Robert Kegan. In Over Our Heads
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«In my thirties I wrote The Evolving Self, proposing a view of human being as meaning-making and exploring the inner experience and outer contours of our transformations in consciousness throughout the lifespan. Although the book was published over a decade ago, it is still rare for two weeks to go by without someone putting pen to paper to write me about it. Some years ago, when I proudly told my father that it was being translated into German and Korean, he said, "That's great! Now when is it going to be translated into English?" And in truth, these fortnightly letters from readers occasionally have a similar theme:
I appreciated the "sincerely.”»
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«In my thirties I wrote The Evolving Self, proposing a view of human being as meaning-making and exploring the inner experience and outer contours of our transformations in consciousness throughout the lifespan. Although the book was published over a decade ago, it is still rare for two weeks to go by without someone putting pen to paper to write me about it. Some years ago, when I proudly told my father that it was being translated into German and Korean, he said, "That's great! Now when is it going to be translated into English?" And in truth, these fortnightly letters from readers occasionally have a similar theme:
Dear Dr. Kegan,
We had to read your book in our psychology class. I can't believe the publishers let the thing out in this condition. No one in our class understands what you are saying. Not even our teacher, and he assigned it! Who are you trying to impress with all those big words? I got so mad reading your book I wanted to come to Boston and break your teeth.
Sincerely,
[writer's name]
I appreciated the "sincerely.”»
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Giovanni Stanghellini, René Rosfort. Emotions and Personhood
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«[…] to be a person is not a fact, but a continuous task.
[…]
Personhood characterises what we all have in common, and still no person is the same as another. Second, personhood makes evident the problem of identity through time. We are the same person throughout our life, but the sameness of our identity as a person is continuously challenged by the changes that all persons undergo through time. How can we talk about being the same person when, more often than not, we change drastically over the span of a lifetime? Finally, the notion of personhood emphasises the otherness at the heart of selfhood.
This third feature somehow brings together the two previous ones (normative ambivalence and per- sonal identity) in the question of how to cope with tension, and sometimes conflict, between otherness and selfhood in being a person over time. I am a person in the eyes of other people, and my particular way of being a person is continuously challenged by the gaze of other people. Again, I am who I am, but I might feel that I am not myself, or that the person that others take me to be, is not the person that I truly am. My choices and actions when done leave my control and may result in unexpected, happy or unfortunate, results that in some way or another influence the person that I am. The responsibility for my words and deeds does not end when they are out of my mouth or hands, so to speak. The future can be oppressive (as in shame, obligation, anxiety, or despair) as well as liberating (as in hope, possibility, surprise, or ambition). My body changes, becomes different as the years go by, and I may become alienated by these transformations. I can accept such changes, despair because of them, or fight them ferociously, but every one of those attitudes affects the person that I am. In short, to be a person involves a permanent struggle with the otherness that constitutes the person that I am.»
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«[…] to be a person is not a fact, but a continuous task.
[…]
Personhood characterises what we all have in common, and still no person is the same as another. Second, personhood makes evident the problem of identity through time. We are the same person throughout our life, but the sameness of our identity as a person is continuously challenged by the changes that all persons undergo through time. How can we talk about being the same person when, more often than not, we change drastically over the span of a lifetime? Finally, the notion of personhood emphasises the otherness at the heart of selfhood.
This third feature somehow brings together the two previous ones (normative ambivalence and per- sonal identity) in the question of how to cope with tension, and sometimes conflict, between otherness and selfhood in being a person over time. I am a person in the eyes of other people, and my particular way of being a person is continuously challenged by the gaze of other people. Again, I am who I am, but I might feel that I am not myself, or that the person that others take me to be, is not the person that I truly am. My choices and actions when done leave my control and may result in unexpected, happy or unfortunate, results that in some way or another influence the person that I am. The responsibility for my words and deeds does not end when they are out of my mouth or hands, so to speak. The future can be oppressive (as in shame, obligation, anxiety, or despair) as well as liberating (as in hope, possibility, surprise, or ambition). My body changes, becomes different as the years go by, and I may become alienated by these transformations. I can accept such changes, despair because of them, or fight them ferociously, but every one of those attitudes affects the person that I am. In short, to be a person involves a permanent struggle with the otherness that constitutes the person that I am.»
