On identity, inner life and stereotyping
Interview with Akeel Bilgrami.
AKEEL BILGRAMI is an Indian philosopher of international eminence and influence. He graduated from Elphinstone College, University of Bombay, in 1970 and went to the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Thereafter, he moved to the United States and earned a PHD in philosophy from the University of Chicago. He currently holds the Sidney Morgenbesser Chair in Philosophy at Columbia University, New York. Bilgrami was the chairman of Columbia’s Philosophy Department from 1994 to 1998. He was the director of the Heyman Centre for the Humanities at Columbia from 2004 to 2011 and was the director of its South Asian Institute from 2013 to 2016.
Bilgrami’s writing spans the philosophy of language and the mind as well as political and moral philosophy. His books include Belief and Meaning (Blackwell, 1992), Self-knowledge and Resentment (Harvard University Press, 2006), Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (Harvard University Press and Permanent Black Press, 2014), Gandhi, The Philosopher (Columbia University Press, 2022) and What is a Muslim? (forthcoming, Princeton University Press).
Bilgrami’s work, even when it is philosophical, is not an ivory tower philosopher’s engagement with abstract ideas but stems from his deep sociopolitical and moral concerns. His widely admired and highly influential writings on Gandhi, Marx, alienation, secularism, identity, liberalism and populism provide deep and significant insights on these subjects.
This is the fifth in the “long conversation” series (earlier conversations were published in 2018 and 2019) that Jipson John and Jitheesh P.M. conducted with him. In the this interview (presented in two parts), Bilgrami discusses the concept of identity and its importance in the domains of politics, society and culture. There is no better authority than Bilgrami to discuss this topic.
“Identity” is a complex and varied concept. It has long been applied to basic and general categories such as objects and to larger social categories. As a philosopher, what would you say is the concept of identity?
You are right, it is a complex notion that has interested scholars in a wide range of disciplines and it is an important notion. Speaking very generally, I think identity is a relation, but it is a limiting or degenerate case of a relation.
What do you mean by that?
The standard way of thinking about relations is to think of the relations in which things stand with one another, but identity is the relation that something has to itself. That is why I call it a limiting or a degenerate case of a relation.
I think identity is of great interest, particularly in the case of human subjects, because how one relates to oneself can make a big difference to how one presents oneself in public life and in politics and how one demands that others think of one and act towards one.
However, philosophers have tended to discuss the concept of identity in very abstract terms and not as it