Abstract
When we deal with complex things, like human subjects or organizations, we deal with identity – that which makes a person or an organization what it is and distinguishes him/her/it from other persons or organizations, a kind of “self”. Our identity determines how we think about and interact with others. It will be argued in this chapter that the self is constituted relationally. Moreover, when we are in the realm of the self, we are always already in the realm of engaging with and mediating differences – the realm of ethics. The position which will be developed argues that approaching identity as a complex system allows us to resist thinking of identity as an easily identifiable and static entity. Identity is always being constituted within a complex and contingent world, where we have to make choices based on contingent values rather than on universal knowledge or the outcome of rational calculations. As a result, we have to keep in mind that our daily practices always already have an ethical component, and our decisions need to be continually evaluated and re-evaluated in the light of our (and others’) varying identities.
A previous version of this chapter appeared in The Political Subject. Essays on the self, Art, Politics and Science. W. Wheeler (ed.). 2000, London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 226–245.
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Notes
- 1.
Descartes insists that the imagination and the senses do not belong to the mind (intellect) and cannot comprehend the world correctly:
.... it is now manifest to me that bodies themselves are not properly perceived by the senses nor by the faculty of imagination, but by the intellect alone; and since they are not perceived because they are seen and touched, but only because they are understood [or rightly comprehended by thought], I readily discover that there is nothing more clearly apprehended than my own mind (Descartes 1978: 94).
- 2.
Descartes paints a picture of a mind which is naturally wilful and wayward and which needs to be constrained:
“But I see clearly what is the state of the case. My mind is apt to wonder, and will not yet submit to be restrained within the limits of truth. Let us therefore leave the mind to itself once more, and, according to it every kind of liberty [permit it to consider the objects that appear to it from without], in order that, having afterwards withdrawn from it from these gently and opportunely [and fixed it on the consideration of its being and properties it finds in itself], it may then be the more easily controlled” (Descartes 1978: 90).
- 3.
In fact, the world and the rest of the body can be disregarded as superfluous and cumbersome:
“And there are besides so many other things in the mind itself that contribute to the illustration of its nature, that those dependent on the body, to which I have here referred, scarcely merit to be taken into account” (Descartes 1978: 94).
- 4.
Sartre concedes that historical situations are variable and do place limitations upon the subject, but argues that the necessities of living in the world do not vary. One needs to labour and die in the world. These limitations “are lived and are nothing if man does not live them” (Sartre 1946: 46). By “lived” Sartre means that man freely determines his existence in relation to these limitations.
- 5.
In his attempt to do this, Cuypers argues that introspection cannot be modelled on external perception, as is the case in the perceptual model of self-knowledge. In his own words (1998: 355) “the use of the pronoun ‘I’ is identification free.” The self cannot be interpreted as an object. Similarly, he argues, the analogy between introspection and perception cannot be sustained in the light of the causal relation that exists between the phenomenological character of the perceived object and its perception. Introspection has no object. Cuypers (358) quotes Shoemaker in saying that, “from an empiricist standpoint the status of the self (the subject of experience) is suspect compared with that of such things as sensations, feelings, images, and the like.”
Our perspective, the one from complexity theory, calls atomistic theories of representation into question altogether (cf. Cilliers 1998: 11–12).
- 6.
Cuypers explains philosophical atomism with regard to identity as picturing “the self as a non-bodily, private and static object with which the first person is intimately acquainted” (354).
- 7.
This will be a key issue in the discussion of a complex view of the self and we will argue that Cuypers does not manage to overcome this separateness adequately.
- 8.
From complexity, we will argue that a subject can neither be “complete” nor can it be a “logical unity”. Within a complex view it is equally impossible to distinguish with finality between separate bodily and non-bodily identities.
- 9.
When talking about the self, the term “environment” refers to the myriad of influences that the self is exposed to everyday: other people, the media, objects that it encounters, its own history, memories, perceptions, physical sensations etc.
- 10.
For more detail, see chapter one in Cilliers (1998).
- 11.
This dynamic is captured best by Derrida’s notion of difference (cf. Cilliers in Chapter 1 in this volume).
- 12.
This point will be elaborated upon in order to argue that a complex system (and identity) cannot be seen as an arbitrary construct.
- 13.
Such models can be helpful in developing ideas, as long as we are aware of their limitations. It is exactly in these murky waters – that of the status of formal models – that research into artificial intelligence has been floundering.
- 14.
This interview was published in Afrikaans in the South African philosophical journal, Fragmente. The translation is ours.
- 15.
The Freudian contribution to the understanding of the self will not be elaborated upon, but should be clear from statements like these.
- 16.
- 17.
This idea of presence is similar to the idea that “pure”, unmediated knowledge of the self can be obtained trough first-person introspection. Primacy is given to knowledge about oneself “seen” in the mind’s eye, because it seems, to some theorists at least, improbable that one may be mistaken about such knowledge.
- 18.
“A text presupposes an extremely complex textual field that branches off in space and time in all directions, and to which a text points to and relies on” (IJsseling 1992: 21).
- 19.
See Cilliers (1998) pp. 43–46 for a more complete discussion of this important concept.
- 20.
“Since language, which Saussure says is a classification, has not fallen from the sky, its differences have been produced, are produced effects, but they are effects which do not find their cause in a subject or substance, in a thing in general, a being that is somewhere present, thereby eluding the play of différance”. (Derrida 1986: 11)
- 21.
‘Thus one comes to posit presence – and specifically consciousness, the being beside itself of consciousness – no longer as the absolutely central form of Being but as a “determination” and as an “effect” (Derrida 1986: 16).
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de Villiers-Botha, T., Cilliers, P. (2010). The Complex “I”: The Formation of Identity in Complex Systems. In: Cilliers, P., Preiser, R. (eds) Complexity, Difference and Identity. Issues in Business Ethics, vol 26. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9187-1_2
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