đ The Evolving Self
Author: Robert Kegan
Full Title: The Evolving Self
âLife is an autonomous event which takes place between the organism and the environment. Life processes do not merely tend to preserve life, but transcend the momentary status quo of the organism, expanding itself continually and imposing its autonomous determination upon an ever-increasing realm of events.â
The conceptions of post-formal thought bear remarkable similarity to each other and are consistent with the notion of developmentâemergence from embeddedness, the whole becoming part of a new whole, the oscillating tension between inclusion and distinctnessâpresented here.
Gilligan and Murphy find in their studies of post-college age adults that some persons begin to question the limits of their abstracted forms or principles for intellectual solution of moral problems.
Among the central features of this new way of thinking seems to be a new orientation to contradiction and paradox.
All transitions involve leaving a consolidated self behind before any new self can take its place. At the 4-5 shift this means abandoningâor somehow operating without reliance uponâthe form, the group, standard, or convention. For some this leads to feelings of being âbeyond good and evil,â which phenomenologically amounts to looking at that beyondness from the view of the old self, and thus involves strong feelings of evil.
in the shift to stage 5 there is often a sense of having left the moral world entirely (â âoughtâ is no longer in my vocabularyâ); there is no way of orienting to right and wrong worthy of my respect. This is the killing off of all standards, the attempt to be not-me (who is his standard)âthe cynic, or existentially despairing.
People may live along a wide continuum of health or malaise at any evolutionary moment, but how they experience their experience is first of all a function not of where they are on that continuum but where they are in their evolution.
At the moment (this disequilibrial moment when the old structure is being negated or rejected without yet being fully appropriated as content for the new structure), the âinstinctualâ is seen as antagonistic to the âjudgmental.â In order to give that instinctual life some play, one must âsuspendâ judgment and âgo with the wind.â But what is actually being suspended is a form of judgment, a form of authority bent on internal control.
While the world of work is ideally suited to the culturing of the institutional balance, work settings which can encourage, recognize, or support development beyond the institutional are quite rare.
Workaholism is the hypermasculine analogue of the institutional balance to the hyperfeminine self-abnegation of the interpersonal balance (though neither predicament is the exclusive province of men or women, respectively). The picture of the workaholicâwith his or her all-consuming investment in the exercises of achievement, self-esteem, independent accomplishment, self-discipline, and controlâlooks like that of the evolutionary truce of institutionality in peril, working overtime lest it fall apart.
Rather than expressing itself in terms of a loyalty or fidelity to an abstracted system-preserving form (of the self or the actual public institution), responsibility would seem to be more saliently a matter of taking responsibility for oneâs construction and transformation of the form.
If the notion that most workplaces are not well suited to the development of genuine intimacy is unperturbing to those who shape them, perhaps the notion that the workplace works against a personâs growth in general might be more so.
Work organizations that will not recognize the employeeâs growth often force the employee to choose between the job and his or her own life-project. Most workplaces are appallingly unconcerned about this choice, judging that its costs are almost entirely borne by the employee.
The image of an adult relationship that is genuinely intimateâsexually, but in every other respect as wellâbrings to light again the theme of reciprocity first seen in the interpersonal balance.
Author: Robert Kegan
Full Title: The Evolving Self
âLife is an autonomous event which takes place between the organism and the environment. Life processes do not merely tend to preserve life, but transcend the momentary status quo of the organism, expanding itself continually and imposing its autonomous determination upon an ever-increasing realm of events.â
The conceptions of post-formal thought bear remarkable similarity to each other and are consistent with the notion of developmentâemergence from embeddedness, the whole becoming part of a new whole, the oscillating tension between inclusion and distinctnessâpresented here.
Gilligan and Murphy find in their studies of post-college age adults that some persons begin to question the limits of their abstracted forms or principles for intellectual solution of moral problems.
Among the central features of this new way of thinking seems to be a new orientation to contradiction and paradox.
All transitions involve leaving a consolidated self behind before any new self can take its place. At the 4-5 shift this means abandoningâor somehow operating without reliance uponâthe form, the group, standard, or convention. For some this leads to feelings of being âbeyond good and evil,â which phenomenologically amounts to looking at that beyondness from the view of the old self, and thus involves strong feelings of evil.
in the shift to stage 5 there is often a sense of having left the moral world entirely (â âoughtâ is no longer in my vocabularyâ); there is no way of orienting to right and wrong worthy of my respect. This is the killing off of all standards, the attempt to be not-me (who is his standard)âthe cynic, or existentially despairing.
People may live along a wide continuum of health or malaise at any evolutionary moment, but how they experience their experience is first of all a function not of where they are on that continuum but where they are in their evolution.
At the moment (this disequilibrial moment when the old structure is being negated or rejected without yet being fully appropriated as content for the new structure), the âinstinctualâ is seen as antagonistic to the âjudgmental.â In order to give that instinctual life some play, one must âsuspendâ judgment and âgo with the wind.â But what is actually being suspended is a form of judgment, a form of authority bent on internal control.
While the world of work is ideally suited to the culturing of the institutional balance, work settings which can encourage, recognize, or support development beyond the institutional are quite rare.
Workaholism is the hypermasculine analogue of the institutional balance to the hyperfeminine self-abnegation of the interpersonal balance (though neither predicament is the exclusive province of men or women, respectively). The picture of the workaholicâwith his or her all-consuming investment in the exercises of achievement, self-esteem, independent accomplishment, self-discipline, and controlâlooks like that of the evolutionary truce of institutionality in peril, working overtime lest it fall apart.
Rather than expressing itself in terms of a loyalty or fidelity to an abstracted system-preserving form (of the self or the actual public institution), responsibility would seem to be more saliently a matter of taking responsibility for oneâs construction and transformation of the form.
If the notion that most workplaces are not well suited to the development of genuine intimacy is unperturbing to those who shape them, perhaps the notion that the workplace works against a personâs growth in general might be more so.
Work organizations that will not recognize the employeeâs growth often force the employee to choose between the job and his or her own life-project. Most workplaces are appallingly unconcerned about this choice, judging that its costs are almost entirely borne by the employee.
The image of an adult relationship that is genuinely intimateâsexually, but in every other respect as wellâbrings to light again the theme of reciprocity first seen in the interpersonal balance.
Incoming Links
Rowan here begins to draw on Ken Wilber with whom I am only very vaguely familiar. I haven't finished reading this part yet, but it feels like it's kind of similar to David Chapman and Meta-Rationality and Robert Kegan's đ The Evolving Self and so on. First you are a little baby, then you develop a confused adolescent multiplicity, then you gather yourself as an adult and make yourself kind of coherent, you even develop a playful agility of moving between selves, but beyond all this there's a next level of development, which is the Transpersonal.