5 - Personal identity and social identity

Summary

I well recall having my identity tested in California fifteen years ago. Candidates were faced with a sheet of lined foolscap paper, topped with the single question ‘Who am I?’. They had to respond with whatever truths about themselves they thought important, broadly either descriptions of their inner being or lists of their significant roles. Those who failed were deemed to have an identity crisis and hauled off to wooden shacks behind the library, where psychiatrists lay in wait with ink blots. Or so rumour had it, but I cannot vouch for its truth, as I did not stay the course. To one nurtured in arctic regions of English society, where upper lips are stiff and chins up, the whole show seemed dreadfully bad form. To one polished off on Oxford analytical philosophy, it appeared incomprehensible. At any rate, I wrote my name and then could think of nothing to add. Even that was a mistake, as the test was meant to be anonymous, but my name did strike me as a necessary and sufficient answer to ‘Who am I?’ Any other response, I reasoned, would be addressed to the different question, ‘What am I?’, thus, from a logical standpoint, confusing accidents with essence and, from a British point of view, confounding moral identity with social relations.

I was being absurdly insular and richly deserved the ink blots. A crisis of identity is more than a failure of confidence, displays more than what the army dubs ‘lack of moral fibre’ and cannot be dismissed in the Oxford idiom of the time as ‘logically odd’. I give my name when postmen or dentists ask who I am but it will hardly do as an answer to myself. Conversely, knowing my own name is hardly a sufficient prophylactic, even in a primitive society like Britain where names still have a ritual magic. Yet I remain puzzled by the question set. I am not in doubt that identity crises are real; but I do wonder what they are crises of. As a student of philosophy, I wonder why discussions of personal identity supply nothing which could be en crise; as a student of the moral sciences, I am still seeking a cogent account of the man behind the mask.