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чугунные тетради
Giovanni Stanghellini, René Rosfort. Emotions and Personhood — «[…] to be a person is not a fact, but a continuous task. […] Personhood characterises what we all have in common, and still no person is the same as another. Second, personhood makes evident…
Giovanni Stanghellini, René Rosfort. Emotions and Personhood
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«Our particularly personal experience of the world is shaped by both subjectivity and biology. We have feelings of being, on the one hand, significantly unique and active, and on the other, of being insignificantly anonymous and passive. Our existence as persons is constituted by a complex interplay of voluntary and involuntary factors that restrict, enable, and form our lives. A human life is never merely a result of pure accident or sheer will. Neither is it a product of determined necessity or amorphous possibility. A human life is lived somewhere in between those extremes. This is obviously a common insight that most people are familiar with, and try to cope with, in their own lives. Then again, most philosophy is about articulating and arguing for or against common insights.»
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«Our particularly personal experience of the world is shaped by both subjectivity and biology. We have feelings of being, on the one hand, significantly unique and active, and on the other, of being insignificantly anonymous and passive. Our existence as persons is constituted by a complex interplay of voluntary and involuntary factors that restrict, enable, and form our lives. A human life is never merely a result of pure accident or sheer will. Neither is it a product of determined necessity or amorphous possibility. A human life is lived somewhere in between those extremes. This is obviously a common insight that most people are familiar with, and try to cope with, in their own lives. Then again, most philosophy is about articulating and arguing for or against common insights.»
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Giovanni Stanghellini, René Rosfort. Emotions and Personhood
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«We all share a commonsense, linear conception of time: the past influences the present and the future. If something stressful happened in the past, this will affect the present and the future. This linear, unidirectional conception of time has, however, proved to be incomplete. Not only do we make sense of our present through our past experiences; we also understand our past in terms of the present. This was an important insight of early psychoanalysis called Nachträglichkeit. An event placed in the past (especially in the remote past of early childhood) may become traumatic when the person develops the capacity to attribute to it a traumatic (in psychoanalysis, often sexual) meaning. The event itself does not contain the traumatic meaning. There is a backward attribution of meaning to the event that becomes traumatic. A present experience gives new meaning to past experiences. The fragments of our past are reorganised in the light of our present experience, mood, and cognition. Once this has happened, the newly attributed meaning becomes fixed and may be lived, rather than as a post hoc attribution, as a discovery.»
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«We all share a commonsense, linear conception of time: the past influences the present and the future. If something stressful happened in the past, this will affect the present and the future. This linear, unidirectional conception of time has, however, proved to be incomplete. Not only do we make sense of our present through our past experiences; we also understand our past in terms of the present. This was an important insight of early psychoanalysis called Nachträglichkeit. An event placed in the past (especially in the remote past of early childhood) may become traumatic when the person develops the capacity to attribute to it a traumatic (in psychoanalysis, often sexual) meaning. The event itself does not contain the traumatic meaning. There is a backward attribution of meaning to the event that becomes traumatic. A present experience gives new meaning to past experiences. The fragments of our past are reorganised in the light of our present experience, mood, and cognition. Once this has happened, the newly attributed meaning becomes fixed and may be lived, rather than as a post hoc attribution, as a discovery.»
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Giovanni Stanghellini, René Rosfort. Emotions and Personhood
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«Each specific feeling-sensation has its own distinctive feeling-flow. For instance, feeling sad is flowing downwards in a sinking movement. Sadness feels like a slow, sagging flow during which the ‘I’ slumps down under its own weight. In joy, on the other hand, the feeling-sensation flows upwards in a radiated manner. In hilarious laughter, we feel flowing upwards in quick, staccato surges. In retaliatory anger, we painfully feel driven forwards, violently attacking. Love makes us flow forwards in a gently binding way. Pride goes upwards as an inflated rising. Humiliation flows downwards in a plummeting manner; it is a quick and violent emotional drop. In repugnance, the feeling-sensation flows backwards. In awe the feeling-sensation flows backwards and downwards in a shuddering way. Fear makes us move backwards in a shrinking and cringing manner, whereas in anxiety we feel suspended in quavering over an inner bottomlessness.»
