Subjective Identity

This is the notion of identity that is most immediately relevant to politics since people sometimes tend
to allow themselves to be mobilized in the public arena on its basis. It is not not by any means that
subjective identity is always mobilized in politics. It is more that, where it exists, it is poised so as to
be mobilized if other conditions, which I will not discuss here, are present.
What is it to identify with some characteristic one possesses, thereby making it an identity-imparting
characteristic in the subjective sense? This is a more complicated question than it might seem.
A first stab at answering it might be to say that someone identifies with a certain characteristic, if she
values it. Thus one must value the fact that one belongs to a certain nationality or ethnic community
or even a certain profession, if one can be said to have the identity (in the subjective sense) of an
Indian or Korean-American, say, or a teacher and writer. That seems to be a minimal initial condition
for identifying with it. But it is clearly not sufficient since one may have values from which one is
oneself alienated. This can be a fairly common phenomenon. To be alienated from ones values is
structurally akin to being alienated from ones desires. Just as an alcoholic may be disgusted with his
addictive desire for alcohol, so also someone may disapprove of his own patriotism or find his pride in
his profession, intolerably smug.
So a further condition has to be added to our minimal condition before a characteristic imparts
subjective identity. One has to endorse ones valuing of that characteristic. That would presumably
ensure that one is not alienated from its valuing. There is another reason why endorsement of this kind
is necessary apart from the attempt to solve the problem of values one is alienated from. The topic
of subjective identity is not merely about what one is but also about what one conceives of oneself to
be. This idea, therefore, brings with it, in any case, the reflective endorsement of the relevant valued
characteristics.
To endorse a value, it is often said, is to have a second order value. Someone must value the fact that
she values the characteristic of belonging to a certain nationality or profession, before she can be said
to have the identity of an Indian or a teacher, in this subjective sense. (We should add that something
like a second-order valuing may not be necessary in order to ensure that there is no alienation from
ones own first order values; all that may be needed is something negative: that there is no secondorder disapproval of ones first order value. However, as Ive just said, the second-order level comes
in a more positive form, in any case, because subjective identity is unavoidably about reflective
matters such as what one takes oneself to be.)

With this second-order valuing in place have we said something sufficient about subjective identity?
Not yet, since ones second-order values can be highly neurotic, and when they are they can be values
that one is also alienated from. For example, someone may feel his second order value which
disapproves of his first order valuing of his role in his profession as being too smug, as itself being too
prim, too censorious, too much of a super-ego phenomenon.
What yet further condition must now be added to give a sufficient account of subjective identity? One
possibility is to conceive of it as requiring a receding hierarchy of orders of value. At each order, one
is not alienated from a value if one endorses it at a higher order. So in our example, any neurosis
regarding a persons second order disapproval of his pride in his profession is ruled out, if he has a
third-order approval of his second-order disapproval. This solution raises worries about an infinite
regress.
In order to avoid such a regress, a second possibility is to conceive of subjective identity not as
emerging in a receding hierarchy but as requiring a coherence among ones values, no matter what
order of value is being considered. So in our example, the second-order disapproval is neurotic, not
because there is a lack of third-order approval of the second-order disapproval, but rather because the
latter does not cohere with ones other values at all levels, including the first-order values. The
second-order disapproval is something that one is not alienated from, something that one identifies
with, only if it coheres well with the first order values and other second-order values one has. Here
no infinite regress threatens, but some philosophical account of coherence among values must be
worked out to match the coherentist accounts of belief and knowledge that we already have available
with some degree of sophistication. It is worth noting that if this coherentist way of thinking of
subjective identity is right, it is very closely tied to rationality in values, since the point of a coherentist
account of value is presumably that it is an account of when ones values are rational. In a word, one
identifies with ones values to the extent that the value is rational, in the sense of being fortified by
coherence with our other values. The conclusion is attractive like any conclusion that allows two
seemingly separate themes (rationality and subjective identity) to be united.
The trouble however is that if subjective identity is given by a rationality-imparting coherence among
our values, then we will be identified with all the values we have which are rational in this sense. But
that is of not much help with the idea of identity since it follows from this that our identity (in the
subjective sense) is never going to be anything very distinctive. It will pick out nothing very special
or identity-imparting among all our coherent values, such as the ones we have been discussing: ones
valuing the fact that that one is an Indian, a teacher, a writer, a Muslim; no one of these will be
more importantly relevant to ones identity than other characteristics of ours which we value
coherently, such as ones weight, ones love of cricket or of dessert. Precisely what seemed attractive

