Differences in Identity in Philosophy and Religion

A Cross-Cultural Approach

Lydia Azadpour, Sarah Flavel, Russell Re Manning, Lydia Azadpour, Sarah Flavel, Russell Re Manning

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350076525
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

This book explores the constitutive role alterity plays in identity formation in Western and Eastern traditions. It examines the significance of difference in conceptions of identity across major philosophical and religious traditions in a global and comparative context, considering Ancient Greek and Egyptian, Chinese, Islamic, European and Japanese philosophies. In addition, the book opens up discussion of less dominant trends in philosophical thinking, particularly the spaces between self-same existence and otherness in the histories of philosophical and religious thought. Chapters critique both essentialist and postmodern understandings of self-constitution by questioning the ordinary narrative of identity construction across Western and non-Western traditions. The book also explores the construction of selfhood from a wide range of perspectives, drawing upon individual philosophers (including Plotinus, Descartes, Geulincx, Hume, de Beauvoir and Ueda) as well as religious and philosophical movements, including Confucian philosophy, Zen Buddhism, Protestantism and Post-Phenomenology. Differences in Identity in Philosophy and Religion represents a landmark study, drawing together a range of approaches, perspectives and traditions to explore how identity is constructed across the world.

1

Souls, stars and shadows

Stephen R. L. Clark

Introduction

In what follows I aim to expound and to examine the ‘two self’ theory of identity, from Ancient Egypt to Plotinus: on the one hand, there is a psycho physical unity, whose mere shadow remains in the afterlife; on the other, the real self, nous or ba, that is native to the stars, and need not remember (perhaps should not remember) its merely earthly history.¹ It was possible, or so Platonists believed, that we could awaken, even in this life, to our real identity. But there is a sense in which what wakens is not (for example) just Plotinus – a particular third-century Egyptian. It is worth noticing that caterpillars, in one ancient and respectable account, are not turned into butterflies, but they only lay the eggs (the chrysalides) from which the butterflies will hatch! Plotinus even identifies our present corporeal selves, exactly, as grubs in the tree of nature (Ennead IV.3 [27].4, 26-30). And ‘psyche’ means both soul and butterfly. On the other hand, there must be some real connection between the shadow-self and the real or star-like self. What sort of identity or quasi-identity is this? And what are its practical effects or its practical content? Following the Egyptian clue, we have at least two ‘souls’ – on the one hand, the mere shadow or image of a sometime mortal life (ka), and on the other, a spirit who may join the gods in glory (ba), becoming in its turn one of the transfigured dead (akh). We may hope that we are all like Heracles, to be freed from memory of past follies and misadventures.

Heracles and Heracles

According to Plotinus’s exegesis of Homer’s Odyssey 11.601-2, Heracles’s image or shadow is in Hades, but he himself is among the gods (Ennead I.1 [53].12; see also IV.3 [27].32).² Most commentators suggest that some copyist, desperate to reconcile entirely conflicting traditions, had added the line about ‘Heracles himself’, distinct from the shade of Heracles. In the earlier text or oral recitation, it is supposed, Heracles was no more than another mortal hero, whose ‘afterlife’ was no real life at all. At death, The Iliad repeatedly declares, our force (menos), will (thumos), guts (phrenes) and breath (psyche) itself all leave the bodily remains behind, but not so as to constitute a real surviving entity. All that can be found in the Unseen, in Hades, are memories and images of ‘the departed’, perhaps to be given momentary life by the blood of sacrifice, but best walled off from the life of the survivors.³ If there is any conscious experience there at all it is a life of regretful memory – a notion that in later years amounts to eternal damnation, whether or not particular punishments are imagined.⁴ A quite different notion of our ‘soul’ (still psyche) permitted the idea that we are souls, able to wander away even during this mortal life, and destined for real life hereafter. In Homeric or pre-Homeric times, such ‘life souls’ may be reserved for the special few, who are being raised to life immortal, even to godhead (like Heracles himself, or Dionysus), or granted a unique escape from death, an everlasting home in Elysion, as Zeus’s son-in-law (a fate prophesied for Menelaus). In The Odyssey even the great hero Achilles was left in Hades, though an alternative tradition suggested that his mother took him away instead to the White Island.⁵ That Island may be Elysion – or it may be merely an island in the Black Sea, his putative burial place. Another editor might have added a gloss to Achilles’s gloomy conversation with Odysseus to accommodate the story.

