On self-becoming and so what? Searching for a transforming vision for our untransformed world

CHAPTER SUMMARIES 1. LIFEWAYS AND WORKWAYS: THE TRUTH OF MYTH This chapter, a chapter on the ontology of me, describes a pattern of encounters I had from my youngest years with the Arthurian legend-turned-myth which eventually became the organising framework for my book, Finding Merlin. In it, I offer my own précis of the anonymous, late 14th Century Sir Gawin And The Green Knight, the greatest chivalric poem of the English medieval canon, which I use to ‘set’ the discoveries of the modern developmental theorists who, together, have provided a modern, Western interpretation of what has been an ancient inquiry – to understand the human adventure as an ontological quest. I share the lessons my life has taught me in the decade and more since Finding Merlin was published. And I explain how Gawain’s tale, the story of an ‘ordinary hero’ who must learn what it is to be human, may remind us of our own story of wonder and mystery that we, too, must tell - for it is in our story-making that we ‘make’ ourselves, a realisation that became the motivation for my next endeavour, the subject of Chapter Two. 2. MAKING OURSELVES IN STORY: SUMMONING OUR AGENCY FOR THE WORLD This chapter, a chapter on the dynamic, interdependent relationship between the epistemological and the ontological, describes a ‘theory of knowing’ and the importance of language as an essential structure of self-making for us as storytelling organisms. In it, I assert that reflecting-in-writing is a particularly disciplined means of incorporating our life experiences into our sense of who we are, of grounding us at the waypoint we have reached on our development journey, and of living out the proposition that individual and social development are intertwined. I list my various efforts to help social-change professionals – ordinary heroes of our own time – to write their stories of ‘outtrage aventure’’ to support their personal development and to summon their agency for the world. I acknowledge, though, that writing can be a lonely undertaking, hence my next endeavour to explore the possibility of Conversation and Friendship as method, the subject of Chapter Three. 3. A SPACE FOR THE LIFE OF THE MIND: A WICKED COMPANY FOR OUR TIME This chapter and its six appendices describe the formation of ‘Wicked Company’ – an illustration of working at the intersection of thinking and practice, of the manifestation of one individual’s expression of their unique agency for the collective. My 50th birthday was marked by the diagnosis of breast cancer, and this was not my first experience of severe adversity. Unlike the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, I did not make the claim in Finding Merlin that “that which does not kill us makes us stronger”14. Nevertheless, when I learned that I may survive, I realised that I needed to discover a new purpose. Inspired by the ‘wicked companies’ of the 18th Century, I set myself the task of creating a ‘culturing context’ to support social-change professionals who, like me, believe that human and social development are interwoven. In the marked absence of either technical or political mechanisms for managing the commons, a new way of thinking is required that is not of the order of consciousness that gave rise to the multiple, global crises we are witnessing today. The Wicked Company network, therefore, continues to assemble in the spirit of the courageous freethinkers of the Enlightenment period for Friendship and Conversation, to challenge established worldviews in our own turbulent times. 4. CONSTRUCTS OF THE SELF: ONE NARRATOR’S TALE OF ‘TIMELESS TRUTHS’ This chapter describes the beginning of a new line of inquiry – of the letting go of the delusion that there is only one expression of ‘timeless truth’. Recognising that Finding Merlin offers a Western, scientific construct of personhood, I became curious about how different people in different cultures and in different times have conceived of it, and so I began to research and compose a genealogy of ideas about the Self which will be published in due course. As an interpretation of that which has already been interpreted, and of which I will also, necessarily, be a part, it will inevitably be “radically incomplete, insufficient, provisional, disputable, and arguable”15. But our globalised world calls for the expression of a plurality of cultural views to produce new visions of complex phenomena, and so this “new knowledge synthesis”16 - a more expansive and inclusive interpretation of the Self than that proposed in Finding Merlin - is intended for those who seek frameworks of different ways of thinking in order to understand more fully the human experience and the world in which it is embedded. 5. A TRANSFORMING VISION FOR OUR UNTRANSFORMED WORLD: AN UNFINISHED TALE This final chapter, an unfinished tale of how emerging insights can spark creativity, describes the reinvention of a beautiful, Victorian school in a conservation village in the North-East of Scotland. The building has lain empty for more than half a century and my high dream for it is to re-establish it as a place of learning once more, to enable all those who cross its threshold to live out the central proposition of Finding Merlin that, when we work on ourselves, we do our work in the world. This not-for-profit venture will consume all my resources and I do not know yet if it will be successful, but this is a non-personal task that I realise I must do in my remaining working years, and so it is my duty – indeed my obligation - to try to fulfil it.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

DProf by Public Works

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

DProf thesis

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Middlesex University

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Cowie, C.L.

Identifier

oai:repository.mdx.ac.uk:2w99yz

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.mdx.ac.uk:2w99yz