Personal Identity and Literature

Patrick Colm Hogan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429560248
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

In Personal Identity and Literature, Hogan examines what makes an individual a particular, unique self. He draws on cognitive and affective science as well as literary works - from Walt Whitman and Frederick Douglass to Dorothy Richardson, Alice Munro, and J. M. Coetzee. His scholarly analyses are also intertwined with more personal reflections, on for example his mother's memory loss. The result is a work that examines a complex topic by drawing on a unique range of resources, from empirical psychology and philosophy to novels, films, and biographical experiences. The book provides a clear, systematic account of personal identity that is theoretically strong, but also unique and engaging.

1

BASIC PRINCIPLES

Here are some things to keep in mind when trying to think about identity. First, a general point: We need to be clear about just what it is that we are claiming to be identical with. In personal identity, it’s the person, of course. But what is the person? That’s easy too. The person is the self. But then it turns out that there are different senses of “self,” many of which are potentially relevant (a point made by Leary and Tangney [“The Self as an Organizing Construct in the Behavioral and Social Sciences”]). Moreover, there are different components of the self in each of these different senses. And there are different meanings of “identity.” So, personal identity starts out looking like one easily isolated individual, but it quickly multiplies into a crowd. It’s like little cartoon people are popping into life and making a “boing” sound each time one tries to be a bit clearer about what personal identity might be. So, let’s consider these selves and identities first. After that, we’ll sketch a few points about the way in which identities operate and what their functions might be.

My Hobby Horse

Perhaps the most important distinction is one rarely drawn in discussions of identity. That is the distinction between categorial identity and practical identity, outlined briefly in the Foreword.¹ As noted there, one’s categorial identity comprises one’s social categories, either those with which one identifies oneself or those with which one is identified by others. When this distinction within categorial identity is important, we may refer to the former as categorial self-identification (a form of personal identification) and the latter as categorial social identification (a form of socially attributed identity). Categorial identity may involve any social group. The most common categories would include religion, race, nation, family, sexual preference, and probably most fundamentally sex. Discrepancies between self-identification and social identification may arise for any category. Thus, a transgendered man identifies as male, but (prior to transition) is likely to be identified by others as female.

The operation of identity categories is complex. For one thing, we have various categorial identities and they are sometimes contradictory. For example, the nation in which one is a citizen may be at war with the nation of one’s ethnicity, thus potentially complicating one’s sense of in-group loyalty. In Understanding Nationalism, I have argued that there are specifiable factors contributing to the way in which we hierarchize our categorial identifications. In the long term, factors such as durability (how resistant a category is to change) contribute to our preference for some identity categories over others; in the short term, factors such as salience (how obtrusive a category is) are more consequential.

Moreover, identity categories involve “inclusion criteria” that define who is or is not a member of the category. However, these often make reference to hidden properties—such as whether one has been initiated into a religion, descends from a particular ethnic group, or has been granted citizenship in a particular country. For this reason, identity categories also include “identification criteria,” which enable us to quickly sort people into in-groups and out-groups, on the basis of clothing, skin color, accent, or other more readily ascertainable features. Norms and ideals are also associated with identity categories. As a man, I am supposed to have certain skills, propensities, and attitudes; as an American, ditto; as a professor, ditto again. For example, as a citizen of a particular nation, I may be expected to speak the national language, know the national anthem, and be inclined to support the national team at the Olympic Games.

This brings us to practical identity. Again, one’s practical identity is one’s entire set of capacities and skills, one’s emotional dispositions, one’s habits and routines. For example, practical identity includes one’s knowledge of a language, one’s ability to communicate, reason, remember, and engage in other operations through that language. Our spontaneous inclination is probably to think that group identity is a function of practical identity. In other words, we might intuitively expect that individuals would identify with the people with whom they share significant parts of practical identity. This certainly happens. However, our principle modes of group identification seem to be a matter of social categories. In other words, we do not tend to group people together by individual similarity—by what they most obviously are—but by something more like species categories, putative essences given by some supposedly definitive physical property (such as biological sex) or some lineage or supposed lineage (e.g., having ancestors from Africa or Ireland).

Indeed, rather than categories deriving from practical identities, practical identities are commonly judged by reference to the norms and ideals of identity categories. In an Irish nationalist context, for example, a “good” Irish person (i.e., a putatively exemplary case of an Irish person) is supposed to speak Irish. Culture, in the anthropological sense of the common ways of a society, is an abstraction from the individual practical identities of a group, just as language is an abstraction from the individual idiolects of speakers. However, when explicitly discussing culture or language, social authorities not only abstract, they establish norms as well. Often these norms stress parts of aspirational—rather than actual—practical identity. This is the case with speaking Irish. Even when only a small minority of Irish people spoke Irish, it was a crucial aspect of cultural identity for many Irish nationalists.

The difference between aspiration and actuality is not the only reason that practical identity cannot be equated with the cultural practices of a given society. Culturally specific capacities and practices constitute only one part of practical identity. Components of practical identity are often more general (e.g., universally human) or more specific (e.g., familial or individual and idiosyncratic). Thus, we may distinguish between culturally descriptive, culturally normative, universal, familial, individual, and other forms of practical identity.

