It is not unimaginable that a person would
alienate himself from a project of his which he is being actively and
successfully engaged in and which has positive value in the eyes of others. Let
us consider the case of Tolstoy. For most people, his identity as a great
novelist, or more specifically, as the author of War and Peace and Anna
Karenina, certainly had positive value, but the following is how Tolstoy
himself thought about this identity in A
Confession:
During this time I began to write out of vanity,
self-interest and pride. In my writings I did the same as I did in life. In
order to achieve the fame and money for which I wrote I had to conceal what was
good in myself and display what was bad. And this is what I did. Time and again
I would contrive in my writing to conceal under the guise of indifference, or
even of light-heartedness, those strivings for goodness which lent meaning to
my life. And I succeeded and was praised.
Or
thinking about the fame my own writing brought me, I would say to myself, “Well
fine, so you will be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Molière,
more famous than all the writers in the world, and so what?”
It is
clear that Tolstoy himself, at least when he was writing A Confession, did not think his life was meaningful by virtue of
his identity as a respected and famous novelist. It did not matter to him what
others thought; even if everyone else thought his life was meaningful by virtue
of his identity as a greater writer, he did not think so because he did not
identify himself with that identity ¾ he did not think
this is what he really was or what he wanted himself to be.
If it is not clear enough from the above
quoted passages that Tolstoy alienated himself from his identity as a novelist,
a writer, or an artist, the following passage should make it clear:
‘Art,
poetry …’ For a long time, under the influence of success and praise from
others, I had persuaded myself that this was a thing that could be done, […]
But I quickly realized that this too was a delusion. It was clear to me that
art is an adornment and embellishment of life. But it had lost its charm for
me, so how could I charm others? While I was not living my own life but was
being carried along on the crest of another life, as long as I believed that
life had meaning even if I could not express it, the reflection of life in
poetry and in art of all kinds gave me joy and I enjoyed watching life through
the mirror of art. But when I began to search for the meaning of life, when I
began to feel the necessity of living, I found this mirror either unnecessary,
superfluous and ridiculous, or tormenting.
It is also clear from what Tolstoy said about
his identity as a writer that he did not value
this identity even though it was (and would be) valued by others. This suggests
that a person cannot value an identity of hers without identifying herself with
that identity. Some may think that since a person can identify herself with an
identity that she does not value (such as in the case of a Dalit), she can also
value an identity which she in fact has but which she does not identify herself
with. Let me explain why the latter is not true. To identify oneself with one’s
identity as x is to see x as part of what one really is, while
to value one’s identity as x is to
see x as what one wants to be or what
one should be. It is possible for a person to believe that she really is x without wanting to be x or believing that she should be x ¾ it is possible for
her to identify herself with x
without valuing x. Now if a person
wants to be x or believes that she
should be x, and if she indeed is x and is aware that x is one of her identities, then it does not make sense for her to
deny that she really is x. Indeed,
given that she wants to be x, she
cannot consistently refuse to embrace her identity as x ¾ she cannot consistently
value x without identifying herself
with x.
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