authenticity, selfhood and the crisis of modernity

[cebus_albifrons]

I know that I said I'd be posting most of my enneagram stuff elsewhere, but I decided this one warrants being cross-posted. It's an idea I've been mulling over for some time now

Comments

[forsakenmystic]

Good insights. Interesting to see this taken from a philosophical standpoint as opposed to the spiritual one, which is where I normally see this sort of fleshed out. I would say that the despair over finding authenticity is what sets maybe the INFx or Four apart from those who just wish to find authenticity and selfhood. I know so many people who are interested, and intrigued by the idea of finding self, but they seem to miss the despairing aspect that characterizes the 4 or INFx...I find myself literally despairing over it, fearing that I won't find a stable sense, the search can become compulsive and all consuming, but even when something is found it is not enough. I believe this is because the self cannot be grasped through ideological or even mental terms, that recognition of self must come on an essential level...probably pre-verbal, intuitive, and possibly spiritual level that precedes or proceeds linguistic convention. I have been trying to dis-identify with my thoughts and emotions but wonder if this is a relatively impossible task...

Anyway, good insights, thanks for sharing it.

[cebus_albifrons]

I would say that the despair over finding authenticity is what sets maybe the INFx or Four apart from those who just wish to find authenticity and selfhood. I know so many people who are interested, and intrigued by the idea of finding self, but they seem to miss the despairing aspect that characterizes the 4 or INFx...I find myself literally despairing over it, fearing that I won't find a stable sense, the search can become compulsive and all consuming, but even when something is found it is not enough

...but that's just the point that philosophers like Kierkegaard and Møller were making, that the despair over not finding a self was a crisis that came following the late-medieval period. The shift from an agrarian to an industrial way of life caused selfhood to become an issue because, quite frankly, the idea of a self was non-existent prior to that. Selfhood is a distinctly modern concept, and as a result, so is the idea that a self can be authentic or inauthentic. It's why it irritates me so much when Riso & Hudson lump all the existential philosophers in the 4w5/5w4 camp. A lot of what those philosophers wrote can be situated historically within a cultural epidemic of despair over what it means to be an authentic self, and an intense fear of being an inauthentic self. If you look through not just the philosophy of the time, but the literature as well, there isn't just an interest in these questions but a preoccupation with questions of selfhood, and in particular, the affected "dandy" is a source of intense derision, if not a bit of comic relief. This isn't just a passing concern, but something that existed on an intense level, still persists today, and is a fundamental part of human experience.

If the a concept of the self didn't come about until modernity, though, this raises some interesting questions about what constitutes type four. If it's a socio-historical phenomenon and not something that is a fixation, what then makes the fixation of four? How does one trace type four back to a pre-medieval era if the preoccupation with self is a four fixation, yet there was no concept of the self at that time? The only thing I can come up with is that you have to get back to basics, look at things like the fixation of melancholy and the passion of envy. Take a look, for example, at Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium. You could see the fixations of envy, melancholy and Narnajo's "sickness love" in him, even though he doesn't exhibit that sense of searching for the self or compulsive uniqueness that is in so much of the literature.

[forsakenmystic]

Yeah I see what you/they are saying. That brings to question whether or not certain types have developed out of a societal malaise. Certain egos perhaps weren't as prominent or perhaps didn't exist prior to certain societal conventions or ideas that sort of seeped into the ether, therefore causing a fixation to develop out of those changes in society.

You'll have to forgive my seeming ignorance or difficulty in grasping philosophical concepts...I'm not meaning to restate what you had already espoused...See, this is precisely why I dropped out of philosophy :-\...it makes me feel silly and then I just feel bad about myself, haha...

I'll probably have to reread it to fully integrate it.

[cebus_albifrons]

Hmm, no I haven't read it. I'll have to add that to the reading list. Lately, I've been doing a lot of reading about Kant, and going over some Kierkegaard and Hoelderlin stuff in anticipation of the conference. I know some women that work on feminist readings of identity and selfhood, so it would probably be worth adding to my Amazon wishlist.

I think I have ethical problems with anxiety and a mental block towards a subject being raised to the level of PTSD, even humorously. I think that it trivializes the difficulties experienced by people who have PTSD from things like being in combat, being raped, domestic violence, etcetera. That said, the biggest problem people encounter when they read philosophy comes from how they approach it. When most people read stuff in, say, a social science textbook, or literature, etcetera you can generally read through once and get a fairly decent understanding of material. Philosophy is a bit different though. You usually need to read through it a few times to understand it, and you have to train yourself to catch when you're "glossing"--reading but not really comprehending, since that's where important stuff is missed. I'm still working on this. Something that helps immensely is secondary literature. With a lot of stuff in philosophy, especially existentialism and phenomenology, it helps a lot to read at least one or two commentaries before/during the reading of the actual text.

[forsakenmystic]

Didn't mean to offend.

[cebus_albifrons]

You didn't offend. I just didn't agree.

[forsakenmystic]

I meant about the PTSD. I guess it was a thoughtless thing to say. I don't want to trivialize anyone's pain...It's like saying someone who's unpredictable is "bipolar" I hate it when people do that and my comment can be likened to that kind of ignorance about mental illness. I spent 2 years learning about mental illness and human relations and then I say something like that.

Nonetheless, cheers on the insightful post.

[cebus_albifrons]

Yeah, I can understand that. Well, I don't think the ethically perfect person exists, which is why those sort of questions are important to probe, so I tend to distinguish in my mind between the ethics of one individual act and the goodness of the person. The only exception is with stuff that's really egregious. There are small lines and big lines, and then there's the point of no return. In other words...don't beat yourself up about it too much, we all have those moments.

Also, FWIW, whenever I say something like "I have an ethical problem with..." it's more of a position stater and conversation starter than a final judgment. I think discourse over questions of ethics are important, and sometimes the only way an objective stance on them can be worked out, so it's more of an intellectual response from me than an emotional one when I say stuff like that.