From Authenticity to Profilicity, As Experienced
From dishonest truth to honest lying; my relationship to the shift in identity formation described by contemporary philosophy
When I was sixteen, I took a class in high school called Winter Survival. This was (and still is) a very unique program for a public school to run, in which we students were put out in the woods by ourselves for three days with basic equipment. The twist was that we were doing so in mid-January, on the border of Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
The first day of the trip was mixed snow and rain, and the experience wasn’t terribly complicated: I made a small shelter to keep my sleeping bag dry, crept inside it, and went to sleep. The following two days were a life-changing experience. I struggled to make a fire (something I had never done before at that point), a puddle formed at the foot of my sleeping bag, and most of all, I barely spoke to anyone-apart from the occasional appearance of a staff member to make sure I was alive and uninjured.
Eventually, a couple staff members actually did come and help me start a fire-the little bits of tinder I had managed to light were put out by melting snow falling from the trees above me, a miniature Jack London sort of motif-and I remember sitting in the forest at night by the fire, being stunned at how comfortable I was in my winter clothes and boots, having made some oatmeal, sitting by a fire. It seemed to me, in that moment, that there was nothing more I really needed, and if I could be sustained by this, I could in fact live a very simple life.
Mostly I appreciated the solitude. Certainly I had always been a shy kid, and an odd one, and the reaction this created in my classmates produced a feedback loop of sorts-alienated from them, I would move further into my own world, mostly populated with comics, books, jazz music, drawing, and writing-and the more self-involved my world became, the further alienated I became, and so on and so forth. I didn’t know much about what sort of person I was, only that I was different from other people, and that I was quite satisfied to keep my distance from them. The woods seemed like a refuge, a space where I could unapologetically be myself.
I had no interest in making money-worldly possessions didn’t seem like any sort of guarantee of happiness, and I didn’t like work. In retrospect I think I disliked the thing every honest person dislikes about capitalism, regardless of what position they occupy within it-having to defile yourself, devoting your energy to serving a role within an institution of some sort to convince others of your worth, such that those above you grant you professional success, that you might be able to stand in judgement of others instead. To my adolescent mind, this seemed a fair representation of the life adulthood promised, if I did what my teachers wanted me to do. I can’t say my younger self was wrong, and I can’t blame him for taking what seemed the most obvious means of averting this disaster-trying to figure out how to best live as a vagrant, without a job, address, or credential, independent of and unentangled with the demands of society.
But it wasn’t so much the idea of working for a living that disturbed me-it never occurred to me that I would be able to escape labor, nor did I have enough experience of it to know how nice it would be to avoid it. In fact, the idea of being one of the working masses, in the Steinbeckian form I imagined them, seemed quite appealing. Reading Bukowski, listening to Woody Guthrie and the like, it seemed quite obvious to me that all that was worth knowing of human beings was to be found among the working class. To be destitute and materially deprived didn’t scare me as it should have-the idea of being inauthentic, however, absolutely did.
One major influence upon my thinking, from childhood onwards, was the example of the homeless. I think I became a socialist some time around age 4, or whenever it was I first noticed that there were people who needed money, surrounded by those who had it, and for some reason the latter group would walk past them on the street every day, and seemed to think nothing of it.
When I say “socialist,” I don’t mean it in terms of any considered position about how the economy or political system should be destroyed and reconstituted. I mean it in the sense in which George Orwell used the term in The Road to Wigan Pier:
To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about. To the more revolutionary type, the type who is a hunger-marcher and is blacklisted by employers, the word is a sort of rallyingcry against the forces of oppression, a vague threat of future violence. But, so far as my experience goes, no genuine working man grasps the deeper implications of Socialism. Often, in my opinion, he is a truer Socialist than the orthodox Marxist, because he does remember, what the other so often forgets, that Socialism means justice and common decency.
