Collaboration: Two Essays On Identity?
Nikoli O'Dwyer's "On Identity" and Thomas J. Pellarin's "Identity As Facts?"
This is a collaboration between The Nostomodern Review by Thomas J. Pellarin and Philosophical Terrorism by Nikoli O’Dwyer on the concept of identity in language and labour respectively. You can follow @thenostomodernreview and @fake_niko_odwyer_v.3 on Instagram.
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On Identity by Nikoli O’Dwyer
The Impact of the Capitalist Mode of Production on Identity
What is identity? How is it formed? The only way to answer these questions is to view them from the lens of dialectical materialism, the philosophy of Marxism. Dialectical materialism posits that the world, and everything in it, is interconnected and inseparable, constantly in motion, and that the only way to view it scientifically is as a whole which is more than the sum of its parts. So then, what are the dialectics of identity?
First, let's take a quotation from Capital by Marx, his crowning achievement, and the best example of the power and insight of the dialectical method. In Chapter Seven, Marx says that “Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material reactions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. “
What’s particularly important here is the last part of the quote. It is from here that we can begin our analysis of identity. “By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway.” Put simply, this means that human beings cannot act on and change nature and their environment without also acting on and changing themselves. We can take this further by stating the following; by acting on the environment and giving it a particular form, human beings also give themselves a particular form. Thus, identity, like all things in the world of man, begins with labor and nature, it emerges from them. However, this is not to say that it is static and unchanging. Quite the opposite. As Marx says, when we act on nature, we also act on and change ourselves; thus, identity is constantly growing, changing, and even negating itself. This is effectively summed up by Engels’ remark in Anti-Duhring that “motion is the mode of existence of matter.” So it is with the self. The body (and the mind) would die if it wasn’t in constant motion, and so too would our conception of ourselves. This effectively debunks the appeal to nature arguments that are regularly spewed by transphobes about trans people, for if the self is constantly growing and changing, who can say that a someone who at one point was a man can’t become a woman, or that someone who was once a woman can’t become a man? From the dialectical viewpoint, the idea that gender identity is static and unchanging is pure nonsense (not to mention that gender isn’t determined by biology, and that it is purely a matter of how one identifies in the first place!).
Let’s look a little further into the claim that the formation of identity takes place within the labor process. First, what is labor? Labor is the essence of man; it is what distinguishes him from all the animals. Labor is the power man exerts over the environment around him in order to change it. But, as we’ve said, in this process he also changes himself. In the Marxian analysis of political economy, labor is what gives any particular commodity its value. However, in order to actually be valuable, something must serve a purpose. Therefore, value is determined by two things: labor and use; “The coat is a use value that satisfies a particular want. Its existence is the result of a special sort of productive activity, the nature of which is determined by its aim, mode of operation, subject, means, and result. The labour, whose utility is thus represented by the value in use of its product, or which manifests itself by making its product a use value, we call useful labour.” In order for labor to be useful labor, it must be “productive activity of a definite kind and exercised with a definite aim.” (Capital). To summarize using the words of Engels, “the value of commodities is determined by the socially necessary general human labor embodied in them, and this in turn is measured by its duration.” (Anti-Duhring).
People labor, or work, because “so long as the world has existed and as long as it continues to exist every individual must maintain himself in the sense that he himself consumes his means of subsistence,” (Engels, Anti-Duhring). However, people not only labor just to create value for the market; people also labor because it's fun and a necessary aspect of leisure and play. This may sound contradictory, but let us take a few examples. Take, for instance, a child drawing a picture or making mud pies, or a teenager writing poems in a journal. To do and make these things one must use labor-power, yet they aren’t made for the purpose of being exchanged, they are just made for the fun of it. This labor, or play as one may call it, is an important part of the process that forms identity. How? Simple. The seemingly meaningless play of a child is in actuality a form of experimentation. The child is new to the world, and is, in a sense, testing it and himself. He wants to understand the world, to mentally grasp it, but before something can be mentally grasped, it must first be physically grasped. That is the point of play; it is the process by which the child physically comes to grips with the world around him. This is, I believe, the aspect of labor that has been missed by many theorists; it is not only that labor upon nature forms products and use-values; it also forms our perception of the world and ourselves.
