Body and Identity: A History of the Empty Self

Résumé

Lifestyles, political platforms, and even surgical removal of genitalia are justified in the name of identity, but what does the word mean, and how did we get here? Body and Identity demonstrates that identity is not a recent problem. The much longer genealogy of our present moment is given in this book.

Body and Identity is the first one-volume comprehensive history of identity, drawing from a wide variety of disciplines, including biology, sociology, psychology, history, and literature, with philosophy and theology functioning as the lens through which these disciplines’ results are assessed. The book shows that, historically, these questions fall into three categories: identity through time (Identity1), the “true self” probed by the Delphic Oracle’s Gnothi seauton (Identity2), and one’s awareness of oneself (Identity3). Despite many genealogies of the modern subject, which insist that such questions are recent, pre-modern thinkers inquired about all three of these categories.

Previous secondary works have tended to be closed to the significance of theological developments for identity. While dedicating considerable space to ancient voices (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Plotinus), Body and Identity insists on the importance of Christianity for modern identity, both in advancing important questions concerning hypostasis, person, and nature, as well as making of penultimate importance the role of social, familial, and political structures for forming identity. For Christianity, seen most clearly in Paul, such structures remain good and important but subordinate to God’s call to the individual. This is the Christian content to Identity2 (the “true self”).

This “liquifying” reality of the God-given mission to the person and the relativization of the “solid” structures is an inheritance that modernity receives in a complicated way. Modernity accelerates and absolutizes the liquification of structures, even philosophical ones such as Aristotelian substance and human nature, in the name of freedom. (The modern thinkers examined in depth on this question are Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel.) But modernity also promotes a secularism that dogmatically closes off the world from the transcendent and seeks all that it needs in the immanent domain. This secularism jettisons the identity-content contained in God’s call to the person, while simultaneously liquidating the philosophical and social structures that had provided identity-content in antiquity.

Thus, in modernity, identity becomes a problem in a new way. Identity2 is viewed as inaccessible or non-existent. When Identity2 is rescued in modernity (Heidegger), its content is usually provided by group membership (race or nation), which, while important, cannot be central to human identity. Identity1 is no longer answered ontologically; it is folded into Identity3, such that the continuity of consciousness or a sense of authenticity is asked to also guarantee a person’s sameness through time. Further, identity comes to be a matter of self-creation—a process that is not guaranteed of success. Identity is now an anxiety-producing aporia.

This volume points to a theological solution to the identity question and provides a ground-breaking and thorough history of our current identity crisis.