O eu não é singular, mas uma rede fluida de identidades.

Você é um entrelaçamento de emoções e experiências. Você não pode ser reduzido a um

corpo, uma mente ou um papel social específico. Leia mais sobre como essa
individualidade obtém essa complexidade.

Quem sou eu? Todos nós nos fazemos essa pergunta, e muitos gostam. Minha identidade
é determinada pelo meu DNA ou sou um produto do meio onde sou criado? Posso mudar
e, se sim, quanto? Minha identidade é apenas uma, ou posso ter mais de uma? Desde o
seu início, a filosofia enfrenta essas perguntas, que são importantes para a
maneira como fazemos escolhas e como interagimos com o mundo ao nosso redor.
Sócrates pensou que a autocompreensão era essencial para saber como viver bem
consigo mesmo e com os outros. A autodeterminação depende do autoconhecimento, do
conhecimento dos outros e do mundo ao seu redor. Mesmo a formação de governos estão
fundamentadas na maneira como nos entendemos e na natureza humana. Então, a
pergunta 'quem sou eu?' tem implicações de longo alcance.

Muitos filósofos, pelo menos no Ocidente, procuraram identificar as condições

invariáveis ou essenciais de ser alguém. Uma abordagem amplamente adotada é o que é
conhecido como uma visão de continuidade psicológica do eu, onde o eu é uma
consciência com autoconsciência e memórias pessoais. Às vezes, essas abordagens
enquadram o eu como uma combinação de mente e corpo, como René Descartes fez, ou
apenas como consciência. A experiência de pensamento do príncipe/pobre de John
Locke, em que a consciência de um príncipe e todas as suas memórias são
transferidas para o corpo de um sapateiro, é uma ilustração da ideia de que a
personalidade acompanha a consciência. Os filósofos criaram numerosos experimentos
de pensamento subsequentes - envolvendo transferências de personalidade, cérebros e
teletransportadores - para explorar a abordagem psicológica. Os filósofos
contemporâneos no campo "animalista" são críticos da abordagem psicológica e
argumentam que os mesmos são essencialmente organismos biológicos humanos.
(Aristóteles também está mais próximo dessa abordagem do que dos puramente
psicológicos). Ambas as abordagens psicológicas e animalistas são estruturas de
"contêiners", posicionando o corpo como um recipiente de funções psicológicas ou a
localização limitada das funções corporais.

Todas essas abordagens refletem a preocupação dos filósofos de se concentrar no que

é a característica distintiva ou definitiva de um eu, a coisa que escolherá um eu e
nada mais, e que identificará o eu como eu, independentemente de suas diferenças
particulares. Na visão psicológica, um eu é uma consciência pessoal. Na visão
animalista, um eu é um organismo ou animal humano. Isso tendia a levar a uma visão
um tanto unidimensional e simplificada do que é um eu, deixando de fora os traços
sociais, culturais e interpessoais que também são distintos de nós e são
frequentemente o que as pessoas consideram centrais em sua auto-identidade. Assim
como os eus têm diferentes lembranças pessoais e autoconsciência, eles podem ter
diferentes relações sociais e interpessoais, antecedentes e personalidades
culturais. Estes últimos são variáveis em sua especificidade, mas são tão
importantes para serem um eu quanto biologia, memória e autoconsciência.

Recognising the influence of these factors, some philosophers have pushed against
such reductive approaches and argued for a framework that recognises the complexity
and multidimensionality of persons. The network self view emerges from this trend.
It began in the later 20th century and has continued in the 21st, when philosophers
started to move toward a broader understanding of selves. Some philosophers propose
narrative and anthropological views of selves. Communitarian and feminist
philosophers argue for relational views that recognise the social embeddedness,
relatedness and intersectionality of selves. According to relational views, social
relations and identities are fundamental to understanding who persons are.

Social identities are traits of selves in virtue of membership in communities

(local, professional, ethnic, religious, political), or in virtue of social
categories (such as race, gender, class, political affiliation) or interpersonal
relations (such as being a spouse, sibling, parent, friend, neighbour). These views
imply that it’s not only embodiment and not only memory or consciousness of social
relations but the relations themselves that also matter to who the self is. What
philosophers call ‘4E views’ of cognition – for embodied, embedded, enactive and
extended cognition – are also a move in the direction of a more relational, less
‘container’, view of the self. Relational views signal a paradigm shift from a
reductive approach to one that seeks to recognise the complexity of the self. The
network self view further develops this line of thought and says that the self is
relational through and through, consisting not only of social but also physical,
genetic, psychological, emotional and biological relations that together form a
network self. The self also changes over time, acquiring and losing traits in
virtue of new social locations and relations, even as it continues as that one
self.

