Self Interest vs. Interest in Self

Rebecca gave me a copy of Robert Henri’s 1923 classic The Art Spirit for my birthday a few years ago and I promptly lost it. Luckily it turned up in a most extraordinary place (a bag of sketching supplies I keep in my car) this week and I have been reading it and savoring every page. One of the things that Henri, who during his day was the most popular artist in America, says on the opening page is, “When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature. He becomes interesting to other people....The world would stagnate without him, and the world would be beautiful with him; for he is interesting to himself and he is interesting to others.”

We live in an era when self-interest has gotten a bad rap and, in a lot of ways, for good reason. An excess of self interest has created a lot of social and environmental problems. Those whose self-interest is such that they cannot tolerate the opinions, needs, or rights of others have become a blight on society. Lack of concern for those beyond the self has created a culture of alienation and a me-first mindset that breeds intolerance and outright rudeness. But there is a difference between that brand of self-interest and what Henri is talking about. In fact, they may be polar opposites.

To take an interest in the self, in what the self is capable of and what the cultivation of the self has to offer. The interest may be focused inward but the results usually flow well beyond the self. If you grew up Catholic (or in any traditional religion, I would bet) you learned that putting the needs and desires of others ahead of your own was virtuous. But this has lead to people, and I think particularly women, who know so little about their own selves that they lived lives of self-neglect. When this mindset collided with the post-feminist, New Age movement, a lot of people trying to get to know themselves and “take care of” themselves wound up getting their heads wedged in a very uncomfortable place. The results have been disastrous.

Socrates said, “Know thyself” and that is the sort of interest in self that Henri advocates. Know who you are and take an interest in the workings of your mind, your capacity for learning, and your capacity for creativity. Henri points out over and over in his book that the artist, the person who has chosen to take an interest in himself as a human being, needs to spend a lot of time alone and cultivate an intimacy with the workings of his own mind and his own heart. Few have the capacity to do that. When we try to make that inward journey — well, there be dragons. But if we can get to know those dragons and take an interest in our dragons, we can find ways of transforming them. As Rilke said, “Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princess waiting to be seen.” And when we transform our own dragons into princesses we can offer that transformation to those around us.

That is the thing about giving, the thing they never taught us in school or church or wherever — we can’t give what we don’t have. We can’t give money to others if we don’t have it for ourselves and the same thing holds true for the quality of our attention. If we are not interested in ourselves, it is hard to take a genuine interest in others. If we don’t have respect and appreciation for ourselves, it is hard to offer respect and appreciation to others.

Henri says that what makes an artist is that “he simply finds the gain in the work itself and not outside it.” I think that is true of all aspects of our lives. If we are more interested in results than in the means by which we obtain them we create societies of alienation, self-centeredness, destructive, selfish institutions and corporations with no conscience. So far we’ve been real good at that. It’s time for all of us to cultivate our inner artist — stop the noise and the running around and the lust to acquire and get to know what it is we’ve really been longing for all along.

Thanks for reading.