580 Identity

The French philosophers whom I discussed in the preceding items in this blog also militated against what the called ‘presence’, which I take to mean a well-delineated, stable nature of any entity: person, narrative, fact, meaning, interpretation. They maintain that every entity is different from any other, partly hidden and in ongoing transformation, flux. Hume had already said that. This is related to the ‘difference’ discussed in a previous item in this blog.

However, one can have an identity that develops, within the boundaries of its potential, along a path of life. A moving car is still a car. A car can stall or crash or receive another colour paint. A human being also has no fixed identity, and develops within its constraints of inherited talent, upbringing and education, along its path of life.

If identity has been seen as an object, this is due to the ‘object bias’, discussed earlier. We used to play with marbles, but now have lost them