Five motivations for self-improvement: finding a balance

The mentor

Imagine you meet a mentor who can help you become the person you want to be.  Perhaps you want to be more loving, a better listener, more generous, more free, or more authentic.  If you’re willing to put some work into the project, the mentor knows how to make it happen.  It might mean intentionally acting in a loving way, seeing a therapist, reading a book about relationships, going to church (if you are religious), discussing relationships with a friend, or writing a reflective journal.  The mentor can give you very good advice.  You, however, have to supply the motivation.  You would have to want to become more loving.  What might motivate you to accept the mentor’s offer?  (So that we can have an example to talk about, I’ll often refer to love as your goal; but these ideas could relate to any self-improvement.)

On your shoulder, you also have a Bad Angel.  The Bad Angel opposes the mentor’s goals.  The Bad Angel is not evil, exactly, but they are cynical.  They’re a more cynical version of you – a radical moral skeptic.  They try to persuade you that the world is a dog-eat-dog place, not unlike the elimination tournaments in reality TV shows or in the television show The Squid Game.  They claim that this means that your desired self-improvements are futile.

You aren’t sure you agree with the Bad Angel; you want to cultivate love in yourself as well as other positive interpersonal values.  How should you respond to the Bad Angel?  Is there any reason you might choose to go down the mentor’s path toward positive values?.

Reason might persuade you to follow the mentor’s advice, but it can’t make you love someone in the moment.  Love is an emotion – it is there, or it isn’t.  But to cultivate love; to value love; to consciously work on oneself and make oneself a more loving person; or conversely to make oneself less loving – these are susceptible to persuasion and motivation. Can we make a list of the kinds of ideas and circumstances that have persuaded people, throughout the ages, to cultivate love and other positive interpersonal values in themselves?

1. Why should we improve ourselves?

There are five ways to answer the question “why should we improve ourselves?”  For the sake of concreteness, I’ll focus on one particular kind of self-improvement; namely, “why should we value love?”

The “mimetic” answer: we love because we imitate others’ love (such as our parents’ love) toward particular people, such as a spouse or child.  Our society defines parenting especially as a sacred commitment – if we don’t love our child, we are doing something wrong. This is a norm that we internalize through imitation. Often, imitation requires some ability to tell what others are thinking or feeling; otherwise, we do not know what to imitate. It is associated with embodied knowledge – the kind of knowledge where you know you’re supposed to cry at weddings, even though no one tells you that verbally. Joseph Henrich’s book “The Secret of Our Success” is partly about mimesis.

The “amoral individualist” answer: we love so that we will be loved in return.  We do not have unlimited amounts of love to give to someone who doesn’t love us back. The writings of Ayn Rand are about amoral individualism – but so are Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

The “moral individualist” answer: we love because we freely choose to contribute to others’ well-being. Michaeleen Doucleff’s book “Hunt, Gather, Parent” is about moral individualism.

The “disembedding” answer: we love because love is what’s left when we transcend the unhelpful ideas that we are stuck in, such as selfishness or clinging. David Wallin’s book “Attachment in Psychotherapy” discusses disembedding.

The “transcendence” answer: we love because of an absolute belief or feeling that in our view transcends our society’s norms and beliefs as well as our individual desires and goals.  Transcendence indicates the way as opposed to our way or my way. It is especially associated with declarative knowledge (facts). For instance, if you know that a plant is poisonous in one village, the same plant is likely poisonous in another too. Philosophy books such as Plato’s Republic are about transcendence.

This essay will consider these “five ways” to explain why we would improve ourselves, for instance why we would have positive values such as love, listening, authenticity, freedom, and generosity.  To value love means to intentionally cultivate love in oneself – whether by seeing a therapist, deliberately acting in a loving way, reading a book, keeping a journal, or talking it over with friends.  The question is how to find your motivation to take these actions.  You are likely good at some of the five ways and less so others, but the ideal approach is to find a balance between them.

2. Each of the five ways, alone, is insufficient

The five ways mentioned above are not just about love; they explain relationships and interpersonal values more generally.  Mimesis holds that we should learn how to do relationships by imitating others in our society, especially prestigious people.  Amoral individualism says that I should analyze the best way to get what I want out of my relationships.  Moral individualism believes that I should understand for myself how to contribute to others.  Disembedding suggests that I can let go of unhelpful ideas that I am stuck in.  Transcendence holds that I have access to absolute truth, goodness, and beauty that can guide me in my relationships – such as religious, mathematical, or artistic value.  By “relationships,” I don’t just mean romantic relationships.  I mean friendships, parents and children, business partners; anyone.

