What Is A ‘Who’?

The question of the self is a major one, and it grounds many problems which in orthodox academic philosophy remain unsolved. Here is a prior essay about the issue.

When asked who one is, the common immediate response is to give one’s name. The significance of the name is to present one’s own being as a person. A ‘who’ is therefore assumed to be a person. The next act of disclosing oneself is to provide a few things with no specific order: a history of oneself; a schema of one’s social relations (who we know, who our friends/family or work mates are); categories and properties of what we do (our jobs, our hobbies); categories and properties of what we are (religion, race, sex, etc); a list of tastes and preferences (what we like and dislike). In such a manner we come to know the person, ‘who’ they are, as a list of categories and properties, and the ‘who’ in question is merely the arbitrary nexus in which these varied things are predicates. A who is therefore just another ‘what’ over and above other whats, but a what that is of a different and often unspecified kind in relation to its predicates. These various predicates accrue to the ‘who’, but are not individually nor collectively the who.

The ‘who’ becomes mysterious, an imperceptible being which eludes any predication other than that it is that to which predicates append. There is, however, a sense of ‘who’ which does not concern a static thing with predicates, but as a generator of its predicates as directly proceeding from the ‘who’. There is a common phrase in certain situations: “I know who you really are.” While it can be parsed in static terms, the intention is dynamic. To know who one is, is also to know the active consequence of what one is. This has a subtle and strong implication about the concept of the who. A ‘who’ is a being that does things which proceed from its seemingly static being. It is like a plant, which grows specifically and has specific conditions to enable it, and aims which it attempts to realize in its very being. The who thereby becomes a very different kind than what it appears as when considered only under the frame of predicates inhering in a substance. Its history is no longer arbitrary events that happened to it, it is active in creating a specific history in accord with its being. Its social relations are no longer arbitrary and external happenings, but also generated. It becomes possible and actual to be consistent through the most radical change. This ‘who’ is the stable identity which unifies the changing appearances across time and space.

The issues of what the ‘who’ is come forth as follows:

1. The problem of identity.
2. The problem of universals.
3. The problem of persisting identity through change.

The Problem of Identity

This problem is conceptual and not epistemic. The question is also not about what markers we should use for establishing identity. To ask how I know this thing is the same as that thing, I must first know what the thing is, and in this is the implicit question of how the thing is the thing it is in the first place. Somehow a thing establishes itself as what it is, unifies itself, and so of its own being identifies with itself. If the question isn’t about how I identify a thing, but how the thing identifies itself, what could this mean?

To be identified is to have self-relation. ‘A=A’ or ‘A is A’ is the self-relation of A which affirms it as being what it is. Even if we do not make the statement as a self-reference, the identification of A in its immediacy relies on the distinction of A from other things as a background, which is an implicit self-reference of A being the non-being of non-A. Identity is not ultimately a formal category projected onto things, it is an actual state of things themselves, for things relate to themselves. What is self-relation, then? A physical analogy and example is that of a body as such, a material being that is distinct from other material beings. In one way or another, regardless of shape, a body has a contour which not only splits it from other bodies and from empty space, but also which closes upon itself, linking a beginning and end of a contouring shape in dividing a body from what it is not. A circle is what it is in being the curved line that bounds an enclosed inner from an outer, where the bounding line goes out from a beginning point and returns to it from another side.

The self-enclosure of identity is more clear in organic beings, where a being actively produces itself as unified in its activity and its various appearances. A frog, for example, identifies with itself as singular through maintaining its metabolic process and homeostasis through the coherence of its internal organic functions and its external actions toward survival. It identifies with itself as a species by reproducing its kind through its singular life process and the species process of procreation of other frogs. In either case, the frog more or less generates and maintains itself as a unified being.

The Problem of Universals

In the problem of universals, as regards identity, what is sought is the unity of disparate things as belonging to or proceeding from said unity. When one looks empirically, however, there is nothing for the senses to grasp as the unifying thing of personhood, hence someone like Hume could claim he only saw a sequence of bundles of experience that seemed to be contingently unified, yet not necessarily a distinct unity of its own kind. Rationalists, on the other hand, took unity to be obviously necessary, yet could also fall into the issue of having no idea what this unity of self-hood is beyond a blank canvas. Plenty of Eastern philosophy, for example, takes it for granted that there is a self, but it has nothing to do with the experience that people overwhelmingly have about themselves. Such a self is a nothing, a passive observer who does not act, and so is no subject in a common sense, yet everyone feels their selfhood at its highest precisely in the identification with their empirical actions, and more strongly with the origination of actions.