Some Selves

Thus, my practical identity is in one sense what I am. Put differently, my practical identity is my self, my self as it has developed through the course of my life, with formal and informal learning, emotional experiences, and so on. We may contrast what I am in myself with the way I think about myself or the way other people think about me.

An obvious aspect of my thought about myself is my perceptual self-image. By this I mean not what I actually look like, as immortalized, for instance, by the Department of Motor Vehicles on my driver’s license. It’s more what I think I look like. No, that’s not quite it either. It’s the way I spontaneously imagine myself. Better still, it’s the implicit image, the one that leads me to be shocked and repulsed when I see my driver’s license and exclaim, “That looks nothing like me!” The self-image is not just vision either. For example, it’s sound too. Heard from inside, my voice is not nearly as squeaky and annoying as it seems to be in recordings. (For those who have not heard me speak, just listen to Eddie Murphy imitating a generic white person. I sound suspiciously as if I’m his model.)

My self-image is part of my self-object, that which is sometimes called the ego. That self-object includes ideas as well as images. Categories (e.g., male) and “episodic memories” (e.g., of visiting Catania last summer). Dates (when I was born), properties (how tall I am, how much I weigh). Lots of stuff. The part that involves thought may be called the self-concept. Thus, according to the way that I use the terms, self-object comprises self-concept and self-image. Self-concept obviously includes categorial identities. Indeed, the most socially consequential aspects of self-concept are often those socially valued identity categories. In keeping with this, it is likely to be more consequential that Jones thinks of himself as white than that he thinks of himself as, say, polite—more consequential for society, and for Jones himself. As Oyserman et al. point out, “People may organize and structure their self-concepts around some domains that others commonly use to make sense of them—their race or ethnicity, their gender,” and so on (73).

The self-concept is inseparable from “people’s chronic activity to ‘figure themselves out’” (Dunning 490) and is commonly understood as “what one believes is true of oneself” (Oyserman et al. 69). But there are complications here. For one thing, as I have already noted, there may be a difference between one’s own identification and social attribution or attributed self-concept. We have seen a case of this in the difference between categorial social identification and categorial self-identification, as in transgendering. But we should not too starkly oppose self and society in the formation of self-concept (or self-perception). As Swann and Buhrmester point out, “we infer who we are by observing how others react to us” (408), and how they categorize us. This point is most obvious in the case of children, who are explicitly and implicitly assigned sex, race, and other categories by parents, siblings, and the extra-familial society.²

A further complication is that “each person may have many self-schemas” (Baumeister, “Self” 355), different complexes of thoughts and feelings that arise in different contexts. As Showers and Zeigler-Hill explain, “the retrieval of relevant self-beliefs” occurs in an “information-processing context.” As a result, only a “subset of beliefs” is “retrieved” (106) in any given situation. Thus, “self-concept categories are generated idiographically (e.g., ‘me at school,’ ‘me with my friends,’ ‘me when I’m in a bad mood’)” (107). As Oyserman et al. explain, “much of the literature now focuses on ‘working,’ ‘online,’ or ‘active’ self-concept, one’s salient theory about oneself in the moment” (82). In connection with this, Oyserman and James understand self-concept as “a working theory about who one is, was, and will become” (117).

As this indicates, beliefs need not be consistent with one another across contexts or categories. My beliefs about myself “with my department head” and “with my parents” need not be the same. Indeed, we could add to this that they need not even be the same within a given category. If a particular memory of an awkward meeting with my department head is salient, I may have different ideas about “me with my department head” than if a memory of a more congenial meeting is prominent (and this may be a matter of some irrelevant feature, such as the room in which I run into him). On the other hand, there are broad patterns across situation types. Thus, I may tend to be a different person when angry or sad, with friends or with co-workers, but I am likely to be the same person when sad and with friends, for example. As Vignoles et al. explain, “research suggests that such contextual shifts in identity typically occur in a predictable manner, based on features of the context in which individuals find themselves” (11).

At this point, you might be thinking that the self-concept—or, more broadly, the self-object, the ego—is necessarily explicit. In other words, you might (tacitly) imagine that I always know self-consciously what I think I am. But that’s not true. I don’t have to be able to call up an image of myself to be shocked at a photograph. A fortiori, I don’t need to be able to articulate the differences (though I can usually manage some general points—such as “Don’t I have more hair than that?”). Thus, there is an implicit self-concept and an explicit self-concept (as suggested by Devos et al.). These two don’t have to agree. Consider, for example, self-efficacy beliefs, which is to say “beliefs regarding one’s ability to exercise one’s competencies in certain domains and situations” (Maddux and Gosselin 199). I may self-consciously think that I am perfectly competent at undertaking some sort of task—say, playing basketball with some acquaintances. But before the match begins I may feel such apprehension that I cannot help but recognize that I do not really have such confidence in my abilities. In this case, my explicit self-concept is self-assured, but it seems that my implicit self-concept is wracked by self-doubt.

