I Drink Therefore I Am

Who am I?

The hard ones first eh?

What does ‘I’ even mean? And what is a “fixed, fully-centred identity”?

‘I’ is an expression of myself as an individual, an acknowledgement of the human person as separate from others, an establishment of an individual identity.

And what is identity? Identity and the sense of the individual are concepts of the Age of Enlightenment. Before that, people saw themselves as part of a divine cosmology, created by God or Gods and powerless before fate or destiny dictated by divine plan. The Age of Enlightenment proposed individuals as independent, conscious entities, controlling their existence through free will and reason, and possessing a centred identity from birth that developed as the individual experienced life.

As Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am”. Or as Monty Python said, more appealingly and a whole lot funnier, “I drink, therefore I am”.

The modern definition of identity expanded to acknowledge the effects of culture or society on individuals, and how their identity was shaped by the meanings and interactions of the culture they existed in. Modernity has also raised questions about the crisis of identity – whether the fragmentation of modern society from its traditional, established base roles of class, gender, race and belief has led to a destabilisation of identity as individuals no longer have fixed classifications to belong to.

The concept of a fixed, fully centred individual is of limited value. There are the questions of defining what fixed and fully centred actually means to different individuals, and then there is doubt whether individuals can evaluate themselves with anything other than complete subjectivity, which arguably makes the evaluation of limited worth.

Do I know who I am? Do I know who anyone else is? Do I know the culture that we all exist in, that influences so much of our understanding of ourselves and others? Arguably, no to all three. At best, I know what my behaviour is, and the behaviour of others, the behaviours expected and tolerated in the cultural context; and must draw conclusions from that.