Identity is formed on the one hand by labor, and on the other by ideology. The question that we now must answer is this; what is the role of ideology in the formation of the subject? But before we can answer that, we must first answer the following question; what is ideology? According to the Marxist theorist Louis Althusser, “ideology is an imaginary assemblage, a pure dream, empty and vain, constituted by the ‘diurnal residues’ of the only full, positive reality, that of the concrete existence of concrete, material individuals materially producing their existence.” Furthermore, “every ideology, in its necessarily imaginary distortion, is not the existing relations of production (and the other relations deriving from them), but, above all, individuals’ imaginary relation to the relations of production and the relations deriving from them. What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of real relations governing individuals’ existence, but those individuals’ imaginary relations to the real relations in which they live.” (On the Reproduction of Capitalism).
Althusser goes on to say that ideology is not just an idea, and that it has a material existence. It exists not only within the minds of individuals, but also within the Ideological State Apparatuses (schools, churches, news media, advertising, etc). Thus, “an ideology always exists in an apparatus and in the practice or practices of that apparatus.” However, this is not the only place ideology exists; it exists within the heads of individuals, as we have said, but it also exists in their acts. In fact, the idea that ideology exists only in the heads of individuals and not in the material world is itself a kind of ideology, which Althusser calls the “Ideology of ideology.” Althusser, in order to explain the functioning of ideology in the material world, invokes Pascal’s brilliant statement regarding religion; “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.” Put into other words, we do not act because we believe, but rather we believe because we act. As Althusser says, “the existence of the ideas in which he [the subject] believes is material in that his ideas are his material acts inserted into material practices regulated by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which (hardly by accident!) his ideas derive.”
Althusser then says that ideology exists for subjects, and that, no matter what we do, we all exist within it, and that it imposes itself on us at all times. In other words, ideology interpellates individuals as subjects. With this we agree, but we must add one thing to it; ideology interpellates individuals as subjects, but before it does that it creates them as subjects. In other words, ideology interpellates the subjects that it creates. Althusser gives the example of being hailed by the police as an act of interpellation; when the policeman hails you (“hey, you there!”) you recognize that you are being hailed, and in that moment become a subject. However, this is just an example, for, as Althusser says, “ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects, which amounts to making it clear that individuals are always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects. This ineluctably leads us to one last proposition: individuals are always-already subjects.” To this Althusser adds that “...an individual is always already a subject, even before she is born…”
It is here that we would like to identify three ideological moments that forever define the individual which are decided for them by the parents/doctor before it is born and at the moment of birth. First, the recognition that the child is alive, and that it is a human being. This recognition gives it status as a human being, that is, so called human rights such as the right to live, the right to own property, the right to freely express its opinions and follow whatever religion it chooses (if it is born in the so called “free” world). Second, the assigning of gender to the child. This, as any feminist worth their salt will tell you, is a moment that will define a child for the rest of its life. It decides, in general, the way the child will be raised, the interests it will have, the clothes it will wear, the people it will be expected to be romantically and sexually involved with as an adult, the way it is expected to act, etc. The third and final ideological act is the assigning of a name. This recognizes the child as being a unique subject, different from every other subject, with its own perspective that no one else can take away from it. The assigning of the last name will determine its ancestry and the family it belongs to.
Once the child is born, ideology will continue to determine its life. How it views the world and the religion it follows depends on the ideological outlook of the parents. The education it receives is dependent on the educational apparatus (which is an ideological apparatus, and which also, alongside the parents, determines the child’s outlook). The way the child acts and who it socializes with is determined by gender norms. What the child will come to view as acceptable politically will be determined by the legal apparatus. In other words, nearly every aspect of the child’s life will be determined by the ideological apparatuses of the society it grows up in. Even if the child eventually dissents, becomes, say, a communist, joins a communist party and becomes an active political dissident, this is still determined by ideology, in particular, it is determined by the child’s (who is at this point an adult) opposition to the dominant ideology, and also its dedication to proletarian ideology.
It is at this point that we must leave Althusser and return to Marx in order to understand the effects of alienation and commodity fetishism on the development and growth of identity. First, let us discuss alienation. First, what is alienation? Alienation is the state of existence that man finds himself in under the capitalist mode of production. Man is alienated from himself, from his labor, from others, and from nature. Man is alienated from his labor; for the rich, labor “produces wonderful things - but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces - but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty - but for the worker, deformity.” (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844). Labor produces all this pain and suffering for the worker precisely because the product of his labor belongs not to him, but to the capitalist. The worker does all the work, and the capitalist reaps all the benefits. Alienated labor is also constituted by the fact that “labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his mental and physical abilities but mortifies his body and ruins his mind,” (Marx).
