The notion of the self as the tear in the soul strikes me as a bit Foucauldian. I’ll explain.
Foucault concerned himself with three axes of inquiry: knowledge, power, and self-other. Knowledge was the focus of his early, “archeological” work, and looked a lot like the work of Thomas Kuhn. His work on power focused on how (especially) institutions like the clinic, the prison, and the asylum functioned to create their own forms of knowledge, which they would then enforce upon those in their care. Finally, the axis of self-other asked how spiritual disciplines could (or couldn’t) form the self in such ways as to break (and/or use) “knowledge” and “power” in the service of the self and its relationships. (He died while investigating axis three.) Together, the three axes give a three-dimensional description of social and individual dynamics as they compete and cooperate (that is, play) for the individual. Hackneyed summaries of Foucault tend to supply a dogmatic version of the power axis, with perhaps a nod to the knowledge axis.
Together, these three axes provide a way to map out the play that is the tear in the soul. Perhaps there are other axes worth considering, but the three together certainly would provide a thick description of any person’s self. Questions to ask would include:
- What are your dominant metaphors for knowing? (Reflection, discovery, similarity?) How do those metaphors channel your functioning?
- What are the dominant institutions in your life? What do they demand of your functioning? How thoroughly have you absorbed those demands?
- What disciplines and self-technologies, what forms of selfcraft do you practice? How have they formed you? How have they accentuated or countered the demands of “knowledge” and “power” in your life?
It should be understood that the tear in the soul is probably not static. The play of these three dynamics changes the shape of the tear. It is nonetheless possible for a stable tear to exist, either through the cooperation of the three dynamics or through the dominance of one dynamic over the others. The tear may or may not be painful. You might choose to tear your soul, for good or for ill.
Our slave liberator Gorgik talked of the play between the historical “I” and the mystical “I,” between the self that experience life and the play between social dynamics and the self that sits behind that self and experiences the experiencing, that sees the seeing. This is the fundamental tear in the soul, and without it there is nothing of the self-reflective consciousness we describe as self. Without this tear, there is no mystical “I,” and thus no play between the mystical “I” and the historical “I.” Developmentally, this event would seem to occur most usually during early adolescence, precipitating the need for rites of passage.
After the initial tear in the soul, a fundamental choice arises: which self is in charge, the mystical self or one or more historical selves? This choice could be made and unmade a thousand times over a lifetime. There is a wide body of wisdom literature speculating on whether and how our three Foucauldian dynamics (or others, if you like) impinge upon the mystical “I.” Further research.
