One of our most cherished cultural values is that one should judge other people not by their outward trappings, but for “who they really are.” What has always puzzled me about this is that I have never gotten a good idea of what counts as “who they really are.” If we are not to judge people by their race, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, dress, body art, religion, culture, familiy background, voting record, blood type or Coke/Pepsi stance, what is left?
This has bothered me for some time now, and I have not been able to come up with an answer: Is there any cultural consensus of what makes up a person’s “true self”?
Now, it makes sense not to judge people on the basis of race(an artificial construction imposed on people) or blood type(I don’t know of any scientific evidence that this has anything to do with much at all except for what sort of transfusions one can accept).
On the other hand the others seem a valid basis for judgement. Dress, body art, and voting record are manners of self expression, and that seems to me to be a valid basis for judgement on a person. Sexual orientation, family background, culture and religion are things that determine some very basic facets of one’s behavior, or atttitudes. Coke/pepsi preference though, I must admit, I am clueless on. Is there some sort of pop-psych distinction between people who prefer pepsi to coke or vice versa?
Overall I would say the problem is not judging people on the basis of these factors, but judging them unfairly on the basis of these factors. To judge that because someone is Catholic that one might hold a viewpoint espoused by the catholic church is a bit different from assuming that because one is Catholic that they obviously obey the instructions of the Pope in every facet of their life. Essentially, the problem with judging people is not judging them based upon those factors, but judging them unfairly, or in a method not relevant to those factors, for those factors.
If this made sense, then it was me saying it. If not, it was the beer. Thank you.
Still later, Gerald did a terrible thing to Elsie with a saucepan.
Artificiality is not the issue. Morals are artifical constructs imposed on people, but do you suppose it’s unfair to judge people by their morals?
Furthermore, it isn’t only racists who judge people by their race. Multiculturalists would also argue, and not without reason, that the race one was born into has a lot to do with the values that one grows up with – that to think otherwise is to assume that everyone has an equal claim to what you yourself value. I.e., you charitably assume that everybody thinks like a white person (or whatever it is you consider yourself).
Notice that I don’t mean you’re wrong, if all you really mean is that race is an insufficient and unreliable indicator of a person’s character. But race is an indicator of something, and to ignore it is arguably as racist as to over emphasize it.
I think I phrased my question poorly. I am trying to find out if we have any common conception of what makes up the true self–what a personality is. We seem to, in that we all assume people have unique personalities, and we seem to all be able to use the term without confusion or even much debate. But I cannot seem to find any element that everyone, or even a majority of people, agrees is a necessary part of the personality.
My first thoughts were along these lines, but it would seem that a lot of people disagree with this idea. If you look over in MPSIMS, there is a thread entitled “holy fuckin shit a tattoo” Several people there seemed to feel that critisizing someone for a tattoo was unfair and “judgemental”. But what is a tattoo if not your thoughts, emotions, and dreams expressed through your actions?
Once again, many people seem to disagree with you here. Often in the media we are told that what we do is not who we are, or at least that we are more than that. THey may be lying to us, but I am not really interested in objective truth at the moment–I am trying to figure out what is this thing that we all seem to agree on but never define?
This is really what I am trying to get at. What does this word mean?
These are more interesting, but still not completly satisfiying. Our society does seem to feel that high moral charecter is a universably good thing, and that low moral charecter is universally bad, with some squabbaling about the details. However, there seems to be more to the idea of “self” or “personality.” If a formally honest man lied, would that mean that his self was changed?
the question I am ultimatly grappleing with is that of the unified personality. Does a three year old child have anything in common with the eighty year old man he grows into, beyond the shared flesh? We all seem to assume that some mental tie exists, but I have never been able to figure out what that could be. Another way to attack the question would be: What does someone have to lose before the self is gone?
This part, at least, is easy. Memories. If you lose your memory, you effectively lose all sense of self. How this applies to character is a little more complex.
Our values ultimately define who we are. Those things we consider important are the truest indicator of self.
