Latest news with #AlexanderDouglas
Scotsman
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Book review: Against Identity by Alexander Douglas
Alexander Douglas teaches the history of philosophy at the University of St Andrews. His book, Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self, is published by Allen Lane on 19 June. A study of three major thinkers by philosopher Alexander Douglas is one of my highlight books of the year so far, writes Stuart Kelly Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... The late William McIlvanney told a wonderful anecdote about meeting Sean Connery in the café at Edinburgh Zoo. A young waitress asked, nervously, 'Are you who I think you are?', to which Connery replied 'No'. But as McIlvanney archly and wisely observed, Connery was not who he thought he was either. This exemplifies some of the ironies and complexities in Alexander Douglas's lucid and absorbing study. For a subject which is daunting, he writes with both enviable clarity and, more importantly, honesty. In the conclusion, he writes about the 'philosophy of going against identity': 'I cannot claim to understand it in any practical sense… I have not escaped the mire of identity… Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'Try as I might to embrace the teaching I have presented here, pride manages to keep sneaking back into the driver's sear of my actions'. I don't care if this seems like reading too much into the text, but the tenor of his words, and the reference to 'the driver's seat', seems haunted by Muriel Spark (Douglas is a resident of Edinburgh). The book is a study of three major thinkers: Zhuagnzi, (c. 369-286 BC), Spinoza (1632-1677) and René Girard (1923-2015). It is worth commending simply the fact that represents strands not normally brought into dynamic relation to each other; a Chinese sage whose own historical reality is in doubt, a doubly-ostracised Enlightenment Jew and a French-American deconstructionist and theologian. All of them saw their respective periods as moments of profound unsettlement, potential turning points when old certainties were called into question. All three internalised this sense of the precarious. The parable of Zhuang Zhou dreaming about being a butterfly is given a strong re-reading in these pages. It is not about uncertainty, a kind of Schrödinger's cat situation where we can open the box and know definitively whether Zhuang is a human or butterfly. The original says 'between Zhuang Zhou and the butterfly there had to be a boundary. And this is known as the transformation of things'. For there to be a change between them, they must be acknowledged as separate entities or forms; what is paramount is whatever 'it' is, 'it' has the capacity, the plasticity, to be both. A thought experiment underpins the book's concerns: how many of our markers of identity truly constitute us? It is akin to Locke's distinction between primary and secondary characteristics. For Locke, erroneously, something like colour or dimension was secondary: a sphere can be red or green, have a diameter of a millimetre of a mile, without affecting its intrinsic sphere-ness. How many of our characteristics – Douglas lists, among others, ethnicity, politics, clothing, sports teams, opinions on metaphysics – can we change without changing our elusive 'self'? On a personal, somewhat flippant, level, after an operation and an extensive blood transfusion, I lost my taste for coffee. It didn't change my sense of self, but cataracts operations meaning I don't need glasses after 45 years rather did. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The urgency of this book can be highlighted by noting that one of the students (and remember, students often set themselves up as Oedipal antagonists to their mentors) of Girard was the technocrat Peter Thiel. With him – and Musk, and Zuckerberg, and Altman – we can see the monetisation and enforcing of competitive identities, and even the atomisation of anything like a self into a flurry of ticks and likes. Douglas looks at the fictive aspect of identity, its basis on imitation in Spinoza, and the constructed nature of desire in Girard. Girard is a great exponent of St Paul and his awful realisation: 'For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do'. If our concepts of identity are so many cobwebs, they are also very dangerous ones. As he puts it: 'Aggression, performative contempt, public humiliation – anything that might fill its targets with enough shame to want to be somebody else – these are the right tools for the job' [of changing the minds of others]. But the idea of self-liberation is quixotic too. 