The moral center of the idea, that it seems clear that in a just world everyone would have what they need to live a dignified life, and would allow one another to live in peace and liberty, has always been the authoritative standard of common decency which has kept the idea of socialism alive through its numerous perversions, the attempts to suppress it and subvert it, the countless embarassments done to it by its often delusional adherents, and even in the face of the enormous crimes committed, however cynically and strategically, in its name. The core idea itself is one which does not excuse the perpetuation of human suffering and deprivation, and this is something no system opposed to socialism is capable of. A capitalist, a liberal, an imperialist, or a fascist can employ countless arguments drawing from utilitarianism, social darwinism, religion, or any number of other things, to defend their willingness to enforce suffering on some segment of the populations of their various polities-but none of them can escape the admission that, yes, in their proposed system, some significant number of humans will be forced to live abjectly terrible lives.
Thus, the homeless seemed to have a moral authority to me because they were the only ones operating in a rational moral universe-the convenient part of having no real material wealth is that there’s no need to create an edifice of rationalistic nonsense to convince yourself you deserve to keep it from those who need it more than you do. Neoliberal capitalism and its hierarchies, as I unconsciously believed then and maintain now, sit atop a mountain of ideological bullshit to justify obvious insults to human decency, and in its madness will talk all of us out of a habitable planet before dealing with practical or moral realities.
Whatever else might be said about the homeless, they aren’t burdened with the need to pretend all of this makes sense. A homeless person has the distinct advantage of being able to walk down a city street without having to make an active effort to pretend someone else on that street doesn’t exist. Lacking almost everything else, they have what everyone else claims to want: they are authentic.
As an adolescent, then, authenticity is what I sought more than anything else. Small wonder as to why.
Children of the Age of Authenticity
In his lecture series on his book The Malaise of Modernity, philosopher Charles Taylor outlines the development of an “ethic of authenticity” as the driving premise of modern identity construction, and the source of moral values. He locates the beginnings of this new idea in the writings of Enlightenment-era moral sentiment theorists, and especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
As against what the theorists of sentiment thought was this rather bloodless ethic [of Lockean morals derived from God], this ethic that seemed to give no place to the human heart, they developed the notion that God had implanted in human beings, on the contrary, moral sentiments-a sense of one’s emotional life, of what was right, and what was wrong. One had to follow the voice of moral sentiment within oneself. And that came to be a very important stream of thinking in the 18th century, and in a way it developed and took new form in one of the most influential writers-perhaps the most influential writer of the whole century-Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau turned this idea into the notion of our having a “voice of nature” within, a voice that comes from our authentic being, and that tells us what the right thing is to do. And the danger that stands before the voice, [that] one can in one sense drown it out, is our dependence on other people, our entering society in such a way that we become dependent on the opinions of the people around us, on their good opinion of us, our reputation in their eyes. We come to want to play up to them and be accepted by them, and in all these ways we become dependent on others and lose the sense of dependence on ourselves, by which he means this voice within.
This ethic of deriving oneself from oneself, is summed up in countless moral truisms bandied about in the modern world, but is probably most easily sensed in the commonplace refrain of “just be yourself” or “be the real you.”
I’ve discussed in earlier essays the way in which identity is formed, particularly in The Redistribution of Identity, which was essentially me stumbling into the philosophical discipline of identity theory, and ways in which we try to construct a coherent sense of self in the modern world, as I thought this striving for identity might go some way to explaining the bizarre phenomenon of modern woke political ideology, and its oddly cozy relationship to capitalism.
At the end of that essay I offered a fairly off-the-cuff alternative for identity construction-that we might build our identities rather around what we create on an individual basis, our thoughts and actions, rather than on prescriptive labels ascribed to us by our peers, sociological theorists, or advertisers:
I suppose I would advocate the construction of identities conceived of as cells in a body of democratic participation. To return to Locke’s model of man in the state of nature, I would argue that reason is in fact our process of decision-making, the essential mental faculty for creation. We choose to cut down this tree or that tree, to hew it in this shape or that, to shape it in any number of styles as we decide is best, until we are left with some artifact- a chair, a table, a digging stick, a fire. We take the materials present in the world around us, we apply our own unique reasoning to them until we are emotionally satisfied, and we create something new. It is those creations, I believe, which we ought to identify with- our actions, ideas, stories, relationships, analyses, jokes and whatever else it is that we have plucked out of nature and refined through the application of our minds and bodies.
What I was invoking, in other words, was a kind of theory of authenticity-that what you are is to be found somewhere inside you, in your unique contribution to the communal sphere, trying to find a balance between the individual’s service to the collective, and the collective’s service to the individual.
