Identity, Political Freedom, and Collective Responsibility

The Pillars and Foundations of Global Ethics

E. Souffrant

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137337979
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Eddy M. Souffrant calls for a reassessment of the starting points of moral, social, and political philosophy that takes into account the actual living circumstances of persons living the 21st century.

Part I

Identity

1

Collective Identity

Introduction

Personal identity is an artifice that has helped philosophers determine what there is, the extent of our rights, and the range of our responsibilities. As these essays attempt to follow the trajectory forged throughout the history of philosophy, they too operate with the belief that philosophical inquiries either establish or take for granted a firm sense of self and proceed to place nature and others in a comprehensive and intelligible narrative. At the center of these revelations by narrative is the concept of personal identity. This section will examine directly the nature of personal identity and will lead the way to the other sections in this collection to help evaluate the extent of our individual rights and the constituents of our moral responsibilities. Personal identity shapes the views on what there is; it also determines the range of our rights and serves to justify our moral responsibilities. The present work will consider only cursorily what there is. It will, however, offer a compelling interpretation of personal identity and of its impact on the conceptions of rights and responsibilities. I begin thus with the determination of personal identity.

There is no identity. The notions of singular or personal identities that we have come to associate with the concept of identity are simply expressions that aim to localize identity and that are meaningful only in context. Expressions of identity are fabricated attempts to locate conceptually persons, groups, or things. In the present chapter, my analysis will focus on expressions of identity that concern persons or groups of persons. I shall hold that expressions that presume to assign personal or collective identity and that purport to refer to static and essential identities are simplistic markers. They are markers that attempt to capture the various and complex conditions in our intellectual, social, and political practices of positioning. In short, identity expressions are the products of inclusionary and exclusionary exercises that parcel the context of human interactions. The practice of identity assignment is a useful social tool that offers an impression of control, as well as an artificial comfort of membership, as one navigates the expectations of the social environment.

In this section, I intend to support the preceding view by examining various modes of identity. More specifically, I consider the concepts of singular personal and collective identities to help establish that any meaningful expression of the concept of identity takes for granted that all conceptions of identity are collective. The practice of identity, as I shall endeavor to demonstrate, is consistent with the effort of membership best captured in theories of moral philosophy.

Sources of Identity

I follow the preceding proposal on conceptions of identity with two stories that delimit the discussion of identity. One is represented by Jean Métellus, who thinks that identity conceptions drawn from language and nation ought to promote the emancipation of groups in question. I contrast Métellus’s argument with an anecdote by Gisèle Pineau. In my view, Pineau’s position not only appears to challenge Métellus’s view that identities are instrumental but posits that if there are such things, they are ephemeral and individually generated. Consider Pineau’s view first.

Singular and Collective Identity

Some years ago, as a member of the hosting party for the Caribbean writer Gisèle Pineau, I was reminded of the practical difficulty of cornering a static conception of identity. As a Guadeloupian woman born in Paris and who has lived in France, Guadeloupe, and Martinique, Pineau was always made to feel as an “other” and an outsider by her peers whether in France, Guadeloupe, or Martinique. Marked as an immigrant, an outsider, she recounts that she often queried her belongingness. As she searched for the appropriate ways to capture and guarantee her appurtenance, she realized that her quest for identity was an attempt to be accepted. She also found that her search for acceptance could only be satisfied by the solitary activity of writing. Through her writing, Pineau gave up her search for identity and came away with the advice that one ought to take persons as they are. Persons are neither fixed nor known. Given their willingness, they are discovered continually.

This open and humanist prescription may be at the source of an ethics, or it may serve as a criterion for responsible behavior in society or a social or political philosophy, but the radical liberalism that it suggests is not my concern at the moment. Rather, my intention is to alert the reader to Pineau’s retreat, perhaps in frustration or perhaps because the search is futile, in a creative exercise that denies at once a singular and static identity.

Certainly, at first look, it would appear that in matters of personal or individual consciousness, the critical process that eventually gives way to a consciousness of self is undoubtedly singular and static. I shall try to argue that even when there is consideration of personal singular identity, the reflections are not about something strictly unique to the individual. It is rather the case that the uniqueness of whatever attributes one may assign to oneself, or be assigned by others, be meaningful only in the context of larger categories. They are the categories of common grounds within which the specific attributes deemed unique to a person are understood. The categories anchor the attributes that, in turn, only make sense in context. Identity thus continues to be collective, but it is also contextual; but in what sense, then, is identity collective?