'Anyone who feels suddenly freed to 'be themselves' is warned that they will in reality exercise a freedom to 'be somebody else'. The governing myth which Douglas invokes is that of the mythic emperor Hundun. Hundun was trapped between the competing rivals Shu and Hu, and welcomed them equally and with equanimity. He, however, had no features so Shu and Hu decided to drill and bore facial openings into him, in the process killing him. The myth horrifically conjures identity as a violent imposition, and something that paradoxically erases. Even if we take the position of Saussure on identity – that it doesn't matter which actual engine is the 4.50 from Paddington, as long as we all agree it is the train leaving at 4.50 from Paddington – there is an element of coercion. Are you merely what everyone else agrees you are? Identity politics can be summed up by the old New Yorker cartoon – why do you have to be a non-conformist like everyone else? The most interesting aspect of the argument here is the stress on having no identity, not having a different identity. There is something appealing about existing in a state of positive provisionality rather than deracinated neutrality, though it might require a degree of sanctity to achieve it. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad
Telegraph
13-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Why obsessing over ‘identity' is a stupid idea
Earlier this year, delivering the annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture, Gareth Southgate argued that in Britain today, too many boys and young men are suffering an identity crisis. They need better role models: only through emulating such figures can they reverse their own slump into academic underachievement, Andrew Tate-fuelled misogyny and feelings of worthlessness. The speech was widely praised. It seemed, if you'll forgive the pun, that the former England manager was shooting at an open goal. Few disputed that the fundamental problem was our boys' sense of identity, or that this sense needed to be made stronger and more resilient. Or maybe not. In this incendiary and timely broadside, Australian philosopher Alexander Douglas argues that the entire concept of 'identity', as we find it in contemporary discourse, is wrong. There's something undeniably odd about looking to others to find one's true self. Personal authenticity surely can't be a matter of imitation – and yet, for good or ill, we do it all the time. As children, we play at being superheroes, monsters, parents, criminals, police: we try to find out who we are by playing at being what we are not. As adults, Alexander suggests, we continue this role-play, but with a twist: we're motivated by fear to hunker down in silos of identity definition. Hence, perhaps, the rise of identity politics, as manifested on all sides: Black Lives Matter, the English Defence League, #MeToo, Proud Boys, self-regarding wellness crypto-fascists, the LGBTQ+ community. It seems unlikely that Nicola Sturgeon, Nigel Farage or Donald Trump would have been elected were it not for the respectively Scottish, English and American national identities to which their supporters cleave. Identity politics has for some time been excoriated by conservatives, but increasingly it is attacked by the Left too. Ash Sarkar, a regular panellist on Radio 4's The Moral Maze, who has described herself as 'literally a communist', proposed in her recent book Minority Rule that the Left's cause is being thwarted because the oppressed they hope to defend are being splintered into different interest groups riven by identity politics. If only black people, queer people, trans people and the white working-classes could see past their identitarian distinctions, and think along class lines, the revolution might have some actual prospects. It's easy to understand, Douglas writes, why we shore up our identities like latter-day Canutes. 'Drowning in a world where nothing is certain, where half of what we know is probably mistaken and the other half will soon be out of date, fear drives us to cling to the driftwood of various definitions.' Tech companies monetise exactly this insecurity and desire for stability. We're encouraged to present our 'authentic selves' online, the better for Meta and other firms to exploit our private data for profit – though the more heavily redacted, cunningly filtered and therefore inauthentic, the more engagement-worthy those selves will be. The central point of Against Identity is that these identities are not just generated by fear and algorithms but are fundamentally mendacious. As the late Christian philosopher René Girard put it: 'Individualism is a formidable lie.' That's a discombobulating axiom for the 21st century, in which individualism has become a religion for a society that's lost faith in God. Girard grew up in post-war France, when existentialism was becoming an exportable commodity, like fine wines or Brigitte Bardot, spreading its influence from Saint-Germain-des-Prés cafés to the world. The leader of the turtlenecks, Jean-Paul Sartre, argued that we have the God-like power to become our true selves ex nihilo – a tremendously hopefully message