Aspiration and Mentoring: Two Ideas in Search of Each Other

By, Michael H. Shenkman, Ph.D.

Abstract
I propose that mentoring nurtures, clarifies and emboldens aspirations. But this notion will only have clarifying power if we have a strong sense of what aspiration is. At this point, aspirations cannot be measured, and what is worse, often they cannot even be articulated in advance by those whose lives they affect. How can mentorings contributions to ones life be identified, no less calibrated under such conditions? How is a competent, responsible mentoring engagement to be constructed, evaluated and improved if this is the case? Current work in new scientific research and in philosophy can help. As offered by Stuart Kauffman self-organization comprises notions of more complex structures emerging from simpler ones. This provides way to appreciate the reality of aspirations. Post-structural philosophies, such as those of Deleuze and Derrida, provide links between natural selforganizing potencies to the development of meanings, intentions and values. From these streams of seminal thinking I suggest the notion of individuation. This natural drive focuses ones energy on devising more expansive and more encompassing means of engaging experiences in our lives. That more corresponds to aspirations. The mentor helps the mentee to forge a narrative that strengthens his or her awareness of the experiences, precedents, temperamental orientations and mature groundedness that can promise a path in the aspiring life, if not success. This presentation will introduce attendees to ways of framing aspiration so that it can serve as the unique territory which mentoring helps one explore, enrich and nurture.

Content
This unhearing historicity, advancing through the labyrinth by detours, transgression, slow encroachments and sudden drives, does not imply that the painter does not know what he wants. It does imply that what he wants is beyond the means and goals at hand that command from afar all our useful activity.
Merleau-Ponty
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Mentoring distinguishes itself as a supporting relationship by dedicating its attentions to identifying, nurturing and emboldening a persons aspirations. This paper explores the territory marked out by a set of questions that necessarily follow from that assertion: First, what is aspiration? Second, how do mentors specifically address aspirations, in preference to the other concerns, needs and issues that a mentoring candidate may present? DISTINGUISHING ASPIRATION. Aspiration is a motivating orientation: when you aspire you does not remain in a quiescent or passive state; you vividly and vitally feel the urge to act. But other emotions also have these effects. Ambition, goal-oriented striving and being inspired motivate actions as well. Supporting relationships such as coaching or counseling provide guidance for translating these motivating orientations into effective actions. So if we are going to aver that aspiration is the specific subject matter of mentoring we need to qualify and distinguish that notion further. In this brief presentation, we can look at how aspiration
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Merleau-Ponty (2004); p. 320.

