Lenses: Personhood, Love, and Identity
15 years of philosophy in about 1000 words
Philosophers all have lenses. I’m a philosopher. So I have lenses.
I figure it might be a good idea to give you a basic sense of what I think about the things I think most about, because I’m sure these themes will be laced through a lot of what I write in the coming weeks. (When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Or, a better metaphor: when you wear colored glasses, everything takes on their hue.)
My lenses have to do with ethical themes that orbit around a relational conception of persons, love, and identity.
The contrast class for these themes is, in a word, individualism. Traditionally in mainstream American culture, we think of people first and foremost as individuals, free and independent. Each person makes themselves who they are. With this we assume that folks will (and should) make rationally self-interested decisions, taking primarily themselves into account. The main attitude we should have toward others is respect, which is often understood to mean that the way to treat folks is to leave them alone to live as they wish. We hold all of this up as an ideal, and throw impartiality and disinterest into the mix too, as part of what it means to be rational.
A relational conception of persons
The thing is, this conception of human beings isn’t true, and isn’t ideal, either. People are actually—both ontologically1 and ethically—interdependent, and individuals are constituted primarily by the web of relationships in which they exist. This is true on several levels. On a very broad level, we depend economically on people around the globe. On a middle level, we belong to various demographic and social groups, some because of our ancestry, some because of our choices. On a local level, we have personal relationships that shape us in all kinds of ways (including down to epigenetics2). Most philosophers would stop here when thinking about relationships, because “relationship” is meant to be between people. Personally, I also count relationships of a different sort: to projects (by which I mean, very broadly, our involvement in activities, hobbies, causes or other interests) and also things.
Love
This is because of the way I think about love (and identity).3 There are supposedly many kinds of love, and while there’s probably something to this because it’s such a common belief, I find it difficult to define various species of love very clearly.4 So I’m going to stick to what I think is at the core of love in general, and for the moment I’ll focus on love for people.
I see love as an attitude with emotional and volitional components that tie our welfare to that of the people we love. I think it involves seeing and appreciating a person for who they are as an individual, with all their various characteristics and interests, and coming to love them based in part on these traits. Love characteristically motivates us to preserve and enhance the well-being and personal growth of those we love. We take an interest in their interests for their sakes, and we shape our lives around them (to greater or lesser extents, depending on the closeness of the relationship). This connection bestows personal value on them beyond the value they have just as human beings—the people we love matter to us in a special way. Loving others is a source of meaning for us.
I think this general outline fits many kinds of love, including friendship, family relationships, and romantic love (whatever that is). We don’t always do it well, but I don’t think that means this sketch is wrong.
Identity
Because of the way loving others shapes our own lives, it’s part of how we form our identities. And this is why I like to include the possibility of loving projects and things as well. Identity is largely a matter of valuing—who we are is to a large extent what we value. And that’s not just people, though people figure prominently. It’s also projects: we define ourselves as athletes, musicians, artists, professionals, hobbyists and so on. The idea that we can also love things might be more controversial, but I’ve read and thought enough about clutter that I’ve come to believe that our stuff is important to us in ways that are connected to how we understand and express ourselves.
This is possible because projects and things have public or social meanings: if I tell you I’m a pianist, a philosopher, a logician, a mom of multiples, or someone who loves to walk, you infer some things about me. So what I choose to tell you about myself is a tool to reveal (or not) who I am. This is part of what makes identity a social process. The other part is the fact that the relationships we have with other people are often reciprocal, so that members of the relationship are mutually influencing each other’s identities, making individual identity a social process. We’re not just building ourselves out of nothing. The components out of which identities grow come from all around us.
What this has to do with ethics
Furthermore, being relational comes with built-in responsibilities to the people with whom we have relationships. Our roles as partners, parents, siblings, children, workers, citizens, drivers, etc. make us responsible to one another in various ways. Inherently. Fundamentally. Whether we like it or not.5
Earlier I said that the individualist conception of persons is not only untrue, but also not ideal. In very general terms—there are many specific consequences that I’m leaving out—this is because it drives a wedge between our ideals and our reality. We end up striving for something that’s impossible, which is bound to fail, and decrease happiness in the process. Human beings are built to be together, and the more we can harmonize with our social nature, the happier we’ll be.6
Conclusion
So, friends, there you have it: a 1000-word summary of all the philosophy I’ve read or done in the past 15 years or so, ideas I’ve arrived at in the course of doing what I do. What does the world look like through these lenses? I’m still working that out, and I’m happy to have you join me.
Philosophy vocab! By “ontologically,” I mean as a matter of what kind of thing you are. Ontology is the branch of metaphysics that deals with what things are. Metaphysics is the study of existence, broadly speaking.
Epigenetics has to do with how environmental factors influence whether genes are turned on or off. A growing body of research shows that the care we receive in our first three years has a tremendous impact on our moral development in part through epigenetics.
A lot of things have gone into my view on this. Here are a few of the major influences.
Bennett Helm, Love, Friendship and the Self: Intimacy, Identification, & the Social Nature of Persons
Hilde Lindemann, Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities
Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good
Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global
Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love
Reading Carrie Jenkins’ book What Love Is and What It Could Be—which I really like—made me decide I really don’t know what distinguishes “romantic” love from other kinds.
There are complications here about toxic relationships, and many questions about how to deal with those—questions for another occasion. For now I’ll just say this: one of the people to whom we have responsibility is ourselves, and we should exercise that responsibility to end relationships that damage our well-being.
There’s a growing body of work about this, including two super interesting books:
Darcia Narvaez, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture, and Wisdom
Sara Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding