Self Overcoming - An Essay

Rebirth, from the Self Overcoming Collection

Self Overcoming 

INTRO - THE SELF AS A WORK IN PROGRESS

“You must wish to consume yourself in your own flame: how could you wish to become new unless you had first become ashes!” - Nietzsche, 

What if the self is not something to be discovered, but something to be created? And what if creation requires destruction?

We construct ourselves from experience, knowledge, values, victories, failures, relationships, suffering, and the countless choices accumulated throughout a lifetime.

Eventually, however, even the structures that once served us can become limitations. The person we successfully built yesterday may become the very thing preventing the person we could become tomorrow.

Nietzsche called for self-overcoming: The refusal to regard one's present form as final. To become something new, one must sometimes become willing to destroy something old. Even oneself.

BUILD

First, we build. We construct identities. We develop values, beliefs, habits, ambitions, relationships, and ways of understanding the world. Like the first gestures placed upon a blank canvas, these structures establish form. Some are inherited. Some are imposed upon us. Others are deliberately chosen. Eventually they begin to resemble something coherent. A self emerges. But no construction should automatically be mistaken for a final form.

DESTROY

Then comes destruction. Not destruction for its own sake. Destruction as an act of creation.

Nietzsche writes:

“Whoever must be a creator always annihilates.” Creation sometimes demands the courage to turn against what has already been created. Old assumptions must be challenged. Old values may have to be overturned. Old identities may need to be abandoned. Even things we once loved about ourselves can become obstacles to what we are capable of becoming.

This is the violence of self-overcoming: The willingness to confront one's own construction and say, this too can be surpassed.

THE PAINTING - DESTRUCTION AS PROCESS

The paintings in my collection titled Self Overcoming undergo this process physically. A structure is created. Color establishes territory. Black establishes architecture. Lines establish movement. Relationships begin to form. And then I intervene.

A gesture that appeared important is buried. A field of color is cut apart. Black disappears beneath white. A previous composition is partially destroyed. Something that seemed resolved is deliberately destabilized. But destruction never completely eliminates what came before. Fragments survive. Edges remain visible. Earlier colors emerge through later layers. Drips reveal previous events. The history of the painting becomes embedded within its surface. The destroyed painting becomes the material from which the next painting is built.

REBUILD

Then reconstruction begins. But rebuilding does not mean returning to the beginning. There is no blank canvas anymore. Every previous state remains present, even when only as a trace. The new structure must contend with everything that came before it. This is also true of the self. We do not become new by erasing our history.

We build upon it. Failure becomes material. Suffering becomes material. Knowledge becomes material. The abandoned self becomes material. The ruins are not discarded. They become part of the foundation.

SELF-OVERCOMING

Nietzsche's self-overcoming does not point toward comfortable preservation of the self. It demands becoming. The individual must remain capable of surpassing what the individual has already become. There is therefore no reason to assume that today's successful reconstruction should survive forever. The rebuilt self may eventually become another structure requiring destruction.

Build. Destroy. Rebuild. Then do it again.

CLOSING THOUGHTS - BECOMING

Perhaps there is no final version of the self. Perhaps the mistake is believing that we are supposed to arrive at one. The purpose may instead lie in the continual process of becoming:

To create oneself,

to confront oneself,

to overcome oneself,

and to create again.

These paintings contain the physical record of that struggle. Every layer contains evidence of an earlier state. Some gestures survive untouched. Some are partially buried. Some disappear almost completely. Others return in altered form.

Nothing that happened to the painting can be unhappened. And yet none of it completely determines what the painting must become next. The previous form becomes the foundation of the next. The destruction becomes an act of creation. The ending becomes another beginning.

BUILD.

DESTROY.

REBUILD.

SELF OVERCOMING 

I named this collection Self Overcoming after Nietzsche’s idea of the same name, thinking of the Übermensch and the continual process of becoming. We are never finished - there is always another version of ourselves waiting beyond the one we know. What might your next form become if you dared to overcome the one you are now?