Not much; even the flesh has changed. The brain is the same tissue, but the experience of life has changed the person. We all learn and grow as we get older; our values as a three year old are significantly different from our values as an eighty year old due to the changing nature of our needs, wants, and knowledge. Over the span of time, we develop a set of principles that define what we believe to be right; our actions in living these principles define our character not only to others, but to ourselves. Thus,
Yes. To the extent that he has violated his own principles, he has changed. He has become dishonest, and will know that dishonesty even if no one else found his lie.
Those things we value, those things we cherish, those principles we believe to be paramount and the actions we are willing to take to live by them, are the benchmarks by which we will be known to others, and by which we will know ourselves.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
I agree with much of what you’ve said here, however I took the inclusion of the catagory “culture” as separate from race to indicate that race was not used to refer to the cultural distinctions but rather the 5 part system that was devised back in the 1600s in order to justify european supremacy. In other words I am taking race to mean the simple physical fact, not the cultural distinctions also involved.
(After all, a white person raised in Africa by an African family is still white, but I doubt that they have much(culturally) with a
white person raised in a european setting.)
There is such a thing as a transcendent self,' at least to the extent that ones' experiences are all experienced by the same experiencer. But since we want to broaden the term to carry the sense of personality’ we face a dizzy problem of reconciling the notion of `self’ with the many shifts and other inconsistencies that arise from the examination of any particular person.
Furthermore, how are we to ever come to such a reconciliation if we can never be sure we completely understand anyone’s personality? Observing someone’s behavior is inadequate for a circumspect understanding of his mind, and even the person himself, who has priveledged access to his own mental states, is frequently a poor source of information about who he is.
I’d say forget about it, unless you can say what it’ll get us to untangle this mystery.
But one of the “principles we believe to be paramount” is “to thine own self be true”. How is that possible if our selfhood is so nebulous that it is completly replaced every few decades? Furthermore, one’s values and principles tend to vary alot in any given moment of time, depending upon the situation–I care alot more about cost accounting when talking to my mom than I do when talking to my friend. Which of these selves is the true one that a good American individualist needs to be concerned with?
I am also not sure that memeory alone defines the self. It certainly does not legally. If a person who had never had a drink before got blind drunk, got in the car, and ran into a school bus full of nuns and puppies we would hold them acountable for these actions, even if they retained no memory of the whole event. And I think an amniesia victim retains a sense of “I”; furthermore, we do not traditionally hold funnerals for the self that is gone, nor does the new self adopt a new name or doing anything else to assert autonomy from the self that used to inhabit the body. (Someone please correct me here if I am wrong). To me this suggests that we feel there is some continuity between the pre- and post- amniesiatic person, even if that continuity is strained by the memory loss.
Johnny Angel–I am not really expecting a definitive answer, and no, I don’t have a magic wand to untangle the mystery. This is just something that has been mildly nagging at me for a couple years, and I wondered how the teeming millions saw the problem.
If we’re talking total amnesia, this is only true in the most basic, Descartesian sense of “I think, therefore I am.” Without memory, without experience, an amnesiac knows only that s/he is alive. There is no sense of continuity to provide context for the present. If you consider this sense of “I” to be the true self, then the answer to “What does someone have to lose before the self is gone?” is: “Life.”
Regarding values - I fear I have not expressed myself clearly either. I was not referring to a situational tendency to favor some characteristic over another in conversation; I was trying to portray a dedication to a value system one believes to be correct, be it based on the golden rule, the ten commandments, or the categorical imperative.
Obviously, our view of what is correct may change over time; it is a natural consequence of human growth. I do not, however, see this as a contradiction, but as a learning process. “Be true to your self” means to me to be true to what you believe to be right, always. If your perspective changes and you look back and perceive what you thought, did, or said to be wrong, that, too, is a learning process.
The process is such that your “self” can, and does change, as a consequence of life experience. The memories of those experiences, and the lessons learned, provide continuity of identity.