differs from one of those terms, that of inspiration. The root of this term, spiration, is shared by aspiration, and so both terms refer to the breath. When we inspire, we take a breath in, we know we are doing so, we feel it coming in to our bodies; we feel something coming into our bodies from the outside. When we use the term inspiration metaphorically, as describing a motivating orientation, when we are inspired, we indicate both a definiteness of affect and a known source: something from out there, which we can identify, inspires us; this factor fills us with what we have taken in, and from this we are moved in a particular way, in a particular direction. Aspiration still metaphorically refers to the breath, but as an a spiration -- the a designates not having, being without, implying that this breath seems to come from nowhere, or it comes from some realm which is not apparent to us, or at any rate, we do not have direct, knowing predictable access as to where, exactly it comes from. And still, nevertheless, this spiration, this breath of something, still affects us. Aspiration then, is a motivating orientation, but the source of what affect us remains in question; and so, what our exact response to these affecting phenomena can be also remains in doubt. We are moved, but the specific emotions it stirs are vague, their source unknown, their names not immediately at hand; and so, with aspiration, the intended outcomes are not prescribed either and the story of this orientations effects on my life are yet to be discerned. And so, from this philological difference, we can provisionally separate aspiration from other motivating orientations with this suggestion: If a person feel the urge to strike out in new directions and can also name what it is he or she wants to accomplish, its not aspiration. It might be an ambition or a goal, or even an inspiration, but it is not aspiration. An aspiration motivates, it beckons but does not announce itself, claim an identity or restrict its intentions. CHARACTERIZING ASPIRATION. Aspiration can also be distinguished on a larger scale. For instance, from the perspective of the self-organization paradigm,2 we can connect aspiration to the increasing complexity we see in our universe. In this paradigm, under the right thermodynamic conditions, energies and materials will combine in ways that establish entities and beings that engage their milieus in more expansive and more encompassing ways. Through processes such as fusion, affiliation, symbiosis and genetic exchange the means to use a wider range of the materials and energy factors in their milieus come into play and contribute to the diversification of modes of existence: energy forms matter, matter combines with energy to become life, and life evolves to form intelligence. What self-organizing has in common with aspiration becomes most evident at the organic level: if the energetic and environmental conditions are right, over the span of many generations, self-organization propels species, in ways they cannot know of or direct, to develop in one or several directions: toward a greater diversity of skills, or to improvise and innovate on new skills in ways that no existing mode of life had anticipated or predicted. Analogous to aspiration, no species knows what induced these adaptations, but they happen; and also, just as with aspiration, this process of increasing complexity entails (genetic and behavioral) experimentation, and even failure; but the impetus toward new modes of engagement, in a healthy milieu, is irrepressible.
Stuart Kauffman, Investigations (2000). As a fourth law of thermodynamics, Kauffman proposes: [Since the big bang, the universe persistently diversifies and becomes more complex in such a way that the diversity of different possible next events keeps increasing as rapidly, on average, as is possible. The greater the current diversity of matter, processes and sources of energy, the more ways there are for these to couple to generate yet further novelty, further symmetry breakings. (p. 151)
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ASPIRATION AS S PRIMARY HUMAN CONCERN. Granted, aspiration is certainly more of an emotional or even spiritual process in humans, and takes place within the lifetime of one person. Increasing complexity becomes aspirational when humans add in our ability to use language and cultivate behaviors through communication and education. And right at that point, right when humans do apply language, communication and education to their own development, human self-organizing increasing complexity becomes really different, exceptional, unique and aspirational. Humans, and as far as we know, only humans on earth, take this drive toward increasing complexity as being a matter of primary concern; humans take this urge to take on the factors in ones world more expansively and encompassingly (and not just more competently) as being a matter of what means to be human at all. This unique drive, that institutes aspiration as the pre-eminent human way forces us to ask, not how do we do things better, make more and different kinds of things by better and better methods, but rather: how do we foster our aspirations so that we can envision and commit ourselves to living in ways that are more expansive and more encompassing of wider worlds? Are we really asking this question? When we say we need entrepreneurs, we are saying we need people to aspire; when we say we need new ideas for producing and using energy and organizing our society in these days of information processing ubiquity, we are saying we need people to act on their aspirations. When we say that we want to support people who engage in science or literature or philosophy to envision new ways of living on earth, we are saying we need aspiration to take hold on a larger scale. Thus in all these ways, in an unprecedented shift in perspectives as to what the human endeavor is about, aspiration has been set loose as a factor in its own right as a vector of energy in the human realm. ENTER MENTORING. In my work I provide mentoring to people who, you might say, aspire for a living. My mentees have put social recognition, financial reward, safety and security at risk in order to express their aspirations for a more expansive and encompassing human endeavor. There is nothing, there is no one, asking them to take on these tasks; there is no assurance their efforts will come to anything in the way of material success or recognition. Instead, some driving force eggs them on to offer some way to revitalize the human endeavor, on whatever scale they can imagine. What they do has no other descriptive term than aspiration because they are acting only on that impetus to drive onward in a generative way, and, even though many have tried to get along and go along, they keep coming back to this drive that propels them in a different direction. Working with these people has inspired me to this motto: Brilliance and success are no substitutes for aspiration. A person seeks out a mentor when in the throes of trying to decide what in this life he or she wants to be; a mentor helps someone onto a path that is true to what it feels like to be this person. In a way mentoring is thus the new Socratic mission: mentoring updates our response Socrates essential question, how do we be true to ourselves? Socrates answered the question, of course, by fostering the pursuit of truth by means of philosophy; today, we answer this question by nurturing aspiration by means of mentoring. ASPIRATION AS SUBJECT MATTER OF A MENTORING PEDAGOGY. What is still missing in this picture however, a pedagogy dedicated specifically to the nurturing and cultivating of aspirations; we are still searching for a defined subject matter and an explicitly delineated way of teaching, supporting and learning that elucidates aspiration in its own right. To the extent that this drive seeks an outlet in all of us, to the extent that all of us seek a way to engage our aspirations, I offer these thoughts. Any pedagogy requires a schematic of its subject matter. Aspiration is no different. In my research, I have found it useful to describe what I call The Aspiring Mind. (Shenkman,

