So, images. Strictly speaking, images are the coherence of light stimulus as presented to your mind. I am neither interested nor equipped to lecture anyone about optics and image recognition. I barely know the difference between a refractory index and a refractory period (a little science humor: badoomcha). No, I am chiefly concerned with images of the human persuasion. The image we project, and in turn the image that we receive from the person we encounter in the world. Who and what are we? What are we presenting to others, and what does that say about us?
As a human being, I have learned that I am in fact many people all at once. I am a gradient, from specific to generic; from a Paul to a person. A brother. A friend. A Class D Motor Vehicle Operator. I am, quite probably, hundreds of different people. But these people are all unsubstantiated. They are not me, and they do not exist. Find me a mechanic. No, not John the mechanic, or Alyssa the mechanic, or so-and-so the whatever. Find me a mechanic. You can’t. Conceptually, the term mechanic refers to a discreet, quantified set of features and associated behaviors. There is no such thing, exclusively, as a mechanic. It merely describes a series of patterns. These patterns I emulate, consciously or not, so as to better conform to or deny the definition of Mechanic. I am a bit mechanically-minded, but I am not particularly skilled. My career choice is decidedly white-collar. I am not really much of a mechanic, but I make do in certain situations. Paul is not much of a mechanic. I guess I fall somewhere to the left of Mechanic. When discussing the various people that I am, what we are really discussing are shades of language. Specters of an ideal which I, of course, will never fully realize in the world (nor could I). Spirituality, Love, Gender, Culture, Taste, Temperament, Vocation; everything that makes me, me and you, you is conceptual. They do not exist in themselves. All that exists are the patterns of action and thought which correspond, in greater or lesser degrees, to the artificial concept. There is no Man or Woman or Operator or Mechanic. There are just us, living entities, bubbling along in the Sea of Life.
Besides being a thousand people and no one, I am also always in flux among them. To bubble is to vacillate between the various people that constitute me. When I wake up in the morning I am not the same as when I went to bed the night prior. This is physically, empirically true, both from the physico-chemical perspective and the biological (which are really one and the same perspective, truth be told). More importantly, I am also constantly acting, moving, thinking and Valuing the world around me. Based on my mood and prior experiences, I value various objects in the world and how they relate to me. I also value Perspectives, or rather the roles of the various people that I am, and how appealing that role is to me. When I wake up feeling sick, I am less of a Good Worker – I am less motivated, diligent, active, and the associated shadow fades a little bit. The chorus (or legion) that constitutes my being is changed. I am new and different from the day before. This fluctuation happens constantly, informed by whether I have eaten, the weather, who I met today, and in general my experience as it is perceived and cognized. As a living person you mirror the grand, ever changing life-scape of the larger world within yourself. This living dance is part of a larger unity called the Soul.
The soul is nothing more (or less) than the marriage of the ever changing multitude of what you Are with the relatively static notion of what you Will Be. Put another way, the soul is the union of self, I, and being-in-the-world. I am a triumvirate. That sounds very artsy and academic and stupid, but it makes sense: I (that is the I, or Cogito, or Ego, the notion of conscious directedness and unity of personhood) + Self (that is me in the physical sense – my body, my emotional state, my perceptual sphere) + Being-in-the-world (this is the chorus, my various actions and thoughts, potentialities, and dispositions. When externally considered, they present a sea of conceptual persons whom I inhabit at varying times and to varying degrees)= Paul, or my Soul. To the outside observer, this is also known as my Identity.
Identity and soul are like two sides of one coin. Soul is the closest thing I have to a full experience of myself and all that constitutes me there. Identity is the closest thing you have to a full experience of myself and all that constitutes me here. Both are impossible to fully express due to several factors: the limitations of language, the every changing status of my existence, and the impossibility of encompassing something which exists beyond the realm of the encompassable1In any case, today I am primarily concerned with Identity, which is nothing other than an Image.
