sexuality?

sexuality: it is allegedly some sort of inborn erotic compass that attracts an individual to this gender or another or else whose pointer has arrows at both ends. since there are purportedly only two genders one can be attracted to, viz. one's own or one's opposite, sexuality comes in only two legitimate flavors: gay and straight (bisexuals are often perceived to either have a broken compass or else to merely be confused as how to read it or else as falsifying the reading). evidently, then, all that is needed to establish one's sexuality is to determine which of the two genders is the object of love (but not all love) as well as the object of physical affection (but not all physical affection). it seems to me that there are countless ways to love and engage in physical contact. we all initiate, dissolve, and maintain a wide range of loving relations in the course of a lifetime. we all engage in countless processes of physical contact in the course of a lifetime. love is often present without physical intimacy. physical intimacy is just as often present without love. i can only assume that the idea is that there is a certain way of loving that is always accompanied by a desire for a certain type of physical intimacy and vice-versa. it must be this special type of love-physicality dyad that flows forth from one's sexuality. or is it that one's sexuality emerges within the dyad? either way, i cannot imagine which of the infinite ways of loving and equally infinite types of contact (ways and types that once were, now are, or are yet to be imagined) are self-evidently those to be cited as evincing a so-called sexuality. it seems to me that any of the particulars that might be pointed to as particular to this special sort of love-mode and concomitant physical desire will not only be arbitrary (at best) but will often fail to be exclusive to the special and indicative love-physicality mode. and, two genders? the qualifications for one gender or another are also largely arbitrary and always include too few or too many. further, is the love-desire attraction a biological attraction (based, for example on penises and vaginas) or is it an attraction to types (e.g. to masculine people or feminine people)? if we can nary construct a definition of so-called romantic love that neatly separates it from so-called non-romantic love while remaining other than farcical and we can nary conceive of a definition of gender that splits the human race neatly into two camps, what are we to make of this meta-concept, sexuality?

self? (part VII)

The third species of content that populates the archive is prosthesis. As the etymology of the word suggests, prostheses are those articles “placed in addition”. Recalling the lessons of śūnyatā, they are those objects, events, people, etc from which the self has/is/will be dependently arisen. Two subgenres of prosthesis relate to the two senses of the term, the first being the 'etymological' and the second the 'definitional.' In the etymological sense of the term, prothesis acts as a "sign" (in the semiotic sense of the word) for those articles that prop up, undergird, give rise to, or condition the other two species of content. Examples in my case include: a surname; an asthma inhaler; a great uncle; petroleum; American English; alcoholism; the American highway and railway system; the Sun. The definitional sense of the term acts as a sign for those articles that function as continuation, substitute, extension, or augmentation of body or memory. Examples that apply to my archive include: a photograph of my mother taken during her senior year of high school; a pair of black and white Converse shoes; a digital copy of an essay titled Whitey X; a preferred/nick name; a passport; a “dear John” letter; my reflection.

self? (part VI)

The second species of content identified below is memory. Whether reflecting upon the self in abstract terms by invoking conceptual images or as an agent or patient in some sequence of events by invoking perceptual images, both feats are accomplished via memory. This species of article can be separated out into two subgenres: declarative and procedural.

Declarative memory is fact-based memory and takes its name from the notion that this type of memory can be an object of knowledge; it can be discussed or declared. Declarative memory can exist in one of two forms: episodic and semantic (see Table 1 below). Episodic memory is perceptual and casts one’s self as either agent or patient within a sequence that is marked by narrative tone or structure. Semantic memory is conceptual and is a record of facts versus experience. Examples of semantic memory include things like “I am white. I am thirty-three years old. I live in Ohio.”

Procedural memory is memory that is activated “subconsciously” and is typically related to conditioning or skill. Procedural memory may be a bodily memory such as how to play a musical instrument or ride a bicycle or it may be cognitive à la how to read or how to get home from school. Procedural memory, by definition, cannot be examined by the consciousness: any knowledge of procedural memory is actually meta-knowledge which constitutes a declarative memory of ability and not knowledge of the procedural memory itself.

self? (part V)

