If your "self" is a blue sky, or a stone in a mosaic - not a broken machine, or a lone fighter - the metaphor makes a huge difference, says Anna Schaffner
We believe there’s nothing more political than the concept of human nature that rests, often unavowed and unexamined, at the heart of your project or initiatives. It’s what we really mean when we talk about the “I” in our “I - We - World” political axis - the sense of personal possibility and potential (or constraints on that) which deserve to be considered, as equally as our communal and global commitments.
The new director of emergence at the platform Emerge (the sister organisation to the think-and-do-tank Perspectiva, with which we have strong relations), Anna Katherina Schaffner, has written a perfect piece in Psyche magazine about diverse “metaphors of the self” - and how important is it to be conscious of how effective they are in shaping our actions and vision.
Some extracts:
The dominant technology mind-metaphor of our age is the mind-as-computer. We’re warned of cognitive overload and advised to switch off more often to recharge our batteries.
But we’re not machines. We’re biopsychosocial organisms, embedded, embodied and encultured, developing in constant feedback with our surroundings. If we become too entangled in computer mind-metaphors, our imagination will suffer.
We’ll trust that we can be repaired by external techno-magical interventions, rather than accepting that all inner work takes patience, effort and time.
…These kinds of metaphors [“invest in yourself”, “build your personal capital”] reduce us to achievement-driven and advantage-seeking entities, condemned constantly to self-optimise, as if our highest purpose is to be effective instruments. But effectiveness for effectiveness’s sake is an empty aim.
Such imagery also casts us as competitors vying for scarce resources in a playing field in which the fittest survive – in this case the mentally fit, the emotionally agile, those who are the best self-managers.
This notion of self-optimisation contrasts starkly with the much older ideas of self-cultivation and Bildung: a life-long process of socio-psychological formation, learning and inner development. The ancient idea of self-cultivation, as explored by Confucius, Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Aristotle and the Stoics, for example, evokes a slower, incremental, less dramatic mode of developing our good qualities.
It emphasises ethical and character development over skills enhancement. Using botanical imagery, it encourages us to nurture our virtues patiently, as we would nurture seedlings in a garden, so that we might grow and blossom.
We must find the right climate and soil for us to flourish. Occasionally, we might have to prune wild growth, plant new seeds and pull out weeds.
…A welcome shift from an internal to an external locus of meaning is also apparent in contemporary developments in psychotherapy. Russ Harris is a prominent practitioner of acceptance and commitment therapy – or ACT, a form of psychotherapy that emerged recently from CBT [cognitive behavioural therapy] with a greater focus on living according to your values, accepting difficult emotions rather than controlling them.
In his book The Happiness Trap (2007), Harris suggests that we imagine our permanent, observing self as the blue sky, and all thoughts and emotions as weather – passing phenomena that, no matter how tempestuous and scary, are unable ever to harm the sky.
We can also think of unhelpful thoughts as unruly passengers in the bus we’re driving – we can’t get rid of them, but we can choose not to follow their advice, just letting them bellow in the back while we focus on the road.
Perhaps we’ll see a broader cultural paradigm-change soon, inviting us once again to imagine the self as relational, interdependent and pro-social. This new kind of self could, as the US psychologist Robert Kegan suggested in The Evolving Self (1983), be understood as a work in progress, a process rather than a fixed entity, as dynamic rather than static.
I believe that our new self-metaphors need to be based on a more sophisticated conception of the relationship between the self and the social, giving birth to notions of selves that are capable of striving for self-authorship, intimacy and contribution at the same time.
Nothing, then, is more urgent than minding our metaphors – especially our mind-metaphors. They not only shape the way we experience and seek to improve our inner lives, but they can perpetuate specific sociopolitical assumptions – for example, based on individualism rather than community.
We should pay more careful attention to the imagery we use to talk about our inner lives, and be less tolerant of metaphors that cast the self as a broken machine, an entrepreneurial entity, or a lone fighter in enemy territory.
I hope we can begin to create different kinds of metaphors that emphasise our connectedness – comparing us to bees, for example, to threads in a multilayered fabric; or to tiny, multicoloured mosaic stones, each unique and distinctive, but together forming a beautiful work of art.