According to Marx, the immediate consequence of man’s estrangement from the product of his own labor, “from his life activity, from his species-being is the estrangement of man from man.” This is because if the product of labor does not belong to the worker, it must belong to someone else, and that someone else is the capitalist. This dynamic pits worker against capitalist, i.e., man against man. It also pits worker against worker, for now the workers must compete against each other for better pay, better positions, better working conditions, etc.
Furthermore, man is alienated from nature because he can only view it as a hostile power that must be conquered, a malicious force that must be subdued. This leads to the growth of ideologies that are based in human supremacy over nature, which inevitably leads to the destruction of both humanity and the environment.
It can easily be imagined that this alienation, this estrangement, inevitably leads to psychological pain and dysfunction. Human beings cannot live healthily when they are pitted against not only each other, but also themselves. Human beings, in order to function properly, require community, compassion and understanding. Capitalism can bring them none of these things. Capitalism brings only competition and a brutal regime of discipline and production. It brings a world of estrangement and alienation, a world in which all the gods of men are brought to their knees and reduced to mere commodities, where god himself, on his golden throne, is replaced by the ultimate alienable commodity; money. “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones are antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.” (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto).
From the womb of alienated labor is born the crowning achievement of bourgeois ideology; commodity fetishism, which itself leads to the reification of all existing relations. To the commodity fetishist, society is not built on people, but rather, it is built on commodities. Where there are relations between people and their labor, the commodity fetishist sees only relations between things. “A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” (Capital).
This leads to the phenomenon marxist theorist Georg Lukacs calls reification. Reification is, in his words, the “universalisation of the commodity form.” (History and Class Consciousness). As he goes on to say, “the commodity can only be understood when it becomes the universal form of society as a whole. Only in this context does the reification produced by commodity relations assume decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by men towards it. Only then does the commodity become crucial for the subjugation of men’s consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression and for their attempts to comprehend the process or to rebel against its disastrous effects and liberate themselves from servitude to the ‘second nature’ so created.”
In our analysis, reification plays a crucial role in the subjugation of men to the capitalist mode of production and, consequently, plays a crucial role in the formation of their identities. Under a reified order of things, the way things are now are the way they have always been. It is impossible to imagine any other past or any other future as long as one remains within the reified structure of consciousness. Consequently, it is impossible to imagine the self being any different than it is now. When the world is seen as a series of relations between things, the identity of the human being inevitably becomes subordinated to said relations. It becomes determined by the possession and exchange of commodities. In other words, under capitalism, you are what you own.
The growth of identity is further impacted by the fact that, under the capitalist mode of production, individuals find themselves in a state of constant social war (something we touched on when discussing alienation). As Engels says in The Conditions of the Working Class in England, “...the social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared… people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is that the stronger treads the weaker underfoot, and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains.”
Out of this state of being grows a situation in which people view each other, and thus themselves, as nothing but objects, commodities to be used and abused.
The Nature of Identity
It is at this point that we must transition from discussing how identity is formed to discussing the nature of identity. Let us open this discussion with a quote from Engels. In Dialectics of Nature, Engels says that “Abstract identity (a=a, and negatively, a cannot be simultaneously equal and unequal to a) is likewise totally inapplicable in organic nature. The plant, the animal, every cell is at every moment of its life identical with itself and yet becoming distinct from itself…” Applying this to social identity, we can clearly see that it is not a static category, but rather, one that is constantly changing and adapting to its external environment. In this sense, one cannot simply say that one is queer, but rather, that one is always in a process of becoming queer. The same goes for race, gender, and even being a worker. The working class condition is not static; it is a constant process of degradation, alienation and exploitation, a quantitative state that can only be overcome via a qualitative change, i.e., revolution. The same goes for other identities. The condition of being queer must be transformed from being a process of degradation to a process of elevation, a process that affirms life rather than negates it. Queerness must elevate, strengthen, and overcome. It must dissolve what is old and make way for what is new. But one cannot have pleasure without pain, success without failure. Within euphoria lies the kernel of dysphoria, and from goodness evil is born. This is the unity of opposites, and it is a law that applies to all things in existence.
