The occasional consideration of Becoming
The notion of contemplating becoming is almost surreal.
There is always an element of fear in that consideration, especially when an element of retrospection is involved. Whenever I think about my past, I irresistibly start to fear that I have not become a better person over the years—when you take into account the enormous material abundance and almost preposterous privileges enjoyed by my generation there is no longer many circumstances or objective background to blame, and the slightest possibility of stagnancy or regression in personality becomes an unbearable burden on oneself. No excuses. Yet the examination of becoming is crucial in understanding ourselves and is probably one of the most meaningful topics on which we get to converse with ourselves.
The purpose of being and the being of purpose
The dictatorship of purpose
We think about what we want to accomplish, then we decide who we want to be.
At the beginning of the course, we talked about Sartre, existentialism, and the ethical implication of which. As an existentialist, Sartre interprets the metaphysical existence of humanity as 'le pour-soi': that we are born naked; there is no inherent nature attached to our being — rather, our being is a product of iterations based on our previous being and ultimately shaped by our actions, which are conceived in our own free-will. Sartre further points out that our actions are governed by conscious reasoning with purposes, even when we do not admit it. It can then be logically concluded that becoming per se is a consciously controlled process.
Thus it is probably our views on the purpose of life that is really behind our decisions to become, pushing us into our projected being.
It goes without saying that there are countless different purposes out there varying in context and scope. In the specific scope of, say, college students, the purpose could be to excel academically, which makes one envision oneself as a diligent, efficient student. It could also be to become literate and sophisticated, which makes one envision oneself as a philosopher. Or in the larger scope of life, the purpose can be Eudaimonia — a content and virtuous life, as Aristotle would argue; or maybe it can be pure happiness, as Aristippus could say. On the more contemporary end, Sartre leaves that decision to us — by stating that purpose is like any other attributes of our lives to which we commit: that the purpose of life is whatever we decide it should be.
Therefore, the analysis of purposes may explain how I became who I am today. The non-singular, varied nature of different purposes makes it difficult to fully comprehend one's purposes, even when one examines one's own. Nevertheless, I find my desire to be different quite obvious in determining who I am, and the purpose behind it is probably recognition. Perhaps this is more of a conscious evasion of competition: the criteria familiar to people will be invalid where what I do is different from most other people, and thus I will not have to be judged, assessed, and compared with others. So I may enjoy my achievements and qualities, instead of subconsciously dismissing their values because someone else does them better than I do. This desire could, in turn, be traced back to the primal human need for self and social recognition.
With the importance of purpose identified, we may take one step further and ask ourselves: where do our purposes come from?
The Origin of Purpose
Purpose is but the slave to memory
— William Shakespeare
We know for a fact that the development of consciousness is at least partially exogenic. Our minds are shaped as we interact with the external world. Thus, like Shakespeare proposed here, our sense of purpose is inevitably a product of our past experience in interacting with different social contexts ranging from our family to our bigger community such as schools, churches, and countries. Our purposes are essentially generated in two ways in which we interact with our context: one where we recognize the social norms and practices and thus, consciously or unconsciously, conform and internalize such norms and practices — a phenomenon Bourdieu refers to as habitus; the other is the opposite: we see conflict between our belief and the social norm, we see what we think what we should do failing in the particular context; irritated, we start to challenge, we start to question, we conscious revolt against the social norm and strive to become as different from it as possible — even unto consciously pursuing the exact opposite.
For me, both types of interaction have their impact on my purpose. On the conforming end, I believe my four-year stay in Singapore has made me conscious of the need and preferences of others and try to be as accommodating as possible as Singapore values a somewhat individualistic culture and advocates consideration for others. Yet I admit that the pragmatic and competitive mindset has planted some sense of insecurity in me, such that despite my awareness of its shortcomings, a part of me always attempts to establish my self-worth by being 'better' than others.
On the other hand, the resistant type of interaction probably played an even more important role (hopefully so). One of my most central purposes now is to be good and not to harm others, which then translates to me wanting to be empathetic and open-minded — and by empathetic I mean more than just feeling sorry for others, but to be able to actually feel what others feel. At this point, I have to admit that I used to be a bully in school just so I would get along with others. Back in China, bullying was an issue but not generally considered a big deal so long as no physical violence is involved. Yet the mental and social kind of oppression could be even crueler. When I was in secondary school, there was a girl in my class who is more eccentric and imaginative in her behavior. She would talk to the air and pretend to have a conversation, or put a pen by her mouth and pretend to be playing the flute. She was seen as weird and excluded, even to the point that she was hated for no reason. Everyone in the class would laugh at her as soon as she starts to talk, regardless of what she says — even when she was simply answering a question on class. Now, whenever I look back and reflect, I feel ashamed to be once a part of the group which ridiculed, hated, and mentally abused her. And this serves as a constant reminder for me to practice restraint in judging. Granted, it is impossible to fully eliminate the automatic prejudice I have towards people different from myself; but the least I could do is to constantly remind myself to examine why I feel a certain way towards others and rationally control unjustified disapproval.
