A Philosophical Identity Crisis
Chris Durante asks himself just what makes him the person he used to be.
I still recall the very first experience I had as a child with my “identity” as more than just me thinking this or doing that. I was at my Aunt Betty and Uncle Mike’s house in Miners Mills, Pennsylvania. My family moved to Baltimore when I was 7, but every summer I would go back and spend a couple of months at my Grandmother’s house. That day I had I had done something I was being reprimanded for but I refused to go into details as to why I had done it. That’s when my Aunt Mary said something to the effect, “it’s no use, he is just like his father”.
And then for the first time, and for reasons I did not understand, I began to really think about that. “Philosophically”, as it were. I began to wonder how the boy I had become was connected to my parents and my family and how they had raised me and how in some ways I had come to be like them.
What if I had been raised by different parents in very different circumstances? Would I have done what I did that day? Would I have reacted to others as I did?
But then of course I slipped back into just being a kid again.
Here of course all you need to note is that while this is largely applicable to all of us, the actual pieces that come together out in particular worlds, lived in particular ways, understood from particular points of view, seems clearly to revolve around the manner in which I encompass human identity in dasein. And surely philosophers over the years have not managed to encompass themselves an assessment of identity able to take into account all of these diverse sets of circumstances.
As for ethicists, what progress has been made going all the way back to the pre-Socratics in providing us with a more rational manner in which to differentiate right from wrong? Let alone the most rational manner. “I” here is as existential, as problematic as ever. Perhaps even more so in a “postmodern” world where almost everything is up for grabs in the minds of the deconstructionists. Even language itself.