Stephen Billing’s Blog

In Kenneth Gergen’s The Saturated Self, he notes that the Western concept of the "self" has developed in three stages and I have been thinking that we can see these three stages in our current views of leadership. These stages he labels as:

• Romantic
• Modern
• Post-Modern

This post considers the Romantic stage and the residue it has left on our current thinking about leadership.

Gergen is not using the term "romantic" in the way we think of romantic love. Rather he is referring to a view of the world that prevailed at its height in the late 1700s and on into the 1800s, which is known as the Romantic period. During that period, the view was that what was important about people was their personal depth – passion, soul, creativity and moral fibre.

An early exemplar of the romantic period was Goethe’s "The Sufferings of Young Werther." This is the story of a young man, Werther, who is hopelessly in love with a young woman who is married to an older man. His love goes unrequited and Werther has months of agonising over the conflict between passion and morality.

This conflict summarises in a nutshell the elements of the concerns of the Romantic period – the conflict deep inside the person, between the passions of the spirit, and what it is right to do.

This depth of the psyche was not just words though, it was a call to action. In the story, Werther takes his own life. In the 21st century this would be seen as a futile act, but in the book at the time of publication this was seen instead as heroic. Because the way they saw it during the Romantic period, his heart was the source of all his strength, bliss and misery. Without being able to have the object of his love, taking his own life was an act of self-actualisation, long before Maslow ever thought of the term and put self-actualisation at the top of his hierarchy of needs.

Apparently Goethe’s work was so popular and influential that a wave of suicides followed its publication.
The Romantic period, then, is the source of our ideas today about humans having a deep interior. Artists and philosophers in those days were exploring the make up of this psychological depth. For example, William Blake elevated the imagination over mere experience because imagination enabled people to escape from mundane life and in Blake’s drug-induced poetry, imagination became a spiritual sensation, as it did also in Keats.

The philosopher Schopenhauer thought that the human will was at the centre of the deep interior that controlled the actions of individual human beings. Edgar Allan Poe was writing stories positing that a dark core of inner evil inhabited our deep interior. Edvard Munch’s faces were contorted with anguish from an eternal wellspring deep inside (e.g. "The Scream"). He and other artists were creating paintings which were expressions of inner emotion, rather than as illustrations of the real world.

The Romantic view was also the source of the idea of the soul which in Romantic times was not seen as a fictional aspect of the self, but as an aspect of nature given by God.

This Romantic view lives on today in our ideas of people being true to that deep inner core, and the concept of being authentic – acting in harmony with that inner essence. We especially expect this of leaders – leaders with character are seen as being true to themselves and passionate about their organisation or team. Qualities of this inner self, such as integrity and trust, courage, ethics and values, compassion, and fairness are now articulated as competencies, generic attributes that can be developed intentionally.
We also attempt to get to know that deep inner core of leaders through the use of personality questionnaires to identify the kind of inner essence that our leaders have, and to develop these in the service of their organisation.

I do hope though, that our leaders are not now expected to die for their passion for their organisation like young Werther! This may be due to the influence of the modern thinking stage which came after Romanticism, and is discussed in the next post.