Each of these five ways has a major drawback:

1. Mimesis is not liberating.  Mimesis subjugates people to social convention.  For instance, if we imitate the common ways of doing marriage, we may tacitly conclude that marriage has to work a particular way.  The married people have to be a man and a woman.  The man and the woman each have a certain kind of job to do.  This arrangement subjugates individuals to a preconceived pattern of marital relationship.
2. Amoral individualism is selfish.  It is just about “how to get what I want in my relationships.”  But selfish people aren’t perceived as trustworthy, so in the long run they may fail to get even the transactional deal that they wanted.
3. Moral individualism analyzes what can’t be analyzed.  Moral individualism requires that we understand our own choices and how they impact others’ well-being.  But it’s difficult to calculate how to best contribute to other people’s well-being, because we don’t have direct access to other people’s mental states and emotions.
4. Disembedding is not positive.  It says “let go of that idea” not “grab onto this idea.”  It’s all well and good to say we should let go of selfishness, pride, or clinging; but then what?  What should we actually do?  What happens if we let go, but it doesn’t seem to help us find direction?
5. Transcendence does not naturally apply to relationships.  Although people have historically tried to explain relationships via transcendence (e.g. via the ten commandments) it is not a perfect fit. Declarative knowledge evolved to explain, say, which plants are good to eat, not how to relate to people. Thus, embodied cognition is likely more naturally suited to relationships.

If you try to motivate self-improvement using any one of these five ways, you’ll encounter an obstacle.  If you motivate yourself by telling yourself that “this is how others do it” (mimesis), then you’ll face the objection that in a free society, we don’t have to obey arbitrary social norms.  If you motivate yourself by pursuing what’s in your own interest (amoral individualism), then you may be concerned that it makes you a selfish person.  If you motivate yourself by trying to help others (moral individualism), you may find that you don’t always know how to help.  If you motivate yourself by letting go of unhelpful thoughts and emotions (disembedding), then you may be lacking in positive guidance.  And if you motivate yourself using absolute, transcendent beliefs and feelings (transcendence) then you are adopting a rather clumsy mode of social thought.

This essay is about an additional alternative.  Since none of the five ways by itself is adequate, the remaining possibility is to combine the five ways in a balanced synthesis or syncretism that respects all of them.

While sages debate the best theory, actual human societies pursue syncretism – they combine different social ideas.  Many people are perfectly comfortable with their moral system being a mish-mash of religious values, their parents’ rules from childhood, lessons learned from social interaction, and ethics they learned from watching television.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and this moral syncretism is a feature of many societies, not just ours.  For example, a traditional subject in historical Chinese painting is “the vinegar tasters,” depicting Confucius, the Buddha, and Lao Tzu tasting a pot of vinegar.  One possible meaning of the painting is that these quite different teachings can be reconciled as three interpretations of the same “vinegar” – the same life experience.  Mimesis, amoral and moral individualism, disembedding, and transcendence can be reconciled, too.  They work together to answer the question “why should we improve ourselves?” – for instance, why we should value love, freedom, listening, generosity, and authenticity.

3. The Self-Improvement Exercise

The most practical recommendation from this essay is an exercise for self-improvement:

Keep a daily journal.  Each day, make a new header for that day, and write down your daily activities according to the five ways framework.  If you do something that’s in line with copying social norms, rules, or responsibilities, mark it “mimesis.”  If you do something for yourself, such as reading a book for enjoyment or making a trade to get something you want, write it down and mark it “amoral individualism,” and so on.  If something fits under multiple categories, you can mark it as both; but it’s worth trying to find the best fit.  You don’t have to write down all of your activities, just the ones that seem worth recording.  The goal is just to get yourself to notice your motivations behind different activities.  Activities can also be labeled “none.”  These are activities that don’t benefit you – not even by helping you to relax – or anyone else, that don’t match social expectations, don’t help you escape unhelpful ideas, and aren’t transcendentally true or good.  By definition, you wouldn’t lose anything if there were no “nones” in your daily activities.