To the entire World, to those you love, or hate, or have never even met, you are functionally an Image. Albeit an extremely complicated one – an Identity – but an image nonetheless. Your image is a representation of only a part of you (as Identity is an imperfect representation of the soul drawn outward). However, you can focus that image, or rather you can consciously choose to emphasize and draw out one member of the chorus, and have them sing in soliloquy (this is what happens when I write, or become particularly focused at work). You can even choose to falsify the image. You can Photoshop yourself (and unless you are some Tibetan Monk meditating on the profundity of the living Universe, chances are you are falsifying your image from time to time). Many of these alterations are, in my estimation, benign. We deceive through all three modes of personhood: through the I (lies of intentionality, attentiveness, certainty), Self (desire and violence), and being-in-the-world (overemphasizing one role over another). As messy, interconnected beings, these all overlap. It seems like a waste of time to try to tease them out away from each other since functionally what ends up happening is the same – we become something for others that we are not in our Soul. Take, for example, a Murderer. Murder has been treated by far more skilled men and women than I, and with good reason. By and large, the societies of the World agree Murder isn’t Okay. This level of agreement is a rare thing, and worth studying. I ask you to consider the Murderer exclusively as an image of a person.
The Murderer is a member of the chorus for some. The difference between a true Image and false Image is not whether or not the Murderer murdered anyone. Identity is not an object to be examined through the lens of causality. Assuming the Murderer did, in fact, off a dude, it is up to the person who murdered to determine the falseness of the Image or Identity they have chosen2. It is perfectly reasonable to assume someone simply is a murderer, and their identity coincides with their soul. The gradient of Murder is a very steep one; it is difficult to see how someone could be in the middle. Perhaps someone who has very strong impulses to kill, but still resists. Murder in the traditional sense is binary – either you killed someone or you didn’t. I am not speaking of this particular concept, but rather an interpretation that represents both thoughts and possibility of action as well. Having some knowledge of how to douse several types of fire, I fall more towards the middle of another steep gradient – Firefighter, though I have never fought a large fire. It is all playing with words. In any case, it is equally plausible that someone exists who, willingly or unconsciously, has denied the desire of their soul to not be a murderer, either because of external factors (coercion, substance-abuse, etc.) or internal factors (delusion). The reverse is also possible, and there are people out there who have the conviction to resist their base impulse to murder.
Your image, though intimately connected to your soul, is also independent and flexible enough to go against the soul. Inadvertently or intentionally, the image you present is more often than not quite different from your soul. This is why they should not be conflated, and here I get to the heart of what I see as a growing problem with personal image. Identity, false or not, exists as an ever-flowing representation of ourselves to others. It is both decided upon and intuitively generated, depending upon the circumstance and occasion of a given experiential moment. Our Identity is, and again I stress this, not our soul. It is our form in dynamics presented externally. The reason why I have been considering identity so much lately is because our society seems to be falling into an obsession with the subject. Personally, I blame sociology, but I have always hated sociology as a dumb bogus pseudoscience that only states the obvious and tautological and is for idiot baby retards. In any case, whether race, religion, social status, or gender, people have become hyper-categorical with respect to themselves and each other. Unfortunately, this does a great disservice to everyone. People are confusing their Identity with their Soul, and mistakenly interpreting a value judgment made about their Identity as a value judgment about their Soul. For a particularly topical example, take Bruce, now Caitlyn Jenner. Here is a man, now woman, who strikes me as someone who is unaware of the distinction between Identity and Soul, and what it really means for an Identity to be a unity of various parts. She has gone on record as saying she is a woman, who is straight, and who is sexually attracted to women. This only causes cognitive dissonance until it becomes apparent that Caitlyn is operating under some incorrect assumptions. First, that there are women and men in this world, second, that you necessarily have to be one or the other, and third, that your Identity has to mirror your internal content with respect to a given object. Women and men don’t exist; any privilege and social structure related to gender status is entirely man-made, tacitly tied to biological sex. That anyone chooses to act differently towards someone based purely on sex is another issue for another day, but strictly speaking, it is this sexual bias, and the false presumption that certain behaviors will be expected from someone (indeed an inferred Image of a person being projected back towards the subject) that cause the kind of discord that Caitlyn experienced.
