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Written by Muriel Leuenberger
The more philosophers I have come to know, the more I realize how deeply personal philosophy is. Philosophical positions often emerge from personal experience and character – even the seemingly most technical, detached, and abstract ones. As Iris Murdoch wrote: “To do philosophy is to explore one’s own temperament, and yet at the same time to attempt to discover the truth.” Philosophy is an expression of how one sees the world, a clarification, development, and defense of “an outlook that defines who someone is” to add the words of Kieran Setiya.
This personal dimension of philosophy becomes evident in the new philosophical positions and topics that emerge when people with different personal experiences and points of view start to do philosophy. The most prominent example is how women in philosophy, particularly in the last 50 years, have contributed new perspectives – a brush of fresh air in old, stuffy rooms. Philosophy’s allegedly objective view from nowhere was rather the view from a particularly male perspective. Care ethics, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of pregnancy are just some areas where the inclusion of women in philosophy with their own outlook and priorities has advanced the discipline.[i]
The relational turn that can be observed in the philosophy of identity can be seen as a recent addition to this list. Relational identity is the idea that who you are is not just defined by your own properties and characteristics but also by how others define you. Others define us through concepts and norms we acquire in a social context that shape how we see ourselves and the world, they define us through our relations with them as friends, siblings, or members of an ethnic group or a book club, and they have the power to constrain our scope of action or provide opportunities. The latter can be a particularly incisive way of being defined by others. For example, by banning women in Afghanistan from universities the Taliban is defining who they can be. They can no longer become a doctor who dedicates their life to and finds meaning in caring for their patients. Insofar as we are defined by our actions, we can be defined by others who exercise control over what we can do in our lives.
Philosophy has typically been pursued by people whose life was in some sense open to them. They had a range of opportunities – doing philosophy was one of them – and did not face strongly limiting constraints and expectations, as in the example of an Afghan woman today. Academia and with it philosophy have become more accessible in many parts of the world. This means that more people are doing philosophy who either experienced more limiting constraints posed by others or who are aware that only very recent changes or the fact that they are born in a certain country spared them from a life of far-reaching constraints. People who have experienced or can readily empathize with how others can define one’s identity have entered the debate on identity. This development makes the emergence and rising popularity of relational identity views comprehensible.
I want to highlight a further, related reason for how the personal dimension of philosophy creates new trends besides the commonly mentioned shift in who is doing philosophy. The growing literature on philosophy concerned with topics and positions relevant to and based on the experience of a more diverse range of people can also be traced back to a diversification in whose testimony is being heard and taken seriously. As Miranda Fricker argued, marginalized groups are often faced with testimonial injustice – their testimonies are considered less credible due to prejudices related to their identity. For most of the history of philosophy, testimonies of experiences and viewpoints of women, non-western, non-binary, and non-white people were not heard, not taken as seriously or relevant, and not readily accessible. Globalization, digitalization, and a cultural shift towards more openness and equality are gradually changing this (although we still have a long way to go). The increased accessibility and ascribed credibility of testimonies of diverse experiences can inspire new topics and positions in philosophers who do not share those experiences but have come to learn about and empathize with them.
Philosophy clearly profits from taking other perspectives into account. We can get a richer picture of reality, a broader understanding of the moral landscape, raise interesting metaphysical questions, and new philosophical positions can come into sight that challenge established old doctrines. The deeply personal character of philosophy makes the inclusion of and attention to different voices all the more pressing.
[i] Vintiadis, Elly (2021, August). The view from her. Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/is-there-something-special-about-the-way-women-do-philosophy
Written by Muriel Leuenberger
The question of who gets to be a person is one of those old but never outdated classics in philosophy. Throughout history, philosophers have discussed which human beings are persons, when human beings start to be persons, when they are no longer the same person, and whether non-human beings can be persons – and the discussion continues.
The task of defining the concept of a person can be approached from a purely ontological angle, by looking at what kind of entities exist in the world. There are those beings we want to call persons – what unites them and what separates them from non-persons? This ontological project has, at least at first sight, nothing to do with how the world should be and purely with how it is.
But many moral practices are connected to this concept. Persons deserve praise and blame, they should not be experimented on without their consent, they can make promises, they should be respected. The status of personhood is connected to a moral status. Because of the properties persons have they deserve to be treated and can act in a certain way. Personhood is what can be called a thick concept. It combines descriptive and normative dimensions. To be a person one must meet certain descriptive conditions. But being a person also comes with a distinctive moral status.
