Ridden of the Self
[Epistemic status: Poetry (?) + personal but possibly with implications for understanding agency.]
sing destruction, sing of unfullfillment
search abandoned, let the blood be fevered
ridden of the self provided things get easier
ignite our minds and let's burn brighter
The Wonders At Your Feet has long been one of my favorite songs by DT. Something in the verse talking about "getting rid of the self" was especially appealing to me. What was so appealing? Probably some combination of at least the following:
- It sounded mystically radical.
- It pointed at the possibility of becoming more powerful by abandoning excessive metacognition1 and/or undesirable parts of one's self-model (or could be interpreted as attempting such pointing).
- It ringed true with experience of flow (but also of my mood and performance often seeming better when having reduced self-awareness).
But, by Chesterton's fence and the self probably being a human universal, there's probably a reason why humans have the kind of self-awareness they have and so one should be prudent not to "ignite one's mind and burn brighter" without understanding the reasons why one's mind is not ignited already.
I've been reading Christine Korsgaard recently. In her version of Kant-inspired philosophy of agency (and I think also in Kant's original thought?), selfhood is closely tied to agency. More specifically, one's self(-conception) is the source of one's normativity, normativity that creates the possibility of one being an agent by aiming effectively at realizing that normativity.2
If this is the case,3 then transformations of self are very much akin to value change, but perhaps even more basic, because they change something like the ontology/language in which value is expressed or constraints that it must obey, thus being closer to an ontological crisis.
Sometimes I think of large scale metrics as like standardized value currency. Like, when you go on … the standard value system doing it will have much more utility but partially because you redefined utility.
Something like this might also occur on the self side of one's agency in that one becomes more of what one wants to be because one redefined the normative principles that one is governed by, i.e. one's self.
Coming back to flow in psychology, can we somehow squeeze it into this? One way of doing it, the most naïve and straightforward one, would be: Plasticity of normative constraints at a shorter timescale (/lower level of organization of a compositional agent) is necessary/productive for stability of normative constraints at a longer timescale (/higher level of organization of a compositional agent).