Do you know you are? (by anon)

I’m testing out a thought.  Bear with me as I fumble through it.

The question, “Who are you?” seems simple enough to answer.  I ask it, you give me your name, and we are all happy.  But if I ask myself, “Who am I?” just stating my name doesn’t say much.  So I say my name.  Big deal.  I am “Jim.”  But saying “Jim” doesn’t give me any insight into who I am, my self.  In this case, there really isn’t much in a name.  And now to go back to the first question, “Who are you?” it doesn’t seem that saying your name makes me happy anymore.  So what if your name is “Helen.”  That is only a designation by which I can refer to you.  That does not tell me who you are, your self.  There is no insight given as to who you are.

Am I my body?  In a trivial sense, of course I am.  We are material beings.  But that kind of answer doesn’t answer the “Who am I?” question, it answers the “What am I?” question.  “What” and “who” have very different meanings.  If I answer “my body” or even “my spirit or soul” as a dualist might say, those answers only deal with the composition of personal identity and not the selfhood of personal identity.  I want to avoid making a category mistake and stay focused on the “Who am I?” question.

Maybe I am my past, my history.  I’ve done plenty of things.  I’ve gone to the Grand Canyon, got an education, dated a bit, wrote some papers, did some experiments, had some pets, etc.  Are all those things what make me who I am?  I’m not satisfied with that kind of answer.  Talking about my history might in some way give a glimpse into who I was, but why must that have bearing on who I am now?  It need not.  Thus, I’m moving on.

Couldn’t I say that I am what I do?  If I am a professor, I could say, “I am a professor.”  Someone else could say, “I am a student.”  But that alone isn’t enough.  I do all sorts of things throughout the day and throughout my life, but just because I do those things, it doesn’t mean that I self-identify with them.  I brush my teeth every day – “I am a teeth brusher.”  Do I consider that something insightful about my self?  No.  Many people have jobs of which they cannot stand and would hate to be self-identified in those roles.  So we need to go deeper.  While what we do matters, it is not what I consider to be essential (it is more a matter of why we do what we do – keep reading).

Part of the problem in why it seems so hard to answer the question, “Who am I?” is that we start looking inside as if the answer is “in there” somewhere just waiting to be uncovered.  But what if that’s just the wrong way to think about it?  I’ll let you know what I’m getting at.

My self is grounded in that which I am passionate about.  In those things I am passionate about, I have a profound interest in them, I have an investment in them, to be more precise, I have a commitment to them.  As such, my self is grounded in my commitments.  I am my commitments.  If a person lacks any passion for anything and has no commitments, that person would lack a self.  The person would be “empty” if you allow the metaphor.  That empty person could do many things like work and go to school, but without any investment, that person (or we) wouldn’t have the slightest clue as to who that person is, because there is nothing to know.  We know ourselves through our commitments.  I know who I am through those things I am committed to.

This makes sense to me because how else could we know ourselves?  We need to relate ourselves to something in order for us to know ourselves.  In our commitments, we externalize ourselves in a process I have started calling “selfing.”  We are relating ourselves to ourselves in another (for those of you who took PHI 364, you’ll catch some Kierkegaard here).  When I see what I am committed to, I see that that is what I am passionate about and can then relate myself to myself through that understanding – in other words, I know myself through that commitment.  But because those commitments will always involve something outside my self, I (as a self) am always related to another.  Thus, I relate myself to my self through another.

For instance, I am passionate about student learning (yes, I am a professor).  I am genuinely committed to {students and their learning}.  Every commitment has the same kind of structure of being committed to something outside oneself, and whatever is in-between {} would be the object of that commitment.  My objects of commitment in this case are students and their learning.  Therefore, my self includes students and their learning; they are involved in my “selfing.”  They are a part of who I am.  That is but one of my present commitments, but it follows then that I would know more about myself the more commitments of my own I understand.  Thus, when we understand our commitments, we understanding ourselves – we are knowing ourselves.

Of course, our commitments change.  And so we change too.  The self is not a static thing, but it itself is a relation.

One thing I like about this view is that the self is not some mysterious thing many people want to make it out to be.  It is very understandable. Your self is not a function of your name, your body, your history, or simply what you do.  Your self is a function of your commitments, that which you have bound yourself to.

So if this all made sense, the question is “do you know who you are?”  Figure out those things you are passionate about, and you are beginning to get a good glimpse of your self.  I guess the next question would be whether you are happy with what you find.