On the nature of subjective identity
Interview with Akeel Bilgrami.
LAST time, we discussed the distinction you made in some early articles of yours between objective and subjective identity, and we spoke mostly about objective identity. Can we speak now more on the nature of subjective identity? You have described it as a kind of identification more than an identity, saying that when one identifies oneself with something, one’s subjectivity is involved, whereas in objective identity, one has a certain identity whether or not one identifies oneself with that thing. So, what exactly is it to identify oneself as something, thereby forming a subjective identity. Is it an act of choosing an identity?
After I wrote those early pieces long ago about subjective identity as identification, some people did use just your term “choose” to describe what subjective identity or identifying with something is, though I myself have avoided using that word.
Why would you want to avoid it?
I think the rhetoric of choosing is quite misleading. It is not as if it isn’t sometimes apt, but it is mostly not apt, and so it should not be the rhetoric we adopt as a general or generic description of subjective identity.
What is misleading about saying we choose our identity? I think, if you give that as a general description of subjective identity, it makes subjective identity come off as too voluntaristic. A subject can be involved in identity-formation without it being a matter of sheer will, sheer subjective decision, as to what the identity is. As I said, though it can happen sometimes, of course, that I choose my identity de novo, usually when my subjectivity is active, it takes the form of endorsing something I already have objectively.
Can you give an example of how it can be misleading to talk of choosing?
Yes, it would be misleading for me to say I choose my Indian identity. I endorse the fact of my being Indian and make it in some way central to my life. That is, I endorse and make central something ongoing, some relatively objective fact, something given to me by my birth and biography. I need not have endorsed it, nor made it central in my life. I might have instead identified myself as an American, endorsing a different fact of my biography, my having been domiciled there for over four decades now, but I don’t. (As it happens, by the way, I don’t even have an objective American identity in any formal sense since I don’t have an American passport; I am still an Indian citizen.)
I don’t think we should confuse the fact that my endorsing of some given facts about me (rather than other given facts about me) is something I choose to do with the fact that I choose my identity. To say I choose my identity gives the impression that I go around choosing to be anything I like even if it is not an endorsing of anything that is already given to me in some more objective sense. If I can choose any identity in that way, then it would seem to follow that I can just choose the identity, say, of being an African American. Now, under some very unusual circumstances, we can imagine that happening. But, by and large, the question of choice is only over which given facts about me I should endorse and not directly choice over one’s identity.