Indian Perception Of History

[acharya]

Self-identity



One of the puzzling and contentious problems in philosophy concerns the nature of personal or self-identity: what is it that makes individual biographies of people into histories of different individuals? What does it mean to trace the career of an organism from birth to death, and claim that it is the history of some specific individual? What appears as a non-question from a common-sense point of view (after all, what is easier than talking about oneself and one’s past?), upon philosophical reflection, transpires to involve a host of complex and tangled issues: the nature of identity as a logical relation, the criteria for personhood, the discernability of individuals, etc.



Even though a wide variety of solutions has been put forward during the course of the history of philosophy, it would be fair to say that despite all disagreements most, if not all philosophers, are agreed upon the following: what makes human beings into persons is their self-consciousness i.e. as selves they are aware of being selves. This reflexivity, viz., the self is aware of itself as a self, is supposed to typify the uniqueness of human beings. Or it could be said that the Western philosophical thought is agreed upon the fact that self-consciousness is a reflexive relation, and that all human beings (insofar as they are not severely retarded) are self-conscious persons by virtue of being able to take their selves as an object of reflection.



What has been disputed in the history of philosophical thought is the nature of this ‘self’: what kind of an entity/thing/process/construct is this ‘self’? Is it the same kind of a being as the table I am using to write and type these words? Or, is it like Gluon of contemporary Micro-Physics whose existence we infer? Or, is it some thing postulation of whose existence is necessary to build a coherent picture of our selves as human beings and moral agents? Etc.



The Psychology of the Self



Psychological theories – branches of developmental and social psychology, psychoanalysis – partially answer these questions by attempting to specify the processes and mechanisms involved in the construction of self-identity. Even though the relations between philosophical theories of the human self, and psychological and psychoanalytical theorizing about personal identity are far from being smooth or self-evident, I shall presume them to be non-problematic in the rest of what follows. This simplifying and simplified assumption is necessitated by two factors:



(a) It would otherwise be impossible to complete the task that I have set for-myself in a reasonable amount of space.



(<img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cool.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='B)' /> The intuitive world models in Western culture do not incorporate this empirical division. A person’s ‘self’ and his identity do overlap, at least partially. The difference between these two, where it obtains in the Western world models, is itself the result of a conception or model of self which does not make a principled distinction between them. (For a further amplification of this, see the next section.)



Therefore, with advance excuses to the fastidious, I will talk as though the ‘self’ and its ‘psychological identity’ are merely different ways of talking about one and the same ‘thing’. Regrettably, there is simply no space in this paper for necessary nuances, qualifications or subtleties of thought.



Given this, it could be said that psychoanalysis and branches of psychology tackle issues of ‘selfhood’ by looking at them as empirical, developmental issues instead of as questions requiring the formulation of necessary and sufficient conditions for identity. In their own special ways, both psychoanalysis and psychology attempt to conceptualize the maturation process of human beings from infancy to adulthood. It is in the course of this attempt, to the extent they do so, they account for the emergence of selfhood and the mechanisms of its constitution.



Despite the very real difference between psychoanalytical theories and the psychological ones (not to mention the differences within each of these domains), it is not difficult to see that they are all agreed upon the goal – to the extent such a goal is posited explicitly or guides the theorizing by being merely implicit – of the psychological maturation process: a ‘healthy’ individual is one who has successfully built up an individual identity i.e. has self-identity. This mature individual of, say, psychoanalysis is also the autonomous individual of the Enlightenment thought: a person who relates to other persons in freedom; one whose relationship to the other is founded upon the awareness of the uniqueness and unicity of self. The index of maturity is the extent to which one is not dependent upon the other for one’s own identity.



Quite obviously, such a normative goal has value components built into it. There is, firstly, the axiological component: one’s worth as a person is ultimately to be found in oneself. Every person has an intrinsic dignity and an intrinsic value which is independent of the others’ valuation. Natural Rights theories both ground and express such a sentiment. I shall return to this theme later.



Secondly, equally importantly, there is an ethical component. A moral agent or a moral person is one who follows the dictates of practical reason and of no other authority in performing moral actions. This ‘practical reason’ is the capacity of the person to deliberate over good and bad and act accordingly. In moral questions, there is no actor other than one’s self: the moral authorship and responsibility is to be localized in one’s self. I shall return to this later as well.