AM)3 This dedicated psychic-somatic resource comprises processes (machinic assemblages) that acknowledge, but stand apart from the workings of the knowing and producing cognitive ego and its objects, laws and technology. These non-conscious machinic assemblages are devoted to nothing else but discerning, accommodating and then engaging the aberrant and untoward energies that spur doubt and curiosity, and then firm, form and construct them into viably aspiring life ways.4 The world of the aspiring mind has aspects to it that are specific to the question, what do I want to be and so mentoring, in responding to that question has to appreciate those aspects on their own terms. Instead of a world of facts, objects and laws, or even instead of a world of opportunities, the world looks like and feels like a set of forces, attributes and characteristics that both attract and resist the aspirant in certain and particular ways. If theses factors are not experienced as palpable things or direct causes, then they are certainly experienced as phenomena, which are capable of having specific effects and that require the formation of specific responses. There are six of these phenomena that the aspiring mind comprises (See Chart I):5 Completeness: the sense that what is at hand is what there is, the way it is, and all that there is; Coming Towards: some sense that a change is afoot that the person feels the need to address; Otherness: it is not his goal or idea, but is out there. Threshold: the aspiration affects this persons very core, it changes the persons goals, and his or her sense of self the more it approaches and becomes real. Face, Flesh, Voice: the aspirating affects the mentee personally, with specificity and a sense of its own vitality, a life of its own; and so the aspiration feels real, alive, as though it were beckoning to be taken up as a lifes way; Excess: the world of the aspiration is always greater than what one person is about, it always exceeds what can be grasped or know and it always is greater in scope, magnitude, intensity and amplitude than anything the aspiring mind can accommodate. The aspiration is humble. ICONIC ROLES AND FIGURATIONS. In response to these phenomena, the aspiring mind does not form a self (or what is typically addressed as the standard psychological ego) that goes out operating, as a psychological being on the objects that are at hand. Rather the aspiring mind forms a sense of one being a figure and taking up (forming ones skills, talents and interests) to a role in that world. The idea is to gather ones motivations, ways, ideas and ethical stances into becoming practices that might bring ones aspirations to fruition. This figure, or Iconic Imago,6 takes up a role as enacting the very life (the self) of that aspiration. By means of assembling energies in this iconic way, an aspiring persons experiencing energies are gathered into what are ventured as viable modes of discerning the scene and then structuring engagements, experimentally, to see what might emerge as being possible, and then, finally adjudging whether or not these outcomes are consonant with the aspirations that were at stake from the outset.
Shenkman, Aspiring Minds: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Urge to Create (Unpublished) This psychic-somatic resource emerges during the course of 50,000 years of cognitive and transcognitive development (a developmental path that includes but also exceeds what Merlin Donald outlines in The Origins of the Modern Mind (1991)). I characterize and analyze the psychic-somatic resources of the emergent aspiring mind under the rubrics the notion of machinic assemblages, as suggested by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). Aspiration takes up the drive of the human psyche to guiding its own processes increasing its own complexity. I call this drive individuation. 5 I base these factors on the work of Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess (2002); pp.112 ff. On these pages he introduces what he calls saturated phenomena. I adapt these phenomena so as to be appropriate for the machinic assemblages of the aspiring mind, and call them saturating phenomena. 6 This notion combines the work of Marion (cited above) along with Jean-Franois Lyotard (Discourse, Figure (2011)) and several works in Self-Psychology by Heinz Kohut (1989, 1988).
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For the sake of analysis I have provisionally characterized four such roles, and their corresponding icons:7 the leader: the arch; the artist: an amphitheater; the prophet: the bazaar; and the mystic: the open. As enacting these roles, in ways that are organized by these iconic figurations, the aspirant develops new modes of engagement faculties and practices that keep that aspirational world and makes it available for engaging. The iconic figuration thus puts into effect a set of tasks, relationships, orders and sequences of engagement that define a persons role in the world at large; it provides a sense of order and a way of practice by means of which this person can venture out to establish what that aspiration envisions. MENTORING THE ASPIRING MIND: A PROPOSAL. If this is how the world of the aspiring mind takes shape, and if this figuration is guides the conversation with the aspirant, then the mentoring process unfolds within certain parameters. I will conclude this condensed overview with an outline of that process: (See also Chart 2 for the essential factors and terms that are applied in this process.) 1. First the mentor has to peel back the language of the commonplace and common sense, which subverts aspiration, and get to the terms that define and demarcate the aspiring world, in terms that express how the mentee feels it. The terms will often cluster around the phenomena described above, but they will be individualized (and compromised) according to the role a person gravitates towards and the environment in which that person has been trained and developed professionally. The emotional orientations of aspiration are not clear, but, as I have suggested, they are specific to aspiration in general. Then, according to the emerging role that the mentee is stepping toward, these orientations will be named or framed as actions in different ways. See Chart 1. 2. Part of this aspect of discernment is determining the state or stage of emergence the aspiration is in. Is it in an inceptual stage where the energy, but not the role or the material is in view? This determination is especially important for mentoring young people. In some figurations (well get to that), the aspirations form early for the roles of leader and artist; but the roles of prophet and mystic form quite late, and a younger person might not even be aware that his or her longings are taking on this figuration. As a preliminary aid to mentors I suggest these stages: Inception (the stirrings make themselves felt, especially in young people); Potentiality (a sense of a role and a desired effect is taking shape); Possibility (a commitment to a role emerges and so a way is clarified); Feasibility (the role and the course of action and a lifes way is accepted for testing as being viable). 3. Aspirations are frustrated in different ways. Each mentee feels a certain kind of frustration: this is also indicative of the role that the person is gravitating toward. The mentor needs to help the mentee identify this block, and contextualize it within the frame of the role and iconic figuration toward which the mentee is gravitating. Often these blocks are just an essential way the common world always resists this aspiration, and so the feelings the mentees have are right on track and are to be expected, not rejected or taken as signs of failure. 4. Aspirations are set back on track by clarifying the iconic figuration that is in play for the mentee. Here the clarification of a role becomes the central task. The mentor provides a conversation that strengthens the aspiration, provides a sense of reality and context for the aspiration, and helps that person to a practice that sustains that aspiration. 5. The mentor will then clarify, unify and connect the mentee with the heritage and genealogy of a role. A role, as opposed to a profession or a career, offers a person a way to
I have written, or am researching and writing separate works on each of these figures and the factors that mentoring needs to take into account for each. A list of these works is available at breakoutcreatives.blogspot.com.
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engages life in more expansive and more encompassing ways, even at the expense of being less competent even successful, or even long-living. 6. Finally the mentor helps the mentee to envision a path, a journey of practices and experiences on which this role can test itself, develop and become more robustly effective. Set out a set of experiments and also the things to note along the way. I frequently recommend keeping a journal, for instance (or nowadays, a blog). Also, work with the mentee to develop terminology, channel perceptions in accord with orientations; flag and accept blockages and develop concepts that can help to plow through and over them onto new ventures. CONCLUSION. This outline is far from complete, and from this extremely compressed and overly accelerated summary, I hope we can outline how mentoring, as a new mode of Socratic-like inquiry and dialogue, provides the occasion for aspiration to unfold. And, ultimately, I hope we can envision and craft a pedagogy that is specific to mentoring aspirations: that we can forge a learned and concentrated curriculum of discerning and conversation that will elevate both mentoring and aspiration to their rightful locus, that is to informing and nurturing the aspirations that ignite the fire at the very core, heart and wellspring of the human endeavor.