One advantage of this exercise is that it helps you to frame your activities in the right way.  A large part of useful self-reflection is ensuring that you’ve framed things correctly.  For example, when solving a physics problem in a textbook, you’re better off focusing on physically important categories like “energy” and “momentum” rather than less fundamental ones like “cars” and “blocks.”  Likewise, when organizing your daily activities, it’s helpful to choose the five ways as your categories.  This will ensure that your thoughts go in productive directions.

A second advantage is that the exercise does not view any of the five ways as necessarily “bad.”  Thus, it allows you to write any of the five as a positive achievement instead of penalizing you when you step outside of a rigid box.

Third, it leverages multiple motivations in order to get the most improvement.

Fourth, although humans are capable of thinking about self-improvement in narrow ways, it is also common for us to rebel against narrow ideologies.  A child who grows up thinking that they must only live for others may eventually come to resent such restrictive guidance.  The exercise is balanced and might avoid this kind of rebellion.

Fifth, the exercise starts from your motivation rather than from an overarching goal.  You don’t have to write down a goal.  Once your daily activities are balanced, they will automatically take you where you need to go by meeting your needs.

Of the five ways, disembedding may be the least familiar.  We don’t often set aside time for disembedding.  A few ways to practice disembedding include mindfulness meditation, therapy, and reflective journal writing, but there are certainly many others within different spiritual traditions. If you’re interested in some ideas about why these practices aid disembedding, the following page has some ideas:

How mindfulness and disembedding work

4. Five ways and the Axial Age

Now we are ready to give more complete definitions for the five ways of answering the question “why should we improve ourselves?”

1. Mimesis is the idea that we should do things the way others do them – by imitating their bodies and their emotions.  We should improve ourselves in order to make use of our society’s implicit, collective wisdom.  For example, a parent-child relationship typically works a certain way; perhaps there is some wisdom in that way.  Perhaps, in a particular society, the child must always respect the parent’s authority, and must then care for the parent in their old age.  This can be divided into kinship mimesis (copying the way siblings, parents, and spouses do things) and beyond-kinship mimesis (such as copying the emotions of nationalism).  The motive for mimesis is imitative: one imitates people who are prestigious, who are successful, or who are honored by society.  Societies may even imitate other societies whom they respect.
   
   The word “conformity” is a close relative of “mimesis,” but we typically use this word only in cases where we disapprove of the behavior. (We wouldn’t say that a parent who loves their child, in imitation of their own parent, is a “conformist” even though that is arguably what’s happening). Therefore, I have avoided the word “conformity.”
   
2. Individualism is the idea that individuals are prior to relationships.  On this view, we should understand people in terms of their talents, dispositions, and personalities.  A relationship is an arrangement between individuals, who have a degree of power to enter or exit arrangements of their choosing.  Individuals can understand relationships for themselves, perhaps through analysis.  A commercial relationship, a friendship, or a dating relationship could be an example.  Individualism includes two ways within itself.
   
   • Amoral individualism is the notion that being an individual means looking out for oneself; using others toward one’s own ends.  We should improve ourselves in order to get what we want.  One can negotiate with others in order to achieve selfish ends, and in doing so, one may incidentally end up meeting other people’s needs too.
     
   • Moral individualism is the notion that individuals should voluntarily choose responsibilities toward other people.  We should improve ourselves in order to benefit others.  Individuals should understand their contribution for themselves rather than relying on dogmatic authority to tell them how to contribute.
     
3. Disembedding is a perspective that un-thinks other ideas, including the ideas of mimesis and individualism.  We should improve ourselves by letting go of ideas that feel unhelpful.  Disembedding recognizes the limitations of our own thoughts or culture.  For example, if a person is clinging to an idea of how a relationship “should” work in a certain way, they could recognize that they are clinging and then “disembed” from that.  If they are excessively concerned with themselves as opposed to others, they could disembed from that too.  Disembedding doesn’t have to mean discarding an idea: more profoundly, it can mean a feeling of “observing” that idea rather than “falling into” it.  The feeling of letting go doesn’t feel like “I must stop thinking this thought” but perhaps rather “hello, thought, how are you?”  If you attend to the emotions or the sensations in your body that are associated with a thought, eventually they will go away.
   