Recently, among certain ultra-left circles, it has become fashionable to believe that the way towards liberation is to abandon identity altogether. They say that identity is static, unchanging, and that it keeps us in cages. This couldn’t be further from the truth. As we have shown, identity is far from being static and unchanging; in fact, it is changing all the time! These people mistake human identity for abstract identity, which, as Engels says, is the belief that A=A and that it can be nothing else. These people, who believe identity is static and that it must be escaped, take a very undialectical view of things. If they were dialectical materialists, they would understand that it is impossible to escape identity, for through labor we are constantly imposing self made norms and conditions upon ourselves. This is not negative; rather it is necessary. To want to escape from identity is just as idealist as wanting to escape from the body, or to want the mind to escape from the brain - that is, it is nonsensical.
The same can be said for philosophies such as gender nihilism. In Gender Nihilism: an Anti Manifesto, Alyson Escalante says that “We are nothing but the convergence of many different discourses and languages which are utterly beyond our control, yet we experience the sensation of agency. We navigate these discourses, occasionally subverting, always surviving. The ability to navigate does not indicate a metaphysical self which acts upon a sense of agency, it only indicates that there is symbolic and discursive looseness surrounding our constitution.” This seems convincing at first, but upon further investigation we find it to be unsatisfactory. It is true that what we call the self is a convergence of discourse and language, though this is not the whole of it. The self is also a result of human labor, as we have shown. It also isn’t true that these things are beyond our control, for we can change these things through labor. Our identities are not floating abstractions, they are the result of tangible, material processes that occur in the everyday world. There are many things about the the Anti-Manifesto that are excellent; for example, the author writes that “The liberal feminist says “I am a woman” and by that means that they are spiritually, ontologically, metaphysically, genetically, or any other modes of “essentially” a woman. The gender nihilist says “I am a woman” and means that they are located within a certain position in a matrix of power which constitutes them as such.” Put into marxist language, what this means is that for the gender nihilist, gender is viewed as a product of various labor-processes that occur within the real world. The problem the author has with gender is, in their words; “I am constituted by a social world I never chose.” Precisely! Our identities, under capitalism, are not entirely determined by us, because our labor is subjugated by brutal regimes of work. It is the task of the communist revolution to overthrow these brutal regimes that rule over our labor and create a world that is truly free.
So, then, do we call ourselves gender nihilists? No. Gender nihilism is anti-humanist. We are not. As we understand it, human labor is at the center of the struggle for liberation. Labor, which is unique to humans, is at the center of our philosophy. We take labor as the essence of humanity. Gender nihilism posits that humanity has no essence. This is false. Marx says, in his Theses on Feuerbach, that “The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself.” This means that human beings are not just changed by their circumstances, but that circumstances are also changed by human beings. Furthermore, nihilism implies a total rejection. We do not totally reject gender. Rather, we want to dialectically raise it to a new level. As such, it would be more accurate to say that we are gender materialists. Now, what will this raising to a new level look like? As of now, it is impossible to say.
If we take this to be the case, then the interpretation of politics as being a struggle between different static identity groups is false. Rather, we must view politics as a struggle between various groups of people who, because of their conditions, are constantly changing, growing and adapting. Under capitalism, the only growth that is possible is a negative growth; a growth of alienation, exploitation and destruction. All tools created will be directed towards the task of making exploitation more efficient. Capital, as Marx says, is like a vampire; the more blood it sucks, the stronger it becomes, and the more blood it needs.
A recent manifestation of the decline of vitality under capitalism is a phenomenon in queer discourse known as trans-medicalism. This is the idea that, in order to be trans, one must have dysphoria and that one must be medically diagnosed as such. In other words, it is the idea that in order to truly be trans, your transness must bring you pain, and that it must be able to be medically categorized as an illness. To the trans-medicalist, one must prove one’s transness and queerness. One must prove it through one’s pain. This is the core of trans-medicalist philosophy; pain. They who suffer the most are the most authentic, most true, most good. This is what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called slave morality; it is a morality based in pain, suffering, and victimhood. Such philosophies must be rejected by all true revolutionaries, for we are not merely defined by our pain; we are so much more. It is true, we are defined by our struggles, our hardships, our failures, but we are just as much defined by our joys, our pleasures and our triumphs.