This resistant type of interaction may also be induced by the failure to follow previous mindsets. If one continuously fail to comply with societal expectations, on which one's sense of self-worth rests, it is natural that one start to question and evade such norms and seek alternative purposes to establish self-worth. In my case, I was accustomed to, if not proud of, a science-centric life when I was able to win prizes and awards in math and science Olympiads. Back then, being able to excel in these competitions was proof of my worth. Yet the nature of these competitions decides that you can only go so far without realizing that there are so many people more talented than you are. It was around then I started to feel tired and stressed by competitions, and then it became a part of my purpose to try to gain knowledge in other fields and find recognition in non-competitive ways.
Confinement: we jump out of a box, only to find ourselves landing in another.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau
It is unlikely that there is a universal mindset, with which one may conform, that remains effective and relevant in all social contexts. At some point in life, one is inevitably subjected to the need to revolt against his previous habitus. Yet the immediate question which follows is this: does revolution against conformity make another type of conformity in its own right? This question is especially relevant in the larger context of organized and communal approach to change social norms. When Beauvoir examined the historical context in which females are disadvantaged and oppressed, she proposed that changes cannot be heroically done alone or in isolation, rather it is the larger movement and community that empowers females to challenge and bring changes to social norms. Yet what we observe in real life is that such social movements may often paradoxically instigate labels, norms, and conflicts, rather than dissolving them. When women who are unsatisfied with the current status of females in the society unite together in challenge, the label 'feminist' is instigated as a representation of the progressive thoughts. When the movement challenged the historical convention that women are supposed to be housewives who take charge of home economics while men are supposed to work and support the family with their income, did it actually provide females with freedom from such conventions, or did it, rather, just substituted these conventions with something else? If a woman chooses not to work and to instead stay home attending to household chores and taking care of her child, not because she is not allowed otherwise but because she wanted to, we know that this woman is empowered with the freedom to choose what role she plays in the family (or perhaps the society at large). Yet is she going to be seen as a feminist? Is she going to be held as an exemplar of empowered, liberal woman?
Thus we find that us revolting against a certain norm may not necessarily free us from conforming, it may actually instead subject us to another form of conformity. At the end of the day, we are still inevitably acting in accordance to a socially instigated habitus, rather than being free from them. In fact, the moment we decided to be for or against a certain idea, we are doomed to this result. The very moment we label ourselves as 'liberals', 'feminists', 'egalitarians', we have subject ourselves to a set of criteria and code of conduct that comes along with such labels. It is really these labels to which we identify with that defines and confines our positions and dispositions, and thus prevent authenticity.
Revolt against confinement: a deconstructionist approach
Labeling is a common approach to, or at least a common by-product of ethical challenges in the modern context. In order to address the under-represented and suppressed, we use labels to identify those in need. We use socially constructed concepts to assign help and allocate resources. Taking education as an example, we see people of minority races being favored in college admission, especially in the cases of the black and Hispanic people. We see top academic institutions being not only candid about, but also proud of it. As a matter of fact, the whole idea of affirmative action is often based on social constructs. It is reasonable. We do see certain groups being historically disadvantaged and it makes sense to consciously allocate more social resources to such groups so as to mitigate the inherent disadvantaged which comes historically. Yet I personally feel an intense paradox in such endeavors. If the intention of favoring minority races in college admission is to counteract the vicious cycle of poverty and lack of education, we already have a more fundamental goal: to provide help to the financially disadvantaged, and the very fact that we equal racial minority to disadvantaged facticity, we become exactly the instigators of racial stereotypes. It might be argued that it is much easier to identify a person's race than determining how disadvantaged he is, but that really makes us as racist as Judge Tucker, who decided to use biological features to determine one's race and thus whether one was a slave.
