350
PARTISAN REVIEW
is always undergoing fundamental changes, or is capable of doing so. There
is
consequently no core of " innate" human nature or of fIxed social condi–
tions which defIne it: it is a self so totally immanent in the world that it is
a product of immediate appearances and of sensations. This notion of
selfhood puts an immense premium on " direct" experiences with other
people; it detests reserve or masks behind which other people are felt to
lurk, because in being distant they seem to be inauthentic , failing to take
the immediate moment of human contact as an absolute. About this protean
self, Lifton
is
highly ambivalent. He sees its value, as a pure analytic con–
struct, because the vision of an infInitely malleable human nature does away
with the .whole problem of ahistorical, innate personality factors ; but he
fears this protean man somewhat as a cultural phenomenon. For
if
one
dedicates oneself so thoroughly to a life of direct sensate experience, one
cannot make long-term commitments, and resistance to immediate moments
which are malign or unjust becomes difficult. A protean man may live a
rich immediate life, but only at the cost of accommodation
to
his environ–
ment. By contrast, the person who feels his selfhood
to
be constant has
acquired the will to resist his environment.
Belief in a protean self follows logically from a loss of boundaries
around the self. If the world of impersonal necessity is erased , and reality
becomes a matter of feeling, then changes in feeling , transitory impressions
and sensations come to seem like fundamental changes in character. The
self-concept as a whole is thus fetishized , just as individual objects were a
century ago.
This totally phenomenological view of the self achieved one of its most
dramatic expressions in the commune movements of North America and
Western Europe during the last decade. These communes were seen less as
arrangements valuable or pleasurable in themselves than as models of how
the larger society ought to reform itself. Indeed, the millenarian commune
involves a conviction that changes in one's immediate life space are so im–
portant and changes in the quality of feelings between people who become
intimate are of such value, that these changes somehow become emblems
of what the whole of society ought to be like. Thus, there is no vision of the
operation of society as something different from intimate transactions . But
it is possible to believe that changes in one's immediate feelings are political
in character only if one assumes that the whole of society is made up of
creatures defIned essentially by their immediate feelings . And if one accepts
such an assumption, then it is logical to believe that this society of protean
selves is waiting for a " model " of changes in feeling
to
guide the transfor–
mation of the whole.