A similar view about labor is very prevalent among leftists. Labor, and laborers, are viewed as being exploited, oppressed, downtrodden, victimized. While this is certainly true, it is not the only thing that defines labor, and not the only way labor has functioned in society. Labor is also what breathes life into the world of humanity; it creates it, molds it, reinforces it, changes it. It is what distinguishes man from the animals, it is what makes us different. The ability to consciously plan something and to carry out that plan, the ability to change the world around him based on notions he has in his head. As Marx says in Capital, “We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be.”
Thus, it is important to always keep the unity of opposites in mind when discussing such topics, for nothing is one sided; far enough down the line, everything brings about its opposite. It is the task of the revolution to negate the negation and bring about the full realization of the unity of opposites.
Possible addition:
It is important that we further elaborate on the nature of gender; If we are to understand gender through a dialectical materialist lens, we must first acknowledge that it is part of what we call the mind, which is itself merely a result of matter being organized in a certain way. Gender, is, in a sense, an ideology; it is the background against which we judge people’s behaviors and determine if they are socially acceptable or not. Dialectical materialism, being nominalist, rejects the idea of gender as an abstract object that exists separate from the particulars in which it is manifested. Marx gives the example of fruit: there are particular fruits, such as pears, apples, etc, but there is no universal “fruit” which these are all an expression of. There is just the particular: the universal is non existent. The same can be said of gender. There are particular women and men and non binary people, but there is no universal “womanhood” which all women are expressions of. Rather, there are particular women who have particular “womanhoods”.
Appendix: On The Problem of Desire and Ideology
Deleuze and guattari think that it’s too simplistic to just say that people are tricked into doing certain things or believing certain things, and that rather they actually want to do what they do and believe what they believe. That is, the masses desire their own repression. For example, Guattari says that “the German masses had come to desire nazism… under certain conditions, the desire of the masses can turn against their own interests.” But that doesn’t answer the question; why did they desire nazism? Why do they desire their own repression? Wouldn’t it make sense to say that the masses desire their own repression precisely because ideology has placed them within a certain framework?
Like, ok, we can say that people desire their own repression, sure, but that doesn’t explain why they do. And that’s I think the role ideology plays in explaining self repression. take for example war. We can argue that soldiers go to war because they truly desire, deep down, to kill, rape, plunder, etc, but to say they truly desire it isn’t enough, we must explain why they desire it. And they desire it precisely because ideology has placed them within a certain frame work, primed them to believe certain things
It is for this reason that we cannot merely “reconfigure” desire; rather, we must change the ideological foundation on which it is based. This is exactly why a new state apparatus is necessary, because it is only a state apparatus that is capable of doing that.
Citations
Althusser, Louis. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Edited by Balibar Étienne and Jacques Bidet. Translated by G. M. Goshgarian, Verso, 2014.
Engels, Friedrich. Anti-Dühring. Wellred Books, 2017
Engels, Friedrich. Dialectics of Nature. Progress Publishers, 1976
Escalante, Alyson. “Gender Nihilism: An Anti-Manifesto - Alyson Escalante.” Libcom.org, 2016, libcom.org/library/gender-nihilism-anti-manifesto
Lukács György. History and Class Consciousness. Indo-European Publishing, 2018.
Marx, Karl. Capital Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Edited by Friedrich Engels. Translated by Ben Fowkes and Ernest Mandel, Penguin Books in Association with New Left Review, 1990
Marx, Karl. “Theses on Feuerbach.” Marxists Internet Archive, 1995, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm
Marx, Karl. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm.
Copyright © Nikoli O’Dwyer, 2021. All rights reserved.
Identity As Facts? by Thomas J. Pellarin
When we speak of identity, what is being spoken of? And when we speak of others, what is being identified to us? Is it their appearance, their names, or their genders? If we were to categorise people, how would we start? There are many ways to classify others. We might classify them according to their ethnicity, their genders, their age, their temperament, and so on. From there we can generalise people based on these facts. For example, one person is 23 years old. This is part of their identity. This person is curious about studying philosophy too. This is also part of their identity. If we collect enough information about a person, we might say we have enough to identify them as an individual, because the sheer combination of these facts is unique enough to separate them from others. How many people are 23 years old? How many of those 23 year olds study philosophy? If we were to search for this person, it would be simpler to identify them based on these facts, and to search for them within the identified population of people who share these facts; the rest of the population would be irrelevant to the search.
