Yasemin Aydın
One of the peculiar confusions of contemporary life is that we have begun to mistake a life worth displaying for a life worth living.
We read, travel, work, exercise, parent, cultivate friendships, develop opinions, support causes and attempt to become more thoughtful versions of ourselves. None of this is inherently suspect. The desire for self-development is among the most human of desires: we want to become more capable, more generous, more coherent, perhaps even wiser.
But somewhere along the way, the axis can shift. Without quite noticing it, character becomes image, authenticity becomes performance, and the question “What kind of person am I becoming?” begins to merge with another: “What kind of person does my life appear to reveal?”
The danger is difficult to detect precisely because it rarely feels like failure. It often feels like progress. We may believe that we are accumulating the ingredients of a richer life at the very moment when we are beginning to experience that life from the outside.
Friedrich Schiller gave us an unexpectedly useful way of thinking about this problem more than two centuries ago.
In his 1793 essay On Grace and Dignity, Schiller developed one of his most beautiful ideas: the schöne Seele, the “beautiful soul”. The phrase can sound quaintly Romantic today. The problem behind it is anything but.
Schiller was asking whether moral life must always feel like a struggle against ourselves. Must we continually force inclination to submit to duty, overcoming what we want in order to do what is right? Or can human beings reach a point at which their values have become so deeply incorporated into their character that goodness no longer feels like permanent self-coercion?
Schiller was responding, in part, to Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy. Kant placed enormous weight on our ability to act from duty rather than merely from inclination. Schiller did not reject the seriousness of that demand. But he wondered whether an endless civil war between reason, desire and duty could really represent the highest form of moral maturity.
For Schiller, the beautiful soul represented another possibility: a person whose ethical commitments no longer stand above the self like a supervisor.
To borrow, carefully, from contemporary psychology, the distance between the person one is and the person one believes one ought to be has diminished. Right action has become, to some meaningful degree, natural action.
Goodness is no longer a performance.
Yet Schiller was far too perceptive a writer to leave us with an uncomplicated ideal. In his dramas, he repeatedly explored what happens when the stories we tell about our own goodness become more powerful than our ability to see ourselves clearly.
When ideals make us blind
In Don Carlos, Schiller places his characters in the court of Philip II of Spain, a world structured by monarchy, suspicion, obedience and political calculation. Against this background appears the Marquis of Posa, perhaps the play’s most seductive moral figure: cosmopolitan, eloquent and committed to freedom.
His famous appeal to Philip “Give us freedom of thought” has echoed far beyond the play.
Posa appears to stand above the small compromises and intrigues of the court. He speaks the language of universal principle.
But Schiller does something more interesting than turning him into a flawless spokesman for liberty.
He asks what happens when a person becomes so convinced of the nobility of his ends that other human beings begin to appear as instruments within a larger moral design.
This is one of the more uncomfortable possibilities of ethical life. The ideal self can elevate us. It can call us beyond selfishness, complacency and cowardice. We need ideals precisely because the person we currently are should not always have the final word on the person we might become.
But an ideal can also become a screen behind which we stop examining our own conduct.
Once someone becomes deeply invested in the belief that they are acting for justice, humanity, truth, freedom or some other unquestionably worthy cause, an especially dangerous form of moral reassurance becomes available: because my aim is good, I must therefore be good in the way I pursue it.
Posa’s problem is not that his ideals are too high.
It is that the distance between the magnificence of his ideals and the moral ambiguity of his actual behaviour becomes increasingly difficult for him to perceive.
Schiller thus poses a question that remains disturbingly modern: Do elevated ideals necessarily produce elevated conduct?
They do not.
Sometimes they make our conduct harder to see.
The distance between being a king and being a man
Philip presents the opposite problem.
It would be easy to read him simply as an authoritarian king. Schiller does not allow us that comfort. Behind the institution, he gives us a human being who has almost disappeared into his role.
In one of the play’s most revealing moments, Philip admits that he has longed for “a human being”.
The line matters because his problem is larger than loneliness.
As king, Philip must continually enact a particular version of himself. He must not hesitate. He must not appear weak. He must distrust intimacy, subordinate private feeling to political order and learn to regard individual lives through the abstractions of state necessity.
Yet beneath this armour remains a person who wants what people ordinarily want: to believe someone, to trust someone, to be encountered as a human being rather than merely as an office.
There are, in other words, two Philips: the person demanded by kingship and the person who continues to exist underneath it.
And here Schiller begins to sound remarkably contemporary.
We are divided not only between who we are and who we wish to become. We can also become divided among the different selves demanded by our roles — professional, parent, citizen, leader, partner, intellectual, believer, dissenter, caregiver.