This was, I think, a very reflexive anarchist answer, one which would have appealed to my young self, uninterested in the professional treadmill of ritualistic labor and brown-nosing, and I still think it has value. Certainly, I would rather evaluate myself and others in terms of ideas and actions, rather than by prescribed labels or social roles. Those who know me know I like to do things for myself for this reason. I would rather pull a table off the side of the road, fill the cracks with wood putty, sand the old finish off and put a new coat on, than simply buy a table that would probably be nicer than the end product of my labor anyway. Even if this weren’t a more economical option, I would probably do it-I take pride in the end product, in my own thriftiness, in the learning process involved, and in the fact that I can do something for myself. I don’t think that’s a bad trait to have, even though I question if that pride actually makes any sense.
It guided my path after high school. In my journey to be able to fully inhabit my authentic self, I took no interest in going to college-I never took the SATs, participated in high school classes just enough to graduate, and often skipped class to go to the library and learn about things I thought were more important. At the time, this meant learning about Native American crafts and botany, subjects I considered useful for when I would eventually go off into the wilderness, Chris McCandless style. Unlike Chris McCandless, however, I would be armed with an extensive practical knowledge of how to survive in the wilderness, rather than an extensive knowledge of Tolstoy’s philosophical journey to ascetic anarcho-pacifism.
In retrospect, the plan sounds insane on its face (I recall thinking to myself, with all the zeal of a wannabe tech entrepreneur or novelist, that while it certainly was crazy, it could be achieved if one was truly devoted to authentically pursuing one’s passion), but I did find others who shared it-in the age of the internet, it seems like one can find a tribe of fellow devotees to reify one’s confidence in almost any idea.
I found them by spending a six-month apprenticeship at a wilderness living school in Maine, where I lived outdoors, went on survival trips, taught courses on making fire by friction with cedar wood and white pine roots, and at one point was nearly arrested by an Augusta police officer for dumpster diving at 3AM behind a Dunkin’ Donuts. Such is the life of the truly devoted, and this was what I was doing at nineteen instead of getting a college degree. Whatever else it was, at least it was authentic-right?
I was growing less certain, though I couldn’t put a finger on why. If one interrogates this theory of authenticity closely, one starts to notice that it is, in fact, translucent. If the source of this authentic self is supposed to be the inner voice, what happens if you stop being convinced that you and your inner voice are one and the same?
Authenticity From Where?
Some time ago, I was debating a friend after writing my essay on the nonexistence of free will. At a certain point, he asked if my denial of free will amounted to a rejection of the self. I wasn’t entirely sure; I remember saying that I think a self exists, but it’s not located where we think it is in relation to what we actually are, or something to that effect.
Over time, as I’ve taken up a more regular meditation practice and become more engaged with Eastern philosophy and the denial of self found in the Buddhist tradition, I’ve become more convinced that the self we think exists is an illusion. While we get our idea of a self from things that are real about consciousness and experience, we misidentify the source from which these phenomena-especially internal discursive thought and social identity-actually stem.
In truth, there is no self-there are instead different levels of reality, which can be characterized as the internal (the field of consciousness) and the external (the validation from the external world that we are a self).
I will make a more thorough argument against the existence of self, but first, the reason it’s relevant: if we grant that there is no self, how can it be authentic? What does the authentic identity come from, if not the self? And if, in dismissing the self, we do away with authenticity as well, what do we have instead?
Bracketing that discussion, let’s deal with the self. To approach this subject, I think it’s useful to start from the Western perspective. Let’s start with a simple Cartesian axiom, which nobody denies: I think, therefore I am. Whatever I am, it is like something to be me, and thus, I exist. I cannot confirm that what I see in front of me is real-I can see it, touch it, hear it perhaps, but I cannot be certain that these sensory confirmations reflect a truth external to the sensory inputs themselves. Of course, we know for a fact, for instance, that color is a product of perception itself-what we see as green is not actually green, or any color at all-the green is a product of the interaction between light, the surface, and our eyes. To other animals, or to color-blind people, what looks green to us looks entirely different. Likewise, I know that radio waves exist, that I am in their presence right now, but I cannot perceive them. Thus, I can perceive things that do not exist outside of me, and I cannot perceive things that do exist outside of me. How can I trust my perceptions, in that case? How, besides through perception, can I verify the existence of anything? Certainly any type of proof I could manufacture would have to be verified only through perception, which we have already established is untrustworthy. Thus, the only thing I know exists is myself, because whatever the nature of the perceptions I’m receiving is, the fact that I am there to receive them verifies my existence as a receiver of perceptions.
