WHO AND WHAT AM I?


Ronald J. Glossop


1st Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, 2 December 2001


  I.  Introduction

    A.  The issue I want to address today is usually called the nature of
self-identity.

    B.  What is the proper way to think of myself?  If someone asks me,
"What are you?" what would be an appropriate
answer?


II.  One way of classifying oneself is in terms
of the various categories into which one fits.

    A.  For example, each of us could begin by saying, "I am a human being."

    B.  We could also mention our immediate family
connections.  "I am the daughter or son of so-and-so.  I am
the father or mother of so-and-so.  I am the sister or brother of
so-and-so."  And these family relations are indeed an important
ingredient of what we are.

    C.  The context in which the question is asked
makes a difference in how we identify ourselves.
When in another part of the country we might say that we are
Illinoisans or Missourians while when in another part of the
world we are likely to idenfity ourselves as citizens of the
United States, or as our language requires us to
say--somewhat insensi-tively to Canadians, Mexicans, Brazilians,
Cubans, and others--we are Americans.

    D.  In some contexts, it would be necessary to identify ourselves by
our occupation, our gender, our race, our age, our religion, our political party affiliation, our
income level, our height, our weight, or other aspects of ourselves by
which we might be classified.


III.  But how do we classify ourselves when we are thinking about ourselves with no
particular questions to answer?  Here it is a question of
what is important to us.  It may be our
nationality that is most important to us.  I am
an American.  It may be our ethnicity that is
most important to us.  I am aSwede.  It may be our
occupation that is most important to us?  I am a
professor.  It may be our >religion that is most
important to us.  I am a Unitarian.  It may be our economic
status that is most important to us.  I am middle class.

    A.  What is most important can of course
change from time to time and place to place. 
In these days of accentuated patriotism, I would suppose that many more
people are thinking of themselves as "Americans" than was the case
before September 11.  All of us are more likely to think of ourselves
as Americans when we are outside of the country.

    B.  But how do we think of ourselves in our own
mind in the long run and outside of any particular context?
How do we identify ourselves?  What do we focus
on as our most important characteristics?  On
what are we willing to <spend time and money?
With which groups to which we belong do we
particularly want to be identified<?


IV.  One kind of identification which seems to be of particular
interest during recent decades is one's roots or
ancestry or heritage.  It
is believed that to know yourself, you must know not only your own
personal history but your family history.  It is supposed that you can
better understand who you are if you know where you came from.

    A.  But how is <underline>my identity</underline> affected by what my
ancestors did, especially my remote ancestors who had no contact with
me and whom I know only by reading about them?

    B.  In fact, it seems that the need to search for something
significant in one's ancestry may merely be an indication of a
lack of anything significant in one's own life.


V.  Some people would strenuously object to
this notion that you can know who you are or what you are by looking
into your past or even by focusing on what characteristics you have or
look deeper within yourself.  They would say
that a person is like an onion and that you must
peel off the outer layers, the accidental features, in order to get to
the >real self beneath these layers.

    A.  Of course what happens as you peel off these layers which
distinguish what you are from what others are, there is no longer
anything that is uniquely you.

    B  For Hindus, that is just the point.  At the
core each of us is merely a center of consciousness, a part
of the eternal Brahman-Atman, the absolute reality.  Each
of us is a spiritual soul which temporarily gets incarnated into
different bodies until we escape from the wheel of repeated rebirths
when we no longer desire to be a separate entity.

    C.  Even if this Hindu viewpoint is in some sense correct, the result
would be not to discover your personal self but
your impersonal self.

    D.  <underline>I do not accept this view that the self is some kind of
spiritual entity which gets reincarnated over and over
again</underline>.  It seems to me that there is <underline>no
memory</underline> of these hypothesized previous existences, and
consequently no reason to believe that my self has previously existed.
Furthermore, how could there be some <underline>immaterial
soul</underline> that can exist as an entity that gets incorporated
into one body after another.  When does it enter the organism?  When
does it leave the organism?  Doesn't death occur gradually rather than
all at once?  How (when and where) does this soul exist between
incarnations?