Roles do not merely prescribe what we should do. Given enough time, they begin to tell us who we are permitted to be.
Two centuries later: the psychology of self-discrepancy
In 1987, the social psychologist E. Tory Higgins gave systematic psychological language to something Schiller had explored through literature.
His self-discrepancy theory distinguished among three domains of the self: the actual self, the person we believe ourselves currently to be; the ideal self, the person we would like to become; and the ought self, the person we believe duty, responsibility and social expectation require us to be.
The distinction explains why two apparently similar statements can belong to quite different emotional worlds.
“I have not become the person I wanted to be” is not identical to “I have failed to become the person I was supposed to be.”
One contains the sorrow of unrealised possibility. The other carries the weight of obligation.
Read through Higgins, Schiller’s two figures almost form a psychological symmetry.
Posa is possessed by the grandeur of the ideal self. Philip is crushed beneath the demands of the ought self.
One risks losing sight of his actual behaviour because he believes too completely in the person he aspires to be. The other risks losing the living person altogether beneath the person his position requires him to become.
Against both stands Schiller’s beautiful soul: not a perfect human being, but the possibility of a life in which values, inclinations and behaviour have become less alien to one another.
And this is where the old literary problem begins to illuminate something strikingly contemporary.
The desire to become a better person is not the problem. Nor is self-realisation.
Without ideals there would be far less learning, moral development, artistic ambition or hope. Human beings need images of possibilities not yet realised.
The problem begins when the ideal ceases to function as a horizon and starts functioning as a measuring device.
At that point, the desire to live well can quietly turn into the desire to produce the appearance of a well-lived life.
The life we live and the life that appears worth living
Erving Goffman’s classic work on the presentation of self reminds us that impression management did not begin with Instagram.
Human beings have always cared about how they appear in the eyes of others. Clothing, titles, manners, speech, possessions and social circles have long communicated identity and status. There is nothing uniquely digital about presenting a version of ourselves to the world.
What has changed is the scale, continuity and intimacy of the audience.
We no longer merely live a life. Increasingly, we watch ourselves living it.
The books we read, the cities we visit, the work we perform, the food we prepare, the causes we support, the people we know, the way we raise our children, the arrangement of a room, even our modes of rest can become fragments in an ongoing narrative of the self.
This is not simply vanity.
Something more psychologically interesting is happening.
We gradually acquire an external gaze upon our own existence.
Alongside “Do I genuinely want this?” appears another question: “What does wanting this say about me?”
Alongside “Was this meaningful?” comes: “Is this the sort of thing a meaningful person does?”
And alongside Higgins’s distance between the actual self and the ideal self, contemporary culture introduces another possible discrepancy:
the distance between the life we actually inhabit and the life we consider worthy of being seen.
When that distance grows, the ideal self begins answering more than the question, “Who could I become?”
It also begins deciding what kinds of lives appear admirable, cultured, successful, ethical, fulfilled or interesting enough to count.
At that point, identity risks becoming curatorial.
We begin to manage not only our choices but their representational value.
The unsettling consequence is that self-realisation and self-display can begin to resemble one another so closely that we lose the ability to distinguish them.
The person becomes both performer and audience, protagonist and curator, constantly looking over the shoulder of experience to assess what the experience signifies.
This is why the distinction matters. It is not an argument against ambition, cultivation or self-transformation. Quite the opposite.
It is an attempt to rescue them from performance.
Where does the ideal self come from?
Psychology alone cannot answer this question.
The phrase ideal self sounds intensely personal. Anthropologically, however, very little about it is purely private.
We do not invent from nothing our ideas of what it means to be successful, cultivated, independent, enlightened, loving, productive, morally serious, politically aware or self-actualised.
We inherit these images.
They come from families and schools, religions and professions, class environments and national cultures, novels and films, institutions and historical moments. Today, of course, they also arrive through an unprecedented flow of other people’s carefully selected lives.
Charles Taylor’s writing on authenticity is particularly helpful here.
Taylor regards the modern desire to live a life faithful to oneself as a genuine moral achievement. But authenticity does not mean excavating some pristine inner self untouched by society.
The very language through which we understand who we are, and who we might become, is socially acquired.
There is no self waiting beneath culture in a vacuum.
This complicates one of contemporary culture’s favourite instructions: ignore everyone else’s expectations and discover what you really want.
But how exactly does the self learn what is worth wanting?
Even our rebellion against convention occurs through concepts, desires and possibilities that a particular world has made available to us.
The anthropological question therefore has to precede the psychological one.
Before asking, “Why am I failing to become my ideal self?” we might ask:
Who taught me to desire this ideal self in the first place? What history does it carry? What form of life does it privilege? What does it quietly exclude?
