Who We Are and How We Ought to Engage With Ourselves
Who am I?
This question suggests that there is a plausible answer, as though our existence is fixed. People search for a core sense of themselves, some root identity. The more one seeks to identify themselves, however, the more fragile one becomes. An inverse correlation between the question asked and the ease of one’s life exists. For the question of ‘who am I?’, the emphasis should not lie on discovering who one is, but on facilitating the emergence of what one would like to experience and who one would like to become.
Our identity is an ongoing process. Instead of a static persona, each individual is incessantly fluctuating, re-framing, re-organizing, re-thinking, and re-considering ourselves. How different would life be if rather than questioning who we are, we contemplate how we would like to engage with life? People too often engage in the deepening complexity of understanding themselves instead of devoting themselves to the unfolding process of life. Witnessing our thoughts, not reacting out of habit, and becoming entirely present enables us to craft our lives. We must take responsibility for our lives, not acting on whims, but on reason. Never should we follow conventional morality, but pursue our own interpretation of right and wrong. That is authenticity: reason, responsibility, acceptance, and change. Inauthenticity often arises from a fear and denial of death and/or rejection.
For Wordsworth, “Heaven lies about us in our infancy” and that Youth is “Nature’s Priest” — in other words, the return to Youth through reminiscence and reflection is what the individual ought to aim for, to have “emotion recollected in tranquility.”
The past, however, remains immutable, lost within time and space, never to be recaptured, never to be regained. Even through reflection can the past not be reached, but only ephemerally grazed at, reached for, and remaining perpetually elusive. The past is no longer physical, but has vanished into the mind of the one entity named Situation. Youth, even by the powers of imagination reaching toward the natural world, is utterly lost. But reflection still leads to wisdom, for wisdom is knowledge paired with reflection to aim for improvement. If not the past, what does one reflect upon? One must reflect upon the present moment — not the moments that subsequently add to the present, but merely the present itself, one’s position in that moment and projected path, to try and either keep on or alter that course. And to truly delve into one’s own present position, one must keep in solitude. Yet, to justify the desideratum for companionship, one must balance this solitude with relations. A vast difference lies between solitude and isolation — the latter is not a thing for all peoples, but the former ought be included in every life.
Although the question “who am I?” seems exclusively internal, the environment plays a significant role in determining the life and perspective of an individual. It is arguably the external processes that impact the human mental states, but only because the self is embedded in the environment, not through a view of radical extended cognition. Through the narratives that an individual constructs about themselves and their relation to others is personal identity fashioned and the concept of the self strengthened.
Memory plays a vital role in this constructed narrative of personal identity, precisely because it allows the individual to recall whether or not they are the same person that acted at a previous time. Therefore, psychological factors “like memory, character traits, and beliefs constitute personal identity in contrast to the body. Even if there is a continuity of the same body or brain, still the absence of these psychological factors will cause the absence of personal identity.” By drawing from narrative memory and a first-person perspective, the paper seeks to answer the question of “who am I” by also “stating one’s beliefs, values, memories, and future goals.”
In his work, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke articulates that two people are identical if and only if they have the same consciousness. These two individuals may be at different times, in different bodies, but if memories of past actions and future goals are identical, then the two people prove identical. Locke believes that “even if the body persists but memory is lost, the person no more remains the same person. The identity of a person entirely consists in his consciousness.” But what if somebody loses their memory? Do they then lose their personal identity? This is where Uniyal introduces narrative memory: “it is not only the person that retains the memory of his past as a story, rather, there are others who remember the past of the person and therefore help him retain his identity.”
Narrative memory is what incorporates actions and experiences into the story of one’s life. It is a dynamic process that organizes events and makes sense of life to create an ever changing story delineating a person’s identity. Future events may be anticipated and thought of as one’s own, just as past experiences are personalized, to make a more coherent self-told story. Yet it is not the narrative gaining insight into “the nature of an already existing self as ‘I’, rather self here is constructed through a narrative.” Who an individual is remains entirely dependent on one’s values, goals, and aspirations. One must combine the past experiences and inherent values with the present experiences, as well as aspirations for the future self. The self is “a product of a narratively structured life” — this is coupled with the cultural, political, and social environment one finds themselves in. The self “can never be in isolation, it is always in relation to others,” and thus the individual comes to know themself as they utilize “narrative to apprehend experiences and make relationships with others.”
The narrative self also requires an agent who is responsible for past actions. Paul Riceour acknowledges narrative self-identity as what the self tells about its own life and what others say about the self. In Oneself as Another, Ricoeur establishes two concepts pertaining to self-identity: (1) the identity of sameness and (2) the identity of selfhood. The former is the “identity of something that is always the same and never changes” (i.e. “idem identity”) while the latter is concerned with the “sameness” across and through change (i.e. “ipse identity”). Only from the first-person perspective may one examine one’s life and construct an identity of the self through and across change. And, although an individual may undergo drastic changes throughout the course of their life, they possess their self-identity through a narrative memory. If one’s own narrative memory proves faulty (i.e. loss of memory, displaced body, etc.), then a “collective memory signifies the transmission of shared experience that has been retained by the group.” This prevents a person suffering from lost memory to simultaneously lose their personal identity, because the narrative memory is retained by a collective group. Through this narrative account (whether collective or individual, or, in most cases, both), past experiences are placed within the context of a whole life and are defined as a personal history of an individual. Thus it is only “through the narrative reconstruction of [one’s] continuity through time that [one] make[s] sense of [their] present self.” A person’s personal “narrative identity is about reconstructing past, perceiving present, and imagining the future” with characters, plots, settings, and themes as with any fictional and historical narrative.
Narrative memory and a first-person perspective are the “criteria for personal identity in extended mind hypothesis and suggests that the self is embodied and environmentally embedded but it does not extend to the environment beyond the body.”
However, with each interaction, the identity of the self flourishes and grows, producing a more holistic version of the identity narrative. Thus, in engaging with others, and in reflecting with ourselves, our vision of our own narratives becomes clearer and more complete.