How do you self-identify? You probably have many aspects to yourself and would
resist being reduced to or stereotyped as any one of them. But you might still
identify yourself in terms of your heritage, ethnicity, race, religion: identities
that are often prominent in identity politics. You might identify yourself in terms
of other social and personal relationships and characteristics – ‘I’m Mary’s
sister.’ ‘I’m a music-lover.’ ‘I’m Emily’s thesis advisor.’ ‘I’m a Chicagoan.’ Or
you might identify personality characteristics: ‘I’m an extrovert’; or commitments:
‘I care about the environment.’ ‘I’m honest.’ You might identify yourself
comparatively: ‘I’m the tallest person in my family’; or in terms of one’s
political beliefs or affiliations: ‘I’m an independent’; or temporally: ‘I’m the
person who lived down the hall from you in college,’ or ‘I’m getting married next
year.’ Some of these are more important than others, some are fleeting. The point
is that who you are is more complex than any one of your identities. Thinking of
the self as a network is a way to conceptualise this complexity and fluidity.

Let’s take a concrete example. Consider Lindsey: she is spouse, mother, novelist,
English speaker, Irish Catholic, feminist, professor of philosophy, automobile
driver, psychobiological organism, introverted, fearful of heights, left-handed,
carrier of Huntington’s disease (HD), resident of New York City. This is not an
exhaustive set, just a selection of traits or identities. Traits are related to one
another to form a network of traits. Lindsey is an inclusive network, a plurality
of traits related to one another. The overall character – the integrity – of a self
is constituted by the unique interrelatedness of its particular relational traits,
psychobiological, social, political, cultural, linguistic and physical.

Figure 1 below is based on an approach to modelling ecological networks; the nodes

represent traits, and the lines are relations between traits (without specifying
the kind of relation).

IMAGE 1

We notice right away the complex interrelatedness among Lindsey’s traits. We can
also see that some traits seem to be clustered, that is, related more to some
traits than to others. Just as a body is a highly complex, organised network of
organismic and molecular systems, the self is a highly organised network. Traits of
the self can organise into clusters or hubs, such as a body cluster, a family
cluster, a social cluster. There might be other clusters, but keeping it to a few
is sufficient to illustrate the idea. A second approximation, Figure 2 below,
captures the clustering idea.

IMAGE 2

Figures 1 and 2 are simplifications of the bodily, personal and social relations
that make up the self. Traits can be closely clustered, but they also cross over
and intersect with traits in other hubs or clusters. For instance, a genetic trait
– ‘Huntington’s disease carrier’ (HD in figures 1 and 2) – is related to
biological, family and social traits. If the carrier status is known, there are
also psychological and social relations to other carriers and to familial and
medical communities. Clusters or sub-networks are not isolated, or self-enclosed
hubs, and might regroup as the self develops.

"Sometimes her experience might be fractured, as when others take one of her
identities as defining all of her."

Some traits might be more dominant than others. Being a spouse might be strongly
relevant to who Lindsey is, whereas being an aunt weakly relevant. Some traits
might be more salient in some contexts than others. In Lindsey’s neighbourhood,
being a parent might be more salient than being a philosopher, whereas at the
university being a philosopher is more prominent.

Lindsey can have a holistic experience of her multifaceted, interconnected network

identity. Sometimes, though, her experience might be fractured, as when others take
one of her identities as defining all of her. Suppose that, in an employment
context, she isn’t promoted, earns a lower salary or isn’t considered for a job
because of her gender.

Discrimination is when an identity – race, gender, ethnicity – becomes the way in

which someone is identified by others, and therefore might experience herself as
reduced or objectified. It is the inappropriate, arbitrary or unfair salience of a
trait in a context.

Lindsey might feel conflict or tension between her identities. She might not want
to be reduced to or stereotyped by any one identity. She might feel the need to
dissimulate, suppress or conceal some identity, as well as associated feelings and
beliefs. She might feel that some of these are not essential to who she really is.
But even if some are less important than others, and some are strongly relevant to
who she is and identifies as, they’re all still interconnected ways in which
Lindsey is.

Figures 1 and 2 above represent the network self, Lindsey, at a cross-section of

time, say at early to mid-adulthood. What about the changeableness and fluidity of
the self? What about other stages of Lindsey’s life? Lindsey-at- age-five is not a
spouse or a mother, and future stages of Lindsey might include different traits and
relations too: she might divorce or change careers or undergo a gender identity
transformation. The network self is also a process.