4. Transcendence is the belief in absolute value, the belief that some things are right or good in the same way that 1 + 1 = 2, that a certain plant is poisonous, or that you can build a fire using a certain procedure.  In practice, many people’s beliefs about truth and goodness are somewhere in between mimesis (we imitate others’ feelings about goodness) and transcendence (truths about goodness transcend individual goals and social norms.). Transcendence can take the form of duty or desire to act in accordance with something that you believe simply is right, good, or valuable.  The same value could be mimetic or transcendent for different people.  For instance, math is often considered a window to Truth, but for the linguist George Lakoff it is embodied. However, transcendence, unlike mimesis, is conceptual rather than imitative and so is likely to be based on dialogue and book-learning instead of observation and copying others’ actions.
   

What about strong spiritual feelings or emotions – surely one of the most important human motivators?  It is worth trying to assign these feelings to one or more “ways,” based on (for instance) their origin in your personal history.  Did you learn about love and spirituality from your parents or teachers, or from personal experience?  You can also classify feelings based on their function.  Does your love or spirituality take the form of imitating the embodied emotions of others (mimesis), reassuring yourself (amoral), giving to another person (moral), escaping unhelpful states of mind (disembedding), or serving a transcendent value such as religion or art (transcendence)?

A technical note on terminology: The words “amoral” and “moral” are my choice.  I could have chosen, say, “selfish” and “unselfish” or “self-directed” and “other-directed.”  None of these choices would be perfect.  The ideal term should have some neutrality (showing that the two forms of individualism both have their pros and cons) but should also make clear that amoral / selfish / self-directed individualism is occasionally more prone to producing behavior that most people would view as “bad.”  At the same time, one has to take care of oneself, so amoral / selfish / self-directed individualism is also the most necessary of the five ways.  The philosophy of utilitarianism would deny that there is any basic moral difference between taking care of oneself vs. others; but psychologically and practically there is surely a difference – it’s far easier to know and respond to one’s own desires as opposed to those of others.

Why is amoral individualism included in the list?  Isn’t it bad?  Amoral individualism contributes to love because a person who only gives, without concern for themselves, becomes exhausted; then they cannot give any more.  And a person who is in a harmful relationship should not cultivate love for this person; they should protect themselves and find someone else to love.

Moreover, a society that ignores the amoral perspective and expects humans to be angels is a society that asks too much of people.  A democratic society builds checks and balances into our political system; we do not rely on the moral perfection of any one person.  Scientists are kept in check by peer review; judges are kept in check by appeals courts; politicians by the electorate.

Understanding the five ways is useful so that we do not exclude any one of them or get stuck in any one of them.  For example, it is possible to take the position that the whole answer to life is disengagement from all concepts and attachments – but this position is no better than the idea that the whole answer to life is seeking one’s self-interest, or that the whole answer is generosity.  Different people have different strengths; and our society promotes imbalance – people who are good at math are encouraged to become mathematicians while people who are good at acting are encouraged to become actors.  But when it comes to the five ways, no one way is the whole story; each person needs to find the right balance for themselves.

The Axial Age

This essay is particularly interested in transcendent ways of thinking as an overarching framework for understanding the others – as the five ways scheme is itself declarative and attempts to be transcendent. In searching for declarative discussions of the five ways, I could easily take examples from modern society.  For example, utilitarian philosophy or the psychology of empathy could illustrate moral individualism.  An economics textbook could represent amoral individualism.  Feminist theories about e.g. the male gaze could represent mimesis and embodied knowledge. Postmodern philosophy could stand for disembedding, and certain philosophies and theologies claim access to transcendent truths.

However, our society relies on such a wide variety of texts that it is easy to get lost in one particular way out of the five.  To get a complete picture of these perspectives in college, one might have to be a quintuple major in theology, women and gender studies, economics, philosophy, and English – just to name a few possibilities.

In order to capture the five ways more manageably as declarative knowledge, I will refer to a time when the literary canon was smaller – and was perhaps more focused on self-improvement.  in Western culture, the Bible provided a declarative and balanced perspective about self-improvement in some respects.  It contains war stories and peace stories, selfish people and unselfish people, individual goals and collective goals.  We don’t assign Bible reading in school anymore – for some very good reasons including freedom of religion.  Traditional texts can be unbalanced in many ways, too – for instance, if they elevate men over women.  But one value of canonical texts is that they illustrate all five ways in a relatively smaller textual space, so that one does not have to take a quintuple major to integrate all of them.