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«Each specific feeling-sensation has its own distinctive feeling-flow. For instance, feeling sad is flowing downwards in a sinking movement. Sadness feels like a slow, sagging flow during which the ‘I’ slumps down under its own weight. In joy, on the other hand, the feeling-sensation flows upwards in a radiated manner. In hilarious laughter, we feel flowing upwards in quick, staccato surges. In retaliatory anger, we painfully feel driven forwards, violently attacking. Love makes us flow forwards in a gently binding way. Pride goes upwards as an inflated rising. Humiliation flows downwards in a plummeting manner; it is a quick and violent emotional drop. In repugnance, the feeling-sensation flows backwards. In awe the feeling-sensation flows backwards and downwards in a shuddering way. Fear makes us move backwards in a shrinking and cringing manner, whereas in anxiety we feel suspended in quavering over an inner bottomlessness.»
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чугунные тетради
Giovanni Stanghellini, René Rosfort. Emotions and Personhood — «Each specific feeling-sensation has its own distinctive feeling-flow. For instance, feeling sad is flowing downwards in a sinking movement. Sadness feels like a slow, sagging flow during which…
Giovanni Stanghellini, René Rosfort. Emotions and Personhood
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«The above described feeling-sensations adhere to the ‘I’ as a whole, and as such they must be distinguished from other feeling-sensations which merely adhere to the body.
This is the case for fatigue, in which we feel flowing downwards, as in sadness, but with the important difference that in fatigue we experience going down in a dragging manner. Fatigue drags the ‘I’ down from below. There is, so to say, the sensation of a weight external to the ‘I’, adhering primarily to the body, which weighs it down. The subjective feeling or internal characterisation of an emotion not only entails a feeling-sensation, that is, the experience of oneself moving forwards or backwards, upwards or downwards. It also entails experiencing a corresponding movement of the environment that Smith calls ‘feeling-tonality’ […]
Feeling-tonalities are not felt to be features of the ‘I’, but of the world. We perceive the world as imbued with these flows that appear to be sensuous characters of the world and its parts. We have seen that in sadness the feeling-sensation flows downwards in a sinking manner. Likewise, in the (world-related) feeling-tonality things appear to be forlornly sinking and sagging downwards. In joy the feeling-sensation flows upwards in a radiated manner, imbuing things in one’s environmental surroundings. In the corresponding feeling-tonality, things are characterised by uplifted momentum. In love I flow forwards in a gentle and binding manner; in a similar way, the feeling-tonality flows forwards, towards me. In fear things flow forwards, towards me in a looming and menacing manner, while I cringe and shrink from them. In repugnance, while I flow backwards, the repugnant thing flows forwards, towards me. And in awe, while I flow backwards and downwards, in a shuddering manner, the awful thing is flowing forwards and upwards—towering above me.
We may call this approach to emotional experience a choreography of emotions, since like a choreography it combines the design of the movements of a person (a dancer)with the design of the environment (the scenario) in which these movements are situated.»
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«The above described feeling-sensations adhere to the ‘I’ as a whole, and as such they must be distinguished from other feeling-sensations which merely adhere to the body.
This is the case for fatigue, in which we feel flowing downwards, as in sadness, but with the important difference that in fatigue we experience going down in a dragging manner. Fatigue drags the ‘I’ down from below. There is, so to say, the sensation of a weight external to the ‘I’, adhering primarily to the body, which weighs it down. The subjective feeling or internal characterisation of an emotion not only entails a feeling-sensation, that is, the experience of oneself moving forwards or backwards, upwards or downwards. It also entails experiencing a corresponding movement of the environment that Smith calls ‘feeling-tonality’ […]
Feeling-tonalities are not felt to be features of the ‘I’, but of the world. We perceive the world as imbued with these flows that appear to be sensuous characters of the world and its parts. We have seen that in sadness the feeling-sensation flows downwards in a sinking manner. Likewise, in the (world-related) feeling-tonality things appear to be forlornly sinking and sagging downwards. In joy the feeling-sensation flows upwards in a radiated manner, imbuing things in one’s environmental surroundings. In the corresponding feeling-tonality, things are characterised by uplifted momentum. In love I flow forwards in a gentle and binding manner; in a similar way, the feeling-tonality flows forwards, towards me. In fear things flow forwards, towards me in a looming and menacing manner, while I cringe and shrink from them. In repugnance, while I flow backwards, the repugnant thing flows forwards, towards me. And in awe, while I flow backwards and downwards, in a shuddering manner, the awful thing is flowing forwards and upwards—towering above me.
We may call this approach to emotional experience a choreography of emotions, since like a choreography it combines the design of the movements of a person (a dancer)with the design of the environment (the scenario) in which these movements are situated.»
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