Defining thick concepts is particularly tricky. Those definitions are not just judged for their descriptive plausibility but whether they imply acceptable moral practices. In the debate on personhood, philosophers have repeatedly drawn boundaries on the descriptive level that lead to normative implications they do not want to support. Notably, individuals who they would like to see treated as persons do not meet their criteria for personhood because they do not have certain cognitive capacities.[i] Most recently, this happened in this year’s John Locke Lecture by Susan Wolf on Selves like us.[ii] She argued compellingly for a definition of character as a complex of dispositions and tendencies that reflect and express one’s distinctive way of seeing the world. She furthermore seemed to imply that certain types of attitudes, such as resentment, gratitude, forgiveness, anger, or love (Strawson’s reactive attitudes[iii]), can only be directed towards ‘selves like us’ which meet her definition of having a character. In her account, character requires cognitive faculties of “active intelligence”. Because of this, the question arose what this implies for individuals with cognitive disorders. She replied that she would certainly not want to exclude them from being appropriate objects of reactive attitudes and would have to do more research to work out how they would fit in her framework.
There seems to be a disparity between our intuitions and opinions on who should be treated as a person and descriptive definitions of the term. One attempt at fixing this problem has been to stipulate that while the suggested definition of personhood excludes, for instance, people suffering from dementia from being persons, this does not undermine their moral status.[iv] But because the normative and descriptive dimensions are intertwined in thick concepts, such attempts at separating them do not seem to be successful. It’s too little too late to reassert the moral status of an individual whose personhood has just been denied. The rhetorical power of denying that someone is a person should not be underestimated – a reassurance that this does not affect their moral status seems insufficient to counteract it.
Personhood is usually defined via capacities, such as moral agency, autonomy, self-awareness, narration, or rationality. Those capacities require certain brain functions – they are tied to biological facts about the individual. But biology is fuzzy, gradual, and full of multiple but slightly different solutions for the same problem (e.g., for realizing a capacity). As David DeGrazia[v] argues, those capacities are multidimensional and gradational. For instance, there are different kinds of self-awareness (bodily, social, introspective) and they come in degrees. To know whether, for example, great apes are persons, we would have to define arbitrary cut-off points for the capacities that are defined as essential to personhood. Thus, personhood is a vague concept, meaning that there is no non-arbitrary way to define whether an individual is a person. Because it is also a thick concept, arbitrary cut-offs are particularly worrisome since they can have far-reaching normative implications.
In the face of those considerations, we should be aware of and thematize the limits of definitions of personhood (or selves). Marginal cases can and should remain undecided. This does not mean that philosophy has nothing to say about what is distinctive of persons. Identifying common properties of clear, paradigmatic cases of persons can make salient in which way marginal cases differ. Differences in moral practices can be accounted for through distinct properties, instead of an overarching term like personhood or self. This allows for more nuance in our moral practices.
Pattern theories of personhood or self, which take a range of properties and capacities into account, can be particularly helpful in this regard.[vi] According to a pattern-theory, personhood or self are constituted by a cluster of dimensions that interact with each other and that take a different value and weight for each individual. A self might, for instance, be constituted by embodied, experiential, affective, behavioral, intersubjective, and narrative dimensions. Someone becomes a person through the dynamic interaction of a range of capacities, such as, moral agency, autonomy, self-awareness, narration, and rationality. Changes to one dimension may cause modulations in others. Concepts like personhood or the self are not reducible to any one of these aspects but are complex systems that emerge from the dynamic interactions of those constituents.
Pattern theories can illuminate how a range of properties and capacities interrelate to produce characteristics typical of clear cases and make salient in which ways other individuals differ. Instead of either ascribing marginal cases the status of personhood or not, pattern theories can describe them in terms of different types of persons (with gradual transitions in-between) which warrant distinct moral practices. Thereby, they can help us to avoid the philosopher’s compulsion to draw clear lines where there are none.
[i] On the other hand, definitions of personhood can of course also appear to be overly inclusive.
[ii] Self and person are often used interchangeably. Definitions of the self face the same problems because the self tends be considered as a thick concept as well (albeit less obviously than in the case of personhood).
[iii] Strawson, P. F. (2008). Freedom and resentment and other essays. Routledge.
[iv] Schechtman, M. (1996). The Constitution of Selves. Cornell University Press.
[v] DeGrazia, D. (1997). Great apes, dolphins, and the concept of personhood. The Southern journal of philosophy, 35(3), 301-320.
[vi] Leuenberger, M. (Forthcoming) A Narrative Pattern-Theory of the Self. In: Personhood, Self-Consciousness, and the First-Person Perspective. Edited by Markus Hermann. Brill mentis.
Gallagher, S. (2013). A Pattern Theory of Self. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 443-443.
Written by Muriel Leuenberger
A modified version of this post is forthcoming in Think edited by Stephen Law.
Authenticity is a popular ideal. Particularly in the western world, authenticity has developed into a prevailing ideal since its rise in Modernity.[1] The search for authenticity is a common trope in film and literature, countless self-help books advise us how to become more authentic, and marketing and politics have long discovered authenticity as a useful label to sell goods and candidates.
Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are recent examples of politicians who presented themselves and were perceived by many as particularly authentic. At the same time, both are known for not taking the truth too seriously, if not for being notorious liars. This seems like a contradiction. Can you be an authentic liar? Figures like Johnson and Trump can prompt us to reconsider and clarify what we mean by a concept like authenticity as well as how we should relate to ourselves and express ourselves to others.