Shakespeare, too, is a canonical author who provides a more complete and balanced picture, with brilliant dialogue combined with fart jokes, comedy with tragedy.  Perhaps Shakespeare would be an equally good illustration of the five ways, but not a declarative one.

At the beginning of written literature, thousands of years ago, there really was a small to medium-sized canon that provided declarative knowledge about the five ways.  That was a period of time called the “Axial Age,” around 800 BCE – 200 BCE, when similar ideas started to appear in different parts of the world.  Robert Bellah names China, Greece, India, and Judaism as the centers of Axial thought, but other authors spread their net wider – for instance, to include Christianity and Islam.

The Axial Age allowed for a mixture of declarative ideas about mimetic, individualistic, disembedding, and transcendent ideas. These declarative ideas arose in societies with a practice of writing, so that the declarative ideas could be written down and formally taught. An exception is Indian society, which did not emphasize writing; but it had a special memorization technique which presumably had to be taught declaratively. It seems possible to me that this push for a more declarative society was associated with more formal instruction by professional teachers (Brahmins, philosophers like Plato and Socrates, or Confucian scholars).

Learning about the Axial Age, then, is the gateway to understanding how society became more declarative, and how we might declaratively explain how to improve ourselves and to cultivate values such as love, generosity, listening, authenticity, and freedom.

5. Gravity Falls; the Axial Age, continued; a theory of relationships

Five ways of answering “why should we improve ourselves?”

In the children’s television cartoon show “Gravity Falls,” the protagonists are two twelve-year-old twins, Dipper (the brother) and Mabel (the sister).  The characters are awkwardly exploring their first feelings of romantic attraction to other children – a situation that exposes them to constant humorous moral dilemmas about their relationships.  These dilemmas illustrate some of the “five ways” that we have discussed.

1. Mimesis

Dipper is interested in an older girl, Wendy, and he wants to prove that he is mature and cool like Wendy and her friends. So Dipper tries to hang out with Wendy’s friends and do what they do. Dipper lies to them about his age, making himself a year older than he actually is. When they drive out to visit an abandoned convenience store, Dipper imitates them by helping them to break into the store. When the store proves to be haunted, Dipper ends up having to do an embarrassing dance wearing a lamb costume in order to free his friends from a ghost.

Why does Dipper break into the store? To be like Wendy and her friends. (It’s worth noting that in this case, Dipper has a specific individualist goal – getting to date Wendy – but that’s not always the case with mimesis.)

2. Amoral individualism

Mabel meets a boy band called “Sev’ral Times” and discovers that they are being held captive by their evil agent, who locks them in a giant hamster cage and keeps them unaware of the real world.  Mabel gets them out of their cage and brings them home with her.  She thinks they’re cute, so she wants to keep them.  When she discovers that their agent has been arrested by the police, she ought to let them go – they’re safe now.  But at first, she conceals the truth from them.  She cares about her own desires first and foremost.  This is amoral individualism.

Why should Mabel conceal the truth?  So that the boys will allow her to imprison them.  That’s amoral individualism.

3. Moral individualism

Eventually, Mabel sets the boys free, even though she selfishly wanted to keep them around forever.  She freely chooses to do this (albeit with some input from her friends, who arrive at the moral conclusion well before Mabel does.)  This is moral individualism.

Why should Mabel set the boys free?  Because she wants to contribute to their well being.  That’s moral individualism.

4. Disembedding

Dipper finds out that he will be sitting next to Wendy as they collect tickets at a festival.  He writes down a long list of steps to psych himself up to talk to Wendy, but Mabel suggests that he should “talk to her like a normal person.”.

One lesson of the episode is about authenticity.  It’s important to be oneself in a relationship.  When Dipper does get to talk to Wendy, she shows him a photograph of her younger self, who is super tall.  “Ha, you were a freak!’ Dipper says, then covers his mouth.  He acted naturally, but did he say the wrong thing?  No, it turns out that Wendy’s cool with it.  “Yep,” she agrees, and they keep talking.

Why should Dipper relate to Wendy authentically?  To get out of his head and escape the overanalysis he’s trapped in.  That’s disembedding.

5. Transcendence

Gravity Falls avoids making any declarative claims about transcendent truth, beauty, or goodness in relationships or using lectures or books to understand relationships.  When Stan lectures Dipper about girls, Dipper follows the advice, but it leads to no good.  Dipper does find a book which contains secret truths about the magical world.  Dipper attempts to use the book to help him understand Mabel’s first romantic relationship, but he incorrectly identifies her boyfriend as a zombie.

