Why Must I have an Identity?
I think it was really Hume who gave the game away. In a much neglected theory of the self, Hume argues that one’s ability to feel oneself to have an identity was tied to external property and pride. To own a thing, and feel the joy of ownership, was then to feel a feeling of one own identity. It was then this pride, this feeling of self worth, which constituted the root of identity: that is, the root, of being able to say that there really was a thing inside oneself to call one’s own. For Hume this move is vitally important as he argues that passions are naturally both highly volatile and yet also intricately intermeshed with one another. Thence love also contains within it joy and gratitude, while hate includes fear and anger. The only exception to this rule was the pride one felt in ownership. This and this alone provided a stable passion, upon which one could found a mind. Here then is a theory which on the one hand links up the feeling of identity to possessions (be they material or mental); while on the other hand, suggests that this pride is somehow an antidote to a chaos of other passions, which might threaten to overwhelm any ability for the mind to hold onto itself, and its own thoughts.
Or to put it differently, Hume, writing before a philosophical theory of the self was formalized (Hume is usually understood as a mere stepping stone to Kant on this one), and writing almost three hundred years before the current age appears to grasp three of its most problematic features. Firstly the notion of the self is not something simply innate and inbuilt. It needs constructed, a construction which necessarily involves ownership and property. Secondly, there is a deep instability within the individual. There are numerous passions, indeed all passions beyond pride are instable, and likely to drag us from place to place, desire to desire. Modernity then adds the extra twist of ensuring that the second of these dimensions undermines the first, creating a world of restless selves, wandering as ghosts upon a shifting sand of ownership and desire. Here perhaps Hume might insist he has in part covered this last option. He was very aware in his day of institutions (such as the Church) which oscillated between fact and fiction: that is between pride and reality. He was therefore used to the idea that one might manipulate passions to create odd sentiments - odd prides which distort one’s understanding of the world. This last third point is no doubt true, and yet, it is clear that modernity has uncovered a slightly different aspect here, which will be considered in due course.
To deal then with the first of these dimension in a little more detail. It is clear that we are constantly being made aware by advertisers, but also by nationalists (a pride in one’s country), and even moralists (a pride in one family, or social circumstance), of the accord of pride and identity. Buy this – and you will feel better! Assert the rights of the English to be, well English, and everyone will feel better together. From this it follows that identity, and the demand to have an identity has become merely yet another ‘sales opportunity’.
However modernity develops a second aspect to this pride. Hume himself is very clear that pride is linked to a mind’s consideration of its power to act. To own a wonderful house is therefore to own the ability to hold parties, or balls or hunts… This aspect was then, in Hume’s day, of course the preserve of the wealthy. Modernity, perhaps in the interest of democracy, or perhaps in the interest of capitalism, has then reformed such aristocratic pride within a doctrine of choice. We are told that we all want choice. That choice is a great ‘turn on’ for the electorate. And yet, when faced with the stark reality of choice, of what it means to be able to choose, most of us become distinctly dazed and confused. Even more problematically we all very inconveniently ignore the fact that choice has a downside. Some institutions will not be chosen and will close, leading to local injustice; some choosers will lose out and not get their first choice; even worse, the very fact of choice changes the dynamic of the institution chosen, as their funding, indeed their very existence now depends upon their being the chosen one (and therefore only indirectly on being good!). But this is really all beside the point, Hume might say. that the point of the large house did not lie in having the parties, but merely in the thought that one might be able to hold them. Likewise our feeling of well being, our pride in ourselves, and in our country, lies in the feeling we could, if need be, choose, and be a master of our own destiny.
Hence the deep paradox opens up (again to cite Hume) between the domain of ‘the ought’ (where we all feel we ought to want choice) and the domain of ‘the is’ (where we feel that that choice is rather hard to handle. We end up then, like children lusting after sweets. We revel in the joy of owning choice (and feeling a pride, and with it a self), and do so even if that choice makes one’s life rather tricky! A subsidiary point arises immediately from this last one. It is famously difficult to define exactly how choice makes one happy. We feel that there ought to be a connection between choice and happiness, that it ought to promote (or hinder) one’s pleasures, and yet no connection (either way) is demonstrable. Hume would no doubt say here, that of course it was not. Pride, arises when the choices are given, and as something apart from the choosing itself. However, of course the opposite is not true. I mean, if one removes a choice once given, then one queries the very foundations of one’s pride (and therefore one’s ability to form an identity). Here one needs care in order to understand exactly what is queried. I doubt that the problem is really that one has lost one’s right to make choices, so much as that, in their arbitrary loss, one has come up against one’s sheer powerlessness. The loss of choice is then a reminder that one’s pride was founded on an illusion: That the power to make a choice (and to choose choice) was not one’s own. Perhaps then, it is not the loss of choice which matters, so much as the problem that the very fact of a loss of choice suddenly brings us up against our lack of power. Hence, one’s very identity therefore seems to be questioned; and one can only flail around wildly in one’s attempt to apportion ‘blame’ for this eclipse of self (and thereby no doubt found a new way to inject identity).