But contained within the formula of cogito, ergo sum is the problem. Descartes has not taken his observation far enough. In imagining that thought verifies existence, he has given thought a property it does not have-it is not a perception, he thinks, but somehow integral to the perceiver. The thing that exists for Descartes does not merely perceive-it thinks, and the thoughts and the perceptual capacity are not distinct from one another.
But does this really make sense? In what way is thought different from other perceptions? It is true, thoughts come from the brain. But then, all sensory perception comes into our awareness from the brain. Crucial to Descartes’ observation is the awareness that what we perceive as our bodies may not actually be real. All your weed-fueled philosophical musings about The Matrix are instructive here-Neo’s body in the Matrix is not his real body. Oddly enough, however, his thoughts within the matrix are his real thoughts. This reflects Descartes quite well, who never seems to give serious consideration to the idea that his thoughts could also be manifestations of illusion-indeed, he suggests that while his body in reality may not be real, the body he sees in dreams must be a representation of a truly existing thing. Indeed, in Meditation 1 of his Meditations of First Philosophy, Descartes imagines the possibility of a demon which has created a false reality precisely to delude him:
I will suppose, then, not that Deity, who is sovereignly good and the fountain of truth, but that some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams, by means of which this being has laid snares for my credulity; I will consider myself as without hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or any of the senses, and as falsely believing that I am possessed of these; I will continue resolutely fixed in this belief, and if indeed by this means it be not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of truth, I shall at least do what is in my power, viz., [suspend my judgment], and guard with settled purpose against giving my assent to what is false, and being imposed upon by this deceiver, whatever be his power and artifice. But this undertaking is arduous, and a certain indolence insensibly leads me back to my ordinary course of life; and just as the captive, who, perchance, was enjoying in his dreams an imaginary liberty, when he begins to suspect that it is but a vision, dreads awakening, and conspires with the agreeable illusions that the deception may be prolonged; so I, of my own accord, fall back into the train of my former beliefs, and fear to arouse myself from my slumber, lest the time of laborious wakefulness that would succeed this quiet rest, in place of bringing any light of day, should prove inadequate to dispel the darkness that will arise from the difficulties that have now been raised.
But somehow, it never occurs to him that this demon could, in fact, not only implant all these false images of reality into his mind, but also implant thoughts. This always bothered me: it doesn’t seem like the nature of our internal dialogue is so fundamentally different as to be immune to this sort of consideration. Surely I perceive my thoughts, don’t I? Of course, Descartes was a Catholic who believed in souls and free will-thus, perhaps he imagined that he created his own thoughts. But any cursory observation of one’s conscious experience destroys this belief. Do you feel that you are in any way the author of your own dreams? Do you always notice your own thoughts?
The best way to characterize this problem, perhaps, is in the problematic offered by Sam Harris: If our choices are made through a thought process, then to make a choice freely would involve thinking about it. But for those thoughts to result in a free choice, the thoughts themselves would have to be made freely. How would a thought be freely constructed? Presumably through making a choice about what to think. Finally, we arrive at the core problem: to decide what to think would require thinking it before we thought it, and that is impossible.
So if you, the supposed thinker, are not making your thoughts, how do you know that they aren’t also a manifestation created by a demon to convince you of an irreality?
Descartes’ choice of the act of thinking as a verification of existence isn’t conservative enough. The correct formulation is not cogito, ergo sum but rather sum, ergo sum-“I am, therefore I am.”
Thoughts themselves, like all other experience, are appearances in consciousness, awareness itself. The irreducible self, in fact, isn’t a self at all-your internal voice, the one that calls you “I,” is a construct of thought, one which can’t be convincingly latched onto consciousness. There is no you that exists within the field of consciousness, one which you notice and see. You are not a video game character, being viewed from behind by a third-person camera from which the player sees you as her avatar. You are the camera-the field of consciousness itself.
