14 - Identification and Identity

Summary

When Harry Frankfurt chose a title for the first volume of his essays, he must have been thinking of the direction in which his work was going rather than the direction from which it had come. Retrospect would have led him to the titles of the founding essays in his research program, such as “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person” or “Identification and Externality.” Instead he named the volume after the essay that set the theme for his future work, “The Importance of What We Care About.” In the years since the publication of that volume, Frankfurt has explored many topics suggested by its wonderfully resonant title: how our caring about things makes them important to us; how the process of caring about them is important to us; and how important a matter it is which things we care about.

What I most admire about Frankfurt's essays on these topics is their candor in reporting one man's efforts to understand life as he finds it. Reading this work, one has the sense of receiving dispatches from anexamined life. Frankfurt's reflections on caring, in particular, are clearly an expression of what the author cares about, and as such they command a respect that transcends any disagreement.

Disagreement there is bound to be, however, when philosophy cuts so close to the bone.