An Enquiry into Identity - Part 1, Fundamentals
An essay series exploring and critiquing the meaning of 'identity' in the contemporary world.
Identity is, according to the contemporary Oxford English Dictionary, firstly ‘The fact of being who or what a person or thing is’, or secondly ‘The characteristics determining who or what a person or thing is’. If that satisfies your curiosity about how the word is used in our society today, you don’t need to read any further.
To me the powerful surge of discourse around ‘identity’ in recent years has moved it further away from our understanding, and OED’s definition doesn’t help. The concept seems to hang in the air like a sacred standard or a piñata – and perhaps we like it there, somewhere over our heads. Perhaps it’s the novelty we like, because it hasn’t been there for long. In the 1930s the word would have had an obscure, academic air to it. Since then it has become swollen with meaning, so heavy with it that it has almost become meaningless.
Others think so too, or at least that something fundamental has shifted in the use of the word. In 1999 political scientist James Fearon showed at length that the dictionary definition of 'identity' had not caught up with the meaning of the term used in social science and politics1. In a recent public discussion, Doctors Orr, Biggar and Peterson briefly discussed identity with the same assumption. According to James Orr:
“I think that the fact that we're all talking about identity now in a way that we simply weren't before, is not a sign that we all know what it means, but actually a sign that there's a kind of dislocation; Identitas in Latin doesn't mean anything at all, it just means 'sameness'…”2
Through this series of essays I will take a brief look at the evolution of the word ‘identity’ to the present day. After this I will look at some of the confusion and strangeness that surrounds its usage in our time, and offer a way of understanding what identity is (including a new definition), and how it functions.
Understanding the fundamental meanings of Identity
The ancient Latin meaning provides us with the starting point of our enquiry. We can recognise this Latin meaning of 'sameness' through different forms of the word which we still use to mean something similar, like 'identical'. How exactly did the concept 'sameness' come to mean 'the fact of being who or what a person is'?
This meaning came about through the question of our knowledge of whether something is the same entity as another. The famous philosophical problem that demonstrates the question is the ship of Theseus, founder of Athens:
The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.
- Plutarch, Theseus
How can we say that something is the same thing, when it has changed? The original ship of Theseus and the preserved ship of Theseus 'have an identity' or 'share an identity' if they are in fact the same ship.
This might sound irrelevant or abstract, but it leads directly to what is still the most common usage of the word 'identity' in English – the factual establishing of whether a person is who they say they are; whether the person named and photographed in an identity document is the same as the person standing in front of us; whether the person who committed a murder is the same person as the one standing before us in court; whether an 'unidentified' body is, or was, a person with this name or another name, and so on.
These are objective questions concerning the ‘fact of identity’, ‘the fact of who or what a person or thing is’ from the outside. Identity is determined here through physical likeness, detailed features of the body like fingerprints or DNA, or historical continuity from documentation, e.g. a birth certificate. Facts about somebody can be asked, furthermore, through the word identity: “what is your sexual identity?” could be understood as, “what is the identity of your sexuality?”, i.e. an attempt to pin down or categorise the person's sexuality.
This is an entirely different aspect of the question of the fact of identity, one that is more important to human life; our self-knowledge, our knowledge of our 'identity' – our knowledge, in other words, that we are a particular person – i.e, the same person that we were yesterday.
John Locke suggested in the late 17th century that this knowledge is derived from our consciousness of ourselves, intertwined with memory. It is my consciousness that perceives that I am the person I was last week; and though this person may have changed, the consciousness that perceives is the same. The memories that accompany our consciousness are our own, whether they are false memories or true.
Here we have the basic pre-1940 concept of personal identity. For now we are leaving aside certain developments of the concept by thinkers like Kant and Hegel, partly because they would complicate things far too much, and partly because their ideas did not penetrate as fully into popular consciousness. ‘Lockean identity’ is nevertheless a profound concept, as simple and mysterious as consciousness itself. It is a spare, analytical way of describing something that most people can relate to. It is still intimately relevant to any contemporary discussion of 'identity' which considers 'who you are' – but it has been eclipsed by a change in the use of the word, sparked by the upheavals that the 20th century presented to 'who we are'.
Erik Erikson and the identity crisis
This change was spearheaded by Erik Erikson, a psychologist trained in the Freudian tradition. Erikson's writing is a strange mixture of great creativity and insight on the one hand, and carelessness and Freudian dogma on the other. His development of the new concept of identity should probably be thought of as a co-development – it spanned 20 years, during which US society in general seized the word and ran with it. This co-development is what gave rise to the second dictionary definition given at the start: “The characteristics that determine what a person or thing is”.