These five ways – mimesis, amoral individualism, moral individualism, disembedding, and transcendence – answer the question “why should we improve ourselves” in many societies, whether modern or ancient.  None is sufficient by itself: mimesis is too restrictive; amoral individualism too selfish; moral individualism analyzes what cannot be analyzed; disembedding provides no positive guidance; and transcendence is not perfectly suited to relationships.  What we need is a “morality sandwich” – one that contains mimesis, amoral individualist, moral individualist, disembedding, and transcendent elements.

The Axial Age

Morality has been a complete sandwich at least since the Axial Age in the first millennium BC, when more declarative theories of relationships came into existence.  Axial Age philosophies are not “better” than ours; in fact, they often express outdated views on gender relationships.  However, they do provide a convenient example because their ideas are concentrated in a relatively smaller number of texts.  In our society, you might have to quintuple major in college – in theology, women and gender studies, economics, philosophy, and English – to get the whole sandwich, and that scope is wider than this essay can discuss.  Even then, these fields are not necessarily focused on self-improvement.  For instance, economics is more about predicting the effects of policies and business strategies rather than explaining individual amorality generally.  In contrast, if we use the Axial Age to illustrate the five ways, there are a smaller number of texts to consider, and they are more aimed at self-improvment.

The Axial Age began as human societies began to rely more on writing – or Vedic memorization in the case of ancient India. These modes of thinking were more declarative and more compatible with formal schooling. Thus, Confucius, the Buddha, and Plato were teachers. Prior to the Axial Age, teachers would hardly have been candidates for the most revered people in their society – divine kings and aristocrats would have had that honor. These divine kings ruled more through dominance (threats and fear) while Axial teachers commanded respect via prestige (teaching by example). In pre-Axial societies (what Robert Bellah calls “Archaic” societies), the same, static sets of families stayed in power in perpetuity.  However, some time around 800 BCE – 200 BCE, similar changes happened across diverse societies.  Coins were invented in Greece, India, and China, encouraging commerce.  Increasing warfare created a context where people connected with non-relatives via military service.  In Greece and India, democratic or republican forms of government – where non-relatives met to change their government – were associated with philosophical and religious ideas.  In China, the emperor needed educated commoners to manage the bureaucracy in order to prevent aristocratic families from becoming too powerful. In all of these societies, writing (or Vedic memorization) became very important.

These changes at first gave rise to forms of mimesis that went beyond kinship: relating to the state (in China or Greece), the Buddhist Sangha (the community of monks), or the Jewish people.  They also postulated transcendent moral values based on monotheism (Judaism), dharma (Buddhism), Heaven (Confucius), or Platonic Forms (Greece).  Some thinkers, however, took the idea further and came to individualism.

Individualism is also tied to analytical or rational thinking, because when you’re on your own, you have to think for yourself and calculate a bit more; you don’t have as many kin you can rely on to help you make decisions.  But calculation can be moral or amoral; so one challenge of the Axial Age was to explain how careful, analytical thinking was compatible with altruism and trust.  The debate between Plato and Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic is a great example of this; Thrasymachus claims that justice simply means strong people getting what they want; and the Republic is Plato’s response to Thrasymachus.

Robert Bellah names four main Axial Age philosophies; here are the morality sandwiches for each.

In the Old Testament:

Mimesis: Sacrificial rituals
Individualism: Proverbs
Disembedding: Ecclesiastes, Job
Transcendence: Monotheism, Jews as the chosen people

In Buddhism:

Mimesis: Meditation
Individualism: Karma, loving-kindness, compassion
Disembedding: Zen Buddhism
Transcendence: Sangha – the community of monks; Dharma and karma

In China:

Mimesis: Confucian ritual (“li”)
Individualism: Mozi and universal love
Disembedding: Taoism
Transcendence: Confucius, Mencius – the family and the state; Heaven (Tian)

In Greece:

Mimesis: (?)
Individualism: Plato expects individual readers to understand the logic of the polis for themselves.
Disembedding: Plato’s aporia (dialogues where he concludes that e.g. the definition of courage can’t be known.)
Transcendence: The polis; Platonic Forms

More recently, sexual relationships have become more individualistic in the sense that they are less aimed at kinship and less tied to transcendent truths or goodness.  The “relationship escalator” tending toward marriage was the promise that kept sexual and dating relationships linked to the idea of future kinship.  Today, we have more casual sex, nonmarital parenting, and less commitment between partners but more freedom.  The Axial Age didn’t have to deal with these scenarios because they didn’t have the sexual revolution, effective birth control, the service economy, and other factors.  Axial thought often failed to consider individualistic romantic relationships, and perhaps for that reason our society could not rely on Axial ideas to underpin feminist theories of romantic relationships.  Creating a moral sandwich theory of romantic relationships would be a worthwhile endeavor.