A person thus consists of facts. If we collected a sufficient number of facts, we could identify any person within any crowd of people, irrespective of how many facts or how few they shared with each other. This is because some facts are not shared between you and other people. The parents to whom you were born to, the house in which you grew up, the memories of your childhood; these are essential facts which few or none can share with you—especially the latter fact, which is yours, and yours alone. The amalgamation of a childhood—the architecture of an upbringing—and the product of a thousand generations: you are a fact insofar as you are a consequence of prior facts too.
Facts do not exist in isolation. The colour “Red” is the colour Red (A = A) because it is not the colour “Blue” and not Blue (not A = non-A), for example. Likewise, you are you because you are not someone else; you are the child of your parents because you are not the child of others. The existence of different unique facts is what makes a unique fact unique—unique insofar as it is not substitutable with something else (A ≠ B). But consider a situation where you might have two names: “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus”. These are two different unique facts, but they refer to the same you. And yet both of these facts are not only valid, but they are true insofar as you do identify as both “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus” simultaneously, and respond to either name. But consider that one of them is a pseudonym, one which others might exclusively know, and one which others may exclusively not know. You might respond to either in different ways. Yet both of these names are part of your identity. These are facts contingent to you; likewise, they can be used to identify you. They refer to the same person, but their facticity is not mutually exclusive with one another. Indeed many people have several names, and they can live without problems from doing so.
But what underlies these names, and therefore, these facts? What fact is to be expressed in a name and yet hidden by its very expression? Consider that we are using names, and thus language, in a very static 1-to-1 way. Your name belongs to you because it is does not belong to someone else, insofar as you are able to be distinguished as you having that name, irrespective if someone else shares your “name” too. If my name were Thomas, and there were other Thomases in the world, I would nonetheless be able to be identified uniquely as Thomas based on this unique fact of me being this particular Thomas. As mentioned before, it is the culmination of facts that allows us to identify people as being unique. From this, we might say that there is a direct relationship between identity and the number of unique facts of a person: the more unique facts one can attribute to oneself, the more they can be identified in merit of their uniqueness compared to others—you are you because you are not someone else and there are many facts to show it.
But what undermines these names, and therefore, these facts? What fact is to be expressed in the name “Thomas”, and yet hidden by its very expression of Thomas? I might declare, “I am Thomas.” But what is hidden by this expression; or rather, what is merely expressed? If you were to ask a stranger on the street, “Do you know Thomas?”, the name “Thomas” might be irrelevant to them. They might say, “No, who is that?” But if you were to ask a friend of mine, the name “Thomas” will hopefully make sense to them. They might say, “Yes, I know them. Why do you ask?”
The name “Thomas”, and likewise with the names “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus”, have more than one meaning. If Hesperus were C and Phosphorus were D, we could not say that C = D, because both have different meanings. Likewise, they would not be substitutable with each other—in spite of referring to the same person. To simply say that C = D is to gloss over the significance of C and D as being two different unique facts about the same person.
Likewise, with the name of “Thomas”, this singular name has more than one different unique fact. It has different meanings according to different people. If we think of the name “Thomas” and the real Thomas as being E and F respectively, then E = F, but also E = F1, C = F2, C = F3 and so on. E is relevant to the real personhood of F, insofar as E can be used to identify F in a general sense. Yet E is also relevant to the variations of F, which can be used to identify, through other people, as being representative under the sign E too. Hence, while it is possible to have two names describe one person; it is also possible, by proof as shown, to have one name describe many people within one person too. This contradicts with our static component of language. Or does it?
“Red” is Red (A = A) because it is not “Blue” and not Blue (if not A = non-A, then A ≠ B). But is “Hesperus” Hesperus (C = C) because it is not “Phosphorus” and not Phosphorus (C ≠ D)? Based on our previous proof, this cannot be the case because if “Hesperus” were your real name and “Phosphorus” were your pseudonym, then (C = D) and (C ≠ D) would be both true simultaneously. Even if it were not your pseudonym, (C = D) and (C ≠ D) would still hold as being simultaneously meaningful. But we know that (A ≠ B) because “Red” is Red and not “Blue” because Red is not Blue. And yet “Phosphorus” is Hesperus and “Phosphorus” is also not only Hesperus. How do we resolve this paradox of naming?