But these differing accounts need not have had different sources, as though one tradition or poetic lineage firmly supposed that even heroes only survived as shadows, and another insisted rather that they were raised immortal. The likelier story is that we have always held apparently conflicting views about the present whereabouts of those we can no longer touch or hold. The dead still exist at least ‘in our mind’s eye’, in dreams or sudden reminiscences: Do they also exist in an Otherworld in the far, imaginary West, or the Underworld, or heaven, independent of our memory? Do they grow and change there, or remain forever what they were, or simply fade to be forgotten? Is there some chance that they may grow to life immortal? There need have been no rationalizing copyist to distinguish shadow-Heracles and Heracles-the-god: gods and heroes (i.e. well remembered persons whether for good or evil) differ from the rest of us – but there may be and may always have been the same uncertainty, the same ambivalence, even about the non-heroic dead.

But even if these ambiguities are familiar ones, and need no special explanation, they may also provide the seeds of more developed theories. On the one hand, the dead are shadows, eidola, dream images of the real bodily beings that have real effects in the world, and real choices. On the other, perhaps they can be counted – or some of them can be counted – alongside really immortal beings, tangible divinities. The ancient Egyptian story suggested that ‘one aspect of the god’s nature, his ba, is in heaven; another one, his body, rests in the realm of the dead’.⁶ Even the human dead may have at least two modes of ‘survival’: the ka is given form through the body’s mummification, the array of funeral goods, and seems to persist simply as an echo of the once living being; the ba, represented as a bird with a human head, can be expected to join the sun in his progress across the heavens, maybe as a star, probably in the constellation Orion (the sidereal home of Osiris).⁷ There may, in short, be a systematic theory of the Afterlife, developed in Egypt, and persisting (perhaps) in Homer, and (more certainly) in Plotinus.

Gods and transformations

A consistent materialist must be committed to the view that each of us is no more than a single wave of the sea, and that wisdom lies in identifying ourselves with the whole: it is that world that guides or determines all our thoughts and actions, quite as much as it guides or determines the path of planets, falling rocks or chemical reactions. There is nothing more to us, materialists must suppose, than that. The transformation of this particular body here into other bodies is all that I can expect, and need not fear. Anything – or so many in the Classical world believed – could be transformed into another shape – women into trees, or birds, or oxen – and the gods could take on any shape they pleased to beget their offspring upon mortal women. Nor was this so unfamiliar: tadpoles become frogs, and caterpillars turn into – or perhaps give birth to – butterflies. So it is not so obvious that each of us here-now is essentially and distinctively a human animal: humans are only a transient subset of ‘lifekind’, even if – on staunchly anthropocentric principles – we are somehow the most typical or natural of living creatures, the form from which all other things diverge.⁸ Nowadays we can add that each living creature is itself a colony, a more or less cooperative assembly of other creatures, and dependent also on a wider living world for its continued being. This is not so distant from the Empedoclean speculation that – with some good reasons – Aristotle disparaged⁹ : living organisms cannot be simply chance-met aggregates of hands, feet and internal organs (as though such things could ever survive outside an existing, goal-directed organism). But they can be – since they are – associations of smaller creatures whose ancestors ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Different differences in identity in philosophy and religion
• 1 Souls, stars and shadows
• 2 Confucian philosophy as a universal approach to integrated living: A contemporary interpretation
• 3 Realizing virtues: Plato and Buddhism
• 4 Application of tradition in Gadamer and the sameness-otherness of Islamic philosophy
• 5 ‘The mind is more like matter, the body more like the form’: Geulincx against Descartes (and the scholastics) on the sources of difference in minds
• 6 My identity differs: On why I am not myself in light of Hume, Beauvoir and Zen Buddhist writings
• 7 Individual identity and cultural practice: Relationalism in modern protestant theology
• 8 One’s other self: Contradictory self-identity in Ueda’s phenomenology of the self
• 9 Events of excess, being and existence in Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean-Luc Marion’s philosophies
• Index
• Copyright