To the extent these two components are present in a culture, I claim, to that extent are all theories which talk about growth processes of human beings forced to embrace some notion of a mature, autonomous person. I add this, because research into the ‘self-concept’ in social psychology denies the presence of built-in normative goal in its enquiry.



From when is the emergence of such a self to be dated? Has a notion of self, that which gives identity to a human organism, been always present in the Western culture? Or is it typical of the Christian tradition? Or is it of more recent origin, say, dating from the development of capitalism? I would have liked to carry on this controversy in footnotes, but, alas, this text has no footnotes! So, let us agree to a minimal claim: the concept of self has been around at least from the time scholars began to enquire into social life with the aim of understanding it.



The ‘Self’ in Western Culture



Is there, however, one model of self which we could dub as the model of self in the Western culture? If we take the literature about it as the reference point, the answer will have to be overwhelmingly in the negative. A very great variety of notions of self, few of them mutually exclusive, has been recorded, explicated and argued for in the course of the last two hundred years or more. With just a little bit of exaggeration, one could say that all notions of self, from all cultures and quite a few besides, have been put across some time or the other. How, then, are we to make sense of the title of this paragraph?



There are many ways of solving this problem. Quite apart from the point I made earlier on about the relation between intuitive and intermediate world models, here are three answers as they relate to the theme under investigation. Firstly, I am not indulging in a literature study. Consequently, not everything that has been said or written about the ‘self-concept’ is of equal importance to the purposes of this paper. Secondly, more importantly, even if it could be shown that all concepts of self have to be taken into account, it does not make much of a difference to us. Most of the proposals can be dismissed as not belonging to the Western culture, because they would be incompatible with the notion of self as it is presupposed by a diverse set of disciplines and domain-theories: Jurisprudence, sociology, political philosophy, ethics, economic and decision theories, cognitive psychology, etc. What I am after is not just, say, what some social psychologists chose to tell us at any one time on the subject. Rather, it is that notion of self as it underlies a whole segment of a culture which interests me. I will strengthen this argument further. If I succeed in my venture, I will have shown that it does make sense to speak of ‘the self’ in Western culture. Thirdly, and finally, I am interested in the way the self is experienced in the West. That is, I want to explicate the outlines of the model of self as it is present in folk psychology in the West. Such must be the model of self that it allows those who have it to make intuitive sense of the variety of social institutions and practices that obtain today in the West.



These remarks enable me to say that the general model of self as it is typical of Western culture can be perspicuously formulated thus: each individual constructs or elaborates a self for her/himself i.e. constructs an identity for one’s person. This process begins at infancy and proceeds in interaction with the natural and social environment. A typically mature adult is one who has built up such a construct successfully. The basis on which an adult relates to the world at large is, in fact, such an elaboration. The disturbances that an adult experiences in her/his inter-personal relationships with others in the world is, somehow, crucially and causally dependent upon the identity that s/he has acquired.



The intuitive world models in the West incorporate such an idea – though not so explicitly and certainly not so clearly. Yet, incorporated it remains, both as an experience of one’s own self and those of others. One’s self, to use a spatial metaphor, is that rock-bottom, whose solidity determines the confidence with which one goes about in the world. The folk psychology in the West allows each of us a self : a self waiting to be discovered within each one of us; something which can grow and actualize itself; as that which either realizes its true potential or fails to do so… etc. To put it succinctly, one does one’s damned best to be oneself under all circumstances or be one’s true self as the case may be.



These ideas are embedded in the elaborate constructs of theories as well. Psychoanalytical theories, for example, have attended to the process of construction of selves – the various real or alleged mechanisms, the phases and stages involved in such an enterprise (In this connection, think of Erickson’s famous theory of the various cycles of identity. ) Once properly constructed, such a self endures through time.



A self which has itself as its foundation is characterized in the Western culture by the possession of the following two properties:



1. its reflexivity (the property of referring to itself as a self)

2. its privileged epistemic access (it alone knows its thoughts, feelings etc.)



With the development of Cognitive Science, (2) has come under challenge. Therefore, it can be formulated in its weaker version as asserting,



3. its direct epistemic access ( it has direct access to its own experiences)