Who Am I. Really.

Identity.

Who you are.

What defines you.

A quest for some. A stupid question for others. And always a tool for those who are aware of its power. Identity takes many forms – pride, honour, patriotism – and in every form it has brought people together and pushed them apart since time immemorial. I would argue that it is really identity and the feeling of inclusion and exclusion that it creates that gives strongholds like religion their power. If this argument were to hold water, this one word would probably be responsible for the largest share of bloodshed caused by a single motivating factor. Quite a thought.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant divided qualities into two primary classes – qualities things inherently possess and qualities we ascribe to things. The inherent qualities comprise the things in themselves, or “das ding an sich”. We then superpose certain qualities on objects (and people by extension); these superposed qualities are subjective in nature according to Kant. It can then be postulated that the perceived differences in the identity of things are due to this second layer of subjective ascriptions.

According to Kantian theories, there is this fundamental identity things possess. Of course the question of how we can distinguish these traits from any subjective additions, if at all, still remains.

Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy is characterized by his idea of a paradigm. A paradigm is a set of assumptions within which we view the world and construct all of our knowledge (knowledge as opposed to Knowledge). Revolutions in epistemology (in any field essentially) occur due to a changing of paradigms. Therefore paradigms aren’t fixed. However, they are not easily modified either. A paradigmatic upheaval has serious implications as all knowledge constructed within the previous paradigm has to be re-assessed, and discarded if it does not comply with the new set of assumptions. It is an idea that applies well when applied to figures like Albert Einstein who could not accept the quantum revolution despite having instigated new paradigmatic eras themselves.

So Kuhn’s paradigms make it impossible for there to be an unbiased anything. Assumptions are bias. The absence of assumptions is also the absence of any kind of knowledge. For even the simplest forms of deductive knowledge, assumptions are necessary. If this is now superposed with the two-layer Kantian identity idea, the first layer is something we can never get to. It would require an unbiased view, which Kuhn says we cannot have.

The wider implication of this is that while there is a dichotomy between ‘actual’ and perceived as regards identity, actual has no real practical meaning. Who you are or a thing is actually is a pointless question because you cannot know. It’s like asking what a quantum object is like in the absence of the observer- it could be nothing, everything, something entirely different – you just will never know. Practically all identity there is, is perceived.

It might seem logically consistent to conclude that you are what you think you are. However, it isn’t entirely accurate the way I see it. That conclusion would presuppose a certain freedom to formulate an independent opinion of anything. Shakespeare pointed out centuries ago (via Julius Caesar) that we see ourselves through other people’s eyes. Our perceptions are a product of society and by extension so are we, to a very large extent. If Robinson Crusoe claimed after years of solitary living that he was who he thought he was, it wouldn’t still be believable because again the freedom to form an independent perception was absent. Survival was his motivation as well as his compulsion.

There is an apparent pointlessness in trying to see things in black and white when wearing rose coloured glasses. And there is that same pointlessness in trying to search for what something really is or who you really are. The way I see it, while you don’t have the freedom to define yourself in any which way you desire, you still have a very large say. The challenge is to not choose to do or not do things because of something or someone, but to do them regardless of what something or someone wants you to do. Because it is really in the absence of external influences that you can find/define your identity.