Cartesian Collective Identities

A person is an X, Y, or Z on the basis of there being an alphabet common to all the letters: an alphabet in which the letters participate. One might agree that Xs, Ys, and Zs are unique in their own ways, that they differ from each other. They cannot be unique strictly of themselves without a common ground, a collective standard, or a common space. They must share a collective identity, however subtle it may be. There may indeed be moments, as exhibited in this latest exercise in community identity, where the uniqueness of a singular identity appears to stand on its own, but in the final analysis, the identities are collective. Personal or individual identities are pragmatic gestures of appurtenance; they are attempts at segregating or partitioning universal belongingness. I hasten to add, however, that even that process of compartmentalization makes show of a reliance on collectivity. The singular identity relies on that which enables and precedes its determination.

Descartes’s Cogito is, in my mind, the clearest expression of the reliance of personal identity on the collective.1 Descartes’s cogitation, his skepticism, and in the end all marks of thought compelled him to determine that the thinking being is. I suggest that the singular cogitation is collective. The collective we notice is of two sorts in this approach. On the one hand, Descartes’s analysis avoids a tautology. It asserts a being conscious of its partaking in a peculiar sort of activity—namely, a variety of thought: doubting. The assurance that the dissection is real enables the distinction between thought and the thinking agent. The duality is exposed. Descartes’s singular consciousness is constructed from a collective of two: thinking and being. Of course, thinking and being, even as they are the constitutive elements of the Cartesian singular consciousness of persons, do not help explain the world being the singular person. So if nothing else is said about consciousness and the person, we would remain in an irresolvable solipsism.

Rejecting the option of solipsism, Descartes again realizes the needs of the collective beyond the duality of thinking and being and makes an additional presumption in order to guarantee the second sort of collective: the material world. This material world offers Descartes an environment in which the thinking being partakes at the same time that it distinguishes itself from other material things (thinking or not) that are in the end fundamentally like itself and different. They are either beings like it or thinking beings: again, like itself. The duality or collectivity that is required for identity enables consciousness. The individual’s consciousness is the awareness of locality, the awareness of a presence in space and time. Consciousness, derived from the Cartesian argument, consists of the awareness of oneself as both same and other. It is, in my view, this process of being like and unlike some things at once that discussions of identity attempt to capture.

The complexity of the interplay of self and other will escape us if the role of the collective in the determinations of identity is overlooked. The view of identity that I advocate here also construes identity as a gesture toward appurtenance. In this effort, the conception of identity that I delineate and embrace owes a debt to the distortion brought about by atomism and its resultant sociopolitical form, traditional liberalism. The promoters of the latter have, with some success, convinced some of us that one’s first realization, one’s first consciousness as it were, is of one’s singular isolation. In this view, individuals are like atoms: singular and fundamentally unrelated to others except by social forces and necessity.

If others are significant and they have a role in our conception of the world we experience, the task of this atomism is to reconstruct or account, as Descartes himself tried to do, others and the outside world. This artificial move from singular isolation to connectivity (collectivity) has infected many aspects of contemporary and classical philosophy. There is no identity. The expressions of supposed singular personal identity are attempts to capture, metaphysically or epistemologically, this multiple and fluid experience of being at once part of and apart from a transitory category. The static attempts at capturing this uniquely human experience are presented in a variety of ways that I shall explore in what follows, even as these attempts reinforce the truism asserted here regarding identity as necessarily collective.

Consider for a moment the physical and psychological threats to children, many of whom are subjected to threats of abduction or abuse in many parts of the world. It is not particularly difficult to find reports of children subjected to potential abduction by one of their divorced parents, or by someone with a particular predilection for young children, or by an adoption agency that kidnaps children for a profit (often exhibited in its most repugnant form in the participation of children in a forced labor environment), or through the sale of these children as slaves for sex or other types of abusive activities. These threats to young persons have compelled some elementary schools (notably in the United States) to encourage parents to register their children with the local police department, in effect instituting the equivalent of the French “carte d’identité” very early in the child’s public life. The practical need to frame the child’s identity is the result of an atmosphere of violence against children. Identifying attributes that will be deemed unique will be determined against categories of normalcy, marks deemed specific to the person.

A recent and more appealing approach to this type of program is the one that nears the actual French “carte d’identité,” but it reverses the seat of primary responsibility in making the identification card the property of the private party, the child’s guardians or parents. This mode of identity, provided by a private organization as a service to parents, records digitally the picture and other appropriate identification marks of a child for the parents’ safekeeping. Beyond the security issues involved, the notion of identity looms large. Identity in these examples appears fixed, singular/unique, even as it is reactive. That it requires a child to be threatened with abduction in order to realize the pressing need to crystallize her being through a set of visual or other such attributes points to the difficulty of accepting the thought that identities are formed, positioned contextually, and contingent. Physical and biological characteristics may be presumed to be unique, yet they do not constitute personal identity. One’s sense of self is more than one’s physical or biological characteristics.

She is identified in terms of her body—her appearance—and on the basis of peculiarities the grounds of which are presumed, and rightly so, to be common. The identity that is thus promoted is unique because of its commonality. The identity is unique against a normative criterion without which the identity makes no sense.

