Identity and (Inner) Activity - Part Two
In the first part, I introduced the “I am” statement and discussed a possible interpretation that I called the Cartesian Strawpuppet. According to this interpretation, the “I am” statement has the grammar of an elementary proposition which predicates a property (an aspect of identity) of an object (a person).
I’m not sure I managed to make a solid case against this interpretation. However, I hope that I raised at least some doubts when I suggested that persons are too complex for the “I am” statement to be understood as an elementary proposition, because they can relate to themselves in a way that an object cannot. In what follows, I will discuss Iris Murdoch’s philosophy of person to show that her concept of Inner Activity can give us an interpretation of the “I am” statement that does justice to said complexity.
Murdoch’s concept of Inner Activity
Murdoch introduces the concept of Inner Activity in her essay “The Idea of Perfection” to provide an alternative to a meta-ethical view which is influenced by Ryle’s Logical Behaviorism. Summarizing Stuart Hampshire’s position as a proponent of this view, she says:
Thought and intention must be directed towards definite overt issues or else they are merely day-dream. ‘Reality’ is potentially open to different observers. What is ‘inward’, what lies in between overt actions, is either impersonal thought, or ‘shadows’ of acts, or else substanceless dream. Mental life is, and logically must be, a shadow of life in public. Our personal being is the movement of our overtly choosing will. (IOP 7)
Murdoch argues that, by bracketing the mental life and declaring outward, observable action as the only relevant theoretical objects, we are left with an impoverished image of ourselves as the moral beings that we essentially are.
To introduce her contrasting view, she invites us to imagine a mother-in-law M who despises her daughter-in-law D for failing to comply with the social norms of the class she has married into. However, over time, M begins to reflect on her opinion of D and comes to see her in a positive light. What’s important about the vignette of M and D is that M’s change of heart is not describable in the vocabulary of the “existentialist-behaviorist view” she attributes to Hampshire, Hare, and others. It takes place purely “inside” of M. Yet, it is a kind of activity:
M is engaged in an internal struggle. […] And M’s activity here, so far from being something very odd and hazy, is something which, in a way, we find exceedingly familiar. Innumerable novels contain accounts of what such
struggles are like. Anybody could describe one without being at a loss for words. […] M’s activity is peculiarly her own. Its details are the details of this personality; and partly for this reason it may well be an activity which can only be performed privately. M could not do
this thing in conversation with another person. (IOP 22)
What’s important about this, for the purpose of my essay is that we have the concept of something that goes on in the mind but still is an activity. Furthermore, it is an activity, that belongs, in an important sense, to the person who performs it. So, we have an alternative to the Cartesian Strawpuppet which conceives of mental states as static and logically independent from the subject.
But what sort of activity is it? I think, if we get to the bottom of Murdoch’s view, it is about the person in question relating to aspects of their identity, thus clarifying, expanding, and transforming them. This happens by a specific individual appropriation of public concepts, as Murdoch illustrates with the example of “repentance”:
Here an individual is making a specialized personal use of a concept. Of course he derives the concept initially from his surroundings; but he takes it away into his privacy. Concepts of this sort lend themselves to such uses; and what use is made of them is partly a function of the user’s history. (IOP 25)
By making the “specialized personal use” of the concept, a person is relating themselves to the aspect of their identity which is expressed in the concept. The concept is public in the Wittgensteinian sense (“derived from the surroundings”) but the individual appropriates it in a specific way (“takes it away into [their] privacy”).
Take the example of gender identity to unpack this. What, according to the Murdochian view, does it mean to say “I am transmasc nonbinary”?
Identity as activity
A person who says that, wonders if, or arrives at the conclusion that they are transmasc nonbinary first derives the concept “from the surroundings”, meaning that they understand it in the way that it is commonly understood. In this case, the understanding can roughly be summarized as “a person who was assigned female at birth but conceives of themselves as closer to masculinity without identifying fully with it”.
Imagine, the individual in question begins to reflect on their gender identity, wondering if they are a trans man. They start researching about transgender identities, might come across the concept of nonbinarity and find that this fits them better than conceiving of themselves as a binary trans man.
Throughout this process, they are asking themselves “how does the concept of transmasculinity” match my experience?” And this question breaks down into more detailed questions, such as “What pronouns would I like to use?”, “What gender-affirming healthcare brings me closer to an experience of my embodiment that matches my understanding of myself?”, “Do I want to change my name and what name fits for me?”, and more. This, I think, is precisely the “specialized personal use” Murdoch mentions.
Identity and history
There is another remark in the cited passage, to which I would like to draw attention. Murdoch says that the specialized use “is partly a function of the user’s history.” What does she mean? The way I read it, the point is that the specialized use is both, an upshot and the continuation of the person’s biography.
Someone who considers the possibility of being transmasculine might reflect on past experiences, thoughts, and feelings and examine them closer in the light of this possibility. So, there is a feedback between the concept of transmasculinity and the history (or biography) of the person in question, in the sense that the concept opens up a possible re-interpretation of said biography, while the biography conditions the specialized use of the concept.
I claimed that the inner activity that is the individual appropriation of the public concept also is a continuation of the person’s biography. Murdoch does not explicitly say so (after all, she uses the term “history” which indicates a primarily or even exclusively past-directed conception). However, I think it is consistent with Murdoch’s overall view on this specialized use of concepts because, for her, it is a process of “change and progress” (IOP 28), and those concepts are clearly future-oriented. The person in our example not only comes to see their past experiences in a new light, this re-orientation also changes how they see their future. This strikes me as almost trivial, for a new interpretation of oneself will obviously change one’s outlook on life and the world and therefore one’s plans for the future.
“I am” statements and inner activity
So, how does the concept of inner activity bear on the analysis of the “I am” statement?
The Cartesian Strawpuppet tells us the “I am” statement is an elementary proposition that predicates a property of an object. The Murdochian view, in contrast, tells us that the “I am” statement is the expression of an ongoing activity whereby a person relates themselves to themselves and, by extension, to the world.
The “I am” statement is, on this view, both, an expression of this relating oneself to oneself as it has occurred in the person’s biography up to this point, and a continuation of this relating oneself to oneself. This is because the act of making this “I am” statement in a specific context is itself an experience of the person who makes it which they will relate to and integrate it into their biography.
Conclusion
Our starting point was that the “I am” statement expresses an aspect of the speaker’s identity, which led us to ask what identity is, and what it means to express it. I tried to reject the interpretation of the “I am” statement as an elementary proposition.
As an alternative, I introduced Murdoch’s concept of Inner Activity. On this view, identity is the continued matching of public concepts with individual experience. Through this activity, we make sense of our experiences and integrate it into our biography, thus continuing this exact biography. The “I am” statement, then, is both, a result and a manifestation of this activity.