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| 52570 |
What is an identity, exactly?
What is an identity? Is it a name, or a, what?
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Language pair: English; German
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| 52694 |
Re:What is an identity, exactly?
Identity is a bit more complex than a name, I think. I would divide identity in three parts. First, everyone is a person, that is to say what he shares with the whole humanity. This part is what each person has in common with other human beings, i.e. all the things that have been written in the Human Rights Act: freedom, dignity, a right to achieve happiness... On the other hand, and that is a second part, everyone is a character. That part is our social identity, and it changes according to the people that surround us. For instance, a man does not play the same role when he is at is work place dealing with is boss and when he embodies the perfect father playing with his children at home. In fact, this social identity changes regularly since we do not share the same parts of us with everybody. Each person unveils a part of us, and this part is not visible for another person. For example, the boss does not know his employee like the children of the latter does. Finally, every person has a personality which is the result of our own history, of our social background and of our education. It is the most personal part of us, the one that is the hardest to encounter in other people whereas the first part of our identity is common and the second one can be shared to a certain extent.
The issue of identity is quite interesting and I thank you Dwyn Hart for having raised it. Have you ever thought that we change in each second and, however, we are still the same? To clarify, think that you are not the same as one or two years ago, nevertheless, your circle of family and friends always recognize you. You can yourself feel that you are still you, and nonetheless you are not the one you used to be... It is quite amazing, isn't it? In fact, to solve this apparent paradox, we should introduce the notion of essence. We should imagine that there are two other parts that constitute us: our essence, that is to say the part that remains always the same despite the events, and the part that goes through changes( I cannot give it a name...). Hence, our essence prevents us from becoming strangers to us while the other part is constantly changing to allow us to adapt the new circumstances of life. Thus, our identity is both a constant and a variable, to say so.
Now, what takes part in the constitution of our identity? I think there is a major cause of it: the others. An author called Jacquard said that "I come from the links weaved with the others". I think it is quite true. As I pointed out higher in the message, we do not show the same part of our person to all the people. For example, a preppy student can appear as a dutiful son to his family and turn himself into a rebel with his friends. Imagine that at the beginning he was only a preppy boy, but through meeting youngsters from other background, he discovered a new part of his personality. To conclude, the others play a leading role in the construction of us.
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Language pair: French; English
This is a reply to message # 52570
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| 52738 |
Re:Re:What is an identity, exactly?
That's true. I'm different around family, friends, school, adults, ect. I'll give your response to one of my friends. She, at the moment, dosen't know who she really is. I think your response might shed some light on her own questions. Thank you.
-dwyn
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Language pair: English; German
This is a reply to message # 52694
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| 52863 |
Re:What is an identity, exactly? Pt 1 of 2
Dwyn, I've been really chomping at the bit to talk to this one, because it really fascinates me how much we seem to think we know about this and how little we actually do.
I mean, the goverenment things they know all they need to know about our identities, once they get our names on a birth certificate, citizenship paper, social security card, Drivers license, and so on, but how many people are there out there that have identification showing that they are two (or more) different people? Since the government makes so many mistakes, and people are who we are, and life is what it is, there are probably numbers of people who have no idetnification of any kind. Weren't born in a hospital—no birth certificate. Never worked a formal job, no SSAN. Never got a driver's license, no state ID. As far as the government is concerned, they don't exist.
This seems pretty superficial, and it is, but I start here to make a point. Identity within a social/national context is a construction. societies put these together in order to manage the unmanageable. And any conception we have in our heads of what identity is is just as arbitrary and means just as much.
When Rene Descartes rocked the world with his (in)famous conculsion, "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am,") he was making a statement, not only about the nature of human essence, but also on the notion of identity. By defining being as an ability to experience the phenomenon of thought, Descartes was linking our identity to our minds. "I," for Descartes, is the person who experiences thought. That is where our identity lies. That makes a great deal of sense when you think about it, and we kind of want to run up and say, "yeah! That's it!" But there were certain problems with this that Rene never solved, and so far, no has anyone else. If my mind, my soul, or whatever magical force/substance/isness that makes me a self-aware thinking being is the core of my identity, it must be in some way connected with my physical being, with my body. If that is so, there must somewhere be some identifiable connection whereby we can see how it is that the content of my will gets transformed somehow into the dynamic phenomenon of my action. I want to lift my finger and move it over to press down the "t" key and—whohoa! There it goes and all of these t's keep popping up all over my computer screen. It's amazing stuff, and nobody can explain it. We all experience the thought, the will, the idea. We all are intimately familiar with the sensation of our fingers flying about the keyboard (or plodding across it, for those of us who never learned to type properly), by the process that transforms thought into action is pure mystery.
