What is Identity?

I want to say that I will probably do a terrible job of a title like this, but the title seems the best way to start.

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My dear friend Lady W. helped me along inadvertently.

1. Identity is whatever makes you you. Your core. Essence. Whatever. Hooray for lameness- it seems to show how ambiguous this topic is.

2. One's true identity can never include anything wrong- sinful, destructive to oneself or others in any way. (This is the idea that came from Lady W.)

3. Identity is not something we create or discover directly. By thinking of ourselves, looking in at ourselves, we lose any ability to really see ourselves. We look inside at the emptiness that is us, trying to find things in it, and not seeing any.

4. Our Selves can be seen only through our imprint on the world around us. Firstly we know our distinctness physically by the fact that our bodies get in the way of other things and can't take the same space like a spirit does- we are not all thought. Secondly we know our wills are there because they butt up against the wills of others.

5. Strangely enough, it seems that we stay mentally healthy largely by having an influence and impact on the world through creating things, changing things (for the better, I hope), and just generally making a nuisance of ourselves by affecting others. I seem to always think I'll have a negative effect, so I'm making fun of myself.

6. We know ourselves in relation to what is not us... even understanding ourselves through our affect on ourselves by understanding how others affect themselves (sorry if this is confusing; disregard if it is). I wonder if we couldn't know about ourselves without interacting with people- we know we exist because people exist which we are not. 

7. We see who we are by comparison with others. We know about our attributes because someone else doesn't have those attributes (it doesn't matter who does have the attribute). If everyone had all the same character, it would not be character- it would just be clumped in the definition of Human. The way we know that a thing is not another thing is through whatever element in that thing is necessary for it to be what it is, and either not present or unnecessary in another thing.

I don't know if those are all the points I have in my head about identity itself. There is always the negative, but the negative doesn't know when to shut up. There is a lot that can be said about what something is not, than what it is.

History of Identity (Sort of)

I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, so here goes for a starter post, made of confused, entangled thoughts.
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We've been obsessed with the idea of identity for around a century, with the invention of psychology (perhaps it was not invented, but it seems so by the history). It seems we get more and more obsessed as time goes on. It seems that before the 1700's or so, people thought of Who They Are far less than we do today. Especially with the invention of novels (late 1700's?) it seems people started to think more about our Internal Monologue. The importance we put on that monologue has grown over time.

It just doesn't seem to have mattered to people much before what you thought, which brings its own set of troubles, but if what you think doesn't matter that much, it conveniently means that what others think doesn't matter that much, either. However, I doubt anyone was particularly concerned whether or not what they or others thought mattered. We often infer upon the past that they might have been secretly controlling others, knowing that others could have given input, but most likely a lot of the usual chafing between people happened for mostly non-malicious reasons, not that there was no fault in what people did.

(It occurred to me today that that one thing is probably what would be the most culture-shocking about time travelling- the completely different way we think about Our Selves nowadays.)

I haven't yet decided how I rate that, bad or good- so far it seems it's a mix of the two. There is a lot of good in not minding much about your self, highlighted because of our current cultural fixation on Self, but there are some issues, such as advocating for personal needs. I'll leave this off, because there's a lot to go into here.

From what little I know of the past century, the idea of Self and Identity has grown a huge network of language and its own set of new concerns. It is amazing when I consider how things might used to have been contrasted with how we think about all this now. Our whole culture has radically shifted just because of our hyper-psychologised way of thinking. Everything surrounds and concerns the individual in a way unparalleled in the past... the little I can think of in comparison is what seems to be the self-indulgence of cultures in other times or places where the richest and most powerful people have been free to concern themselves purely with how they feel and what they want- where they have the time and energy to simply think of themselves.

We in our affluence nowadays have the luxury to think this way, possibly even more so than they did (although we do not have slaves and servants). We have convenience beyond all past ages because of the inventions and the infrastructure developed over centuries.

So therefore, in our freedom from bare necessity, from the mere struggle to live, we can think about our selves. And thus, we have begun to think about our identities, who we are, which I begin to think may be a culturally regressive thing.

It's fine to think about what you happen to be like- what your attributes are in relation to reality, but to define yourself by those things, to restrict your growth by saying you're just like this and can't help it, that is going too far. I don't mean that you can always change, but rather that we needn't restrict ourselves by our defining Boxes. They are simply useful explanations of whatever is.

I may have to prove that there is an epidemic of self-definition now. Ah, well.

Quote from Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I liked two quotes from nearly the same spot in the book as I was reading it just recently. I won't spoil what's going on in the story if you haven't read it, so you can find out yourself what the context is if you care to. I like the points in these quotes very much.

The pleasure (quite new to him) of being liked and, still more, of liking other people, was what kept Eustace from despair.

