turn out to stagnate or feel destructive to them” is one you have applied to some of us here, and perhaps it is apt. But connecting this description of a type of person with your question about a predisposition toward one category of quest or the other doesn’t apply as neatly as you might have imagined. The tendency toward self-discovery does not necessarily correlate to those who are once-burned, twice-shy, nor does the tendency toward self-transcendence necessarily correlate to those who are still open to “the adventure.”
I can see how someone rendered cautious by religious disappointment might not likely be someone who tends toward self-transcendence. But I can’t see how religious disappointment must impose a tendency toward self-discovery. Couldn’t such disappointment render one uninterested in either quest? Neither can I see how someone who is struggling to know himself must necessarily not be open to “the adventure?”
You keep insisting that your question is not an either/or arrangement, but you keep dividing things into two camps: those who tend toward self-examination and those who tend toward self-transcendence; those who believe truth and those who shun error; those who have been hurt or angered by religious disappointment and those who get over it to pick out the best parts and move on; and, the biological self and the self that is “more.”
I guess I’m predisposed to seek coherent unification.
The Loomer quote just throws me. It confuses me and makes me wonder if we are meaningfully communicating. The Loomer quote seems to me to be the motivational grounding of all conspiracy theorists and doctrinal hobbyists. That’s not a personal attack. I am not dismissing your struggle for self-transcendence as simply “interesting” but without a needful foundation in truth. But why bring it up? Are you saying that self-discovery is not interesting even if it is true, that self-transcendence is more interesting than self-discovery so it doesn’t matter if self-transcendence is possible? What do you mean by transcendence if not another binary process of moving from one place to another (implicitly moving from a lesser place to a “more” place)? And how is self-discovery neither “more” nor transcendent–moving from a place of lesser knowledge to more knowledge?
I guess what I am wondering is if there is an implicit judgment in all these dual formations? It’s getting to feel as if there is.
TWO commandments. Everything I have said talks about valuing both. Every time you call something a dualism, I simply see an articulation of poles and not any kind of exclusivism. We got started on all of this on a question of personal “lean” rather than anything either/or. “Implicit judgment in the dual formations”? Again, in my mind they aren’t dual formations in any kind of right/wrong/better/worse way, so I don’t see it or feel it or mean any judgment whenever I throw things like thes out there. The fact that you lean the way you do is great with me. I don’t feel critiqued or implicitly judged by you because you lean in a different direction than me, that you have a different temperament. I thought we are busy in these posts in articulating various places where too much emphasis in a particular direction would run into issues that would be worth pausing on before going too far in that direction. Sorry if you somehow get a vibe from my notes that seems personal or implicitly judging in some kind of negative way. Our minds don’t think alike—Hallelujah! That’s the only kind of good/bad judgment I’ve got going on.
On the issue of “believing truth is to have simultaneously shunned error,” your comment as well as the part later in the first paragraph in which you say, “I cannot think of an example where a truth has no equal and opposite erroneous alternative, nor can I imagine the reverse. Can you?” belie to me the idea that truth, for you, is primarily about propositions: “If I avoid holding a particular wrong idea, I am automatically aligned with a particular true idea.” On one level I can agree with you, but it’s not the realm of discussion I was thinking of in offering the statements. The two commandments of would-be knowers, as well as the Loomer stuff on “interesting more important than true” are about different temperaments, different approaches to life/novelty/chaos. Your question about thinking of “equals” and “opposites” has very little meaning in this realm.
You ask: “Do you see a tendency toward self-discovery as a tendency toward shunning error rather than toward believing truth?” I think this is a good question, for you are right that it represents a shift in the original question about self-transcendence vs self-discovery. Likewise, your statement, “the tendency toward self-discovery does not necessarily correlate to those who are once-burned, twice-shy, nor does the tendency toward self-transcendence necessarily correlate to those who are still open to ‘the adventure,’” is something I would agree with. These are separate questions and there aren’t clean lines to connect between “self-transcend” and “believe truth,” and vice versa.
At the same time, I don’t think I’ve really attempted to make those links. As I examine where those began to insert themselves in the thread, I think I must have just been looking for something with which to re-energize things–they are me throwing out some philosophical bytes that I like after we stagnated on the original question. Each of the “self-transcend/self-discover” “believe truth/shun error” and “interesting rather than true” are about temperamental “leanings,” so I guess they all felt similar enough to me to belong in the same blog thread. For reasons stated so far, however, I don’t think you’re right that I “keep dividing things into two camps: those who tend toward self-examination and those who tend toward self-transcendence; those who believe truth and those who shun error; those who have been hurt or angered by religious disappointment and those who get over it to pick out the best parts and move on; and, the biological self and the self that is ‘more.’” I think you’re seeing hard dualisms where I was articulating temperamental poles. That you might think I am making the dualisms seem more than that seems to me coming from what may be real differences in what it means for something to be said/claimed to be “true.” If you want to dig into that, we need to start a new thread.