Who Are You?

I'm stunned to discover that one dusty philosophy problem I pored over-- from Pre-Socratic fragments all the way to Albert Camus-- is totally happening.

Until recently, I believed the most pertinent thing I'd picked up from half a decade of study was the fact that Schopenhauer pushed his mother down a flight of stairs. (Misogyny and old-time male intellectuals can go together like dogs and fleas!!)

But, as it turns out, the big issue of our era is selfhood. And it's much bigger than say-- how much stuff can I mortgage or grab for myself.

Yes, we're all wrestling with red-hot identity crises --not as in fear of credit cards theft identity, but deeper and scarier.

Indeed I secretly worry I lack a strong sense of self. Sometimes in a room of people, I sort of merge into the pack of flesh. Mirrors shock me. (I always look more real somehow.)

But , pheww, according to esoteric contemporary thinkers, I'm totally in sync with my times.

So who the hell am I?

According to Christians, I'm better than the worst thing I've done. But Freudians say I'm permanently scarred by the worst thing that's happened to me.

The worst pain? Birth? Burying my parents in dirt? The worst thing I've done--I honestly don't know and, no, I'm not open to suggestions.

Plato wrote that a person's selfhood somehow exists eternally. Immanuel Kant's tangled sentences wind around the self watching self.

Kierkegaard, Camus and Sartre say we're a work in progress--our actions define us.

According to new age soothers, I should seize the day and seek joy.

Actually lately I feel more myself.

Maybe because I tell people what I feel--even when it's ludicrously sentimental and I also push back when people push me.

I felt present the other day on the Fifth Avenue bus when I politely told a woman she'd kicked me. And when I told an editor I didn't want to do my article his way. But maybe I'm begging the question: defining myself by other people's beating hearts and chattering voices.

So who the hell am I again?

Am I primarily a Jew? In 1947, and too young to know the word Jewish, I cried when my mother read a headline aloud about a new home in the Middle East for Jews--her feelings were contagious.

While working at Ms Magazine, I believed I was primarily a woman. And you wouldn't be reading this if I hadn't learned new women's rules. When I was ten, I wept when my favorite uncle said I was perverted, because I couldn't place spoons and forks properly at a Chinese restaurant. (Just pass the chopsticks, I'd say today.)

During the 1980's I worked with a movie star on Central Park West who loved Wall Street moguls and saying dirty words for female genitalia. I decided he was the New Yorker and I was still the Philadelphian--whose Quaker professors taught honor codes and disinterest in possessions. I comforted myself by writing nights and lunchtimes.

After 9/11, I knew I was a New Yorker, a woman, and a Jew--in that order.

But, wait, that omits my most active self. I sacrifice money and friends to write what I think. I also live with a man and five animals. A writer, a lover, a New Yorker, a woman, and a Jew--raised according to solid Quaker values. And yes, Quakers can fall short of their ideals, but I wouldn't trade them all the green tea in China.

Who are you?


This essay first appeared in the West Side Spirit.

Comments

[Glee Cady]

I enjoyed this immensely. Many years ago I moved from the SF Bay Area to Ann Arbor to take a position at UM. One of the people who worked with me asked me "What are you?" I hadn't really thought about the answer to that and didn't have a good, canned answer. Later (I always have good answers later) I realized my answer should have been Western American Female; Vaguely Protestant (protested over church politics, I left in a huff); Educated.; Affected by growing up in small farming community and going to big, LIBERAL state university. Now I'm the proud mom of two really fine adults and have survived the pain of losing parents; a husband; a brother-in-law; and being really ill. Philosophical pigeonholes aside, It's a great life. And I think I still don't know the answer ... maybe when I grow up, it'll come to me. And, oh yeah, I fit better in the West.

[Arithrianos]

Ultimate reality, the only actual existant, because it actually exists it can posses no inherant characteristics, all characteristics are relative, composite and defined by concept and therefor belong in relative reality, which dosn't exist apart from its expression, like the way a rainbow dosn't exist apart from the conditions which occasioned it. So to falsely identify with fleeting characteristics that are not inherent is a prime source of suffering, the only solution to which is identification with that which dosn't change, and since it dosn't change and is not in realative relation with any "thing" it has no characteristics. So i am that which i am, no concept has any power to divide me from ultimate reality.

[Cassandra2]

In the Phaedo, Plato relates Socrates' argument for the soul's immortality predating birth (the Recollection Argument, section 22). You two can argue whether the soul and the self are the same or not.

[Michael Chase]

Fascinating! So Plato says our self exists from birth!!!!

Ummmmm.......maybe somebody can point out where precisely he says that (in other words, I'll bet the mortgage he never says any such thing).

Oh, and old philosophers go together with misogyny? Perhaps: kind of like half-rumped generalizations go with a certain surface-deep Feminism Lite.

[Cassandra2]

In the Phaedo, Plato relates Socrates' argument for the soul's immortality predating birth (the Recollection Argument, section 22). You two can argue whether the soul and the self are the same or not.

(sorry about the separate posting. HuffPo's login process is going to drive me up a wall.)