    E.  So let me return to the issue of <underline>personal
identity</underline> and what I as an individual am.


VI.  The followers of Confucius say that <underline>you are what you
belong to</underline>.  According to this Oriental view, the individual
exists and has significance <underline>only</underline> as a part of
some group such as the family and the state.  Individuals come and go
but the groups live on.  The individual is to the group as a cell is to
the body.

    A.  This <underline>group identification</underline> is found with
many groups which focus on the value of the family and the nation.
Consider, for example, the Japanese, the Jews, the Serbs, the French,
the Hungarians, the Danes, the Russians, the Germans, and so on.

        1.  It is just this kind of ethnic nationalism
which is one of the strongest bases of identity for people in the last
three and half centuries.

        2.  Before that, religion was the great basis
for self-identity, and some people still focus more on religion than
"nation" as the basis of their self-identity.

        3.  Now in multi-ethnic societies, it is >the political
nation-state rather than the ethnic nation which has become
the most important center of identification.  For most of us the fact
that we are members of this or that nation-state has become more
significant for self-identification than our religious allegiance or
our ethnic group.

    B.  Our reading from Norman Cousins shows how this kind of
self-identification can be extended to an even larger group, to all of
humankind.

    C.  That is an important insight and lets us see ourselves as
belonging not only to something larger than ourselves but also
something larger even than our particular
religious group, our particular
ethnic nation, or our particular
political nation-state.


VII.  This matter of transcending the
tribalism of identifying with some group less
than the totality of humanity is the theme of an important book by
Jason Hill, my former colleague at SIUE.  The
title of the book is Becoming a Cosmopolitan,
and it was published just last year by Rowman & Littlefield.

    A.  That term "cosmopolitan" is used by
philosophers these days to talk about world
citizenship.

    B.  In this book Hill, an African-American born in Jamaica, is
pleading for the moral necessity of moving beyond all forms
of tribalism, racism, ethnocentricism, and patriotic
nationalism to a self-concept of being a citizen
of the world and a member of the whole of humanity.

    C.  Primarily he is addressing blacks who limit their
potential human development by seeing themselves as blacks
rather than as human beings, but he also addresses
others who limit themselves by
identification with some ethnic or national or religious group.

    D.  The significant title of one chapter of his book is "Forgetting
Where We Came From:  The Moral Imperative of Every Cosmopolitan."

    E.  Hill finds his source of inspiration in
philosophy and the requirements of
morality, and the person who is so motivated he calls a
"radical cosmopolitan."

    F.  He observes (on page 121):  "A radical cosmopolitan feels no
compulsion to be loyal to his 'roots.'  He harbors a love of the
distant.  He is future oriented, especially with regard to the ways in
which his identity is open to moral modification and reconstitution."

    G.  His message to us in the context of today's topic is that
self-identity should be based on your
moral aims, on <what you want to
become>, rather than on the accidental features of your past
and present life.  He is protesting against the
limitations that you and others might
unthinkingly put on what your life can be because of those accidental
features of your life over which you had and have no control.


VIII.  So what am I?

    A.  I can focus on those features of my life over which I have no
control, the nation-state where I was born, the ethnic group to which I
belong, my gender, my age, or whatever, and thus limit what I can
become.  I can focus on the great difficulty of making things better. 
Or I can view myself as a human being who has the capability of
becoming what my moral deliberations tell me that I should become, and
I can work to realize those things which I feel are morally desirable
no matter how difficult and far-off that realization may appear to be.

    B.  As Hill says on page 134, " . . . [M]oral strides are not made by
allowing our moral imaginations to be shackled by current realities.
New realities are formed when brave new souls dare to dream and dare to
inspire a change by the strength of their visions."

    C.  On page 136 he states his main thesis, " . . . [O]ne must divest
oneself of racial, ethnic, and national forms of self-identification,
because if we fail to do so, we end up falling short of the best of the
ideals we have embraced as well-meaning persons."

    D.  I feel a special kinship with the ideas expressed by Hill.  In my
own life, the moral ideals of philosophy have led me beyond Lutheran
Christianity to becoming a Unitarian, beyond American nationalism to
becoming a World Federalist, and beyond being a native speaker of
English to becoming an Esperantist.  Nevertheless, I feel a bit of
personal frustration by Hill's moving to Chicago to teach at DePaul
University before I could persuade him of the rationality of these aims
which have become an important part of what I am.