It is clear that “Red” and Red and “Blue” and Blue are not the same as “Hesperus” and Hesperus and “Phosphorus” and Phosphorus. However, they are meant to be proper names insofar as they refer to one thing and not other things too. Until they do refer to more than one thing. This is because there is a meaning, or sense, which underlies and differentiates all three cases.
Consider the case of E and F again: the name “Thomas” and the real Thomas. The name “Thomas” refers to one Thomas (E = F), and yet also variations of Thomas, according to different people, (E = F1, F2, F3, and so on). This is not to say that there is physically more than one Thomas, or that multiple Thomases exist as a unique metaphysics, but rather that if you were to ask different people to arrive at a categorisation for Thomas, based on the facts they know about them, you might arrive at different but still valid categorisations of Thomas, depending on who you ask. If this is the case, then (E = F1, F2, F3, and so on) and hence, there are multiple ways to identify and thus be identified as Thomas. But this is unlikely to extend into categorisations of “Red” as being anything other than Red for obvious reasons.
People understand that “Red” is Red because of common sense in of itself. But is there a common sense of the name “Thomas” or Thomas in of themselves? In the case of the name “Thomas”, it is insufficient here because the sign of the name itself is insufficient in expressing the variations of its own meaning, and thus its identity, in of itself. While a sign such as “Red” might be sufficient to express Red as a colour, what happens if there is more than one shade of red? Perhaps it is possible to assign hex codes to each shade of red, and to account for each variation of red, but what if there are “shades” of a person? What is the common sense of that?
Identity is more straightforward for objects with proper names and thus facts. Red is “Red” because it is not “Blue” and not Blue and so on. This is the means of identification: the categorising of facts. But what are the means of identification for human beings? Ethnicity, gender, age, height, and so on, of course. But also personality, passions, impressions. The former set of facts is more straightforward; the latter set of facts is more obscure. This is because there is no common sense for the latter. There are only individual senses specific to each observer in the process of identification based on facts.
If we were to summarise, it would be to consider identification as the process of categorising facts into subcategories of further exclusive facts, with two metaclasses of facts being distinguished by whether they hold common sense or hold individual sense. All common sense facts will hold individual senses of the same facts, but this is not true of all individual sense facts, because not all of them will hold common sense. An example of a common sense fact is that “Red” is Red. The common sense is that “Red” is Red because it is not “Blue” and not Blue. This relation would hold in all cases of individual sense too. However, an example of an individual sense fact which is not a common sense fact is that “Thomas” is Thomas and that “Thomas” is also a different Thomas, depending on who is making the identification—consider a priori and a posteriori.
In the case of self-identification, there might be a Thomas, but why is there more than one meaning or identity of Thomas for other observers? It is possible that there are other Thomases within Thomas that he is not aware of. If someone were to categorise Thomas as a narcissist, and Thomas were not to categorise themselves as a narcissist, then perhaps it is Thomas who is not able to identify themselves as being narcissistic—because they are, in fact, narcissistic. Hence, the case of self-identification is insufficient to hold common sense in of itself.
It should be noted that this essay employs a specific logic of language. This logic is the processing of facts into identity and what happens when there are different sets of facts which affect identity. Identity is not a self-reflective process, but instead an observed process in which the identified themselves are unable to identify their own facticity because identity for human beings also consist of non-commonsensical facts. It is not like colour, which has a common sense, and thus requires a different set of assumptions with which we can identify it.
But if this is true, what does it mean for the identities of human beings? If human beings are able to identify themselves by facts which have no common sense, and yet have individual senses which have meaning in of themselves to themselves and to others, then there is a potential infinity within human beings to reify themselves as per individual sense facts.
Consider the universal set of commonsensical facts and the universal set of individual sense facts to be G and H respectively. While certain commonsensical facts might determine certain notions of identity, there is likewise an infinite realm of non-commonsensical facts (not-G) by which individual sense facts (H) might occupy. Perhaps G might be better categorised as Universal Facts and H as Human Facts. And for human beings, H is limitless insofar as it is human.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2021. All rights reserved.