Identity and (Inner) Activity
In this essay, I am going to draw on Iris Murdoch’s concept of inner activity to discuss its ramifications for a conception of personal identity. I will focus on gender identity because I think it makes for an especially poignant example. However, I believe that the account I am going to outline here generalizes for most aspects of identity.
I will begin by discussing a possible analysis of statements that I call “‘I am’ statements”. The aim of this discussion is to show that this interpretation is insufficient. I will then introduce Murdoch’s concept of inner activity and show that it provides an analysis of “I am” statements that does not come with the deficits of the other.
“I am” statements
In what follows, I call an “I am“ statement any statement whereby a person expresses an aspect of their identity in the form of “I am [x]”. Aspects of identity include gender identity (“I am a cis man”; “I am a trans woman”; “I am transmasc nonbinary”), sexual identity (“I am pansexual”; “I am gay”; “I am asexual”), social roles (“I am a parent”), and the like.
Now, speaking is a kind of action, so, in making an “I am” statement, the respective person is doing something. But what are they doing? Obviously, it depends a lot on the situation in which the statement is uttered. For instance, the statement “I am gay” might be made to correct a mistake when the interlocutor is wrongly assuming that the person in question is married to a woman, or the statement “I am a parent” might be made to back a certain claim by referring to role-dependent experience.
Yet, I think there is a common denominator: one is correcting an error, backing a claim, etc. by expressing an aspect of one’s identity that is relevant to the situation. So, a proper analysis of the pragmatics of “I am” statements has to answer the question what someone is doing when they are expressing an aspect of their identity. This question breaks down into two parts: (1) what is identity? and (2) how is it expressed? Later, I am going to argue that Murdoch’s philosophy of person gives us the correct answer to (1) which in turn points to an answer to (2). But before, I am going to discuss a possible analysis that I believe to be insufficient.
The Cartesian Strawpuppet
From a performative point of view, I think, an “I am” statement can be understood as a request. To reply “I am gay” when asked about one’s wife or “I am a parent” when asked about one’s job is to request to be seen or acknowledged as gay or a parent. However, I think this performative aspect is downstream from what I am trying to get at. It is because I am x, that I request to be acknowledged as x, and it is by saying that I am x, that I request to be acknowledged as x.
So, it seems that at the heart of the “I am” statement there is a description. But a description of what? The utterer’s identity, of course, but what is it that is being described here?
One attempt to answer this question might begin by looking at the surface grammar of the “I am” statement and find that they are just like other descriptions: “I am gay”; “The ball is green”. In both cases, there is an object of which a property is predicated. This would mean that “I” refers to an object that can have the property of being gay, just like “ball” refers to an object that can have the property of being green. This is the view I call the Cartesian Strawpuppet.
Why Cartesian, and why Strawpuppet? Cartesian, because the analysis in question proceeds best by resorting to a view that is often ascribed to Descartes. The common reading of the Meditations is that Descartes defends a distinction between res extensa and res cogitans, spatial substance and thinking substance. The ball is a spatial substance and has the properties that spatial substance can have — such as being colored. Persons are, essentially, determined by being thinking substances and having the properties a thinking substance can have — such as experiencing certain patterns of attraction that constitute being gay.
I call it a strawpuppet because, even though the modern analytic tradition has mocked Descartes relentlessly for defending this view, it is not clear, whether it constitutes and adequate reading of his account. Scholars with a far more thorough understanding of Descartes’ work, such as Helen de Cruz, Hane Maung, or Kristopher G. Phillips have done considerable work to suggest a more nuanced reading.
What’s important — and wrong — about this picture is that it conceives of stuff that thinks and stuff that is in space as both stuff. On this view, persons are gay in very much the same way balls are green. Gayness, just as greenness is a state in which an object that belongs to a certain class can be. The object and its properties or states are considered to be logically independent. You can conceive of the ball without its greenness and greenness without the ball. And you can, the strawpuppet view claims, conceive of the person without gayness and gayness without the person. Furthermore, any object that belongs to the correct class can have the respective property, and it would always be this very same property. The greenness of the ball and of the leaf is, provided they have the same hue, the same property.
According to the Cartesian Strawpuppet, gayness — or transness, or whatever aspect of identity is expressed in the “I am” statement — are, just as greenness, static. One is in the state of being trans, just like the ball is in the state of being green. The ball does nothing to contribute to its greenness and, by analogy, the person — the incorporeal ego, the stuff that thinks — does nothing to contribute to their transness.
Now, it strikes me as obvious, that this pseudo-Cartesian picture is wrong. However, I want to say a bit more about why it’s wrong. For once, because it apparently is not obviously wrong to some, and also to set the scene for the Murdochian account.
Persons aren’t stuff
I think the Cartesian Strawpuppet makes it entirely unclear what exactly is expressed in the “I am” statement. What does it mean to say that the incorporeal ego is “in the state of” being transmasc nonbinary? If we continue to draw on the position commonly attributed to Descartes, we have to say it’s a cogitatio, a state of the mind or some kind of mental content. But what does it mean to have the mental content of being transmasc nonbinary?
It has to be some kind of experience, but an experience of what? And to what extent can it meaningfully be conceived of as the property of a spaceless, and this means disembodied, thinking substance? Where do gender dysphoria and euphoria enter the picture? Or, in the case of gayness, the specific form of desire? Or, in the case of being a parent, the essentially social constitution of parenthood?
I think, understood in terms of the Cartesian Strawpuppet, there is no way of getting an answer to these questions. “I am” statements are not descriptions of an object and its properties — in this case the property of having a specific cogitatio, that, in principle anyone could have. Why is that? — Because aspects of identity are not static properties that are logically independent of the subject, and the “I” in the “I am” statement is not a logical object. (This claim, I think, is influenced by both, Anscombe’s “The First Person”, and Heidegger’s insistence that There-Being cannot be analyzed in terms of Being-Ready-To-Hand.)
The “I am” statement has the surface grammar of an elementary proposition, but it is not an elementary proposition. Persons are self-reflecting and hence self-referential. The way in which a person is trans-masc nonbinary or gay or a parent is different from the way in which a ball is green because they relate to who they are.
This relating-to is, I think, essential to understanding the “I am” statement. But what does it mean that someone relates to their being trans-masc nonbinary? And in what sense is this relating-to essential to the expression of an aspect of identity? These questions set the scene for Iris Murdoch’s concept of inner activity, which I will discuss in the second part.