The pleasure of liking other people is greater than the pleasure of being liked, which Man seems to usually forget in his more conscious thought. I suspect that people who have had wholesome relationships with people know this deep down, unconsciously at least. There is a real peace and complete contentment in being able to really like other people.

So [the lion] came nearer and nearer. I was terribly afraid of it. You may think that, being a dragon, I could have knocked any lion out easily enough. But it wasn't that kind of fear. I wasn't afraid of it eating me, I was just afraid of it--if you can understand.

This I liked because my friend and I were talking about awe and fear of God and about the perhaps natural fear-of-His-power aspect, but then of course also I was talking about how I sometimes have a sense of fear-awe that is like fear, but not fear of having anything done to me. As in, I am definitely terrified, over-awed, overpowered. Partly it feels in those moments like my mind literally cannot grasp the object of its fear, and that's part of why it's afraid.


Both quotes are from Chapter 7 of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Simple Englishness

It is a bit of a cliche to like English things. (Could say British, but not sure... not sure...) When I was a child, I thought I was just following the crowd I grew up in, and was gullible and easily influenced. Just liking what everyone else liked.

I began to realise I had reason for liking it when I read The Lord of the Rings, but still thought I might even like that story because others I knew did. I did have concrete things I liked about English culture, but that wasn't enough to convince me there was reason to like it.

Of course, the explanation for it could just be aesthetic, but I do think I like in Englishness something different than other people do, after hearing them describe what they see in it. Not entirely different, but somewhat. (The future will tell.)

It may be in the last some years that I really figured out that English culture is different fundamentally from continental European. English philosophy was, I am told, different from continental philosophy. The continental philosophers are the ones who came up with liberal theology and Marxism, postmodernism, deconstructionism. Eventually continental philosophy seeped into English thinking and then American thinking (which in some ways might be a bit late on the uptake, for which I'm glad).

Some folks think that the American experiment itself was a result of taking the English philosophy to its logical conclusions. England, for complex reasons including the monarchy, could not do this. the US went further than even England had, though to some extent lost some of that sweet Englishness I so like. But some of it is tidily wrapped up in culture and can't easily be transplanted.

For all that the US went further than England, though, Englishness seems chock full of common-sense which resulted in a very down-to-earth, simple, self-deprecating (in a good way) culture. I've beat it into my head that of course English culture can't be perfect, but I don't care if it is or isn't: it still seems to have so much of value that I love and insist on learning from.


It would be wonderful to do a study to find out if my conclusion on this is correct, but it's confirmed by others I currently trust for information on this sort of thing, and I gathered a lot over the years of Englishness and what-is-not-Englishness, so I'm pretty certain of it at the moment.

Looking back on my life and looking at myself now, I know I've shaped my life around this to some extent- whatever was really noble in English culture and thinking, I have tried to learn from. No decadence, no ridiculous idealism, no flowing romanticism like the French (désolée), but instead good, steadfast, humble Englishness.

(It's worth noting that the culture of lower classes in England is probably somewhat cut off and different from the 'elite' in every era, who also were more influenced by foreign things than those who didn't have time to worry about all that stuff.)

Beauty

Recap: I was supposed to write about why The Lord of the Rings affected me so much back when I was eleven, and I didn't figure out how to do it till I heard Stephen Turley talking about the True, Good and Beautiful. I suppose it's because at the heart of it, they're what I learned about in The Lord of the Rings.

Last I said Beauty might be the appearance of the True and Good. People these days seem to think that the appearance of a thing is not necessarily what it actually is, so I realise if I say it's the appearance, it can seem it is not really intrinsic to the True and the Good. Even in my mind, using the word 'appearance', I seem to split the appearance from what it's stuck on, like a mask, or clothing.

But isn't the purpose of appearance ultimately to really tell us about the thing appearing? Obviously in what I think is a broken world, it doesn't work out that way all the time. We know not to judge a book by its cover, because people like to just attract you to read their book with the cover, whether the cover really has to do with the book or not. Men are ultimately just trying to get what they want, and will be deceptive to do it. We also know we don't always see things as they really are; either our minds are broken, or else this messed-upness is normal.

I don't think it is normal. So, if the True and Good appear Beautiful, then they really are, because they are ultimate reality. Whatever is the umbrella under which other things exist has to be greater than what's under it. Philosophers a long time ago seemed to assume that whatever rules over this world; whatever created it, has to be equal to or greater than the world. One way to be greater is to be either more perfect, or actually Perfect (whole, complete, and lacking any defect). I equate the True, Good and Beautiful with ultimate reality, and if they are that, then they are candidates for perfect, too.