Caitlyn says that she can now do things that she always wanted to – paint her nails and keep them that way until the paint chips off. Have lady’s night at home chatting about personal things with her friends. Wearing dresses, looking how she feels inside, etc. I ask you what any of these really have to do with what she is? I also ask is she a she, and am I a he? I am a person, she is a person, and it is the ancient sexual distinction in our language,a dualistic understanding of personhood that forces concepts upon others, that drives her false assumption. I have encountered no statement on her part that, strictly speaking, she was not already free to do without reacting in the mode of gender disparity. I see no reason why Bruce could not have painted his nails, had a chat about personal things, worn dresses beforehand. It really comes down to an issue of vanity – given the benefit of the doubt, Bruce didn’t much like how he looked, and so he changed his appearance. Fine and good. This should have been the end of it – we are free to change our names, our appearance, our image. It is absolutely within the sphere of human freedom for someone to say “I like the way I look better this way” and leave it at that. Clearly, at least from a biological/sexual standpoint, Caitlyn is still aware of her male-ness, and still expresses that in a pattern of male-female attraction and behavior. This is also completely permissible and not in the least confusing if you can extract yourself from a gendered mode of thought and keep in mind the dialectic between Identity and Soul. In her soul, Caitlyn has thousands of statuses, potential and current actions, etc. some of which relate to women in a male way. Part of Identity for Caitlyn is to go by a name and form her3 body a certain way. But Bruce, in becoming Caitlyn, also continued to force genderization down our throats, by enforcing, for instance, the notion that one must be a woman in order to have an intimate night in with friends. Bruce did not understand that Identity is whatever you make it, that it is an ever-changing entity that is only half a person. More importantly, he did not understand that Identity is constantly changing, altering, and bears very little on the actual person and what you do. Do what you want, and what you value as right. Interact with people as you will. Don’t force external concepts upon yourself. In becoming Caitlyn, Bruce Jenner should have simply done it because it better fit his Identity. By making it all about “who he really was on the inside” he forced an abbreviation of the human person on himself. He has tried to force a concept with which he has become fixated (femininity) upon himself. In so doing, his image has lost some of its humanity, instead becoming more like a caricature. To disparage or aggrandize her is not the point. We should all be capable of seeing what has occurred for what it is – an alteration of image. There is no great triumph here, and no insulting blow to the cohesion of society. There is someone who has simply decided to alter how they present themselves, but for reasons that I suspect are misguided.
So what? Well, I just think it is disappointing that we see this as either courage worth celebrating, or perversion worth defamation. It is neither. It is an attempt by someone to become a freer, actualized person. Those worth celebrating are those who live their lives beyond the shroud of conceptuality. We are all worth celebrating when we live exactly how we see fit, and not thoughtlessly conforming with artificial constructs. I am not advocating for some hellish narcissistic anarchy of the mind. Many concepts serve tremendously useful roles in society. Anyone deliberately shirking all conceptuality is at best misguided and at worst a total douchebag artist guy who subverts trends and is a big ol’ piece of shit. We should all remember that concepts are simply tools for expression, aspects of ourselves to denote a predilection for certain behaviors and thoughts. Nothing more. We cannot choose all of them, but we can choose some of them, and we can certainly choose how important each is to us. To impinge upon yourself for the sake of your image is to deny your right to independence and the freedom to change yourself for the better. The truth is we are all exactly what we make of ourselves. We are not women, men, workers, fighters, lovers, madmen, presidents, musicians. We are people. We are all of these things and none of them. There is much in life we must simply endure; the actions of others and the movement of the world cannot be controlled, and they are often cruel and frightening. But the fullness of your freedom as an individual is itself daunting, even terrifying. It can be easy to turn to the simple and conceptual as an appeal for relief from the angst and fear we feel in our vast universe. But we must face these difficulties with our heads held high, because it is in our freedom that we can exert control and become greater than ourselves. We must not throw down our mantle of creator; we must instead create and recreate ourselves and our expressions.
Notes
- This might sound quasi-religious, but it is actually a fairly technical point. Externally, you have no access to my mind; it is beyond the realm of comprehensibility for you since you cannot experience it, and so you cannot fully understand my Identity. Similarly, I cannot know the fullness of my Soul because I am my Soul, so I cannot get outside my Soul to look at it completely and know it fully.
- A reminder that it is meaningless for us to consider the falseness of their Image – we only receive the image. There is no access beyond this. In a court of law, when we try to determine Intent, we are NOT reviewing the Image of the person. We are merely inspecting another facet of their personhood – whether they are a Liar, or Desperate, etc. The Image-Soul relationship is forever inaccessible to the outsider
- Truthfully, it is extremely annoying that I have to use pronouns this way, because it makes it difficult to make my point. Unless we are talking about physical sex – that is if you want to know what kind of junk I am carrying around in my pants – it isn’t helpful anymore. If people are to get past the notion that gender is anything other than a convenience in interpersonal relationships, another concept in a sea of concepts that help us better define one another, then we have to start ignoring genderedness in language entirely. But good luck with that.