Chapter 8 - The Personal Trek: Transforming the Self

Summary

Emotions, I shall argue, involve judgements about important things, judgements in which, appraising an external object as salient for our own wellbeing, we acknowledge our own neediness and incompleteness before parts of the world that we do not fully control.

The value perceived in the object appears to be of a particular sort. It appears to make reference to the person's own flourishing � Another way of explanation � is that the emotions appear to be eudemonistic, that is, concerned with the person’s flourishing.

Introduction

In previous chapters I argued that inner personal transformation implies a modification to the intentional objects of one's emotions. Obviously, this can also be applied to South Africans. I also argued that the associated beliefs in these objects need to change. An emotion also has a self-referential element. Central to these personal conversions stands the self as the agent of its own transformation process. The self's external world consists of a cosmic array of objects, and the internal connections between the self and these objects are the thoughts of the objects. Only those objects evaluated as significant in relevance to the self, are attended to. The thoughts of the objects are therefore discriminating judgements, appraising the external world of objects in relation to the self. Lazarus sees an emotion as a continuous affair between the self and the outside world,

having a bearing on personal goals, which are brought to the encounter and with respect to which the environmental conditions are relevant. The person must decide whether what is going on is relevant to important values or goals. Does it impugn one's identity? Does it highlight one's inadequacy? Does it pose a danger to one’s social status? Does it result in an important loss? Or is it a source of happiness and pride?

The social transformation of South Africa needs to occur at two reciprocal levels. In addition to the external, structural changes in political order, the inner core of society also needs to transform.4 The inner core cannot transform if we do not know what it was or what it is. During times of social transformation in particular, people have entangled thoughts about themselves. Their ideas of what they regard as important and valuable are often muddled and disorganised. They tend to question the validity and authenticity of their identities, and of their former notion of ‘the good’.