I am not making the argument that the field of consciousness is all that exists. I think it is almost certain that when I, as a mote of consciousness, look into another person’s eyes, there is another consciousness looking back at me. Likewise the objects I perceive, while the perception of them itself is merely a representation, do exist outside of me. Likewise, my thoughts are real-I do not deny that when I do something silly and think “I’m an idiot” or munch on a bag of baby carrots and think “hey, I’m eating healthier”, the thoughts themselves exist in the real world. My claim is that the self about which these thoughts are constructed is an illusion. It’s not merely that it’s not my true self-it simply does not exist. I could spend every day of my life compulsively thinking about pink elephants, but no amount of thought about pink elephants will make a pink elephant exist. The self is much like this-we form huge edifices of thoughts around it, but when we look beyond the thoughts to the thing itself, we don’t seem to find anything there.
But why, then, is the self so compelling? Why does it seem to convincing to us, and why do even those who fully acknowledge its nonexistence lapse into acting as if they were selves on a regular basis? Certainly ancient philosophy and religion play a role here-the idea of the immaterial soul and the modern conception of the self overlap one another almost perfectly. But there are plenty of people who do not believe in souls and nevertheless do believe they are a self. This is certainly encouraged by the fact that we can experience our own thoughts, while we cannot experience the thoughts of others. We are uniquely privy to the world of our thoughts, constituting a private realm in which we can’t help but imagine we have something like a supernatural agency, although a brief consideration of what would be required for this agency to actually exist is also readily available. The most compelling source for belief in the self, I think, is the external verification that we are a person, a confirmation which seems incompatible with the idea that we are merely a consciousness. We observe ourselves operating in the external world, and being incorporated in it, interacting with others, participating in events, etc., and this seems to suggest that there is a self performing these operations.
Here we have to deal with the truth that reality is structured on different levels of order. I’m writing this essay in Boston, Massachusetts. If one were to walk to Back Bay, into the Prudential tower, and take a very long elevator ride, one would find a view of the whole city of Boston stretching in all directions before them. From this observer’s perspective, would I cease to exist, because I was not the subject of their observation, but instead only a part of the city as a whole, as they observed it? And if they were to take off from Logan airport on a clear day, seeing Eastern Mass from a great distance, would Boston no longer be real? I am a person, in a city, in a state, on a planet-but none of these higher order things negate their lower order antecedents, that of which they are composed. They are simply different things observed at different distances.
But we should amend an earlier statement-I am not a person from my perspective. I’m a person from another person’s view, within a relatively short distance. From further away, I’d be a city, from further still, a state, etc. But from my own distance from myself-zero-there is no person. There is only consciousness, one which constructs impressions of sights, smells, sounds, and, yes, thoughts. It is this simultaneous truth-that from my perspective I am a consciousness, and from your perspective a person-which leads to the confusion. The person is real from your perspective, and the consciousness is real from mine. But the consciousness contains within it the awareness that when you look at where I experience my consciousness to be, you don’t see a consciousness-you see my head, and have to intuit that a consciousness must be there, although you cannot see it. Both are real. The self, which is the misconstrued unity of the two, the consciousness and the person combined, is an illusion. So how could this illusion be expressed “authentically”?
To tell you the truth, at no point in my life did I feel totally authentic. I always felt uncertain about what that would actually mean, because I didn’t know who I actually was. To be authentic would involve “being myself.” But when one tries to be oneself, one instead finds that one starts imitating others, looking for behaviors one likes and dislikes. And one also finds oneself doing things one finds questionable. Much like early Protestants, being given the freedom to “talk to God” directly and finding that he had nothing to say, when I tried to be my authentic self, I couldn’t ever find an authentic self to be.
Had I simply failed to construct it? How, if there was a self, could it not be authentic by nature? Was I inhibiting it? Was it latent, buried under cultural conditioning and neglect, or was I in fact being my authentic self already, and it just wasn’t as spectacular an experience as I had been led to believe? After my apprenticeship in Maine ended, I started working on farms. My authentic self, I imagined, wanted to build a humane, sustainable society, and I believed I would do this by working in regenerative agriculture-planting mixed cropland with fruit and nut trees alongside vegetable crops and livestock, a carbon-negative, ecologically regenerative type of agriculture which could work on a vast acreage.
