This post is a revision of the framework post Types of Transformational Desires with its 2x2 framework. Thanks to the feedback I received on it, I decided to stick with “aspirations” as the generic term for transformational desires, rather than place it in the upper right quadrant of the framework as the philosophers I read would want.
So I needed a new word there, and over the past couple of months it became clear that the right term for large-scale changes in kind (as I now have the axes) – those that make a wholesale change in your identity – is metamorphosis. It’s a big word and for many brings big cockroaches to mind (I personally read Franz Kafka in high school. . . .) but it’s the right term, and lends itself perfectly to the top segment of The Delta Model. In fact, I’ve updated this framework now because I’m working heavily on the full chapter that will incorporate the Delta Model, which will refer to this in Chapter 4 on “Understanding the Human Longing for Transformation”.
This part of the chapter introduced the context of identity and transformation – it’s rather philosophical – while next week the second part will provide the 2x2 framework and complete the discussion.
Also, as is usual for me in book writing, I’ve already changed the Table of Contents, as the Delta Model chapter became too big, and so the previous three posts on the Levels of Experience, Part One, Part Two, and Part Three, form their own chapter to be followed by (I think) “From Experiences to Transformation Offerings” with the Delta Model.
Joe
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In studying the literature on transformations – primarily academic but also popular, across the fields of philosophy, psychology, sociology, therapy, anthropology, economics, and more – I’ve found that many if not most authors reserve the term for changes in identity. They refer to deep and personal changes in knowledge, points of view, values, beliefs, even in worldview. They often designate other varieties of human change as lesser, shallower, more superficial, and so forth, or as simply not truly transformative.
In studying the literature on transformations, many if not most authors reserve the term for changes in identity.
For example, therapist and professor Suzy Ross writes that transformation “signifies that all aspects of a whole have changed, producing something fundamentally different.”[i] Cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken’s book on self-reinvention through the ages equates, right in its title, transformations with “identity construction”.[ii] Brad McLain, Director of the Center for STEM Learning at the University of Colorado Boulder, defines “transformative experiences as learning experiences that have an identity impact, changing the experiencers sense of self in some important way – who you believe yourself to be or who you aspire to become”.[iii] Economists George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton write, “People’s identity defines who they are” and that “Choice of identity. . . may be the most important ‘economic’ decision a person ever makes”.[iv] Consultant Tom Wentz, in specifically speaking of businesses, says that “Transformational Change is the conscious and intentional change of a substance, object, organization, or mechanism to create a different form of matter, process or relationship.”[v]
And among many more that could be cited, in the book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming philosopher Agnes Callard of the University of Chicago focuses on transformation as a change in values, or “valuing” as she calls it. Early in her book on a section on “Valuing and Aspiring” she writes:
We have a rich vocabulary for the many forms that positive practical orientations can take: in addition to valuing, we speak of desiring, wanting, loving, approving of, being attracted to, caring about or for, endorsing, preferring, being identified with, seeing as valuable, feeling impelled to, etc. Setting aside other differences between such terms, we can group them roughly into two psychological strata. There is a shallower stratum to which “desire,” “urge,” and “attraction” often belong, and a deeper stratum – one that runs closer to the heart of who the person in question is – to which “value,” “endorsement,” and “identification” usually belong. These terms are quite flexible, and context can suffice to make clear that, in a given case, the urge in question is a deep one, or the endorsement a superficial one.[vi]
For Callard and most others that I’ve read, “true aspiration” involves – and “true” transformation” ensues – only from deep changes in values, being, identity.
Thinking Epistemically
In all such cases of wholesale identity change, the aspiration is best called one of metamorphosis. I started to write “complete metamorphosis”, but that would be redundant, as such aspirations long for, and resulting transformations result in, wholesale identity change. The word is used in biology to refer to a change (“meta”) in form (“morph”), such as frogs transforming from egg to tadpole to adult, salmon transforming physiologically to move from fresh water to salt water (and back again), and most famously from caterpillar to butterfly (which also comprises multiple metamorphoses, actually: from egg to larva/caterpillar to pupa/chrysalis and finally to butterfly).
With wholesale identity change, the aspiration is best called one of metamorphosis.
“Metamorphosis” was first used, though, to refer to human transformation, particularly by magic or witchcraft.[vii] But it’s not about mystical means; metamorphosis aspirations refer to a longing for identity change, which as we shift toward the Transformation Economy is so often achieved with the guidance of companies in the transformation business. (And can, as in biology, involve multiple and sometimes back-and-forth identity changes, such as becoming a long-term cancer patient and later a person who recovered from cancer.)
For Callard and other philosophers this sort of change is so great – strike that; “so great” still implies it’s along a dimension of knowledge you already have. According to these philosophers it’s only an aspirational transformation if it changes your values/identity so much that you cannot even foresee what it would be like to become your aspirational self.
Most notably, Laurie Ann Paul, professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Yale University, in her philosophical book Transformative Experience argues that only if such an experience “changes you enough to substantially change your point of view, thus substantially revising your core preferences or revising how you experience being yourself” is it “a personally transformative experience.”[viii] She goes further to say that some episode is only (truly) a transformative experience if it involves “epistemic change”, changes in how you see and know yourself (epistemology being the philosophical study of knowledge). Paul writes that if an experience
is a radically new experience for you, it means that important features of your future self, the self that results from the personal transformation, are epistemically inaccessible to your current, inexperienced self. A radically new experience can fundamentally change your own point of view so much and so deeply that, before you’ve had that experience, you can’t know what it is going to be like to be you after the experience. It changes your subjective value for what it is like to be you, and changes your core preferences about what matters.[ix]
Interestingly (and amusingly) becoming a vampire is Paul’s favored thought experiment for such transformative experiences. She makes the case that you could never validly decide to become a vampire, because that future existence is so far removed (epistemically speaking) from your present one that you can’t legitimately even perceive what it could be like. She further gives the example of deciding to have a baby, saying such a decision is very akin to that of becoming a vampire! Before you have a baby, the future experience of creating a human life is so different that you simply cannot know what it is like to be a parent. No matter how much you think back to your own parents and see other people having given birth and taking care of their children, actual parenting remains unknown to you, because it changes your values and identity so very much.