for those of us who are struggling to escape the inherited curses of family, class, sex, or (in my case) a Black Country accent. Soon, ironically enough, everybody sought to become an individual. Girard denounced the hipster narcissists whose way of becoming themselves was, ironically, to look like what he called 'a vast herd of sheep-like individualists'. Girard called this desire to establish one's authentic identity a 'romantic lie', and it's a lie that persists today, not least in Silicon Valley. Douglas points, for instance, to Steve Jobs's much-mythologised 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, where the Apple founder hymned 'your own inner voice, heart and intuition', which 'will somehow know already what you want to truly become.' How did we get this way? One account of human evolution, as related by Douglas, goes like this. For much of human history, there was no organised legal force to restrain the lawless thugs who sought to harm others. Coalitions of the willing thus formed to eliminate them and safeguard society. This is what the primatologist Richard Wangham calls the 'execution hypothesis': to put it roughly, the more aggressive members of society were bumped off or, presumably through some form of community-wide castration, prevented from reproducing. Douglas contends that this domesticated human society, which has continued to the present day, produced a civilisation that wasn't violent in a reactive way, as with the elimination of those thugs, but a proactive one: it enforces conformity to norms. Humans became selected, in the evolutionary sense, for their extreme vigilance in conforming to social norms, whether out of fear of punishment or, worse, being made to look ridiculous. 'People fear breaking the social contract,' Douglas writes, 'for the same reason they fear turning up to a gala event in unfashionable shoes finding themselves in a conversation where everybody but them seems to have mastered the appropriate slang or academic jargon.' (He is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of St Andrews: one wonders if he's speaking from experience.) One's identity, that is to say, is constrained and defined by the norms of our society. We are not meaningfully free to choose who we are. Douglas goes on: 'Many of our communities, whatever the stated purpose might be, are really identity regimes driven by egotism – patrolled and sustained by individuals determined to preserve a certain idea of themselves: a fragile idea that cannot bear much novelty.' This rings true to me. But the alternative Douglas proposes is, to put it mildly, bracing. He counsels something called 'identitylessness', which – following the philosophies of Girard, Spinoza and the ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzhi – involves breaking out of the prison of individual identity and realising that we're all, in a profound sense, connected to everything. 'We are the others and the others are us,' he writes at his most rhapsodic, 'not because we share an identity, but because we are alike in identitylessness… I believe we have barely begun to live in the world together. Our drive for identity is always getting in the way.' Alexander is alert to the complaint that this anti-identity vision might be deranging, that 'a world without identity is terrifying'. Not just terrifying, I would argue, but scarcely comprehensible. Yet he believes in it. At one point, he movingly recounts how he struggled to deal with his father's Alzheimer's disease. His dad's identity was being brutally stripped to nothing. A friend advised that Douglas should stop yearning for his dad to become his old self: give up the hope of trying to bring the father back to this world, and instead enter his. 'That turned out to be the secret,' he writes. 'My father was not vanishing but changing.' Douglas set about 'letting go of the things I was exhausting myself trying to hold on to, the things by which I had defined both him and myself, and learning to find joy in what was there'. The experience allowed him to fully understand the anti-identity philosophers he celebrates here. 'Nothing can remain the same. Trying to hold on to the way things are is a losing game. But love remains, because love can flow along with the way things change… Love is as supple as the world, and the world's transformations cannot erase it. Love is the opposite of identity and the secret to adaptation.' Ultimately, I'm not sure Douglas is right about love. Can we really love what has no personality or identity? Nor, closing Against Identity, was I convinced that we could really live identityless in a mystical communion with the rest of the universe. But the challenge he makes along the way to what many of us have become – narcissists onanistically buffing our fatuous identities, both online and in real life – seems to me more valuable and important than most contemporary philosophy.