A modern four-layer sandwich theory of relationships

One goal of this essay is to propose a four-layer sandwich theory of relationships.  Romantic relationships are a very common topic for self-improvement, and In light of the lack of coverage of modern romantic relationships in the Axial texts, I will focus especially on romantic relationships.  In this theory, amoral and moral individualism are collapsed into one layer, because the same theory that describes human needs can be used to meet your own needs or to meet others’ needs.

1. Mimesis:

Childrearing is an important shared project in many relationships, and the parent-child relationship is normative in our society.  Many people imitate their parents, consciously or unconsciously, when raising children. Moreover, people imitate and absorb social norms about marriage and parenting – the idea that parents have a responsibility to care for their children, should they choose to have children, or that the marriage relationship represents a positive commitment. We often act as though it is our business to enforce other people’s marriages and parenting.

Mimesis in romantic relationships could also mean buying into or imitating society’s tacit messages about relationships, such as moral rules against sex, particularly women’s sexuality; the opposite norms that recommend sexual success for everyone; rules about who is and isn’t desirable based on wealth, physical appearance, and interests; rules about who is and isn’t masculine or feminine, and so on. Some of these messages may be unhelpful, and in fact, being able to articulate unspoken or implicit rules may be a sign that one doesn’t totally buy into them and is ready to disembed from them. The more one talks about unspoken rules declaratively, the easier it is to see them as arbitrary.

2. Individualism:

Shared projects – individualistic shared projects enable each individual to have input as to what the relationship will look like.  In selecting shared projects, individuals may be motivated by moral or amoral reasons.  For instance, if two people have dinner together (a shared project), they may want to eat good food, find food that pleases the other person, or any number of other moral or amoral goals.

Authenticity vs. concealed narrative – an individual is a locus of plans and projects. These projects can be shared authentically and openly with others who are affected by them, or they can be concealed. Having an extensive concealed narrative about one’s projects with others could in some cases be considered manipulative or Macchiavellian.

Maslow’s hierarchy – is meant to be a transcendent framework that defines human needs and insecurities.  Maslow’s hierarchy can structure one’s understanding of one’s own needs (to become better at amoral individualism) or others’ needs (to become better at moral individualism).

3. Disembedding:

It’s worth disembedding from evolutionary psychology, which is intended to be a transcendent truth that views men and women as innately different.  It’s more helpful to learn about people by listening to them as an individual rather than by making assumptions about the categories to which they belong.

We should disembed from the idea that shared projects can always be named.  Instead, two partners make up a collective intelligence that can have projects known to neither of them.

Attachment theory – is meant to be a transcendent framework that classifies individuals as secure, anxious, or avoidant in their relationships. Attachment theory is about insecurities, and it’s often helpful to disembed from them.

4. Transcendence

Five Ways theory is itself transcendent – this whole document is declarative. Balance in particular is a transcendent value: balancing mimesis, moral and amoral individualism, disembedding, and transcendence within a relationship.  (Transcendence itself must be balanced; that is – one should not spend all of one’s time and energy thinking about balance or about five ways theory.)

In terms of knowledge types, mimesis is embodied knowledge, individualism is constructed (one thinks out what one ought to do in terms of one’s projects), disembedding is anti-knowledge (unthinking), and transcendence is declarative knowledge.

Five values:

These five values are complex enough to participate in mimesis, individualism, disembedding, and transcendence.  They are:

Love and generosity

Authenticity and listening. These enable us to spontaneously find shared projects via listening, authenticity, perceptiveness, and turn taking.

Freedom – each of us should have control over those things that pertain to ourselves.  We relate to others rather than controlling them.  We share power – just because one person controls a process at one time doesn’t mean they are always in control.