--- date: '2024-02-19' description: personal identity read through Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Freud, Jung, Ricoeur and structural mathematics, with Paul Graham's case for keeping it small. id: identity modified: 2026-10-12 10:58:00 GMT-04:00 seealso: - '[[thoughts/hermeneutics]]' - '[[thoughts/love]]' - '[[thoughts/functionalism]]' - '[[thoughts/Freud]]' - '[[thoughts/Wittgenstein]]' - '[[thoughts/ethics]]' socials: pg: https://paulgraham.com/identity.html tags: - philosophy - pattern title: identity created: '2024-02-19' published: '2024-02-19' pageLayout: default slug: thoughts/identity permalink: https://aarnphm.xyz/thoughts/identity.md generator: quartz: v4.6.0 hostedProvider: Cloudflare baseUrl: aarnphm.xyz full: https://aarnphm.xyz/llms-full.txt --- Two questions get mixed together under “identity”. One asks what makes me the same person as the kid in my old photos. The other asks who I take myself to be: the roles, loyalties and stories I would defend in an argument. The traditions below mostly answer the second question, and most of them deny that the answer is a fixed inner essence. They disagree about what takes its place: the body, a free project, a negotiation among drives, or a story. The note uses “identity” in this personal sense. Type-identity theory, the claim that mental state types are brain state types, is a separate topic in philosophy of mind; see [[thoughts/functionalism]]. ## phenomenology cf [[library/Phenomenology of Perception|Phenomenology of Perception]] ### the lived body In _Phenomenology of Perception_ \[@merleauponty1945phenomenology\], Merleau-Ponty describes one’s own body (_le corps propre_) as the point from which a world is perceived. It is never only an object in front of me. I can walk around a table, but I cannot walk around my own body to see it from outside. He builds on Husserl’s distinction between the body as a physical thing (_Körper_) and the lived body (_Leib_). His examples are habits. A typist does not locate each key with an explicit thought; the keyboard is organised in the hands. A driver can feel whether the car fits through a gap without measuring. Merleau-Ponty describes this as the body-schema extending into the tool. A large part of what I am, then, is a set of practised ways of reaching into a world, and these work before I reflect on them. ### flesh, chiasm, and reversibility In the unfinished _The Visible and the Invisible_ \[@merleauponty1964visible\], he names the shared fabric of perceiver and perceived “flesh” (_la chair_). He says it is neither matter nor mind, and calls it “the concrete emblem of a general manner of being.” The model case is one hand touching the other. The right hand touches, the left is touched, and the roles can swap. They never coincide: when I try to feel the touched hand as touching, the experience slips. Merleau-Ponty calls this reversibility “always imminent and never realized in fact.” The gap (_écart_) keeps the two sides distinct while they stay joined. A chiasm is this crossing. Seeing and being seen have the same structure, which is why he can extend it to other people. ### intercorporeality In a later essay he uses “intercorporeality” for the bodily relation with others that comes before any judgement that they are minds. His example in _Phenomenology of Perception_ is a fifteen-month-old who opens its mouth when he playfully takes its finger between his teeth. The baby has barely seen its own face, yet it grasps his biting intention as something its own body could do. On this account I learn who I am partly by moving with other bodies and reading their gestures, before I hold any explicit self-image. ## existentialism See also [[thoughts/Existentialism]]. ### being-in-itself and being-for-itself _Being and Nothingness_ \[@sartre1943being\] contrasts two kinds of being: - **Being-in-itself** (_être-en-soi_) is the being of things. A rock is what it is, completely. - **Being-for-itself** (_être-pour-soi_) is consciousness. It is always aware of itself at a slight distance, and it is aimed at possibilities it has not yet realised. Sartre’s formula is that it “is what it is not and is not what it is.” The distance is the source of freedom. Because I am never fully identical with my current state, I can always take it up differently. ### existence precedes essence The slogan comes from Sartre’s 1946 lecture _Existentialism Is a Humanism_. A paper knife is designed for a purpose before it exists. Sartre denies that any designer fixed human nature in advance. A person first exists, and then becomes something through choices and projects. Identity is therefore a task, renewed by what I keep doing. ### bad faith Bad faith (_mauvaise foi_) is lying to oneself about this situation. Sartre names two sides of a person: _facticity_, the facts I did not choose (my body, my past, my position), and _transcendence_, my ability to go beyond them through choice. Bad faith denies one side: 1. treating myself as pure facticity (“this is just who I am”), or 2. treating myself as pure transcendence, as if my past and body do not bind me. His waiter in a café moves with slightly exaggerated precision, playing at being a waiter as if that role were his nature. Sartre’s point is that he is a waiter only in the mode of playing it; he remains free to stop. ### being-for-others When someone looks at me, I become an object in their world. Sartre’s example is a man peeping through a keyhole who hears footsteps and is suddenly flooded with shame. He now exists as something seen and judged, and he cannot control what he is for the other person. This being-for-others is part of who I am, and I can never fully take it back. Sartre therefore describes relations between people as basically conflictual. In his analysis of love, the lover wants to be the whole world for the beloved, and wants the beloved to choose this freely. That demand is contradictory: it requires possessing a freedom as a freedom. Sartre concludes that love in this form must fail. ## psychoanalysis ### [[thoughts/Freud]] #### the structural model _The Ego and the Id_ \[@freud1923ego\] divides the psyche into three agencies: - **Id**: the drives. It follows the pleasure principle and is entirely unconscious. - **Ego**: the part of the id modified by contact with the outside world. It tests reality and mediates between the drives, the world and conscience. - **Superego**: internalised prohibitions and ideals, formed largely from identification with the parents. Ego and superego are each partly unconscious. On this picture the self I report is the ego’s account, which leaves out much of what drives it. #### narcissism _On Narcissism_ \[@freud1914narcissism\] calls narcissism “the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation.” _Primary narcissism_ is the infant’s original libidinal investment in itself. _Secondary narcissism_ is libido withdrawn from external objects and turned back onto the ego, as Freud thought happened in schizophrenia. Freud also notes an asymmetry: loving, which involves longing and lack, lowers self-regard, and being loved raises it. He separates two types of object choice. In _anaclitic_ choice a person loves someone modelled on the parent who fed or protected them. In _narcissistic_ choice a person loves what they are, were, or would like to be. The ego ideal is what remains of that infant self-love. Freud writes that what a person “projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood.” Character forms partly through identification: the ego takes into itself traits of people it once loved and lost. ### Jung #### ego and Self Jung distinguishes the ego, the centre of consciousness, from the Self, the archetype of the whole psyche, conscious and unconscious together \[@jung1951aion\]. The ego is a part that tends to mistake itself for the whole. #### individuation In _Two Essays on Analytical Psychology_, Jung defines individuation as “becoming a single, homogeneous being,” and, since individuality includes our “innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness,” as becoming one’s own self. In practice it means bringing unconscious material into a working relation with the ego: - **Persona**: the mask a person presents to fit social roles. It is necessary; the problem begins when someone takes it for their whole identity. - **Shadow**: the traits a person refuses to see in themselves. They often show up as strong reactions to the same traits in other people. - **Anima and animus**: the contrasexual images in the unconscious (a feminine image in men, a masculine image in women, in Jung’s terms). Jung treats them as more autonomous than the shadow, and as what gets projected when someone falls in love at first sight. Individuation does not remove these figures. It changes the ego’s relation to them, so that a projection can be recognised as a projection. ## hermeneutics and narrative identity See [[thoughts/hermeneutics]]. Self-understanding is circular: I interpret myself from within my present self-conception, and the interpretation revises that self-conception. I have no standpoint outside the circle. Ricoeur \[@ricoeur1992oneself\] separates two meanings of “same”: - **Idem** (sameness): numerical identity and permanence over time. The same fingerprint, the same character traits. - **Ipse** (selfhood): being the one who answers for my actions. Its model is keeping a promise. When I keep my word after I have changed, my traits have not stayed the same; I have held myself to something. Narrative identity sits between them. A story connects events that were contingent into one plot, and that plot lets a person who changes still recognise the life as theirs. The story is provisional and can be retold. Gadamer \[@gadamer1960truth\] describes understanding a text or tradition as a fusion of horizons: my present assumptions meet those of the text, and both are revised. He adds that such understanding is in the end self-understanding. Reading