Can you change your identity?

Tilda Swinton in The Absent Present

We had a good discussion in class this week about human identity. I was pushing Sartre’s line that identity is fluid and open-ended. He accepts that there is a great deal of ‘facticity’ about every life, that in once sense we have an ‘essence’. But he emphasises our ability to go beyond this and re-make ourselves, often in ways that can’t be predicted. We always make these life-choices in the context of who we have become, but this context does not completely determine us.

Some of the students disagreed. They thought I was downplaying the elements of continuity: the fact that a human being is always the same person, that there is an underlying core of human identity that can’t be changed at a whim.

I half-agreed. There is a physiological continuity, and (usually, but not always) some continuity of memory and experience. And from a Christian philosophical perspective I’d want to talk about the spiritual unity of the person constituted by the soul. But it is striking how many of the elements that in ordinary conversation we use as markers of identity can be changed: name, job, vocation, marital status, nationality, etc. I wasn’t arguing that it is always good to reshape your present identity rather than making a renewed commitment to it, simply that it is often possible. Another word for all this is ‘conversion’.

I came across these words this afternoon from a recent interview with Tilda Swinton:

I think that the simple question of identity is probably the subject that interests me most often when looking for stories about people’s experiences. It always intrigues me that there could be any doubt about the inevitable mutability of human identity: that people encourage themselves to pick a shape of existence and stick to it, come what may, ad infinitum. It’s always occurred to me since I was very young that change is inevitable and that evolution depends upon it. I think that being resistant to one’s inexorable mutations, let alone one’s ability to live simultaneously multifaceted lines, is a serious and sad mistake. [Curzon No.19, p28]

Sartre wouldn’t agree that these mutations are ‘inexorable’, because this suggests that even the changes are in fact pre-determined.

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