2

Common Identity

Linguistic and Racial Identity

Language is a source of collective identity that is thought to anchor individual members of contemporary societies. It is an instrument through which culture is maintained. Jean Métellus exemplifies the interplay of language and identity in his essay “The Process of Creolization in Haiti and the Pitfalls of the Graphic Form.”1 Métellus evaluates Haitian identity functionally and reinforces at once the fundamental collectivity recognized here with Descartes’s help. As he merges national space and language, Métellus argues that the Créole spoken in Haiti is a source of national identity through its utilitarian and adaptive role.

He believes that to focus on Créole as a source of national identity detracts from its use as an educational tool. He avoids the debate of authenticity, the debate over whether Créole should owe an allegiance to both France and the French language or Charles Laubach’s international phonetics. He rejects both approaches as misguided searches for authenticity on the grounds that they do not solve the problem of illiteracy that dogs and alienates a large number of the members of that society (roughly 90 percent of the population). If Créole is an authentic source of national identity and the illiteracy rates are linked firmly with it, the true Haitian becomes (by an extrapolated argument) an illiterate.

The contemporary sociopolitical circumstances within which the Créole language is used encourage the analyst to relegate it to a secondary role in the discussion of whether or not the language originates the uniqueness of a Haitian identity. Instead, taken as a utilitarian instrument, it could alleviate some of the social problems of the country, as it could its problem of illiteracy.

Créole as a source of national identity recalls for Métellus the racial and slavery conflicts between Africans, Europeans, and Amerindians on plantations. Créole as a social tool appeals to its affinity to the “Oil” spoken in Northern France three or four centuries ago. Given its lineage, it is flexible and as expansive as French when spoken in different dialects and adapted to the variations imposed from the Malagasy to the Caribbean region. Créole is reflective of the fluidity permitted of French before the imposition of the strictures of a homogenized French.

Créole, viewed as an adaptive tool, maintains its integrity as a French language derivation pliable enough to serve the sociopolitical requirements of its country of use. It also equips those educated in that language with the tools to acquire international languages with which Créole shares similar bases or orthography. The admitted similarity between Créole and French would in turn encourage the recognition of Créole’s shared familial roots with other languages. The recognition itself should help foster a favorable disposition toward the language and its affiliates that, when coupled with an active literacy project, would solve the problem of illiteracy. It is also striking that Métellus’s sociohistorical analysis of Créole in the context of Haiti reveals a truism that I believe is at the core of contemporary colonial discourses: the designation of, and struggle for, appurtenance.

Colonial discourses are narratives that emanate from experiences or exercises of structural alienation, exclusion, and discrimination. Colonial discourses compel debaters to designate appurtenance: participation in a national or cultural identity that distinguishes its partakers from the colonial legacy. Such discourses exhibit an effort by authors to position themselves with respect to imposed identities. Colonial discourses are discourses of identity. In his search for a solution to a social problem, Métellus rejects adopting a national identity based on language as he anchors himself in a familial colonial legacy. He engages, however, in a colonial discourse that aims to nurture familiarity rather than alienate it.

Colonial discourse as appurtenance embellishes the works of contemporary writers of identity to varying degrees. It entices them to explore extremes. At one extreme, we find the type of projects engendered by someone like Métellus, who is motivated to look for a founding principle, or an essence, to justify the presence of postcolonial language or peoples. Métellus’s extreme is countered by another, like the microscopic work of a Régine Latortue,2 who studies the works of specific contemporary writers. She takes for granted that the colonial legacy influences the creative expressions of its inheritors. She focuses on the impact of, and the responses to, color categories. Latortue notices that, in the contemporary works of some American writers of African descent, there is a resurgence of “indigénisme.” The term is meant to capture the position of writers whose efforts respond to the negative attributes associated with racialized categories. In the contrast between white and black (where blackness is for the most part negative), Latortue recognizes a marked response. The indigénists positively value blackness and use it as a marker of identity and a source of meaningful strength.

In the works of the black female writers that Latortue considers, the writers exhibit a transformation that takes place in the role assigned to blacks, especially black women. In their narratives, the black woman becomes the author rather than the subject of the text. The writers thus accept the colored category within which they have been relegated and reassign its value. Their corresponding identity is reflected through the representative works.

The works lodged within the spectrum offered here by Métellus and Latortue constitute for me the data of colonial discourse. The d...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Identity
• Part II: Democracies: Thoughts of Informal Democracy, Moral Prescription, Globalization, and Sovereignty
• Part III: Morality: Morality, Unpredictability, and Collective Responsibility
• Part IV: Conclusion: Thoughts on a Caribbean Philosophy and on How Not to Do Global Ethics
• Works Cited
• Notes