Identity checkmates the mind back into the domain of the ‘ought’: Political, but also social, and media realities (which always deal on this level of identity) are thereby caught up within a maze of fantasy through which an individual feels themselves ‘to be’, in the first place. This would no doubt be complex enough. And yet it has been caught up in the second of Hume’s dictates. Without pride, passions are liable to be highly volatile, and move across an ever-shifting galaxy of feelings and of desires. Now at this point the modern world has added a twist into the Hume tale. For Hume, desires were fixed, as the number of pleasures in which one could take a pride, remained fairly constant. Modern society has then almost based its rationale on the eclipsing of this last point. We manufacture new items to desire, almost as often as we change our socks! We thereby play to another factor within Hume’s theory. Namely that joys tend to have a sell by date. If one enjoys a thing too often, one becomes jaded with its pleasures (and therefore its ability to produce pride, and with it a sense of selfhood, is lost). Now again in Hume’s day, this was no doubt the point of choice. Those pleasures which produced choices (one’s house, one’s family etc.) were less likely to be subject to boredom. However it is just on such a domain that our modern mania for gadgets, and almost for boredom, has founded itself. The pleasures upon which a self can be founded (with a sole exception) have become transitory and subject to violent change, and fashion. The self then sits on almost all pleasures as a nervous surfer on a wave too big and too unpredictable to really ride in any comfort or ease. The sole exception is property. Property operates as a single golden thread tying up Hume’s day with ours. To own a property was for him, as it seems to be for us, to own a stable self. Is there any wonder then, in houses having an almost totemic value?
What then is the effect of all these fluctuations? - Perhaps one immediate result is obesity – which is surely the begetting sin of modernity. To be obese is to be caught within a swelter of consumption (quite literally). One is told to be a self, and as that self, one is force fed the ‘latest thing’, until that self swells up in its consuming lusts. We cannot stop consuming for fear (quite literally) that our identity will vanish. And yet over consumption itself renders that identity suspect, and difficult to hold down. The effect is then that we swell first in one way and then another, becoming at once greedy and yet unsatisfied. Our reaction is however, not to face up to the problem of consumption, as that might query that hard won identity. On the contrary our very over consumption becomes, as it were an opportunity for further consuming. Products are made to ‘treat’ obesity, and make us better again! Hence the pride of consuming, of being able to consume, remains rampant, and unquestionable, - we fight a fire with another fire, in order to save that strange feeling of ourselves – of our identity.
Identity, and its corollary pride, wrong-foot the reality of the world, and move it off into a mist of consumption and desire. It is then in this mist, that a final aspect (identified above) of the modern world takes shape (and in a way which would be recognisable to Hume). He had after all argued that the Church occupies exactly this space between fact and fiction. Individual passions are stitched into a feeling of God’s purpose, and as humans are placed within that purpose, serve to ground pride. ‘Reality’ is therefore made to serve a stable fantasy, in the interests of an institution (pride giving one a soul, and the Church’s power being facilitated by being implicated in the making of that pride). Modernity in a sense partially reverses this move. The modern manipulators of fact and fiction, do so not really in the interests of some meta-being, but rather in ensuring the fluctuations themselves. Take the current example of British inheritance tax. Here is a tax that relatively few will ever actually pay, and yet that everyone will aspire to pay (I mean that everyone aspires to have a valuable property – their pride leads them on here). One is caught then in the weirdest of paradoxes, A tax which few pay, and yet many aspire to pay, and yet do so knowing that they lack the income to pay it at all! Into this gap of conflicting desires, newspapers such and the Daily Mail and the Daily Express leap. They orchestrate these desires as if they were the truth itself: they make them into a political campaign, and achieve a result, they ask their readers to feel a sense of pride in the achievement. That is, the very complexity of fact and fiction, the very conflict of desires has been converted into the truth (or at least into a single narrative thread). The twist which modernity adds here, is not that fact and fiction are curiously blended together, so much as the precise meanings and motivations for this blending. In Hume’s day, the shifting passions, were blended together within a fancy (religion) in order to serve another reality (Godhead, and the pride it allowed humans to feel). Modernity however, almost reverses this process. The fancy serves to articulate the shifting desires as if they themselves were the truth (and not merely the witness of a truth elsewhere), and a story is constructed about whether the ‘government’ recognises that TRUTH or not. Narratives which cause a feeling of pride (and so identity), as they are accomplished, become pitched not beyond the world, but rather in the tawdry conflicts and contradictions of today. Human pride therefore finds a new way to recreate itself, as even our gripes and grumbles become the stuff of high politics, and universal concern! In a move which owes as much to Jane Austen and it does to Hume, humans become so very proud of their follies and their foibles…
Hume’s deep understanding of the connection between possessions and the foundation of the human self (and identity) is a thought which straddles the modern world. It fashions a world where fancy consistently trumps reality, and yet is curiously open and vulnerable to realities which undermine the pleasures that are so necessary for the pride to be at all. The potential conflict is then mitigated by institutions, be they journalistic, political or economic, which occupy the space between the reality and pride, and find new ways to reinvent identity within the gap which has been blasted between them. The result is of course, that identity exists within a shifting mirage of pillars and posts. One is pulled and re-pulled, as differing prides are invented and discarded almost daily, in a whirlygig of endless and pointless creation. The irony is that Hume’s principle for identity, and for the enfolding of passions within a single being, has become for us merely the mechanism by which any attempt to have a single being is at once lost, and yet that loss itself becomes unthinkable (as at each instant, such a being is re-forged). The tragedy is, that everything which is kept out of the immediate loop of our pride (I mean here, I think the Third World, and the wider environment) are simply not present to our identity, and our demand for selfhood. Death and destruction happen therefore in a domain where we are not and will not ever simply ‘be’, and remain necessarily therefore ‘someone else’s’ concern.
