Identity
Identity; identity is something you're born with. You are born to be your father's son. You are born to be such and such a social class. You are born to be privy to certain experiences and not others; in essence, you are born to live a certain life. Identity is not who you are, but what others have made you; this is why we qualify ourselves in terms of our relationships to others: on our family, on our friends, and also on what we do for a living (of how we spend our time, no matter how trivial this is).
We are also a product of our material circumstances. Freedom, for me, has always, as a definition, been at odds with itself (the same of which, I feel, can be said of autonomy). This is what I would ultimately argue. You are everything that others remember about you. Even momentary lapses in your past, others will use to construct the identity of you. There would be no personal continuity in this sense, otherwise. How you feel one day is entirely different, and non-comparable to how you felt the previous day; hence is the transient nature of experience.
Though, I am not denying, here, the continuance of certain feelings brought on by physiological considerations,but would say, that are experiencing of them can be differentiated - on an immeasurable, moment-by-moment, basis. You may say that you hold, generally, certain moral principles. And yet, seemingly, when you fall from these, this is what people will remember; never mind the intention you held before, during and after. Also, the very fact you can be deterred from being such and such a way, proves that it was not, necessarily, an integral part of what you are. Thus, a distinction must be held, personally, between identity as objective, of how others see you, and identity as subjective, of what you believe yourself to be - though this, I would argue, is 'fluid', always in flux, rather than 'fixed' (which is what others try to make of us, due to some, seemingly, indescribable quirk of human nature - if there is such a group as humans, there must be something common to all of them, to group them as such), regardless of rational, outward deductions, by others, based upon previous inductive 'evidence' to the contrary. And this is instrumental in maintaining individual wellbeing, also, though I acceot others' judgements can also be positive. Identity, itself, I believe, already presumes the existence of others. And in the true deciding of the self, how is this tenable? In conclusion (and this may seem somewhat anti-climactic), we are what we are; and what this is, may not, necessarily, be known by the individual. All I am certain of, however, is that the need for organisation and understanding seem to be prerequisites of whatever condition we seem to suffer from, and focus much of our attention on, for some unbeknownst reason. Here, as in most things, I find myself wanting to cite the idea of human constructs, and the true ineffability one finds themselves under when trying to rationalise any such things.
By Perry Smith
The Philosophy Takeaway 'Identity' Issue 37
