I've read with great interest the personal tales that have cropped up in recent days regarding religion, ethnicity and national identification. They are all poignant. They are all heartfelt. They are all pieces of the patchwork quilt of human history. And that is exactly what compels me to write this: Human history.
More on the flip.
For many years I was an advocate of what is now known as `identity politics'. I was inspired by the likes of Steve Biko as a kid and informed greatly by the civil rights movements in this country and around the world in literature, art and direct action [and despite what I write below, I still am]. In college I was very much self-identified as a post-structuralist; the various critiques of historic European humanism by the likes of Derrida, Spivak and Irigaray were among my favorites. The idea of universality was what I always fought against, holding up `identity politics', the `personal as political', and the primacy of experience as the true face of humanity.
But then something changed. I realized that even though identity in the sense of the personal may be the `true face' of humanity, it is not the truth of humanity. What was it that changed? For me it was finally the realization of what was philosophically at stake in the rise of humanism, science and democracy, the triumvirate of enlightenment thinking; what changed was finally an understanding of the historical meanings of substance and subject.
There are essentially two approaches to the problem of `identity' in the history of the Philosophy [i.e. the question as to what keeps a being synchronically one with itself as a being and diachronically one with itself through change and time]. One places primacy on ontos [being] while the other places primacy one episteme [knowledge]: hence Ontology and Epistemology. Those who side with the former promote the idea of ousia, `substance', as the ground and actuality of identity, while those who side with the latter identify `subject' as both ground and actuality. I am vastly oversimplifying here for the sake of brevity, but suffice it to say, the former position is identified with `anti-humanism' and what I call `aristocratic values', while the latter is the basis of all humanism and precursor to science and democracy.
Why is ousia, `substance' aristocratic, anti-humanist? Ousia literally means inheritance. It was the word used to describe not only the material riches passed on from generation to generation, but came to exemplify the inherent `good' of the aristocracy itself in ancient Greece. It was a metaphor seized upon by Plato to describe the relationship of Idea to reality found in memisis. It was used to describe the role of the Philosopher King, as embodiment of the agathon [good] turning toward the lowly mass of the polis and inculcating doxa [right opinion] within them through a rigorous paideia in order to enable justice to obtain within the city. Its concept was furthered within Aristotle to describe the site of the relationship between form and matter in which form presides as a benevolent dictator representing formal, efficient, and final cause. In short, the entire philosophical history of the notion of `substance', of `Being', is a history of aristocratic hierarchy. Within this framework, we think of our `identity' as begotten, not made. We inherit our identity from eternal forms and are at best merely the mute matter [with Aristotle], or at worst a `lesser being', one who is only just in memesis of the Idea of justice [as doxa], but not just in and of ourselves [as with Plato].
What changed for me was the realization that most `identity politics' rely on this precise notion of `identity'. Our identity is our parents, our country, our culture, our ethnicity, our religion. We, as individuals practicing `identity politics', view ourselves as these things first. We fail to identify ourselves first as `subject' - yes that transcendental subject, that empty `I' of the categories, that active, objectivizing rational being who is not a means, but an end in itself. We fail to first identify ourselves as homo sapiens, `species-being', or even a `will to power'. We view knowledge as ontos [inherited being] not episteme [created knowledge - object]. We retreat to a world of mysticism and image from the world of reason and science. In short, we are what we were, in an ahistoric sense.
I am not a heartless Kantian. In fact, it is Kant's greatest failing that he cannot see the personal as part of `identity'. I still think coming to an understanding of one's religion, ethnicity, culture, nationality are all central aspects of human life - and that diversity of experience is one that we must celebrate and cherish. It is one of the reasons I embrace Nietzsche - that celebratory creativity of an aesthetic persona, history as art, identity as a creative act drawing not on objectivizing reason, but personal history, on will.
But in times like these, in matters of war, of justice, I must return to Kant, to the moral law, to the `kingdom of ends'. We must act as if each being is an end in themselves, because indeed, as human beings, as `rational beings' we are all ends in ourselves. In the `kingdom of ends', we are not Muslims or Jews or Christians; we are not Israelis, or Lebanese, or Palestinians, or Americans, or Iraqis; we are not Semitic, or Caucasian, or Black, or Asian. We are simply `ends in ourselves'. Morally, we are all equal - none is different from another. To treat another as a means to and end is to betray ourselves as human beings; we give up any claim to justice. This, more than any individual or collective face of humanity, is its truth. And this is also the true meaning of the words we all love to utter freedom, self-determination, democracy.