Essay part 1 of 2
By Phineas Upham
A few things seem clear about our identities:?One, our identities are multi-faceted and, to an extent, in flux.?Two, our identities are at least partially, if not largely, socially constructed.?This means that they are very seriously related to our reference classes, our organizational and social identities, and to our cultural norms/values.?Three, it seems clear that we only have a partial knowledge of what we consider our ?identities? and that this very concept is partially socially based.?Four, we have very little, if any at all, idea of how our self identity is formed and maintained.?
William James, one of this nation?s greatest intellectual treasures, used psychology to explore these seminal questions.?Psychology, as a methodology, is especially well suited to exploring questions of self-identity. ?Firstly, it is able to quantitatively come up with counterintuitive and unpredicted results through the use of controlled experiments and natural experiments (including cross cultural experiments).???This is especially useful for self-concept analysis which is often counter intuitive by its very nature.?Secondly, it is good at dealing with multi-layered and multi-functional phenomena.?Self-concept analysis seems to be like this.?Thirdly, it is highly focused on verifiable or at least testable results, which is something past philosophical speculation never took seriously and which limited research into self-concept analysis seriously.?Lastly, it has developed as a literature in which OFTEN each paper takes on relatively small chunks of an issue and explores it in depth.?Since such a field, with ?bricks? of knowledge rather than ?edifices? tending to be built, lends itself to a building up of walls of verified and accepted information, self-concept/identity analysis has been able to grow slowly and develop some foundational basic beliefs which are so helpful to so complex a field.
William James?s The Principles of Psychology, chapter X ?The Consciousness of Self? is a masterful attempt to understand who and what our self identity, of who we are and how we view our selves.?It is limited by its cultural relativism (as seen in later works explored in this essay), an ?unscientific,? and more philosophically pensive, approach, and a lack of empirical, quantitative data to explore its propositions.?Nevertheless, it provides a framework to think about the problem and effectively illustrates how hard it is to think about who and what we are.?It astutely points out that we have multiple selves, that there is a salient to these multiple selves, that we have social selves, group selves, and individual selves, that our concept of self is arbitrary and adjusts, and many other ideas later explores more qualitatively and refined in later psychological works.?
Part 2 of this essay available on the Academic Ledger.
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