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.

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…

“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.

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.

Douglas deploys cultural references (he makes a sterling case for Suyin Han’s “A Many-Splendoured Thing”), personal revelation (his father’s Alzheimer’s) and mordant wit. The “body swap” so beloved of cinema – Freaky Friday, Dr Who’s New Earth, Stargate’s Holiday – is given a kind of philosophical lingchi. This is certainly one of my highlights of the year.