The Transformative Self

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Bauer
Keyword(s):  
Personal Growth ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Cultural Beliefs ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Literature History

Everyone wants a good life. Some try to create a good life by cultivating personal growth. They have a transformative self. This book explains how people form a transformative self, primarily in their evolving life stories, to help cultivate growth toward a life of happiness, love, and wisdom for the self and others. It introduces an innovative framework of values and personhood to strengthen and integrate three main areas of study: narrative identity, the good life, and personal growth. The result is a unique model of humane growth and human flourishing. Each chapter builds on that framework to explore topics central to the transformative self, such as how cultural beliefs of a good life shape our narrative identity; how narrative thinking shapes cultural and personal beliefs of a good life; how cultural master narratives shape our ideals for personal growth; how growth differs from gain, recovery, and other positive changes in the life story; how happiness, love, wisdom, and growth serve as superordinate goods in life; how the hard and soft margins of society thwart and facilitate personal growth; the dark side of growth; and the lengthy development of authenticity and self-actualizing. This book synthesizes scholarship from scientific research across several subfields of psychology to philosophy, literature, history, and cultural studies. It offers a creative and scientifically grounded framework for exploring three of life’s perennial questions: How do we make sense of our lives? What is a good life? and How do we create one?

Introducing the Transformative Self

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-31
Author(s):  
Jack Bauer
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Personal Growth ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Life Story ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
The Third ◽  
Over Time

This chapter introduces the main features of the transformative self—what it is and is not. For instance, the transformative self is not a person but, rather, a self-identity that a person uses to facilitate personal growth. The person creates a transformative self primarily in their evolving life story. This growth-oriented narrative identity helps the person cultivate growth toward a good life for the self and others. The chapter provides an overview of the book’s theoretical approach and topics. The book’s first section examines the components of personal growth, narrative identity, and a good life that culturally characterize the transformative self. The second section explores the personality and social ecology of the person who has a transformative self. The third section shows how the transformative self develops over time. The final section explores the hazards and heights of having a transformative self.

Humility’s Destiny

2018 ◽  
pp. 95-116
Author(s):  
Kent Dunnington
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Essential Aspect ◽  
Christian View ◽  
Regulative Ideal

If Christian humility sets as a regulative ideal complete unconcern for one’s own distinctive importance, the challenge is to say why anyone would consider Christian humility a disposition of human flourishing. The experience of one’s distinctive importance is often felt to be an important, if not essential, aspect of the good life. This chapter shows how Christian humility requires for its intelligibility a different account of what an excellent self is like, and a different account of what human flourishing is like. The Christian themes of crucifixion, Trinity, and beatitude are shown seriously to revise customary assumptions about human selfhood and human flourishing. The chapter shows how a distinctively Christian eschatology and anthropology grounds a distinctively Christian view of humility.

4. Scepticism as a way of life

2019 ◽  
pp. 72-96
Author(s):  
Duncan Pritchard
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Intellectual Virtues

‘Scepticism as a way of life’ considers the case for a moderate scepticism, by looking at the work of the philosopher Aristotle (384–322 bce). This idea concerns the role of the virtues, and the intellectual virtues in particular, in the ‘good life’ of human flourishing; what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia. Understanding the role that the intellectual virtues play in the good life enables us to see how embracing a moderate scepticism could be necessary for living such a life. It also helps us to resolve a possible tension between adopting a healthy moderately sceptical attitude while at the same time living a life of genuine conviction.

Story and Identity

2020 ◽  
pp. 151-181
Author(s):  
Karen E. Shackleford ◽  
Cynthia Vinney
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Values And Beliefs ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Way

This chapter explores the way fictional stories impact personal identity. It discusses how identity develops with a particular focus on adolescence. Then, it sheds light on how fiction contributes to identity construction as teens gain insight into things like careers, relationships, values, and beliefs through stories and how these insights can impact their choices for their futures. The chapter also looks at the way people’s emotional investments in their favorite stories can cause them to become extensions of themselves and how this may lead them to use these stories as symbols of who they are. Finally, it explores the topic of narrative identity—the internalized, constantly evolving life story each person tells of himself or herself—and how fiction influences and becomes incorporated into people’s life stories.

Virtue and the “Good Life” in the Book of Job

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Patricia L. Vesely
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Living Well ◽  
Presence Of God ◽  
Human Happiness ◽  
External Goods

Abstract In this article, I argue that Job 29 provides an eudaimonic depiction of human happiness whereby virtue, combined with a number of “external goods” is held up as the best possible life for human beings. I compare Job’s vision of the “good life” with an Aristotelian conception of εὐδαιμονία and conclude that there are numerous parallels between Job and Aristotle with respect to their understanding of the “good life.” While the intimate presence of God distinguishes Job’s expectation of happiness with that of Aristotle, Job is unique among other eudaimonic texts in the Hebrew Bible in that expectations of living well are expressed in terms of virtue, rather than Torah piety. In the second portion of the article, I assess Job’s conception of human flourishing from the perspective of the divine speeches, which enlarge Job’s vision of the “good life” by bringing Job face-to-face with the “wild inhabitants” of the cosmos.