See Identity part 2 of 2
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Language pair: English; All
This is a reply to message # 52570
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| 52864 |
Re:What is an identity, exactly? Pt 1 of 2
Identity: Part 2 of 2
At the time the "continental rationalists," of whom Descart was perhaps the most famous were trying to figure out this magical phenomenon of human reason, another really brilliant guy in England was doing the modern thing, trying to spend more time in his body and less in his head. David Hume was a British Empiricist working at the problem of reality from the other end. He studied human beingness from the outside in, rather than from the insite out. He tried to figure out what makes two different people different, and what you could point to, to prove once and for all that that squalling purple hunk of mostly water that comes popping into the world on our original birthday, and the gray, wrinkly quintessense of dust on the deathbead breathing her last are somehow the same person. Physicaly, there's nothing to support the idea at all. They don't look anything alike, and we often hear that the human body completely rebuilds itself cell-by-cell, about every thirty days (This isn't exactly true, but it is fun to think about.) Anyway, inking our identity to our physical body is problematic, even though it's awfully convenient. It is a handy physical phenomenon, there is a direct one-to-one association between our bodies and our senses of self, so it works very nicely unless you believe in some essence of us that survives beyond the death of our body.
Anyway, Hume tried to take that on and he tried to find any physical evidence that would scientifically prove that we have some human characteristic that we can call identity. He failed. What it boiled down to was this: Here I sit in my room typing at my typewriter keyboard and I have some subset of 41 years worth of human memories in my head. These are the only connection I have (beyond the physical body I live in) to that squawling purple prune I once was. Unfortunately, there is nothing continuous that links all of those memories together. How do I know that I wasn't just born this morning in this forty-one-year-old body with some random sampling of memories that would be just enough to convince me that that guy who did all of those forty years worth of things was really me? It's kind of a ridiculous question to ask in one sense. It's a lot easier to accept that I have been the same guy for forty-one years. Occam's razor, you know: The simplest explanation is most likely to be correct. It certainly makes a lot more sense. However, there is no real scientific law that correct answers are always the simplest, and there is no scientific way to prove that the star of my memories is really the guy writing you this long blathering barrage of balderdash this morning.
So what Hume finally decided was that there is no such thing as identity. We are nebulous aggregations of sense impressions –of experiences and ideas—and our self images of being individuals with cohesive identites are nothing but illusion.
What do you all think of that?
Mark
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Language pair: English; All
This is a reply to message # 52570
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| 52872 |
Re:What is an identity, exactly? Part 3 of 2
More on identity,
After I sent that last email, I began to realize how slipper this whole concept of identity really is. Really, it's a word we use many different ways. Sometimes our identity IS simply a matter of a name or a social security number. That really is all that matters on payday, or when I want to get a driver's license.
But when I read Dwyn's question, it really struck me as more of a question of, "how do I define, in a meaningful sense (meaningful in terms of how I can make choices on a day-to-day basis within the context of my life, in such a way that I will be able to embody some concept of integrity) what it is (in terms of values, likes, dislikes, personality, virtues, vices, etc) I'm talking about when I make reference to this phenomenon I best know as "me"?
I suspect that may be somewhere in the ballpark of what Dwyn was talking about and what her friend was struggling with, and perhaps, what we all struggle with all the time. I think it is what Arnaud spoke to far more eloquently than I did.
So I';ve been studying an interesting edition of Sir Philip Sidney's "The Defence of Poesie," (Also known as, "An apology for Poetry."). The Editor, Richard Bear (his edition of the essay is easily available on the Internet), points out that during the Renaissance, when Sidney rights, there was a notion of "fashioning the self."that was widely held at the time that identity was a created phenomenon, and not something we were born with or grew into or had thrust upon us. The more I thought about the contrast between these ideas of the nature of identity interms of how it comes into being, the more I realized that that might be an important way to look at what it is exactly that we are talking about when we talk about identity.
What do you think? Is identity who we are? What we were born with? Is it something created by our experiences of growing up in a particular society? Something we construct ourselves, consciously or unconsciously? something we grow into? Is it constant? Does it change over time? Can it have different forms at once? Is it possible that some combination of all of these descriptions fits best?
Mark Springer
Sacramento, CA USA
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Language pair: English; German
This is a reply to message # 52570
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| 52879 |
Re:What is an identity, exactly?
I like your question Dywn! It makes me to reflect on mine.
I could define identity, saying that is a group of factors that make you feel accepted in a group (social, familiar, professional, etc).
Those factors could be the language, the appearance, the background, the beliefs, the religion, the social status, a profession, the culture.
I’m in a different culture, and at the beginning I though that I could find my identity just with Latin people, but I was wrong.
Identity is more than a language or a culture, identity is to be comfortable with people around you, is to find people that and respect your opinion and differences, is to share the same beliefs with someone.
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Language pair: English; German
This is a reply to message # 52570
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| 52955 |
Re:What is an identity, exactly?
Wow! Everyone has a different opinion and some that are the same. Yet almost all of us end up asking more questions than we started with. This is really interesting. Imagine what the world would be like if everyone looked so deep into everyday life.
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Language pair: English; German
This is a reply to message # 52570
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