Quotes about Self-development

But for the Jews this moral-spiritual issue raises the same societal problem it does for the Greeks: how can a man have the "right" to make himself spiritually or rationally destitute or retarded when this corrupts the whole quality of the culture that we all together need and depend on? If anyone wants a cloistered and closed-minded life, an anti-aristic life, let him either go off and live among the wolves--or else join the community of like-minded idiots that (alas) compose and define the basic terms of modern society.

The fallacy of modern atomistic individualism is of course not just our "tabula rasa" self-deception but also our ego-mythical "social contract":  if every member of modern society is supposed autonomously and privately to think through for himself the most vital and fundamental (normative, evaluative, principled) issues of his life -- i.e. to undertake primal self-formation utterly on his own and outside the purview of parents/peers/education/media etc. -- then of course the vast majority will never advance past point A or B, whatever is most obvious, blatant, and simplistic.  Expecting moderns to be radically "self-creative" when their culture systematically strips them of all concrete cultural content that might act as soulish or spiritual alphabets, is expecting fleas to jump when their legs have been cut off.  Ex nihilo nihil fit, out of nothing nothing is going to get produced:  humans require raw materials, they require means and tools and techniques and instructions as well as a repertory of ends, principles, values, teleological orientations, hierarchies of perspectives, etc..  If anyone wants to know where such an unholy and vast mass of aborted personalities came from in modern society (the modern Many), one virtually has to look no further than the vacuous or abstractivist code that deprives all of them of cultural traction and grit, and encourages their doulic lethargy and their banausic materialism.

We should bear the intelligence and taste of the architect or the gardener in how we shape the becoming of our self.  Too much precision ("stringency") is simply misplaced, a formalism inappropriate to the kind of matter we have to deal with (and to be).