It might seem strange at first to think of yourself as a process. You might think
that processes are just a series of events, and your self feels more substantial
than that. Maybe you think of yourself as an entity that’s distinct from relations,
that change is something that happens to an unchangeable core that is you. You’d be
in good company if you do. There’s a long history in philosophy going back to
Aristotle arguing for a distinction between a substance and its properties, between
substance and relations, and between entities and events.

However, the idea that the self is a network and a process is more plausible than
you might think. Paradigmatic substances, such as the body, are systems of networks
that are in constant process even when we don’t see that at a macro level: cells
are replaced, hair and nails grow, food is digested, cellular and molecular
processes are ongoing as long as the body is alive. Consciousness or the stream of
awareness itself is in constant flux. Psychological dispositions or attitudes might
be subject to variation in expression and occurrence. They’re not fixed and
invariable, even when they’re somewhat settled aspects of a self. Social traits
evolve. For example, Lindsey-as-daughter develops and changes. Lindsey-as- mother
is not only related to her current traits, but also to her own past, in how she
experienced being a daughter. Many past experiences and relations have shaped how
she is now. New beliefs and attitudes might be acquired and old ones revised.
There’s constancy, too, as traits don’t all change at the same pace and maybe some
don’t change at all. But the temporal spread, so to speak, of the self means that
how a self as a whole is at any time is a cumulative upshot of what it’s been and
how it’s projecting itself forward.

"Anchoring and transformation, sameness and change: the cumulative network is both-
and, not either-or"

Rather than an underlying, unchanging substance that acquires and loses properties,
we’re making a paradigm shift to seeing the self as a process, as a cumulative
network with a changeable integrity. A cumulative network has structure and
organisation, as many natural processes do, whether we think of biological
developments, physical processes or social processes. Think of this constancy and
structure as stages of the self overlapping with, or mapping on to, one another.
For Lindsey, being a sibling overlaps from Lindsey-at-six to the death of the
sibling; being a spouse overlaps from Lindsey-at-30 to the end of the marriage.
Moreover, even if her sibling dies, or her marriage crumbles, sibling and spouse
would still be traits of Lindsey’s history – a history that belongs to her and
shapes the structure of the cumulative network.

If the self is its history, does that mean it can’t really change much? What about
someone who wants to be liberated from her past, or from her present circumstances?
Someone who emigrates or flees family and friends to start a new life or undergoes
a radical transformation doesn’t cease to have been who they were. Indeed,
experiences of conversion or transformation are of that self, the one who is
converting, transforming, emigrating. Similarly, imagine the experience of regret
or renunciation. You did something that you now regret, that you would never do
again, that you feel was an expression of yourself when you were very different
from who you are now. Still, regret makes sense only if you’re the person who in
the past acted in some way. When you regret, renounce and apologise, you
acknowledge your changed self as continuous with and owning your own past as the
author of the act. Anchoring and transformation, continuity and liberation,
sameness and change: the cumulative network is both-and, not either-or.

Transformation can happen to a self or it can be chosen. It can be positive or

negative. It can be liberating or diminishing. Take a chosen transformation.
Lindsey undergoes a gender transformation, and becomes Paul. Paul doesn’t cease to
have been Lindsey, the self who experienced a mismatch between assigned gender and
his own sense of self-identification, even though Paul might prefer his history as
Lindsey to be a nonpublic dimension of himself. The cumulative network now known as
Paul still retains many traits – biological, genetic, familial, social,
psychological – of its prior configuration as Lindsey, and is shaped by the history
of having been Lindsey. Or consider the immigrant. She doesn’t cease to be the self
whose history includes having been a resident and citizen of another country.

The network self is changeable but continuous as it maps on to a new phase of the
self. Some traits become relevant in new ways. Some might cease to be relevant in
the present while remaining part of the self’s history. There’s no prescribed path
for the self. The self is a cumulative network because its history persists, even
if there are many aspects of its history that a self disavows going forward or even
if the way in which its history is relevant changes. Recognising that the self is a
cumulative network allows us to account for why radical transformation is of a self
and not, literally, a different self.