The Guardian
10-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Against Identity by Alexander Douglas review – a superb critique of contemporary self-obsession
Identity is something socially negotiated, both claimed and given. I cannot be French if that nation does not exist; I can't be a doctor if no one will grant me a medical degree. Social media, however, promises that we can don or doff identities like so many digital masks. We may become persuaded that identities are private goods over which we have rights of ownership and choice, that we can freely select what we 'identify as'. The heightened salience of identity in modern political discourse thus represents an unwitting internalisation of the neoliberal view of humans as atomised individuals who navigate life purely by expressing consumer preferences. The idea that the identity of the speaker should count when assessing his or her argument is what the right used to denounce as 'identity politics' (now subsumed under the general concept of 'wokeness'), though it is in this way a logical outcome of Thatcherite and Reaganite economics. One strong critique of the critique of identity politics, on the other hand, points out that privileged white males, of the sort who make such complaints, don't have to worry about their identity because theirs is the default one of power and influence – whereas for various minorities identity might matter much more, not least in how it influences the ways in which privileged white males will treat them. Philosopher Alexander Douglas's deeply interesting book diagnoses our malaise, ecumenically, as a universal enslavement to identity. An alt-right rabble rouser who denounces identity politics is just as wedded to his identity as a leftwing 'activist' is wedded to theirs. And this, Douglas argues persuasively, explains the polarised viciousness of much present argument. People respond to criticisms of their views as though their very identity is being attacked. The response is visceral and emotional. That's why factchecking conspiracy theories doesn't work. And it's not just a social media problem; it's far worse than that. 'If you define yourself by your ethnicity or your taste in music,' Douglas argues, 'then you ipso facto demarcate yourself against others who do not share in that identity. Here we have the basis for division and intergroup conflict.' The escape route Douglas recommends is nothing so banal, then, as policing misinformation or even just being nicer to one another; no, we should strive to abandon identity all together. He deploys close readings of three thinkers from wildly differing epochs and cultures: the ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzi, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza, and the 20th-century historian-critic René Girard. Each of them, he argues, hints at a similar ideal of enlightenment: to abandon our attachment to identity and become one with the undifferentiated flow of all things. This sounds fluffy and improbable in precis, but we should begin by noticing how fragile our own sense of self really is. Douglas says of his three thinkers: 'Look within, they would say, and you will find a mess. Introspection reveals only a confusion of qualities.' Oddly, the author doesn't mention the great Scottish philosopher David Hume, though his is probably the most famous expression of this idea: that what we call the self is, per Hume, 'nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement'. If so, it follows that what we think of as our identity must have been drawn from the example of others. This is the meaning of 'mimetic desire' as theorised by Girard: that we choose an admired person to imitate and so teach ourselves to want similar things. 'Individualism,' Douglas concludes, 'is really conformism to a model.' What we think of as our own special identity is just a suit of borrowed clothes. What, then, is the alternative? It is somehow to psychically merge with the 'superdeterminate' nature of Spinoza's concept of God, who exists everywhere and in every thing. Has any human being achieved such a feat? Perhaps, Douglas suggests, Jesus. Another model for us is Hundun, an emperor with no face in an old Chinese fable. His friends drilled holes into his head in an attempt to give him human features, and thereby killed him. Against Identity is a powerfully strange book, melding such matters with enjoyable references to Evelyn Waugh and Jean-Paul Sartre, and a strongly aphoristic turn of phrase. 'The 'inner voice',' he writes, 'is just the noise of others echoing inside your own emptiness.' To the 'romantic lie' that says you can be what you want to be, Douglas counterposes the bracing challenge: Don't be yourself. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Here, then, is a superb counterblast to modern identity fetishism. Whether readers will agree with its proposed solution is more doubtful. It warns against 'making value judgments', but we should make some value judgments, for example about murderers. And Douglas relays the Taoist advice he finds in Zhuangzi like this: 'We would be happier and more peaceful letting things flow, vanish, transform, be indistinct, be ambiguous' – which is all very well, but terrible advice if you're trying to build a bridge. Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self by Alexander Douglas is published by Allen Lane (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
