How does it feel to only go in circles?
You try your best to advance in life, but for every step forward there is at least one step back, no matter the direction taken. You leave for college in a foreign city, only to return home after graduation. You complete one project so you can start the next one. You eagerly accept a new job offer, wanting growth or more time away, only to find yourself trapped by nearly the same conditions as you were before. New hopes, dreams and ambitions. New relationships, too. For each, you embark on a long journey that leads back to the beginning. Wherever you go, there, again, you will find yourself, virtually the same person. The possibility of transformative change is both tantalizing and elusive.
Despite our limitations (or, maybe because of them), there is an incredible appetite for new identities and subjectivities. In his recent book Metanoia: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self (Penn State, 2020), Professor Adam Ellwanger analyzes how people have used speech as a bridge between past and future lives. The author’s inquiry begins at the roots of Western Civilization, in Ancient Greece. From there, he charts the use of metanoic language through the birth and spread of Christianity before finding his way to modern-day America, where he focuses on figures from recent popular culture who have used speech, first to change public opinion, then to change who they are. I spoke with Professor Ellwanger about his book and ideas.
Metanoia. Can you give me a working definition of this term?
It’s a linguistic strategy for personal transformation, a linguistic technique to establish a change in identity.
The book calls metanoia “a bridge between the past and future.” This is speech that changes the audience’s mind about the speaker’s identity. Is that merely performative or fake, sort of like a celebrity apology?
It can be. In ancient Greece, metanoia signified taking back a statement or something said that you regret, which could be an apology. For example, “I said something hurtful to you and I shouldn’t have said that.” That sort of thing. That’s an instance of metanoia as a rhetorical strategy.
Okay, but I’m curious how much of metanoia is artifice or inauthentic—a means to affect only the appearance of transformation but nothing more?
Well, authenticity is a modern fixation. Whether or not you are being authentic would not have occurred to anyone prior to Shakespeare, whose Hamlet famously said each person is obligated “to thine own self be true.” But you are right that we are talking about a rhetorical technique meant to effect some change in the real world. This is practical. We see the concept evolve to encompass not just speech but identity in early Christianity. Consider the story of Saint Paul, for example. He persecuted Christians but then had a transformative experience on the road to Damascus. “Saul” becomes “Paul” and an entirely new person is born. But those familiar with the book of Acts know that not all early Christians were ready to believe in the authenticity of Paul’s transformation. He had to convince them. Classical metanoia only replaced speech with speech. Christian metanoia demands more: the convert replaces one way of living for another.
So, it can be more than just a rhetorical strategy to negotiate wrongdoing?
That’s right.
Your book is evenhanded in the analysis of Greek, Christian, and modern-day metanoia. Beneath the surface, though, you seem suspicious of too much transformation. It makes you nervous. Why?
In my private view, too much transformation makes life worse. If the maxim of western philosophy going back to Socrates is “know thyself,” then part of how we knew ourselves was understanding who we were in the eyes of others—which avenues were open to us and which avenues were not. Today, the idea that there are no avenues that are closed and that there are no limitations on who I can be…well, if that’s true, it becomes much harder to fulfill that basic philosophical maxim. How can we choose an identity? The cruel irony of modernity is that we open up new frontiers of being and sell them by claiming that the options make it easier to know thyself. People come to believe that the self should come before any social or communitarian obligations, that we alone pick who we are.
But that’s not the way society works. In truth, we get told who we are. The modern sensibility creates a false idea that we can articulate our individual identity all on our own. I think that is incorrect. You cannot force your self-fashioned identity to mean something to other people. If other people find those identities unintelligible, then what happens next? Well, if something cannot be comprehended by other people, then you will not be successful at transforming. And if that failed transformation inhibits you from living in accord with what you see as your “truest self” then you are destined for deeper frustration and despair.
But everything seems variable nowadays. There are no fixed values. Do you believe that modern people experience “transformation” more than ever before?