The preceding examples also indicate that our sense of ourselves is broader than beliefs, or even than beliefs and images. Our self-object includes attitudes and feelings, or at least entails attitudes and feelings. Moreover, even beliefs are not as straightforward as they may at first seem, since my explicit beliefs may be incompatible with implicit ones. These various types of belief, attitude, feeling, even self-perception, may vary with context. Simply being in a particular place or seeing a particular person may make me feel proud or ashamed, guilty or redeemed. Again, our sense of ourselves is connected with shifting memories, as well as with changeable hopes and aspirations. There is, in other words, a complex network of conceptual, perceptual, and motivational-affective circuits that define my latent sense of myself. Only a few of these circuits are activated, explicitly or implicitly, in any particular context.

The self-concept may be contrasted most straightforwardly with the self. The difference between the self and the self-concept is the difference between, for example, “the actor who thinks (‘I am thinking’) and the object of thinking (‘about me’)” (Oyserman et al. 71). This is sometimes referred to as the difference between the subject (the thinker) and the ego (the object of the thinker’s self-oriented thought) or the I and the me. Practical identity may be thought of as the substrate of the self (thus of the subject or I), the set of possibilities that one might or might not manifest or enact, depending on circumstances. One important complication of practical identity is that it involves not only spontaneous dispositions to act, but also capacities for self-modulation. One’s practical identity is not a simple set of rules for producing uniform action. It is a dynamic system with often contradictory impulses and responses;³ much like the brain with its synapses and neurochemicals, practical identity is suffused with excitatory and inhibitory forces.

In part, this dynamism is both produced and resolved by context. Like self-concept (or self-image), different components of practical identity or self may be activated in different situations. In other words, it is not merely my ideas about myself that differ when I am around my wife, my parents, or a stranger. Different emotional inclinations come to the fore, different primed memories make it more likely that I will act, think, and speak about some things rather than others, and so on. Thus, there is a working self—a self engaged in the ongoing processes associated with the “now” of working memory—just as there is a working self-concept. A particularly important part of the working self is the “relational self,” which is to say those “aspects of the self associated with one’s relationships with significant others (e.g., romantic partners, parents, friends)” (Chen et al. 149).

Of course, our sense of ourselves—or of others—is not confined to any given working self, but necessarily extends from working memory to long-term, latent memory, in the manner suggested by much philosophical discussion. As already indicated, there does not seem to be a fact about when a failure of such extension (e.g., a person’s loss of long-term memories) constitutes a break in identity. Where we draw lines is simply a matter of how we are inclined to make distinctions relative to a certain context.⁴ Moreover, differentiating between when someone is or is not himself or herself involves not just memory, but other aspects of practical identity as well. Practical identity includes the episodic memories that are typically at issue in memory-based accounts of identity, but it goes beyond these. For example, in a given context, Smith might not count as “the same” if her emotional disposition is altered or a skill has been lost.

On the other hand, this also reminds us that, individually, we hierarchize our capacities and dispositions just as we hierarchize our identity categories. As to the latter, I consider myself more a man than an American. I would find my sense of identity altered more radically by sex reassignment (e.g., if I went into the hospital expecting a colonoscopy and came out with a vagina) than by being deported. As the example of sex reassignment indicates, the point carries over to practical identity. Similarly, as I simulate scenarios, I find my sense of identity more stressed by the imagination of losing my practical capacities for abstract reasoning than by that of losing my ability to play the piano. We may even find some parts of our practical identity alien, in contradiction with our usual or “real” self. For example, I might say that I am not myself at large parties. But clearly it is part of my practical identity that produces my maladroit self-consciousness in such situations. My response to large parties is in that sense just as much “the Me myself” as my less self-conscious interactions at, say, a small dinner. But I feel one set of behaviors to be consistent with and revealing of my self, while the other appears to me misleading.

One’s sense of not being oneself in certain company is connected with further aspects of identity. Specifically, in social contexts, we are almost continuously aware not only of the topic we are conversing about or the goal we are trying to achieve. We are also aware of the impression we are making on other people. Indeed, one aspect of what we are doing in social contexts—sometimes more important, sometimes less—is impression management. One’s self-presentation is an important part of identity.⁵ Self-presentation is, roughly, the public counterpart of one’s self-concept; it is the concept of oneself that one seeks to convey to other people. As anyone who has ever been or even met a person surely knows, we often improve ourselves in trying to convey a particular impression (see, for example, Wallace and Tice 132 on self-presentation on Facebook). Perhaps surprisingly, this prettification is limited and we often seek to convey an impression to others that is generally congruent with our self-concept, even if we are critical of ourselves in relevant areas (Swann and Buhrmester 409). In short, not being oneself in the presence of someone else is partly a matter of not managing one’s self-presentation adequately, thereby conveying an impression that is inconsistent with one’s own self-concept, especially—though not exclusively—an impression that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword: Shame
• Introduction: Know Thyself
• 1. Basic Principles
• 2. Some Kinds of Self
• 3. Becoming Oneself: Society and Identity
• 4. Understanding Ourselves: On Empathy
• 5. Shame, Guilt, and Trauma
• 6. Subjectivity and Loneliness
• Afterword: A Question of Dignity
• Bibliography
• Index