In the meantime, I figured, I would establish myself as a vegetable farmer, and ended up working on a small startup farm in South Shore Mass, near Plymouth. It was a sand mine with a few trailers, three huge wind turbines, some strangely installed greenhouses with an aquaponics system, and a small patch of semi-arable land. It was quite a shaky operation, to say the least, but it was owned by a wealthy entrepreneur who was willing to pay me to do the best I could with it, although at the time I was 20 years old and knew next to nothing about farming beyond what I’d read in books and seen on youtube videos. Still, if there was a way to an authentic expression of self, this seemed the clearest path to it.
One Self, Many Profiles
The logic of the age of authenticity seems to have surpassed itself. I had somewhat caught onto this in The Redistribution of Identity, although I framed it in the context of advertising and consumer culture:
In a very real sense, the way we identify ourselves to others informs how we identify to ourselves. For better or worse, the way I see myself will to a large extent be shaped by how I see myself being seen by others. And in a depersonalized, atomized society where most of the people we interact with don’t really know us on a deep level, the way we shape people’s perception of us is heavily associated with our externally visible consumption habits (“lifestyle choices”.) What we buy shapes how people see us, and seeing ourselves through their eyes, it shapes how we see ourselves.
In our effort to be our true selves, it is incumbent upon us, particularly in a world of social media and brand-building, to create a constructed image of ourselves. This isn’t a cynical or dishonest picture-we construct this image, very often, imagining that it’s true, or even that in the construction of the picture we have actually made it true.
In our efforts to be authentic without a self to authenticate, what we have in fact produced is a performance of honest lying. What we imagine to be an authentic self becomes instead a set of performances of different selves-the self we are when we are drinking with our friends, or the one we are to our grandparents, or at a funeral, or in an awkward encounter with a stranger in a checkout line. These performances have always existed, because the self does not exist-there is in fact no singular identity which responds to every situation with the same consistent set of traits, but the very fact that we imagine that there is produces a brazenly inauthentic effort to perform our authenticity.
These differing selves, or profiles, and the dynamics which shape them are identified by philosophers Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio in their book, You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity. In chapter 2 of the book, they define profilicity as follows:
Profilicity means assuming identity through public accounts of oneself. By presenting their profiles, people tell others and themselves who they are, and they are made accountable for it.
Profiles serve a practical function-they are a necessary tool for manuevering in practical and social reality. While we may find a kind of common sensical reasonableness in declarations like “I’m the same person no matter who I’m talking to,” the truth is that we really do change and curate our presentation to the world on a contextual basis, and it’s hard to see how it would be better if we didn’t. It does seem to be an altogether positive thing that I do not behave the same way drinking with my buddies as when I’m operating heavy machinery at my job, or that I don’t maintain the same seriousness and professional air in performing work when I’m interacting with people I have a deep affection for. It would not, in fact, be appropriate to treat every stranger like I do my best friend, or vice versa. Likewise, it is not at all clear that by trying to create some sense of a stable, consistent internal self, we would achieve a stable or consistent quality of wellbeing. There is no single self which looks identical from all angles-there are rather numerous profiles, created in response to circumstances. Whether we like this fact or not is irrelevant-it is actually impossible to avoid acting it out. It is the nature of socially conditioned existence.
Identifying profilicity as a reality of experience-the fact that we perform our identities, rather than simply expressing them, and that they are subject to contextual alteration-is not to endorse or condemn it. But it raises useful questions. Firstly, if our identity is expressed through profilicity, then we can consider the possibility that the identity is ephemeral, and we need not be excessively committed to it. To fixate on one’s social media presence, for instance, is to fixate on a profile. These various profiles may have various purposes, but they do not say anything real about you. No amount of social media engagement will validate you, because what is being validated is not you-it’s only a profile, literally an account of a supposed self which is not actually there. Having abandoned the idea of an authentic self we are trying to uncover, we can see these manifestations of false authenticity for the profiles they are, and adopt and set them aside as need be. And being honest about the nature of the different profiles we adopt, we can embody them more single-mindedly when it is appropriate to do so, without imagining that they must all thread together into some consistent, singular self. In the knowledge that there isn’t a self to express, we can express a presentation of what the self might be like if we had it, without having to pretend that this reflects a self which is actually there. This is the honest dishonesty of profilicity, contrasted to the dishonest honesty of authenticity-in which we pretend to tell the truth about that which isn’t actually there, convincing ourselves or others that we aren’t actually acting, but in fact expressing our “true selves.”