The first species of content identified below is that of body. Living (and dying) in a world still swaying under the spell of Cartesian dualism, where religious ethics of every creed pit the soul against the body, most people take the body as the locus of the self most of the time. Our bodies are viewed as casings for our soul, regardless of whether ‘soul’ is meant as consciousness (the seat of will, ideas, knowledge, reason) or as the eternal spirit alluded to by King Solomon. As the property of the self in the classic Lockean sense, the body is typically considered as belonging to and subsequently not thought of as being of the self. Indeed, in an increasingly sterilized society where we dwell and work in climate controlled environments, vacate into sanitized receptacles perpetually filled with clean water and with minimal trace of previous content, where we prevent the body’s natural odors from arising by constantly washing it away or masking it with chemicals, and where the sick and dying are isolated, hidden from view, and tended to by specialists, it is small wonder that bodies are typically thought of as little more than a means toward an end. This detached perspective, however, may be dramatically upended should the body become damaged or malfunction. The field of neuroscience, for example, is rife with harrowing accounts of loss of proprioception (an autonomic sensory faculty of the body that gives one a perpetual account of where the different parts of the body are located in relation to one another whether moving or still), of “locked-in syndrome” (where one loses the ability to move any part of the body but is otherwise in perfect mental health, thus becoming a prisoner in their own bodies), of phantom limbs: that is to say, of people who are suddenly and unexpectedly made aware of the body as an undeniable and vital component of self.

As one of the aggregates of self, the body is also a historical record. Calluses are records of effort and repetition, scars records of intervention, injury, or angst. One’s complete history of drug use is in a hair follicle whereas one’s entire evolutionary lineage is recorded in every cell. Acne, the hue of the skin, the condition of the eyes, odors, and more, combine to form a “state of the union” address, an account of one’s health. Tattoos are windows into a past and/or a personality while bone structure and hair color are a tribute to the mother and father. Indeed, the body is such a rich record, an entire history of events can be reconstructed via a “close reading” by pathologists or forensic examiners.

self? (part IV)

The articles that populate the archive of me are, as Charles Merewether asserts, “the foundation from which history is written." And the history that is written from the contents of my archive is done so perpetually; scratch-outs, annotations, new translations, fresh omissions, reclamations, interpretations and reinterpretations, new evidence, old motives, and an array of agents and patients yield a history in the making, my history, the story of me. The articles act as warrant, as evidence of this history, of a narrative, and even possibly of an argument. Moreover, the articles literally constitute the self and are therefore implicit within any metaphysics of self. Finally, while the contents of the archive change over time, they act as a causal chain to “former selves”, making the present self and past selves continuous with one another thereby establishing numerical identity (the past me and the present me are one and the same person; there are not two different people) circumventing any need to rely on some sort of qualitative identity (a highly problematic attempt to establish the persistence of self through time by way of identifying similarities between past and present incarnations).

self? (part III)

The definition of archive as given by the New Oxford American-English Dictionary is “a collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, institution, or group of people.” In the archive of self as I have explored it, there appears to be five species of content (article, document, record, etc): body, memory, prosthesis, impression, and phenomenon. While these articles are not necessary for creating a general philosophy of identity, they are essential to any attempt at procuring knowledge of the self as the articles themselves are the precondition for positing and pursuing any question that falls within the classes outlined above. The content of the archive acts as evidence from which a sense of person can be ascertained. As Paul Ricoeur puts it:

In the notion of a document the accent today is no longer placed on the function of teaching which is conveyed by the etymology of this word… rather the accent is placed on the support, the warrant a document provides for a history, a narrative, or an argument. This role of being a warrant constitutes material proof, what in English is called ‘evidence’… (TA 67)

self? (part II)

The project at hand is to further my understanding of my own identity, my sense of personhood, by exploring the contents, structure, and laws of the archive that is me. In interrogating the archive, a daunting array of questions arises, each interrogative seemingly as important as the next. Fortunately the mass of questions can be parsed into four classes, providing for a more systematic and coherent analysis:

person (Who am I?): These questions are aimed at determining those qualities, properties, traits, experiences, circumstances, etc that make you an individual. It encompasses issues of psychology, experiences, memory, dispositions and values.

persistence (Am I still me?): These questions deal with the persistence of personhood over time. Persons can and do change. So how is it that I am the “same” person that I was when I was born? When I was seven? Will I still be me in twenty years? More specifically, these questions are aimed at determining exactly what it is that has persisted that makes you the same person as the child in the photograph.

evidence (What makes me me?): This class of questions address matters of evidence related to personhood. It asks of any answers garnered to the first question, “How do you know?” Also covered under this category are matters of how self knowledge might be obtained.

metaphysics (What am I?): This class is ontological in nature. Am I a rational being? An animal? A rational animal? Am I body or mind?