And whose admiration would confirm that I had finally become it?
The impossible composite self
Perhaps the distinctive burden of contemporary identity is not that we possess more norms than earlier societies, but that we possess more competing ideals.
One of modernity’s great achievements is that people are less completely imprisoned within the identities into which they were born. A person’s profession, relationships, beliefs and mode of life are, at least in principle, more open to choice than they once were.
But expanding possibility has an unexpected psychological consequence.
The number of people we might become has expanded too.
A single person may want to be professionally successful, intellectually serious, emotionally available, physically healthy, politically conscious, widely read, financially independent, devoted to family, attentive to friendships, open to experience, socially useful, creatively productive and entirely unalienated by the effort of achieving any of it.
There is nothing wrong with any one of these aspirations.
The difficulty begins when we unconsciously treat their simultaneous perfection as a reasonable description of one human life.
The ideal self then ceases to resemble a person. It becomes a collage.
We take one person’s discipline, another’s marriage, another’s intellectual life, another’s career, another’s friendships, another’s activism, another’s serenity and another’s creativity. We combine them mentally into a single imaginary human being.
Then we compare our actual life with that composite. There is one small problem. That person does not exist.
Why Schiller still matters
This brings us back to the beautiful soul.
The radical element in Schiller’s idea is not that he imagined a morally perfect person.
It is that he imagined a person who no longer had to spend every waking hour constructing a morally improved version of himself.
Certain values had become character.
Moral life was not an endless personal-development checklist.
This does not make growth unnecessary. Without the ability to question ourselves, transcend habit and imagine better versions of human life, much of moral and intellectual progress would be impossible.
But development is not the same thing as permanent self-surveillance.
Trying to become better is one thing. Feeling obliged at every moment to produce a “better version of yourself” is another.
Once that distinction collapses, the ideal self no longer resembles a horizon. It becomes a destination that recedes as we approach it.
Every achievement generates another standard. Every improvement becomes merely the preliminary version of the next improvement.
Eventually, the present acquires the strange quality of a rehearsal. Life is always preparing to become itself later.
The beautiful soul has its dangers too
Schiller should not be romanticised.
Complete harmony between the actual self and the ought self would not always be desirable. The capacity to say, “This is how I behave, but this is not how I should behave,” is one of the foundations of ethical transformation.
Conscience itself contains discrepancy.
The goal cannot therefore be to abolish every distance among our possible selves.
The harder task is to distinguish between the distances that enlarge us and the distances that turn us into permanent failures in the classroom of our own existence.
An ideal self can be a horizon. It can also become a tribunal. Posa shows us one danger: the ideal becomes so majestic that the person can no longer criticise himself.
Philip shows us another: the person he ought to be becomes so oppressive that the person he actually is almost disappears.
Schiller’s beautiful soul asks us to imagine something more difficult between those extremes: a relationship between values and life that becomes neither moral complacency nor endless self-monitoring.
Perhaps this is why Don Carlos remains alive.
Schiller does not merely place the freedom-loving Posa opposite the authoritarian Philip. He shows two people becoming imprisoned within their own accounts of who they are.
Posa believes too completely in the person he wants to be.
Philip is crushed beneath the person he believes he has to be.
Behind both stands Schiller’s more unsettling question:
Can we live according to our values without turning our own existence into a permanent struggle against ourselves?
Higgins gave us a psychological language for understanding the distances among our selves. Goffman showed how selves are presented before other people. Foucault taught us to examine the ways in which individuals learn to govern themselves through norms they may experience as their own. Taylor reminded us that even our language of authenticity comes from a social world.
But Schiller’s question may be the one we need most now.
A good life surely involves becoming. We should want to develop our capacities, correct our failures, deepen our understanding and move beyond versions of ourselves we have outgrown.
But becoming is not the same as exhibiting becoming.
The danger begins when the centre of gravity shifts from the value of the life being lived to the value of the life being displayed; from character to image, from meaning to performance.
Maturity, then, does not require abandoning the ideal self.
It requires putting the ideal self back in its proper place.
We have to learn which ideals genuinely enlarge the range of our humanity and which merely produce a life that photographs, narrates or performs well.
Perhaps a mature self is not one that has finally become impressive enough to deserve its own admiration. Perhaps it is one that has become sufficiently at home in its values that it no longer needs to watch itself performing them.
That may be the most contemporary promise hidden inside Schiller’s beautiful soul.
Not perfection.
Something quieter, and considerably harder: a life in which our values have become sufficiently our own that, for moments at least, we can stop looking at ourselves from the outside and simply live them.