Robert Penn Warren didn’t like the idea of “finding oneself.” It implies that there’s a pre-existing self to be found out there somewhere, kind of like a Platonic form.
He didn't like the image of an Easter-egg hunt in which we all dash about, each trying to find our right or true self.
Warren’s complaint was that it’s all too passive. The self is not found but created.
Any time you run into a conceptual problem it’s a good idea to check your metaphors.
One of the classic ones involves an archer who takes aim at a target and shoots. The purpose of the archer is decided before any activity begins. And so ancient students of philosophy took aim and, in old age, judged their lives by how close to they come to the target imagined long ago.
But consider another metaphor: an oak tree that is trying to grow so that its leaves reach the light way up in the canopy of the forest. Speaking metaphorically, we could say that the tree’s growth includes many discoveries, great and small, along the way. When an ancient hickory falls nearby, the oak’s leaves turn toward the light. New limbs grow that way. When small roots and root hairs run into to rock, they grow around the obstacle and find nutrients in other places.
The flight of an arrow does not allow for corrections and changes in the way that the growth of a tree does. It seems to me that we learn a lot along the way.
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