Lately I've been thinking a bit about identity, and have been meaning to write a post about it but it keeps turning into an out-of-control ramble. So for now I'll just note the following.
Identity seems to rest on this weird ontological transformation, where the fact of something comes to have a quality of there-ness. For example, the fact I was born in America becomes a thing that is there: an American. And in undergoing this transformation from fact to person, this thing exits the domain of reason and ideas and logic and is smuggled into quite a different one, the domain of human social interaction, which is governed by a very different set of rules. It's a move from the rational to the psychological, from the universal to the contextual--and it seems to be a precondition for participating in the grand social project of living a human life.
Anyway, I'll stop there. But that's the entry point I'm taking in thinking more about what identity is and the role it plays in human being.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment