Shaping The Self
Sally Latham examines the construction of identity through memory.
Obviously: how we think about ourselves changes over time as new experiences and new relationships create new memories. For example, we might do things today that might have been thought inconceivable or thought to be atrocious ten years ago. The biological self changes in accordance with the human body that all of us come into the world with. But the moral and political self is considerably more problematic. Memories as chemical and neurological interactions in my brain are the same as in your brain. But the memories themselves are wholly dependent on lives that might be very, very different. You remember what you do and as a result of that you choose one behavior…while my own memories prompt me to choose a conflicting behavior.
Then what? What can we come to agree about regarding this memory induced dissension? Whose memories are the most rational?
Though that’s not the direction the author goes:
Wrong about what?
Sure, as we get older, memories fade. Some get obliterated altogether. But the facts here don’t change. You either received a bike for Christmas when you were ten or you did not. That you have forgotten this doesn’t change the fact of it. Someone might have taken photographs of you on the bike on that Christmas morning. This may or may not jog your memory.
But: The rules of logic? How does that – as a “technical” issue? – really pertain to the facts here? I’m missing an important point obviously.
Instead, what I always focus on are the memories that, over time, prompt us to embrace one set of moral and political values rather than another.
For instance suppose a ten year old is indoctrinated by her parents to embrace a liberal/left wing understanding of the world around her. She remembers that clearly. Then at thirty her experiences and her thinking have convinced her to embrace a conservative/right wing understanding. Though she still remembers her liberal childhood views. Then at eighty she is still very much a conservative but she has completely forgotten being indoctrinated by her parent to think as a liberal thinks.
Again, the facts here are what they are. Someone can have an extremely faulty memory in regard to them while another remembers everything exactly as it unfolded from childhood on.
But the memories themselves linked to the creation of a Self linked to either liberal or a conservative worldview doesn’t enable us to establish whether or not one frame of mind rather than another is the more reasonable.
Or, rather, so it seems to me. Particular memories are just another manifestation of dasein in my view.