Chart 1: Saturating Phenomena in Mentoring. The phenomena of the aspiring minds world are articulated differently, depending on the role and figuration that the mentee is envisioning. A mentor can sense what phenomenon is at stake, needs to take shape, by listening to and sifting out certain phrases, words or ideas that the mentee is struggling to express. The mentor can then explore the feelings that this aspect of the mentees world generate and can devise strategies to strengthen the mentees ability to deal with this aspect of his or her aspiration.

Chart 2: Mentoring the Aspiring Roles. Once the role that a mentee aspires to is identified, certain factors can be linked to what that role will entail. The mentor can organize questions and guide the conversation toward outcomes that are then specific to each role.

References
Deleuze, Giles and Guattari, Felix (2001). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Athlone Press. Kauffman, Stuart (2000). Investigations. New York: Oxford University Press. Kohut, Heinz (1989). The Analysis of the Self. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, Inc. Kohut, Heinz (1988). The Restoration of the Self. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, Inc. Lyotard Jean-Franois (2011). Discourse, Figure. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Marion, Jean-Luc (2004). In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. New York: Fordham University Press. Merlin Donald (1993). The Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2004.) Basic Works. New York: Routledge. Shenkman (Unpublished; draft, in progress, available upon request). The Aspiring Mind: A Phikosophical Inquiry into the Urge to Create. See also: breakoutcreatives.blogspot.com Shenkman, Michael (2005). The Arch and the Path: The Life of Leading Greatly. Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris. Shenkman, Michael (2008). Leader Mentoring: Find, Inspire and Cultivate Great Leaders. Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career Press, Inc. Shenkman, Michael (2012). Questions Concerning the Essence of Mentoring: From Goddess to Professional. New Mexico: University of New Mexico Mentoring Conference. Shenkman, Michael (2011) Mentoring the Creative Types. New Mexico: University of New Mexico Mentoring Conference.