We realize, while discrimination certainly does not bring racial equality, neither does conscious favoritism. Neither of these positions serves to break the barriers between races and truly communicate and advocate an appreciation of others' identities beyond the color of their skin. Perhaps it is exactly the conscious disregard of race that will effectively transcend the limitation we set forth for ourselves: we may agree to help one because one is financially disadvantaged, physically impaired, or have one grown up in a social environment stained with violence and drugs, and when we help one because of these factors and not one's race, we essentially render the concept of race irrelevant, which is the way it should be.
In the broader sense, the example of racial inequality in education is but a reflection of a larger social phenomenon. We are so eager for efficiency, that we choose to use pre-packed labels to interpret and analyze people. We use these ready-made attributes to find groups in which we find a sense of belonging. We see an idea we don't like, and we immediately take a completely opposite-stand. We do it to others and we do it to ourselves. We dislike being science nerds so we label ourselves liberal thinkers. We dislike being seen as offensive so we deliberate over our words. While what we don't realize is that there are things more fundamental and more essential. Surpassing the ideas of science nerds and philosophers is our desire for human knowledge and compassion. Transcending the use of offensive or politically correct terms is our intention: whether we mean well or do we intend to mock and deprecate.
Therefore it is important for us to realize that labels are socially architectured to be our guidelines in thinking. When we perceive, analyze, and criticize through the prism of labels, our thoughts are already confined in what the labels permit, even as we consciously revolt against a label, we merely subject ourselves to a counter-label. And if we ever want to transcend this kind of pre-ordered thinking, we must engage in deconstruction. We must try to see beyond the labels and look into the fundamentals beneath them. We must identify the boundaries of labels and constantly remind ourselves to blur these boundaries by consciously disregard them — that is not to say we are to dismiss the factual existence of labels (e.g. "race isn't real!"), rather, we are to face their existence and constantly examine and reflect upon the necessity and the true meaning of these labels so as to act consistently across differently labeled groups. If we can make joke of one because one is white, we can do so when one is black, or maybe we can avoid making jokes based on the color of one's skin. If we decide to render help to a lady, it is only ethical, in the egalitarian sense, when we are willing to render similar help to a male. Thus we may return to a personal level of understanding — an understanding of the ambivalent nature of personality itself.
In a world ravaged by structured, systematized thinking, it is too easy for our thoughts to be hijacked by what has been previously thought. Perhaps there is always an inherent, subconscious laziness in our minds that let us comfortably comply with existing ideas. It is indeed nice when others do the thinking and reasoning for us and all we have to do is just to pick sides, but we must recognize that simply picking sides does not automatically fulfill the ethical obligations we feel. If we do intend to live ethically and contribute to the ethical discussions in the world, we need to be able to examine, deconstruct, and in some cases, dismantle the popular ideas.
In final conclusion: my next steps
Over the course of this class, I have been thinking about who I am and what made me so. I love the arts; I admit that a part of me likes them just because they make me feel intelligent, but I am certainly fascinated by the idea of alternative and ambivalent means of expression. I don't want to be a nerdy programmer like I always imagined I would become eventually, but then no one mandated that a programmer must be nerdy. Politically, I am not quite active but I do tend to challenge the popular. I am not apathetic but I dislike the communal approach to political activism either. I prefer a more personal approach towards addressing social issues, where I do not seek to change the world or to revolutionize my community, but try to enact my opinions in my personal, direct, interaction with others, but then I have to admit that a part of this is just that I don't like being in a large group with a few speaking and making decisions for me. There is always a romantic, dreamy part in me, yet there is also a part of me being fearful, lazy, and insecure preventing me from doing what I imagine I should. A portion of me is altruistic, considerate, and empathetic; yet another portion is just as egoistic, numb, and indifferent. I am no one. I am everyone. Everyone is everyone.
At this point, I find that the better part of me seems to be a condition of its own being. It is only I am happy and content that I am able to feel the inner romanticism and altruism which in turn cheer me up. Thus I am more inclined to what is proposed by Aristippus, that the pursuit of happiness is the end. In terms of ethics I feel that the ethical decisions I make are guided by intuition more than logic and it is hard to judge others' ethical decisions since those decisions, as long as made out of goodwill, are often justified from the point of view of the persons who made them — we may not necessarily agree with their perspective but that does not make them wrong. Therefore I am more or less inclined towards a nihilist stance in the sense that I do not see any a priori ethical system to be superior or absolute. This, however, does not necessarily mean an ethical anarchy in my thinking; rather, I try to challenge and deconstruct what is seen as right and be consistent in my revolt, and base my morality on my conscience and goodwill.