The excitement around the word was sparked by Erikson using the phrase 'identity crisis' to refer to the socio-psychological state of the teenagers of the 1950s and 60s. The origins of his usage date to the decade before, however:
“The term "identity crisis" was first used, if I remember correctly, for a specific clinical purpose in the Mt. Zion Veterans' Rehabilitation Clinic during the Second World War... Most of our patients, so we concluded at that time, had neither been "shellshocked" nor become malingerers, but had through the exigencies of war lost a sense of personal sameness and historical continuity.”
“Above all, the men felt that they "did not know any more who they were": there was a distinct loss of ego identity.3 The sense of sameness and continuity and the belief in one's social role were gone. In this field of clinical observation I first found the assumption of a central loss of a sense of identity both inescapable and immediately clarifying.”4
In other words, while it appears that these soldiers typically retained their 'sense of identity' in that they remembered their name and who they were, they no longer knew who they were in relation to society. The post-war soldier had lost the sense of social role that the pre-war soldier had.
This social or psycho-social identity is similar to Carl Jung’s ‘Persona’; it is the human co-construction of him or herself, the 'who I am', in relation to the rest of society, or in relation to the ‘outside’, including their position in social formations or hierarchies. From this point, the concept of an individual's ‘identity’ invites all of the aspects which have become familiar through recent ‘identity politics’ – all of the socially significant aspects of the individual, whether they are seen to be ‘innate’ or ‘constructed’, become a part of their identity formation; their profession or job, gender, sex, race, religion, sexuality and so forth. These might be considered as parts of the psycho-social identity, or one of them might be referred to as constituting this identity; “I am/my identity is a psychologist”, “I am/my identity is a nurse”.
This is a major shift towards our contemporary usage of the term. Let's take a moment to consider the coherence of the shift in relation to the ancient Latin meaning of 'sameness' as well as to Lockean identity. On the one hand, it appears to be an inevitable and necessary evolution in the meaning of the word. It could be argued that the Lockean identity, the bare consciousness of one’s being, quickly becomes indistinguishable from (or is forever bound up with) the physical and social aspects of one’s life. The real process of me waking up to ‘who I am’ each morning immediately involves all of those aspects. As Erikson says, “we deal with a process 'located' in the core of the individual and yet also in the core of his communal culture, a process which establishes, in fact, the identity of those two identities.”5
On the other hand, the shift is directly contradictory to everything that ‘identity’, in relation to its etymology of ‘sameness’, is meant to mean. Lockean identity is defined as it is because it refers to that which does not change: “since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes every one to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being”.6
It is precisely because our bodies and social lives change that Locke did not select those aspects as defining a person’s identity. Although the social structures of his age might appear to us to be far less changeable than our own time, still people could and did change professions, religions, social environments, and became – and stopped being – fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters, and so on.
These questions did not matter, however, to the world that had so powerfully and spontaneously adopted this word. It was not the coherence of the new term that mattered, but the fact that it filled an ambiguous hole. The white writer of “Who Speaks for the Negro?”, a 1968 book compiling interviews with black civil rights leaders and intellectuals, described his encounter with the word as follows:
“I seize the word identity. It is a key word. You hear it over and over again. On this word will focus, around this word will coagulate, a dozen issues, shifting, shading into each other. Alienated from the world to which he is born and from the country of which he is a citizen, yet surrounded by the successful values of that new world, and country, how can the Negro define himself?”7
Though the 'dozen issues, shifting, shading into each other' sounds prophetic, it was an accurate description of how the word was already being used. The hole in meaning could not be filled by Erikson's original idea of a psycho-social identity alone. He, also, had broken the word out of this limitation, cheerfully joined in with the enthusiasm, and begun talking of 'superidentity',8 multiple 'identities' that could threaten a person's singular identity,9 and 'group identity'. Erikson was joining forces with the popular psyche in creatively extending the meaning of the word.
Eventually – that is, in the 2010s – we would suffer the consequences of this multiplicity of meanings. But in the years between, the popular reinvention of the word would grasp important aspects of ‘identity’ that had previously been hardly noticed.
Higher and Lower identities
As we have seen in the 21st century, the 'psycho-social identity' suggested by Erikson is, unfortunately, not stable. It tends to pull attention in two opposite directions, rather than providing a single usable concept. Because of this, it will be temporarily useful to distinguish between 'higher' and 'lower' identities. Note that both of these tendencies, towards 'higher' and 'lower' aspects of identity, are popular developments, implicit in common usage, rather than definitions put forward by Erikson. Exploring this distinction also allows us to introduce a firm way of thinking about identity – that an identity is something that unifies and integrates things which are below it.