To deny that there is a unity which is the self, and that there is an agential power, is to claim that one’s own experience is false. This experience, however, qualifies over everything we believe, and thus our own reasoning should be false along with it. We are all to conclude that we are under an inescapable illusion that there is a self, yet the presence of illusion requires a self to be deceived, and the cognizing of an illusion is the presence of an agency against illusory knowledge itself. That there is a belief about a self can only be meaningful in reference to a self that believes in the first place. We cannot pretend that our thoughts and beliefs can be treated like a sensation of something other than myself that is mistaken as myself, like seeing a bird flying and mistaking that its flight is my own, for our thoughts are directly experienced from the first person perspective. The ‘who’ is not an empirical object of the senses, but is itself a rational intuition for the self-reflexive thinker. “I think” because there is a thought of the unity of all thoughts in their thinking, that unity being the inescapable unity of my own experience itself.

The Problem of Persistence

The usual way of dealing with persisting identity over time and other kinds of changes is to attempt to single out a static identity unifying such changes. The body is pointed to, yet this can’t be maintained as identical in its exact states across time, hence the problem of the ship of Theseus, where technically the cells of the body are fully replaced by other cells after so many years. Another is memory, and yet memory also changes, some forgotten, and yet we view others to still be the same person even in amnesiac states. One may appeal to a belief in core personality, but people can also change even in their core. Another is the attempt to appeal to what is called a ‘soul’ as a substance that remains unchanged. Since the usual appeal to the soul is grounded in religious doctrine or spiritual belief which cannot express any determinate qualities of the soul that have any bearing on the general sense of what a ‘who’ is, this position is virtually dismissed at face.

What A Who Is

The only rational solution to what a ‘who’ is, if we are not to throw up our hands and declare it all a fiction we strangely cannot exorcise, is to comprehend it as a rational generative simplex at various levels. The ‘who’ as mere subject is the process of identity. To this extent, not only are humans and animals a self, but so is anything which identifies with itself as a process which produces and reproduces itself in maintaining its being. The ‘who’ as the the unity of its predicates must be understood as a generative process by which the unity as unity generates its parts and individuates itself. This is the organic sense of identity, where the process generates its own individuation in parts born of the universal whole and inseparable from it for their own being just as the whole depends on their continued being. It is in this sense that the ‘who’ can be made to cohere with all its changing appearances, even when they seem radically opposed. The ‘who’ is then the essential determinate character of a person not as static properties, but as dynamic. The self is a process of growth from the determinate principle of self-identification in the process of being and knowing. For example, a person’s tendency toward truth cannot be comprehended as merely qualifying in the sense of circumscribing actions or beliefs that fall in or out of one’s character, but as itself generating these specific actions and beliefs as a consequence of the activating of this tendency. In such a way, a person can remain entirely at one in the consistency of their essential character, and yet undergo extreme changes regarding actions and beliefs.

A Left wing person can become Right wing, a kind person can become cruel, a rowdy person can become peaceful, and so on. It is in fact logically the case that every ‘who’ can in essence be the exact same, and yet in appearance be extremely different. One and the same generative process can in different circumstances develop differently in that very identity of the process. In Hegel’s speculative philosophy, the core of the human self is freedom itself. Every human being seeks freedom in their own way, and can be comprehended in their various actions as attempting to achieve the realization of freedom. There are natural distinctions of bodies, temperaments, cognitive capacities, times and spaces, and yet every self in essence is nothing but the process of realizing freedom in its circumstances.

So, who are you, then? Who am I? I am, yes, a history of events. I am a nexus of relations to things and people. I am, more importantly, a kind of person that acts in certain ways and believes certain things that lead to certain actions and further beliefs. I am a thinking being with conscious values which are consistent as guiding measures to action. It is not uncommon for us to hear that people change drastically and negatively, that those around them cannot recognize them as being who they were up to them. This is because the essential tendencies have or seem to have changed, and new kinds of actions are being engaged that are unthinkable from the established tendency. A loving person that suddenly turns violent and hateful can be due to physical conditions of mental deterioration, even stress can induce mental breakdowns where people lose themselves quite literally. Sometimes, however, it is the essential tendency which itself is the occasion for drastic changes. A hyper-religious, social, and pious person can turn into a degenerate and bitter antisocial atheist due to their rational tendencies leading them to a sudden disillusionment with what they had sincerely believed before. This same tendency can even bring them back to religion after some time, but in a very different way than at first. To outsiders, this may seem as incommensurable swings of belief, but they are consistent realizations of the same personal tendencies.

As regards a soul, there is a common connotation that whatever the soul is, it has to do with the power of life itself. The self is indeed alive, and its life is activity. The ‘who’ is the soul insofar as it is recognized as the living generative principle of action that is a person themself. The soul is then not a thing, not a static substance, but a moving process which is at rest in its own movement.