Truly Terrible Advice: Find Your "True Self" and Be Authentic
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Aristotle said, "Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom." He is, of course, not the only thinker in history with this opinion. Socrates's famous dictum to "know yourself" speaks to a deep cultural trend in which self-examination, and perhaps fidelity to what one finds, is paramount. The aphorism "Unto thyself be true," is frequently attributed to Shakespeare, rather than the pompous, pontifical character of Polonius who speaks the words.
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MICHAEL PUETT:

Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. He is the author of The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China and To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China, as well as the coauthor of Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. In 2013, he was awarded a Harvard College Professorship for excellence in undergraduate teaching.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Michael Puett:  We tend to think we know what the good life is. So we tend to think basically to lead a good life you should look within, try to find yourself, find your true self and then spend your life being as sincere and authentic to that true self as you can. And if you do that the idea is you’ll live life on your own terms and sure you can’t control what will happen to you but at least you’ve lived your life as you were meant to live it and you’ll be true to yourself. Now that sounds great except suppose that all of it is wrong. Suppose as our philosophers here would say we’re a very, very messy selves. And we’re messy selves that fall into these patterns of responses in the world. And therefore what you’re finding when you look within are just these sets of patterned responses that you’ve fallen into. Now if that’s the problem that we face as humans then the notion of flourishing is very different. The way to live a flourishing good life is by breaking these patterns and creating worlds within which you and those around you can flourish. That’s a good life. And you’re not going to do it by looking within and finding yourself because again you’re probably just going to hit a bunch of patterns you’ve fallen into. And you’re focusing also on yourself whereas if we are patterned creatures much of what we are depends on these patterns we’re falling into with those around us. So the good life for these philosophers would mean you’re trying to create worlds within which you and those around you can flourish at a mundane level.

So immediate friendships, family at a larger societal level too. And that’s constant work. The idea is it’s constant work, working through these patterns we’re falling into, altering these patterns, breaking these patterns, creating different patterns and it’s an endless work of every situation from the very mundane to the very, very large scale of constantly trying to shift these patterns for the better. And the vision is that and really only that is what the good life is. The good life is a world in which as many of us as possible, ideally everyone is flourishing. And you’ll never get there but it’s a lifelong process of ever trying to create worlds within which we can flourish.

One of the ideas these philosophers will talk a lot about is to train spontaneity. This may seem like a total oxymoron. I mean we tend to think spontaneity means simply breaking from convention and doing whatever you want to do. But they would say even if you do that that will always be momentary and then you have to return to the conventions and the conventions are unchanged. So what they will rather say is think of spontaneity something like learning a musical instrument or learning a sport. Something that takes incredible amounts of training but the goal at the end of the training, let’s say playing a piano, the goal at the end of that is to reach a point where you can play as they would say spontaneously. Sensing the music, sensing the mood of the room, sensing how to shift how you’re playing a piano to shift the atmosphere around you. Something you can only achieve by years and years of training. Now we know that sort of thing works for piano playing or sports but what if we actually thought of our lives or our organizations we’re working in in the exact same way. So what you’r...

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