Firstly, as we briefly discussed, the idea of a socially formed identity directs us to look 'downwards' and focus on the ‘characteristics’ that ‘determine’ this identity. It is easier to think of the social world interacting with, and helping to form, sub-elements of ourselves rather than the mysterious unity of ourselves. Furthermore, analysing the way that society influences 'who I am' requires me to do this, because analysis requires a focusing on isolated units. As we have seen, despite the inconsistencies in how the word developed, this way of thinking of identity has recently made it into the dictionaries.
But attention is also inevitably drawn 'upwards' to the wholeness of ‘the person or thing’. Erikson’s idea of a ‘psycho-social identity’ itself implies a wholeness; it suggests that we can refer to ‘my psycho-social identity’ or simply ‘my identity’ as an integrated whole. If we imagine that humans are made up of many things, we can also imagine that these things are unified in the human, making a singular identity which 'is' that person.
Attention is also drawn 'upwards' beyond the human, of course – and the word 'identity' has gradually been extended to refer to overarching entities, for instance 'the British identity'. As we will continually see throughout these essays, terms like this are ambiguous. A ‘British identity’ was referred to throughout the 20th century, but in earlier usage this was like a ‘stamp’ of sameness, like a ‘Made in Britain’ manufacturers mark. I believe it was only post-Erikson that the term ‘British identity’ was used in the sense of a wholeness that united people within it.
The specific, technical conception of Lockean identity discussed earlier might make us think that the 'identity' of the unified human and the 'identity' of a nation or tribe – that is, what makes them themselves – are very different. They do however have something in common – they both unite disparate elements. A tribe unites all of its members inside itself, defines an 'outside' and an 'inside', and gives an identity to a person beyond their name, or as part of their name – “I am a MacDonald”, “I am Eluzai of the Lulubo tribe”. We also unify the different parts of ourself under a name, define an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’, and so forth.
This ‘unifying’ sense of identity, introduced by the popular psyche and used consciously by contemporary thinkers like Jonathan Pageau10, is the key to how we will understand the word.
Erikson introduced the word 'superidentity', undefined, apparently as a way of grappling with the unifying ability of identities, which is otherwise neglected in his work. The 'psycho-social identity' cannot unite anything – it may be a complete product that we present to the world, that combines sub-elements – character, career, gender, sexuality, culture – within it, but it does not itself unite those elements.
Identity as unifier
It is also hard to think of the Lockean identity performing this task, as it tends to be conceived as isolated from the other parts that make up a human. But in later philosophy, running from Kant to to the phenomenologists, the human mind was thought of as itself a framework, an assemblage of different things, that gives rise to our perceived reality. The 'I' that is the Lockean point of consciousness/memory could be thought of as that which unites this assemblage/framework with its active perception, its attention, and other mysteries. The framework is immanent to the 'I', and always or constantly unified by it. This assemblage can then act as a unifier to the body and persona in turn.
Another way of thinking about human consciousness-identity as a unifier is through self-reflection. The mind can ‘see’ itself naming and perceiving things, and can then reflexively organise and unify those things that are named and perceived.11
This aspect and ability of the human mind will be referred to from now on as the ‘integrating (or cohering) human consciousness’. But this term does not accurately define or contain it – rather I need to use a term that I and my readers will understand. The ways in which it goes beyond this concept will be touched upon in the final essay.
Despite the spareness of his idea of human identity, Locke did consider identity as a unifier when he discussed plant life. As plants also change in their materials, and so cannot be considered to be ‘the same’ by reason of their particles alone, Locke described plant identity as deriving from a unity of “continued organisation, fit to convey that common life to all the parts so united”. Animals also have such a unity of life, which could be initially thought of as their genetic code or their ‘seed’, then the integrating processes and resulting wholeness of the body which grows from that seed (a name for this identity which is the ‘wholeness of the body’, and which animals and humans share, could be the ‘soul’12). If our ‘factual’ identity can be derived from our code/seed, our ‘true’ or higher identity is our unifying, cohering consciousness.
This consciousness serves to give us our ‘true’ identity, but it also gives identity to other things. Our consciousness can give things without life identity – and can give an ‘additional’ identity to plants and animals, i.e. the name that we give them.
If we apply this 'unifying' meaning of identity back to the ship of Theseus, we can see a solution to the problem. The identity of the ship is not found in the sameness of its materials – it is found in the unifying naming and perceiving of the ship as the 'Ship of Theseus'. It is this name which unites the changing materials under it and gives them their identity or sameness. A new plank is integrated into the identity. This is completely flexible, as the humans who perceive the ship could decide that at a certain point the ship no longer maintains its identity, for various reasons, including that the materials that compose it have changed too much to warrant its continued identity. But it is not the change in materials which causes this disintegration in identity, but the intuition, perception or decision of the people who observe and maintain the ship.