I'm sure study of Plato would help me in writing this, as he's the one who talked about Ideals and (maybe with other philosophers around then) set the foundation for real systematic thought about the incompleteness and defectiveness of this world and the perfection of what it comes from or is modelled after. But he thought that the physical world could not be perfect, whereas I think physicalness is also True, Good and Beautiful. I think something else must be wrong with the world besides its being concrete.

I haven't done much study of Beauty by people who have written it, but the impression from my experiences is that it is not merely an illusory appearance, but a real Thing, something you can sense with your mind and heart, communicated through things-that-are-beautiful (abstract or concrete).

What would you guess: C. S. Lewis said something about it in The Weight of Glory, wording what I had felt for years-

We do not merely want to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

That is the sensation I got from reading The Lord of the Rings. I had such a painful longing to somehow break free of the chains that tether me to this bland existence, the prison of my mind, and to be part of the world, which is so beautiful; never again to be enchanted into thinking that there is no hope, no meaning, no loveliness, in existence.

Of course I went back into cynicism. I had some moments where I felt like I saw how things really are, and then that feeling passes. When it passes, one wonders if one dreamed it was real, of course. It may just be a feeling. But I feel there is likely something True about it: that it was real-er than all the grey, blank monotony of life as we see it.

Is that true? And is Beauty actually not simply appearance or illusion, but an actual thing that is part and parcel with Is-ness and Purpose? Is Beauty even substantive- touchable, tasteable?

The True, the Good and the Beautiful

My mother has been listening to Stephen Turley on YouTube, and she found some lectures (and what seems like a sermon) by him, talking about classical times/things and the Good, True and Beautiful. It was somewhat about where the idea of them came from in the West, and how they relate to living well as a Christian.

I was given an assignment to write about what I liked about The Lord of the Rings, in an attempt to remember who I am. For awhile I didn't even know how to do it; kind of like writer's block, but related to a specific topic. Then at some point in the last week my mother turned on one of his lectures on this, relating these things to his Orthodox faith, and I remembered this is why I liked the story.

To me, Truth, Goodness and Beauty are basically reality. Ultimately anything that is worth doing in life is true, good and beautiful. It was wonderful to hear him describe what these things mean, too, as it very much reminded me why Tolkien's world meant so much to me. It led me to see that what I loved most is actually part of the real world... it let me believe what I wanted to believe: that life is meaningful and purposeful.

Here's the mental mess of what is currently striking me about these three things:

1. They either have an interrelationship, or else they are three levels or aspects of the same thing; like three planes of the same thing (dimensions, I guess). Either they necessitate each other; where one of them is, so are the others, in some way or other. My brain kind of visualises this as that they all modify each other. Truth is good, goodness is true, beauty is good, beauty is true, truth is beautiful, so on and so forth.

2. Truth is not 'facts' (or at least not only them), but is Reality and What Things Are. It's not, in my mind, knowledge at all, but rather what we learn about. I see truth like the law that is in fact written in the language of existence. All the nature of things is Truth. Truth is all the is-ness of things. Truth is assumed to exist whether or not any human knows the truth about a thing or not. It is a thing-outside-of-us we can learn about gradually as we live and humble ourselves to open ourselves to what we see.

3. Goodness is about telos- purpose. A thing is good if it is fulfilling its purpose, outlined in Truth (which to me seems to be at least related to Law). A good marriage is good because it is aligned with the definition (whether Man knows it or not) of marriage. Complete goodness in any thing and the world is whole and rich; every thing in the world is complex in how it relates to other things and helps to fulfill their purpose. The one-ness of reality is the dance of the parts with each other in perfect harmony.

4. Beauty is what flows out of these. Things being how they ought to be is beautiful. Turley said that it is through Beauty (the aesthetic of the True and Good) that we see and are drawn to the True and the Good. Maybe Beauty is just how True and Good things appear (when we can see Beauty; I think we blind ourselves to it often), but I've often wondered if Beauty is actually more fundamental.


Next post I'm going to rant on Beauty a bit.

The LORD's Will

Part of me says it's unholy to ask God for something that isn't 'possible'. I justify it by thinking that God wouldn't want me to ask Him to go against the laws of His universe (otherwise termed 'to do miracles').

The result of this thinking is that I never pray for pretty much anything, because I can always find a way that it can't fit into the natural domino-effect of the world in the moment of praying. I also practically feel that God does not care enough to do miracles for me, so I don't ask for them. I certainly don't really believe in His power to do above and beyond the laws of cause and effect (it applies to mental states, too... I try to ask for just the next step, instead of my own end goal).

Perhaps relatedly, or separately, it seems to me a truly sinful thought to think that God doesn't have power to do whatever He pleases. And only good things please Him.

Let it sink in... see if it is true.