Francis Fukuyama & the Perils of Identity
Peter Benson critiques a liberal but nationalistic brand of identity politics.
That’s basically what I am trying to convey to Maia. But until she is more willing to accept that this has less to do with nature and the Goddess and more to do with how the very life that she lived predisposed her to think about nature and the Goddess as she does, I’m not likely to have a breakthrough. And, let’s face it, most of us think about ourselves only to reinforce the comfort and security we sustain believing that, however we describe it, we are on own true path.
Of course she is no doubt thinking the same thing about me. I put too much emphasis on dasein and not enough on nature. So, she suspects, she’s not likely to have a breakthrough either.
Concepts and theories? Nope, I’m still far more intent on prompting those who embrace either one in regard to their own sense of identity to “test” it with respect to the components of my own assumptions, given sets of circumstances we are both familiar with. Human nature evolving over time historically and culturally and experientially.
Thus…
Yes, in medieval times a person might have thought any number of things that people today are unlikely to. And people in medieval times in Europe were likely to think things that people in Asia or Africa or the Americas around the same time were unlikely to think. Then there’s what people thought before and after Freud. Or Jung or Marx or Nietzsche. Only today “overlapping identities” can explode because in the age of the Internet there are countless opportunities to come upon whole other ways to think about yourself. The boundaries between “I” and “we” [and for some “them”] can become increasingly blurred. Which perhaps explains why for the objectivists among us it becomes all that more important to anchor their precious Self in one or another either/or font.
But not you, right?