This discussion allows us to reflect on the contemporary OED definition of identity. The first definition clearly still fulfils a technical role in our society, as discussed at the beginning. The clearest question arises regarding the second definition, “the characteristics that determine what a person or thing is”. Why does the dictionary specify characteristics? Isn’t this a metaphysical claim that it is the lower that determines the higher? Characteristics, physical properties, material elements, sub-features, etc, never ‘make a thing what it is’. A chair isn’t a chair because it’s constructed in a certain way, from certain materials – it’s a chair because we can see and use it as a chair. A tree isn’t a tree because of any of its ‘characteristics’, it is a tree because of the unifying life that organises and integrates new elements into the tree.
This definition could simply be changed to “that which determines what a person or thing is”. For objects with no life of their own, this will be that which integrates and unifies things into a whole, into a thing. That is, the human mind and its ability to ‘name’ things and perceive things as whole. For beings with life, there must be two types of identity – one which is their own, their unity and continued organisation of life, the unity of which I believe is called the Soul – the second which is that given by the human mind in its ability firstly to give identity to itself, then to give identity to all the creatures and things of the Earth. In this ability, it somehow is, or holds, the power of the Logos.
The next essay will fully consider lower identities, but our conclusion should be clear. For humans, ‘lower identities’, or the lower characteristics that ‘make up’ ourselves, are not identities at all, as they don’t ‘make us what we are’. They are elements which are held and unified by our true identity. Some will be more important to our lives, like the sex of our bodies, and others less important. From this point on we will use ‘sub-identity’ instead of ‘lower identity’, because these characteristics are ‘under’ our identities, and are held together and integrated by them.
In summation
In brief summation, ‘identity’ began its meaning as ‘the sameness of one thing and another’, proceeding to ‘that which makes us know that something is itself’, to ‘that which makes something itself’. Is this degeneration of meaning? It doesn’t feel like it, but the last step of this chain, which can already be seen amongst the confusion surrounding the word, is its reduction to just ‘something, itself’ or just ‘something’. I think this last step should be resisted as a degeneration.
This is the very beginning of our discussion on identity. There are many problems that have not been addressed; the imperfection of identity, and where it fits in a cosmological vision. We have already seen that popular usage of the term has extended it beyond and above humans. Do these entities, for instance a city or a nation, have an identity of their own in a similar manner to a tree or animal, or is it ‘only’ human perception that gives integrity and unity to them? How do we relate to them - do they give us identity?
Furthermore, I am concerned with the social problems that are connected with the word identity – it is here that the importance of the word has manifested. It might be thought that this brief discussion is a solution of sorts to the problem of ‘identity’ in the present moment – we have seen how a fresh discussion of identity in the 50s-70s led to the focus on sub-identities that we are familiar with, and yet also gave popular rise to perhaps a 'truer' conception of identities as things which unify sub-elements within them. Thus we can just establish that a focus on sub-identity is somehow 'incorrect', and point discussion of identity towards this 'higher' meaning.
Unfortunately, this is not a solution at all, as we will see in the next essay.
Fearon, J. D, 1999. What Is Identity (As We Now Use the Word)? California: Stanford University.
James Orr, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsmSBJMSRQk&t=300s
Readers will notice the use of the term 'ego identity'. Erikson's 'ego identity' does not indicate his new usage; he was using the lone word 'identity' in a new way, and also distinguishing it from another, very similar concept called 'ego identity'. In my view the difference between the two terms is not significant enough to integrate the concept of 'ego identity' into this document.
Erik Erikson, 1968, Identity, Youth and Crisis, p.17 & 67
Ibid. p.22
John Locke, 1690, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Chapter 27 section 9
Robert Warren Penn, 1965, Who Speaks for the Negro? p.17
e.g. Erik Erikson, 1968, Identity, Youth and Crisis, p.287
e.g. Ibid, p.245
https://thesymbolicworld.com/
See the recent Symbolic World article by John Roxandish for a more complete account of this: https://thesymbolicworld.com/articles/a-logos-runs-through-it-heraclitus-reveals-a-symbolic-framework-for-psychological-identity/
This use of soul is supported by for instance Charles Ellicott, and the sequential reading of the two creation narratives in Genesis. Ellicott specifically says,
Genesis 2:7, ‘And man became a living soul’ – The word translated "soul" contains no idea of a spiritual existence. For in Genesis 1:20, "creature that hath life," and in Genesis 1:24, "the living creature," are literally, living soul. Really the word refers to the natural life of animals and men, maintained by breathing, or in some way extracting oxygen from the atmospheric air. And whatever superiority over other animals may be possessed by man comes from the manner in which this living breath was bestowed upon him, and not from his being "a living soul;" for that is common to all alike. Charles Ellicott, commentary on the Bible, 1897