We all lie, of course. If any small lie leads to a verdict of inauthenticity, we all fail at being authentic. Authenticity is an ideal concerned with who you truly are. Far from every lie you tell seems to be defining or expressive of who you truly are. The lies that most powerfully threaten authenticity are lies about central aspects of who you are as a person—lies about personally significant beliefs, values, goals, wishes, character traits, emotions, or abilities and aptitudes. Politicians who lie about their beliefs and values to convince voters are an all-too-common example of this. Keeping this focus on personally significant lies in mind, let’s take a look at the concept of authenticity.
Authenticity is a complex concept that combines multiple traditions.[2] Rousseau, Herder, and the romantics as well as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and the existentialists have referred to and influenced this ideal. To do justice to both the complexity of the concept of authenticity as well as human nature, authenticity is best understood as a multidimensional concept. The ideal of authenticity provides guidance within different dimensions of how we should relate to, know, define, and express ourselves.
What many people think of first when they hear “authenticity” is being in touch with their true self, a type of knowledge. Authenticity as self-knowledge means understanding and knowing who you truly are. You may achieve self-knowledge, for instance, through introspection and reflection or conversations with friends and family. As long as your self-conception coincides with your true self, you are authentic. Thus, if you know that you are a liar and you understand why you lie, you are authentic.
But arguably, an important part of being authentic is how you express yourself to others. For example, a person who is free of all delusions about who they are, but is forced to hide their identity from others, is unable to live an authentic life. According to authenticity as truthfulness, to be authentic means to express truthfully and openly what you think or feel. This seems to imply that a liar would be inauthentic.
However, we can distinguish two different kinds of truthfulness. One is a careful attempt at being as honest and transparent as possible. It requires self-knowledge and is concerned with getting to the heart of the individual. According to this view, you achieve authenticity in a two-step process. First, you have to know yourself. Second, you have to live and present yourself to others according to who you truly are. We can call this authenticity as self-knowledge and self-expression.
Now, what if, after careful introspection and reflection, you find out that you truly are a notorious liar? In this case, another dimension of authenticity provides further guidance. Authenticity also demands defining, being, and expressing yourself largely free of the restrictions of social norms and conventions. We can call this authenticity as independence. This entails not taking the easy route and misrepresenting who you are or what you think and feel to achieve your goals, such as to impress others or get a job. Thus, the reasons for being a liar matter. A person who is lying because she is ashamed of what she did or someone who lies because he wants to sway potential voters would be inauthentic. A person who lies just for the sake of it, for instance, because she just likes to confabulate and trick others, could do so authentically.
The other notion of truthfulness is truthfulness as an unfiltered expression of thoughts and emotions. You do not have to truly know yourself to be truthful in this sense, you should just not be a phony. Your self-expression should coincide with your experiences and self-conception, no matter whether you are self-deluded. This is authenticity as self-expression. According to this dimension, a person who is telling falsehoods without being aware of it would be authentic, but he would not qualify as a liar. A true liar would always be inauthentic.
A further dimension of authenticity requires that your self-expression coincides with your true self. If you lie you are inauthentic unless you are self-deluded and just happen to tell the truth about yourself even though you think you are lying.
Lastly, I want to mention authenticity as coherence. According to this account, your true self consists of your mutually cohering personal features—the ones that make sense in light of each other and support each other. To be authentic you should live according to your cohering values, goals, traits, beliefs, and other personally significant characteristics. Thus, as long as lying is consistent with who you are, with your overall values, goals, and other characteristics, you are an authentic liar.
So where does all of this leave us with the question of the authentic liar? First of all, it shows that authenticity is a complex concept that comes with a broad range of considerations about the authenticity of lying in which the reasons for lying, insight into those reasons, and overall personal characteristics play an important role. It also means that we need to do some work to find out which dimensions of authenticity provide us with an ideal that is worth pursuing. Why should we value authenticity as self-expression or authenticity as independence? We might also be inclined to say that all dimensions of authenticity are worth pursuing. In this case, authenticity would demand congruence between the true self, one’s self-conception, and one’s self-expression, as well as coherence. Most liars fail to be authentic across multiple of those dimensions and all of them fail regarding authenticity as self-expression. Overall, if you care about authenticity, you should probably refrain from personally significant lies—being honest is definitely less threatening to authenticity than lying.
The reason why many have considered figures like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump as authentic likely has to do with the image they cultivate as not restricting themselves by social norms and expectations (authenticity as independence). According to an online study, for non-establishment candidates, lying can also be conceived as a challenge to the elite and not as really lying. For a long time, their lies did not seem to hurt their image as authentic, or at least not enough to overshadow their authenticity as independence. However, as this opinion article suggests, at least at the end of his position as prime minister, Boris Johnson has stretched it too far and is now more likely to be perceived as devious and corrupt rather than warmly authentic. The image of the authentic liar seems to have its limits.
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