The term comes from Iris Murdoch, a twentieth century British novelist and moral philosopher. But I suspect the concept is an ancient one that has likely been around since the earliest humans first began to dabble in concepts.
For Murdoch, unselfing is a feature of the experience of beauty. It can occur when in the presence of great art. But it also occurs in the presence of the natural world. To look up and see a bird outside the window can be enough to temporarily yank us outside of what has become our default mode of thought, our ruminating self-absorption.
Echoes of Zen philosophy in this, perhaps.
Unselfing, she claims, has moral implications: to make unselfing a more frequent feature of your posture to the world is to become a more virtuous person—in the Hellenistic, rather than the Buddhistic, sense of virtue; Murdoch was apparently a big fan of Plato and his crowd.
As I want to understand the term, unselfing is distinctly different from empathy. To be empathetic is to feel along with the other, to suffer in your own person a measure of what the other suffers. But this empathetic suffering-for-the-other can, paradoxically, involve an intensification and amplification of the self: the other imagined into the self, incorporated as part of your present self-experience. The pain you feel, real or imagined, can never belong to anyone but yourself. Despite platitudes to the contrary, pain is not something that can be shared.
Unselfing has perhaps more to do with the psychological idea of flow than with empathy. As with flow, unselfing involves an immersive state of attentional focus linked with the momentary disintegration of self-awareness. Murdoch seems to suggest this connection between flow and unselfing, pointing out how immediately following an unselfing experience, the anxieties and concerns we were wrapped up in just moments before are no longer as compelling as they were, a clear parallel to the cathartic state of calmness a person can experience when emerging from a protracted period of flow.
But it’s the potential ethical and moral implications of unselfing that I find most interesting. That, and the strong suspicion I have that unselfing—like flow—was at one time a much more commonplace experience, that unselfing is yet another human rule that civilized life has rendered an exception.
