Identity consists not in ‘being’ but ‘becoming’. So guard your steps!

Long is the way and hard that out of Hell leads up to light. 

John Milton -Paradise Lost

Sure there’s something unique in everyone of us which, however, stays unexplored partly because we seldom dare take that philosophical plunge into our souls for fear of being overwhelmed by the complexity of such an enterprise, and partly because our ‘run of the mill’ routine allows no space for such ventures.

As the days roll by at a steady pace against the tick-tock of the clock, there arises in us an urge to look back in time and evaluate the distances we have travelled. Doing so, we start building a perspective to define our current bearings in time and space. We build metaphors. We construct images. We reminisce. The thoughts come cascading down the memory lane. They form streamlets meandering in and out of steep turns and lashing against the boulders on the way.

There are the thoughts so engaging in their appeal that they recur, re-orientate and revamp into a panorama of events. Clamorous as they sound, these thoughts become a part of the daily jingle of your routine and assume an overwhelming authority over your actions in present.

Whereas some people are easily tricked into becoming a puppet against each tentative pull on the strings being moved from the past, others choose to break free from this retrospective predominance. There are still some others who remain indifferent, or at least pretend to do so, so as to manufacture their uniquely different identity, or to be more exact ‘identities’ for a score of different situations.

So, where exactly do we have to look to ascertain which part of our ‘self’ constitutes who we actually are?

Philosophy defines identity as a relation a thing bears only to itself. This definition has its own depths and asks for an inquiry into the self. One may argue that a person’s identity lies purely in his physical or bodily features, since that is what makes him look uniquely different from others. Additionally, this stance may also be supported by the fact that identity has direct bearings on body because you persistently live in the same body throughout your life. This notion, however, does not seem to hold water when seen in a biological perspective. Biology informs us that our skin sheds almost one million cells every day; our blood cells are replaced by new blood cells every four months; even the bones inside us transform. It sounds much like the ship of Theseus, which set sailed from Crete, carrying Athenian men. It underwent a number of odds and adventures, its planks and sails were replaced as the old ones broke apart. Moreover in Athens the ship was preserved for centuries by the Athenians in the sweet memory of their hero, Theseus. Over time, every bit of the ship had changed, but still, by association, it was called the ship of Theseus. Was it really the same ship?

So, it is not the body, but the set of values we weave around it that constitutes its identity. By far it holds true in a range of different perspectives i.e. family background, social position, inheritance, profession and a deep awareness of obligations you owe unto others. We are somehow bound to live our identities in our memories because memories constitute a link back in time where we started drawing upon the stuff that could form our introduction to the world. A tree does not remain a tree when chopped off its roots, cut into logs, crushed into a pulp to form paper for books. A book is not a tree anymore, but the content it carries represents an identity a person acquired by writing it. So, identity, besides being a lot of things, is also a philosophical rigmarole. We are what we do; similarly a thing is what it does. That is perhaps the ‘identity’.