Who I am

In my blogs, I have often written about the problem of personal identity. Most times I have written about it from the perspective of analytical philosophy. In this branch of philosophy the main question then is what makes a person an entity of its own. This leads to questions like “What makes me the same person as the person I was five, ten, twenty, fifty … years ago?”; “What happens with me when I am teletransported to another planet?”; “What happens to a person when her brain is swapped with the brain of another person?” This problem of identity is especially a continuity problem: The problem which makes me as I am now continuous with the person who I was in the past, and what separates me from other persons. However, there are different perspectives to discuss the question of a person’s identity, and I think that the continuity problem is the last one most people – non-philosophers – will think of when we bring up the problem of personal identity. When we ask questions about a person’s identity, I think that most people want to know who they are in relation to others. I think that most people are not interested in continuity problems and the like but want to know what characterizes a person and what makes him or her different from other persons as an individual. Therefore, it is not surprising that Nathalie Heinich, a French sociologist, discusses the question from just this perspective. Because I find her view on personal identity quite interesting and important, I want to give it some attention in this blog.
Before doing so, I want to present first an important aspect of the social theory of George Herbert Mead, namely his famous distinction between Self, I and Me. The “Self”, which Mead also calls the “generalized other”, comprises, briefly, the attitudes of the group or community a person belongs to toward him or her and toward one another in what they do. The “I” is the response of the person to the attitudes of the others leading to a self-image, and the “Me” consists of the attitudes of others toward the person as seen by him or herself. We can also say that the “I” is the person for himself as a subject and the “Me” is the self for this person as an object.
What does this mean for Heinrich’s view on a person’s identity? In most identity discussions a distinction is made between the person him or herself on the one hand and society (“the others”) on the other hand. In this way we can distinguish a “personal identity”, i.e. the way a person sees him or herself (the subjective view on identity) and a “social identity”, which is the way society or others see you (the objective view on identity). For instance, for you your painting is not more than daubing on a canvass, but for others you are a real artist. Some views on a person’s identity take one of these two conceptions as the “real” identity a person has (unidimensional views), other views stress the relationship between the personal identity and the social identity (bidimensional views).
What is lacking in such conceptions, so Heinich, is Mead’s idea that the relationship person-society has three aspects. It involves not only an I versus an Other (Self) but also a Me, so an I as seen by the other according to the I. It was Erving Goffman, she says, who has applied Mead’s idea to the conception of identity: Goffman replaces the bidimensional view on identity in which “personal identity” opposes “social identity” – referring to the I and the Self respectively – by a tridimensional view by adding a third category: the “identity for yourself”. While the social identity still refers to the Self, now the personal identity refers to the Me and the new category of identity for yourself refers to the I. In short:
- social identity: the way others see you (1)
- identity for yourself: the way you see yourself (2)
- personal identity: the way you think that others see you (3).
In this view on a person’s identity all three aspects put forward by Mead are important. Such a tridimensional view has big advantages on the ordinary unidimensional and bidimensional views, so Heinich. By adding (3) and by taking account of all three aspects together, one can see how the social identity reflects itself in the perception one has of oneself. Moreover, for the person him or herself there is a gap between the objective social view of who s/he is and his/her subjective self-image and now this gap is filled by the third category of personal identity. Besides, if one attaches the labels “designation”, “autoperception” and “presentation” to the types of identity just given (in the order mentioned), than we have strong instruments to analyse how people present themselves in society and how they try to manipulate others by their presentation, and to see how a person’s autoperception develops influenced by the designation of the identity by others and the other way round.

Sources
- Goffman, Erving, Relations in public. New York, etc.: Harper & Row, 1972; esp. ch. 5.
- Heinich, Nathalie, Ce que n’est pas l’identité. Paris: Gallimard, 2018; esp ch. 5.
- Mead, George Herbert, Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974 (1934).