scholarly journals Health, Wealth or Wisdom? Religion and the Paradox of Prosperity

2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-23
Author(s):  
Elaine Graham
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
The West ◽  
Contributory Factors ◽  
Vexed Question

AbstractThe so-called 'happiness hypothesis', associated with the work of the economist Richard Layard, has attracted much public debate over recent years. Its main contention is that despite rising levels of material prosperity in the west, incidence of recorded happiness and greater quality of life has not increased accordingly. In considering the major contributory factors to happiness and well-being, however, Layard is not alone in identifying the significance of religious values and participation in religion for positive and enduring levels of happiness. In response, this article critiques some of the evidence correlating religion and well-being, as well as considering the broader and much more vexed question of how far public policy is capable of incorporating questions of belief and value into its indicators of happiness and the good life. Drawing on traditions of virtue ethics as the cultivation of 'the life well-lived', I ask whether specifically Christian accounts of human flourishing and the good life still have any bearing in the wider public domain, and what 'rules of engagement' might need to be articulated in any dialogue between Christian values and the discourse of theology and a pluralist society.

The Narrative Identity Structure Model (NISM)

2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Dunlop
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Model ◽  
Internal Structure ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Structure Model ◽  
Internal Representations ◽  
Social Expression

In this article, I provide an overview of the Narrative Identity Structure Model (NISM). NISM offers a framework for understanding how life stories are represented internally (cognitively) and how elements of these stories are expressed externally (through writing, conversation, etc.). Within a narrator, there exist numerous life stories, with each story corresponding to a recurrent context (i.e., a social role) relevant to the life in question. Contextualized life stories share mutually constituted relations with the generalized life story, which works to establish a sense of differentiation and continuity across, rather than within, contexts. Furthermore, when elements of the storied self are expressed, these expressions are an inseparable combination of internal representations and elements of the immediate and broader social and cultural milieu. Thus, along with at least two dimensions (viz. internal structure and social expression), NISM is a highly contextualized conceptual model of the storied self.

scholarly journals Terra Incognita : Degrowth, community and performance

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Personal Growth ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Access Point ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Social Justice Movements ◽  
Terra Incognita ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Justice Movements ◽  
Collective Authorship

We live in a world in which economic and personal growth is a prerequisite to being human. The alternative lies in what has yet to be explored. Confined by what we are told and know as the “good life”, we must make a choice; will we degrow on our own initiative or will we continue until the biosphere forces us to stop? This paper is written in support of the performance documentary, TERRA INCOGNITA and the formation/creative process of the Terra Incognita Collective (TIC). It will explore the environmental, social and psychological impacts of a growth-oriented culture through a degrowth lens. Furthermore, this paper will explore art as an access point to high consumption cultures and artists as important social actors within environmental and social justice movements. Terra Incognita, its audiences and artists, explore growth histories through embodiment and collective authorship.

scholarly journals Creatures Bound for Glory: Biotechnological Enhancement and Visions of Human Flourishing

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Burdett ◽  
Victoria Lorrimar
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Human Enhancement ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
The One ◽  
Secular Humanist ◽  
Grand Vision

The human enhancement debate is fundamentally based on divergent ideals of human flourishing. Using the complementary, though often contrasting, foci of creaturehood and deification as fundamental to the good life, we examine these visions of human flourishing inherent in transhumanist, secular humanist and critical posthumanist positions on human enhancement. We argue that the theological anthropologies that respond to human enhancement and these other ideologies tend to emphasise either creaturehood or deification to the neglect or detriment of the other. We propose in response that understanding humans as creatures bound for glory integrates both dimensions of the human being into the one grand vision of flourishing God has for humanity.

Remembering the Positive and Negative: Affective Themes as Predictors of Psychological Well-Being Across Adulthood

2021 ◽  
pp. 009141502110376
Author(s):  
Frederique Corcoran ◽  
Nicole Alea
Keyword(s):  
Personal Growth ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Positive Events ◽  
Psychological Well Being ◽  
Cross Cultural Differences ◽  
Middle Aged Adults

The current study explored the link between psychological well-being (PWB; self-acceptance, personal growth, and purpose in life) and affective themes, including redemption (positive endings for negative events), contamination (negative endings for positive events), and positive and negative affect (no change in affect) in the life stories of Caribbean adults ranging in age from 19 to 78 ( N = 105). How often the memory narrative was rehearsed, and whether or not the theme emerged after being cued in content-coded life story low, high, and turning point scenes were also considered. Affective theme alone did not predict PWB; however, when considering age, rehearsal, and cue, redemption and positive affect predicted personal growth. More work should cue meaning-making in specific ways for different age groups in order to understand why there were no associations for middle-aged adults. Efforts should also be made to understand cross-cultural differences in life stories and PWB.

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