Perhaps, but the theme has always been with us. My teacher John Muckelbauer has noted that there is always an appetite for new subjectivities. Still, if we were living in the year 1300, we would understand that there are certain “templates for being” that are off-limits for each of us. We can’t change who our parents are. Or what we look like. Though some self-fashioning was certainly possible, there would have been a limited number of options or opportunities to transform. In contrast, today, any limitation on the self’s articulation of itself is said to be both an unjust limitation and a false one. The idea is that you have the right to inhabit any mode of being you most want to inhabit.
Well, this is America! We have style, force, finesse. With the right mix of those qualities, you should be able to make anything “intelligible” to other people. Forget limits. Make your life a work of art.
That comes from Nietzsche, who said that the highest mode of being is to make the self a work of art. When we try to take his advice, we naturally encounter your earlier question of whether the self we create is authentic. In contemporary art, the “work” that is produced by the creative activity is the artist’s self itself. Once the artist is both the subject and the art object—once the self becomes both the thing that is expressed and the thing that does the expressing—it inaugurates an anxiety that the resulting identity might just be a repetition and not something original. Making your life “a work of art” results in a constant anxiety over authenticity—our own and everyone else’s. So, the fixation on authenticity is a necessary byproduct of self-fashioning. The more we double down on the “art of life,” the more concerned we are about creating a genuine identity.
In a section of the book on incarcerated people, you write that the “moral functions of prison are very much alive.” People use their time to reflect on their identity. They seek a “transition” from one life to another. As much as any illustration in the book, prison seems to be a place where people grapple with who they have been, who they want to be, and what they must do differently to transform.
I think so. People in the context of a prison certainly have a sober idea of the reality of their identities. The prison is inescapable. People in prison have the clearest view of who they really are in the objective sense. When you’re doing time in prison, you’re in a holding pattern and cannot do anything with the time. The prison itself is a symbol of your past life. You want to get beyond the past or botched self, but as long as you exist in this space, the consequences of that past self have captured you and you cannot go beyond. That’s part of what drives the prisoners.
On this theme, you quote one prisoner who says that “life is about transitions and transcending one’s limitations […] sooner or later we all make or miss the transition that will define who we are.” Do you agree?
Actually, I disagree with most of his statement. Life entails transitions but it isn’t about transitions. I especially disagree with the part about transcending limitations. It echoes the dangerous invitation of modern identity: that you should be trying to break all boundaries or limitations rather than reconciling yourself to them.
But I also hear what he is saying. Life is, in fact, a series of transitions. There is childhood. There is a period between being a child and an adult. Adolescence can be so difficult because you are “transitioning” from one phase to the next without being firmly rooted. I think the interest in transition is very, very old. But we have standardized radical change as a normal way of life to a greater extent than any other culture. We don’t recognize how weird that is. Of course, if the biggest goal in our lives as Americans is to be entertained, then radical, constant change and reinvention is a great thing. We will always be dissatisfied. But that pushes us to pursue the new modes of being.
Given our constant dissatisfaction, what is the future of metanoia as it pertains to the pursuit of happiness? What is the future of transition and transformation—what comes next for us?
For one, I think we should talk more openly about so-called “post-humanism” and how technological advance will make it increasingly possible for people to live out new approximations of identity that were previously impossible to achieve. Are others obligated to recognize these transformations as legitimate? As time moves on, new technologies will be directed toward facilitating radical transformations of identity with a much higher degree of fidelity than we have seen before. As a result, the force of the metanoic claims will grow more powerful, and will become more and more coercive in their demands for recognition. It will become much harder to discern the real from the false.
I think we ought to narrow the scope of identity—not out of wrath or spite, but to enhance the chances for human happiness. I think we need to be reconciled to the fact that, as we age, the options are only going to continue to close. If the goal is to “know thyself,” then we will know ourselves fully when every option is closed except the one we have, which happens at the end of our lives. Plato rightly said philosophy is a preparation for death, so perhaps the task of philosophy is only complete at the end of life when you’re out of time and the options for being have converged into the one path you’re walking. I understand a lot of people are terrified by that. But for me, personally, I am most happy when I’m reconciled to the future. I’m happy when I have a clear idea of what’s possible and what no longer is.
John Waters is a writer in Nebraska. His novel River City One publishes on November 7.
