There is no “me” alone
Lately, my friends and I have been using the joke “first of all, don’t call me Shirley” when we say surely. It’s a knee slapper each time, I swear. When I am with my sister, we will begin to say the same thing at the same time and laugh with the same laugh. My roommate and I share values and feelings in a way that sometimes feels eerie. My personhood is tangled with those around me, but I still struggle to feel known because I feel unsure about who I am.
I have, for a while, had this idea that there is a core to me, and my issue is that I don’t know my true self. If I knew her and got okay with her, I would be better at being in the world. I wouldn’t have this fear of being known. This hasn’t just been a goal— this has been an un-skippable first step to being with others. It seemed I would not be able to truly live my life the way I wanted to until I could do so in a way that honors my “authentic self”. To find myself, I needed to search inward.
The problem is that when I try to identify who I am, I can’t find the core of me. The things that make me up— my jokes, values, likes & dislikes, goals, aspirations, sensitivities, etc— all come from the world around me, not from inside me.1 The more I search, the more I realize that I only know myself when I am in relation to others. By turning inward, I have been shutting myself out of the world where I actually exist. Maybe there is no core me that exists alone, outside of the context of the world I inhabit. Who I am is borrowed from others, and maybe my goal shouldn’t be to live authentically to some innate, unchanging identity, but to continue becoming everyday in community.
This suspicion that my goal has been misguided has been building for a while, but this article has made it more concrete. I have unfortunately read the beast that is Heidegger’s Being and Time, but I am less familiar with the work of Hannah Arendt. As this article outlines it, Arendt follows Sartre’s line of thought that “existence precedes essence" and continues it with the idea that the “will” is how we make decisions and act in the world. The will is a reminder that we can always change.2
The funny thing is, I never really believed in a soul (or an innate essence in each person), and I have always believed that anyone can change. These beliefs existed more in a classroom than they have in my everyday life. Maybe it’s time to adopt them into my personal philosophy. The solitary pursuit of authenticity feels too self-concerned anyway: I would much rather be laughing and learning and messing up with my friends around. There will never be a way to be fully known by someone else, but I can be known here and now where it matters.
There are a lot of messy philosophical tangents this brings up. Mainly, what gives someone a certain predisposition to acquire certain values, likes/dislikes, etc.? For my purposes, I am currently only concerned with the idea that we have any innate values, likes/dislikes, etc.↩
This whole post is less a complete thought, and more of a beginning. The idea of identity is one that I have always felt academically interested in, so I’d like to work on that here. I guess I’ll report back if I find out souls are real or authenticity matters↩