Self-realization

'Self-realization' is the development and expression of characteristic attributes and potentials in a fashion which comprehensively discloses their subject's real nature. Usually, the 'self' in question is the individual person, but the concept has also been applied to corporate bodies held to possess a unitary identity.

What constitutes the self's 'real nature' is the key variable generating the many conceptions of self-realization. These can be grouped broadly into two types: (1) the 'collectivist', in which the self-realizing lifestyle, being either the same for all or specific to a person or subgroup of people, is ultimately definable only in the context, and perhaps with reference to the common purposes, of a collective social body; (2) the 'individualist', in which a person's self-realization has no necessary connection with the ends of a particular community.

1 Collectivist self-realization

Aristotle's moral and political work, especially Nicomachean Ethics, is an enormously influential example of a self-realizationist theory, which holds that the development and expression of people's potentials is the goal for the best moral - and, for Aristotle, political - life (see Aristotle §§20-6). Using 'self-realization' as much to describe the good society as the good person, he proceeds from the belief that humans naturally possess a unique, essential state of being - the life of reason-guided activity - to argue that achievement of this state is the goal (telos) towards which normal human development aims (see Human nature §1). Subsequently, he identifies those personal dispositions and social institutions necessary for securing this end.

Aristotelian self-realization is collectivist not only in the sense of its essence being a shared characteristic but also in its requirement that it be achieved within a very particular form of social life: the polis or city-state. Theoretically, it permits some diversity across the range of self-realizing lives. Other versions of collectivist self-realization can be much stricter in detailing exactly what form of life is required, tying the 'real nature' of the self to specific social roles or the performance of onerous moral duties. Often, these doctrines adopt a version of positive liberty by characterizing self-realization as 'true freedom', which facilitates their descriptions of non-self-realizing lifestyles as not 'really' wanted by people despite any 'mistaken' preferences to the contrary (see Freedom and liberty).

The sustainability of collectivist conceptions in Western thought was weakened significantly (particularly from the seventeenth century onwards) with the emergence of more atomized, individualistic notions of the self, generated not least by a growing appreciation of human diversity. This distinctively modern form of identity self-consciously sought individuation, conceptualizing the self and its ends apart from any particular, metaphysically independent moral order. Increasingly, people were seen as empowered to direct their own lives according to their own desires. The postulation of substantive shared natures and comprehensive collective purposes, and the equation of their realization with human freedom and morality, became much less credible. Indeed, for some, such conceptions were downright pernicious in their attempt to attribute an artificial uniformity to human nature.

That some versions of collectivist self-realization remained vibrant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was due largely to Hegel and his intellectual heirs, but the transformation in the concept of the individual left its mark on them (see Hegelianism). Reflecting high Enlightenment optimism over the goodness of human potential and the continuing reconcilability of freedom, morality and social order, their theories held that self-realization involved the expression of full individuality and a unification of every self with each other in a qualitatively new, yet genuinely communal, form of social life (see Enlightenment, Continental). Marxism became the most influential exponent of this approach, viewing self-realization as based upon the capacity for free creative labour supposedly shared by all and insisting that, under full communism, the free self-realization of each would ultimately be dependent upon the free self-realization of all (see Marx. K.).