Henry Nelson Wieman says that the greatest good for us as individuals is “the most complete satisfaction of the individual that is possible when the individual is viewed in the wholeness of his being.”

Wholeness, you say? We find ourselves taken back to the question of the torn soul as self. Elsewhere he writes on the same subject:

A united self does not mean a self free from all conflicts. It does mean a self free of conflicts which cannot be treated in such a way as to promote creative transformation. The united self is not a static or completed condition but the very opposite. It cannot be achieved or approximated except by commitment to creativity. Only by learning from others in depth and others learning from oneself in depth, thus releasing the wholeness of individuality in each, can man be unified and this unity be satisfied. But this involves continuous creative transformation with inner conflicts continuously undergoing transformation.

Almost rises to the level of wisdom literature (at least for me).

I know that Wieman doesn’t have my notion of the torn soul in mind when he talks about the disintegrated self. (A man of his times–the early- to mid-20th century–he thought Freud had on-upped Saul/Paul in describing the divided self.) But what would it mean to apply Wieman’s notion of the whole self to my notions of the torn soul as self?

For one, it means locating the tear in the soul with Saul/Paul (and his theological grandchildren), which makes me uncomfortable. (And we can’t give Saul/Paul that much credit, simply out of principle.) Eleventh century Chinese simply did not have to worry about Saul/Paul’s notions of the divided soul, nicking its universality. (The same could probably be said for eleventh century European peasants as well.)

As an alternative, we could imagine a progressively torn soul, with significant species-wide and/or culture-wide occurring through the millennia. The first could be the birth of self-consciousness, pictured in the Eden/Fall myth and in countless other places. We could envision the agricultural, industrial and information revolutions each adding their own yank to the tear in the soul. Different historical events, like the Holocaust or the French Revolution, also effect the tear. Cultural identifications of gender, race, and disability also play a part. And then the ten thousand different ways our own cultures, families, and personal histories yank on the tear.

So the notion of the torn soul as self is rescued from too much historical particularity by further historical particularity. It’s a humanist take on the torn soul, and a (historically, even empirically?) descriptive take as well.

Secondly, though, we come to the question of what it means for a thusly torn soul to become whole. As Wieman says, it does not mean we become an “unmoved mover,” static and unaffected. In the end, the tear in the soul cannot be closed because that would do violence to our identity. Perhaps we must learn to live with the tear. Perhaps the tear must heal into a useful aperture, giving us increased function and ability. (Those who paid better attention in biology will have to help me with the medical metaphors here.) Or perhaps the tears are necessary opening in the cell wall of the self, without which we would cease to be alive.

Another question which perplexes me is whether or not Wieman’s notion of the whole self in dialogue with the other is enough. As far as his categories go, I think it is. That is, Wieman’s notion of creative interchange is deliberately concrete and abstract enough to cover all the bases. It’s concrete enough because Wieman starts his thought by noting something he has actually observed in real life–that people can become better people and that they do this by being in relationship with other people. It’s abstract enough because–having excluded notions of a transcendent, otherworldly god or ideational realm–because his god–the process of creativity–is nothing other than that process of wholeness-producing relationship itself. That is, having excluded most common philosophical abstractions through this naturalism and pragmatism, his notion of god is the highest abstraction possible, and a fairly low abstraction at that.