someone else carefully changes what I can see about myself. ## mathematics The traditions above say identity comes from relations. Mathematics has precise versions of that claim, with limits that matter. ### category theory See [[thoughts/category theory]]. Every object $A$ in a category has an identity morphism $\mathrm{id}_A : A \to A$, and for all $f : A \to B$ and $g : C \to A$, $$ f \circ \mathrm{id}_A = f, \qquad \mathrm{id}_A \circ g = g. $$ Two objects are isomorphic when there are maps $f : A \to B$ and $g : B \to A$ with $g \circ f = \mathrm{id}_A$ and $f \circ g = \mathrm{id}_B$. Isomorphic objects can differ as sets while being indistinguishable by anything the category can express. There can also be many different isomorphisms between the same two objects, so “the same” can hold in several ways. The Yoneda lemma makes “defined by relations” exact \[@awodey2010category\]. An object is determined, up to isomorphism, by the maps into it from every other object: $$ \mathrm{Hom}(-,A) \cong \mathrm{Hom}(-,B) \ \text{naturally} \iff A \cong B. $$ The lemma determines an object only up to isomorphism, and only inside one fixed category. Change the category and the relevant relations change with it. ### univalence In homotopy type theory, a proof that $a = b$ behaves like a path from $a$ to $b$ in a space. The univalence axiom, proposed by Voevodsky around 2009, says that for types $A$ and $B$ in a universe, the canonical map $$ (A = B) \to (A \simeq B) $$ is itself an equivalence. Identity of types is therefore equivalent to equivalence of types. This formalises the working mathematician’s habit of treating isomorphic structures as the same, and Awodey argues that it captures mathematical structuralism. See [the HoTT book](https://homotopytypetheory.org/book/). ### composition The tensor product $V \otimes W$ of two vector spaces contains elements of the form $v \otimes w$, but most of its elements are sums such as $v_1 \otimes w_1 + v_2 \otimes w_2$ that cannot be written as one product. Such an element describes a composite whose parts have no separate state of their own. In quantum mechanics this is entanglement. In the distributional compositional model of Coecke, Sadrzadeh and Clark, a transitive verb is a tensor in $N \otimes S \otimes N$, and sentence meaning comes from contracting it with the subject and object vectors. The analogy for persons is limited. It suggests why “who I am at work” and “who I am with family” may fail to factor into independent pieces. The mathematics does not show that people behave this way. ## [[/tags/love]] as selfish act Put the frameworks together and love starts to look self-serving. Freud says being loved raises self-regard, and that object choice often repeats a parent or the self. Jung says the person I fall for first carries my projection. Sartre says I want the beloved’s freedom to choose me, so that my existence is justified. Merleau-Ponty says I cannot be a body-subject alone. Gadamer says understanding another person changes my own self-understanding. On every account, I need the other to become myself. That sounds cynical only if a finished self exists before the relationship and then uses it. Every view above denies that such a self exists. If the self is made in relations, “selfish” and “selfless” stop being clean opposites, because the self I serve already depends on the person I love. This does not make all love fine. Freud’s narcissistic choice and Jung’s unexamined projection are cases where I love an image and miss the person. Sartre’s analysis says the demand to possess another’s freedom defeats itself. What remains is to withdraw projections, let the other surprise my interpretation, and accept that their freedom is not mine to secure. That work serves me too, and it only works if they flourish as someone other than my image of them. The most selfish thing you can do is love well. ## keep your identity small source: > Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there’s no back pressure on people’s opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs. The similarity between religion and politics is that you only need a strong conviction towards an opinion to become “domain-expert”. > I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people’s identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that’s part of their identity. By definition they’re partisan. Graham adds that which topics engage identity depends on the people. So a question that provokes religious wars may still have an answer[^example]. [^example]: His example is programming languages. Many programmers identify as users of one language, so comparisons turn into religious wars, and some people conclude that all languages are equally good. Graham rejects this: languages can be well or badly designed, and the comparison is productive among people who do not argue from identity. > More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn’t engage the identities of any of the participants.