For me, the acceptance of profilicity was instrumental in finally making the decision to make a career change. After five years as a vegetable farmer, I had come to realize that I could no longer justify it. In truth, vegetable farming is no different from anything else in the capitalist framework-freed from the constraints of the marketplace, it could be used as a tool for ecological restoration, for instance, or for improving the nutrition of impoverished children, or any number of other noble goals. But in reality, the market has no interest in such things, and no working farmer can afford to be interested in what the market is not-thus, what I had instead was a relatively low-paying and physically and mentally exhausting job which achieved little apart from furnishing a locavore sheen to the farm’s (very) wealthy customer base, oddly enough aiding in the customers’ cultivation of the profiles of environmentally and socially conscious progressive liberals, nevermind the fact that their wealth was typically derived from the most rapacious (and therefore most profitable) sectors of the economy. I could have remained married to my idea of an authentic self largely defined by my role as a vegetable farmer, or I could recognize the performative nature of this identity, soberly evaluate the reality it was constructed upon, and instead look for something that made more money and allowed me more time to do what I actually enjoyed, albeit without the sheen of moral authority that comes with the label of a small-scale farmer. Ultimately, I had to accept that this self-conception held no inherent value, and was really only a vestigial preoccupation with a person I had once liked the idea of being. In other words, the profilic nature of this identity, once recognized, made it far easier to let go of-it was not letting go of a part of myself, but rather of a part of what I had imagined myself to be, and the two are distinct properties.
There is a constant tension in western philosophy between the desire to do what is right because it is right, and the desire to do what is right because of what doing this thing says about you as a person, a distinction rather like that between a Christian who loves God, and one who claims to love him because he doesn’t want to go to hell. By dismissing the self, and recognizing the profile as it is, we don’t avoid this problem. It is entirely possible to imagine someone cynically embracing their lack of identity, and fully embracing the idea that in fact they are nothing but their profiles, with nothing real beneath them. But the more correct interpretation, I think, does us far more good than harm as moral agents. Instead of seeing the lack of self as an emptiness, we can divert our attention from a self that doesn’t exist, and fully embrace the consciousness that does. We can deal with reality directly, as it were-instead of worrying about what I should do to be a good person, I can simply worry about doing what a good person ought to do. This distinction is subtle, but significant-it is the difference between being motivated by principles and being motivated by ego. We can do and feel things for themselves, without lingering on what those things might say about us.
Another consequence necessarily deriving from the absence of a self is the lack of basis for essentialism. One noteworthy quality of consciousness is that it does not possess a race or gender. To say that my consciousness is that of a white male, and yours of a black transgender female, for instance, says a great deal about our profiles, but nothing about our real nature, which is merely that of consciousness itself. We find a basic condition of equality emerges-a consciousness, whatever may be the nature of its contents, is not remotely different from any other consciousness, and profilic identities simply occur as another appearance within it. They do not reflect any “core truth” about us. It is true, profiles are foisted upon us-we have some say over what shape they take, but we do not get to choose whether or not they are shaped, and certain aspects of them are entirely out of our control.
We can not, in fact, choose our race or our gender. What we can do, however, is choose, on a fluid and practical basis, what aspects of these profiles should take precedence. On a collective cultural level, for instance, we seem to have made a decision to assert that skin color is, in fact, a crucially important part of modern identity. I cannot change the fact that I will always be regarded as a white man-but this doesn’t mean I have to think of myself in those terms. Profiles serve purposes, and those purposes accord with certain philosophical priorities. It may be that there are people in the world who would prioritize my skin color or gender identity over my character, and they’re welcome to do so if they wish. But whether I ascribe importance to the latter or the former is not conditioned by external facts, but on an ethical and rational analysis which is my own. There is no real self to be discovered here, only a presentation to be constructed-and the character of the presentation, far from being tethered to prescriptive observations, is entirely up for discussion.