Now imagine a transformation that’s not chosen but that happens to someone: for
example, to a parent with Alzheimer’s disease. They are still parent, citizen,
spouse, former professor. They are still their history; they are still that person
undergoing debilitating change. The same is true of the person who experiences
dramatic physical change, someone such as the actor Christopher Reeve who had
quadriplegia after an accident, or the physicist Stephen Hawking whose capacities
were severely compromised by ALS (motor neuron disease). Each was still parent,
citizen, spouse, actor/scientist and former athlete. The parent with dementia
experiences loss of memory, and of psychological and cognitive capacities, a
diminishment in a subset of her network. The person with quadriplegia or ALS
experiences loss of motor capacities, a bodily diminishment. Each undoubtedly leads
to alteration in social traits and depends on extensive support from others to
sustain themselves as selves.

Sometimes people say that the person with dementia who doesn’t know themselves or
others anymore isn’t really the same person that they were, or maybe isn’t even a
person at all. This reflects an appeal to the psychological view – that persons are
essentially consciousness. But seeing the self as a network takes a different view.
The integrity of the self is broader than personal memory and consciousness. A
diminished self might still have many of its traits, however that self’s history
might be constituted in particular.

"Plato, long before Freud, recognised that self-knowledge is a hard-won and

provisional achievement,"

The poignant account ‘Still Gloria’ (2017) by the Canadian bioethicist Françoise
Baylis of her mother’s Alzheimer’s reflects this perspective. When visiting her
mother, Baylis helps to sustain the integrity of Gloria’s self even when Gloria can
no longer do that for herself. But she’s still herself. Does that mean that self-
knowledge isn’t important? Of course not. Gloria’s diminished capacities are a
contraction of her self, and might be a version of what happens in some degree for
an ageing self who experiences a weakening of capacities. And there’s a lesson here
for any self: none of us is completely transparent to ourselves. This isn’t a new
idea; even Plato, long before Freud, recognised that there were unconscious
desires, and that self-knowledge is a hard-won and provisional achievement. The
process of self-questioning and self-discovery is ongoing through life because we
don’t have fixed and immutable identities: our identity is multiple, complex and
fluid.

This means that others don’t know us perfectly either. When people try to fix
someone’s identity as one particular characteristic, it can lead to
misunderstanding, stereotyping, discrimination. Our currently polarised rhetoric
seems to do just that – to lock people into narrow categories: ‘white’, ‘Black’,
‘Christian’, ‘Muslim’, ‘conservative’, ‘progressive’. But selves are much more
complex and rich. Seeing ourselves as a network is a fertile way to understand our
complexity. Perhaps it could even help break the rigid and reductive stereotyping
that dominates current cultural and political discourse, and cultivate more
productive communication. We might not understand ourselves or others perfectly,
but we often have overlapping identities and perspectives. Rather than seeing our
multiple identities as separating us from one another, we should see them as bases
for communication and understanding, even if partial. Lindsey is a white woman
philosopher. Her identity as a philosopher is shared with other philosophers (men,
women, white, not white). At the same time, she might share an identity as a woman
philosopher with other women philosophers whose experiences as philosophers have
been shaped by being women. Sometimes communication is more difficult than others,
as when some identities are ideologically rejected, or seem so different that
communication can’t get off the ground. But the multiple identities of the network
self provide a basis for the possibility of common ground.

How else might the network self contribute to practical, living concerns? One of
the most important contributors to our sense of wellbeing is the sense of being in
control of our own lives, of being self-directing. You might worry that the
multiplicity of the network self means that it’s determined by other factors and
can’t be self-determining. The thought might be that freedom and self-determination
start with a clean slate, with a self that has no characteristics, social
relations, preferences or capabilities that would predetermine it. But such a self
would lack resources for giving itself direction. Such a being would be buffeted by
external forces rather than realising its own potentialities and making its own
choices. That would be randomness, not self-determination. In contrast, rather than
limiting the self, the network view sees the multiple identities as resources for a
self that’s actively setting its own direction and making choices for itself.
Lindsey might prioritise career over parenthood for a period of time, she might
commit to finishing her novel, setting philosophical work aside. Nothing prevents a
network self from freely choosing a direction or forging new ones. Self-
determination expresses the self. It’s rooted in self-understanding.

The network self view envisions an enriched self and multiple possibilities for
self-determination, rather than prescribing a particular way that selves ought to
be. That doesn’t mean that a self doesn’t have responsibilities to and for others.
Some responsibilities might be inherited, though many are chosen. That’s part of
the fabric of living with others. Selves are not only ‘networked’, that is, in
social networks, but are themselves networks. By embracing the complexity and
fluidity of selves, we come to a better understanding of who we are and how to live
well with ourselves and with one another.