“Who Am I?” Project 1 - Introduction

Welcome to the “Who Am I?” Project.  It is a hopefully humble, but also somewhat lengthy, exploration by one person to answer the title question.  By humble, I mean that I make no claim to novelty, depth, comprehensiveness, or academic rigor.  However, I hope it will be thoughtful, and I hope some of my academic colleagues will, on occasion, find something of interest.  It is also very much my hope that some non-academic readers will also find it interesting.  By lengthy, I mean that this may take me more than a year to finish.  However, I am committed to making my posts no longer than 1,000ish words each.

I will begin by offering a preliminary fivefold answer to the question.  I will be very curious to see if I continue to agree with all of this by the time I reach the (initial) end. Before continuing, let me be clear that already understand who I am in many ways. I am a husband, a father, a professor, and friend to many. I value these identities tremendously. I also recognize that I am a winner in the socio-cultural lottery. I am a wealthy, white, cisgendered, heterosexual, married, employed, and more or less healthy male. No doubt, these conditions will inform the answers I give and I fully expect and welcome critiques that show how my status in society may be informing what I write about. This project is a more general inquiry into human, and so my own, identity. My hope is that the generality will make the reflections interesting to people other than myself. By asking these general questions, I in no way wish to diminish the importance of the ways that my identity is already defined.

1. I live in a world with God at its heart.  I know this may seem a weird place to start, but I cannot help it.  As will made obvious by the fact that I begin my more sustained answer with a discussion of divine creation, or what is sometimes called creation ex nihilo, I cannot avoid the conviction that answering the question “Where does everything come from?” has a whole lot to do with answering the question “Who am I?”  The refusal of most modern thinkers to wrestle with this question leads to very unhelpful and incomplete answers to the second question.  In fact, I think it renders them entirely incapable of answering it.

2. I am an accident.  I do not think that exactly I was “meant” to exist, nor that God has a plan specifically for me, at least no plan any more specific than God’s intention for everything else.  I am, as philosophers say, entirely contingent on a mind-bogglingly huge number of past events, each of which were also contingent.  What I mean when I call myself an accident that my existence is wildly contingent. I very much did not have to be. I am struck by how important it seems for many people to believe that their particular lives have some kind of unique cosmic significance, some specific place in a cosmic and divine blueprint.  Most of the time, this strikes me as narcissistic and embedded within a hierarchical notion of human importance.  I do not need to be told I am important, and I especially do not need to be told that I am more important than someone else.  I do believe that I am loved by God (and you are, too), and that is enough.  As I will discuss at some point, understanding myself as an accident leads me to see my life as a gift.  However, when I use this term, I mean it more as an amazing opportunity that did not have to be than as some specific thing given to me by a divine Gift-Giver.  I just feel so completely lucky to see the sky, listen to jazz, hear birds sing, and encounter my fellow human beings.

3. I am an aggregate.  I may very well be a mental hallucination (much more on that later).  I certainly do not think I am a soul interacting with a body, but rather something that emerges from a whole lot of bodily processes, especially in my brain.  In this way, I am like a hurricane. Most of those processes take place without me having much influence on them at all.  However, as we shall see, I still think it is reasonable to refer to the momentary end-product of these activities as “me.”  Because I am an aggregate, I do not have high expectations about my endurance after the parts of this aggregate break down.  I do not deny the idea of life after death, I just don’t think it is very likely, and that does not bother me at all.  Being an aggregate also makes me very vulnerable.  There are so many parts of me that can break down that I will not be surprised when they do.

 4. I am a hierarchy of goals or values.  These fourth and fifth dimensions zero in on the most “Joe Pettit” parts of the answer to the question “Who am I?”  They are the closest I can come to explaining in what way I am a free self after having said that I am both an aggregate and, likely, a hallucination.  To say that I am a hierarchy of goals/values is to say that some of my goals are more comprehensive than others and so pursuing the less comprehensive goals are ways of pursuing the more comprehensive goals.  My moment-by-moment actions pursue the unconscious goals of my body and the more or less (often less) conscious goals that I affirm.  One of the difficulties of the self is that we often pursue goals at different places in the hierarchy with very little self-awareness.  This can lead to conflicts both with others and with ourself (ourselves? is there more than one of me?).  Gaining awareness and control of our hierarchy of goals has a lot to do with what it means to grow up.  If I am a hierarchy of goals/values, it is worth asking if there are better and worse values and what that would mean for how I should change.  Most modern thought can only answer these questions instrumentally, rendering life nothing but a struggle for power.  I think there is more to value and to life.

 5. I am a storyteller.  I tell stories, or narratives, mostly to myself but also to others about myself and the world that rationalize and reinforce the value hierarchy by which I define myself.  In doing so, I create meaning, but because I really do believe there are better and worse values, or good value and bad value, I think there are better and worse meanings.  Importantly, I can use new stories to change my values or their place in the hierarchy.  Freedom is placing myself within an unfolding story.  The stories I tell can lead to an authentic and intentional ordering of values, but also to various ways of lying to myself.  Recognizing this makes clear that we often flee from being honest when we answer the question, “Who am I?”  I hope that I can find some degree of honesty in this project.

 I am grateful to anyone who follows along in this journey.