Who am I?
Arguably, one of the great gifts modernity offered humanity has been the gift of “the self”; and like all gifts it cloaked a curse. So much has been said in critique of the modern idea of the self-made, autonomous individual that one almost dreads bringing it up for fear a reader’s gag reflex may activate.
I wouldn’t have wanted to live with the pre-modern understanding which rendered most of humanity pawns in life’s chess match. A match in which the only players “of worth” carried special titles – and none more so than the King.
The discovery of the individual was an important corrective. Thanks Søren K. et al.
The postmodern loss of self is huge. What is a self?
I believe we need new language to describe self. “Person” and “Individual” have been useful terms; but both terms have been used in the modern project to highlight individuality as part of the modern corrective to the pre-modern. In postmodern writings hyphenated terms are often used as a corrective for the modern. Terms like: social-self, communal-being, relational-self, etc. Yet, hyphenated language rarely gains cultural traction.
I’ve been playing with the term “Codividual.” Codividual would be an alternative to “social-self.” Consider the term individual; “In” often suggests something like “toward”, thus in-dividual suggests a movement toward dividuation; toward being separated from the rest of humanity.
In my proposal, codividual still highlights the unique personhood through the use of the idea of “dividaul” but “Co” suggests a constitutive community making up the person.
Where Kierkegaard claimed to have been an individual, I think I would claim to be a codividual. Notice the that photo of me is made up of hundreds of photos of family, friends, teachers, pastors, theologians, and figures from history, etc, (if only I had a picture of everything and everyone, I might be less piculated). Click here to enlarge the photo.
peace, dwight
Sounds good – it reminds me of the principles from Expeeriencing God.
1. Find out what God is doing
2. Find the people doing it
3. Form a relationship with them
4. Then do it.
Keepp this stuff alive!, Dwight!
Love the idea and for that matter your complexion.
A bunch of us were discussing the evolution of corporations and their cultures. We found that, over time, a job gets more complicated, then the complications plateau, and the level of complexity stays the same. The nuances of the complexity change, but the overall complexity is the same. Then it gets simpler.
What we noticed, during the complexity plateau, is that the communications and relationships get rearranged. You still talk to the same net number of people (usually some form of "Gladwell Maximum"), but the relationships evolve from "top down" links to flatter ones. Soon, the peer relationships evolve into things like quality circles (popular in the 80s), and later, evolve into informal links between white-collar and blue-collar types. Sometimes these are formalized, but often, become informal.
When the relationships become as important as the tasks (the individual conversational transactions), the job starts to simplify. At this point – which seems to resemble the Codividual point – the thinking seems to resemble the transition (as a Britisher might describe) from "college thinking" to "university thinking".
… word!
Dwight,
Thanks for this post. ThPM/Monkfish struggled a bit with community and individuality. Our community now has much more permeable membranes than what was recommended to us by our modern predecessors, and our indiviuality has more freedom of expression. Its interesting how thats working.
Ive asked our in-house theologian to write something up on emergent theory and co-individualization. (Check it — and variation on your new term…already!) Ill link over to you when he gets it up.
Were also linking to your nextwave article on "Why Im not Missional." Thanks for being such a formative part of our neomonastic life.
See you Friday,
Rachelle