about this view is what makes it of no particular help on the subject of identity, with which we are
concerned.
Perhaps this difficulty teaches a deflationary lesson. Perhaps it is a sign that there is something
inflated about the very idea of identity, that our thinking there is something specially distinctive about
some characteristics is misguided, that it is not something we should expect, and that we have come to
expect it only because of the recent rise of identity politics which has elevated some characteristics
nationality, ethnicity, linguistic and religious allegiances beyond anything warranted by or echoed in
the actual moral-psychological economies of ordinary citizens. There is some point to this qualm, a
point in fact that needs much nuanced development in longer discussions of the subject. But it can
also be a point that is too glibly made. For, it does seem, at first sight anyway, to be quite accurately
descriptive of at least a small, vocal and influential body of citizens in many polities that they display
a strong identification with these very characteristics and allow themselves to be mobilized on its
basis. And of them at least, some notion of identification must be given, which shows why these
characteristics are valued more distinctively than the many others that are also coherently and
rationally valued by them.
We are therefore still lacking a sufficient account of subjective identity. To repeat: what we need is not
merely endorsement (of ones own valuing of some characteristic of ours) by some higher order values
or by coherence with other values, but some further element that makes the value endorsed more
central and distinctive in our psychological economies.
An obvious thought here might be to say that the values which are more central are those that are
more intense than other values, especially since it does seem as if Muslims, Quebecois, Serbians, etc
who seem most visible in identity politics value their Muslimness, etc very intensely, more intensely
than other things they value. It is a question, however, how theoretically useful it is to plonk down
intensity as a primitive and unanalyzable property that values have, but even apart from this problem,
the thought is wrong, for in some cases of weakness of will, we act on values that are very intense but
which we do not endorse.
A better thought at getting at the required further element is to say that the endorsement of the value
must be such that it makes the value concerned, in some sense, more unrevisable (rather than more
intense) relative to the other values one holds. For it is surely intuitive that a Muslim or Quebecois
whose identity is caught up with his valuing these characteristics of his, is less likely to give up
valuing them than the other values he holds, or perhaps a more subtle variation of the intuition, one
that will be developed briefly below is less likely to conceive of himself as giving up the value.

For this thought to be genuinely promising, we need 1) to show what sort of endorsement of a value
makes the value relatively unrevisable, and we need 2) to ground the idea of unrevisability in
something which would not show the reluctance to revise to be irrational by the lights of the agent
herself (in the way cases of weakness of will show that acting on or even holding some of our most
intense values is irrational by the agents own lights).
1) is the most significant task: which among all the values that equally cohere with one another are
the more unrevisable? As we said, it is only if we answer this question that we would have captured
what is distinctively identity-imparting about valuing being a Muslim or Quebecois, for the sort of
agent we are concerned with. Here is a way of bringing out why that should be so. Any answer to the
question would have an analogous effect to what Quine intended when he argued that some beliefs or
propositions are in the very centre rather than further out toward the periphery in our physical theory.
The idea behind this metaphor was intended to replace misguided traditional ideas of analytic
propositions. His point was that for the theory to be the theory it is, is given by the beliefs or
propositions which are at the centre of our physical theory (e.g. our belief in the transitivity of length),
since they are more immune to revision than the ones further out on the periphery which are more
exposed to what Quine called the tribunal of experience. If those central beliefs do get revised, then
it is not clear whether the theory has been changed or whether we have changed the subject because
the meanings have changed. So also, analogously, we might say that a persons identity is given by
his or her relatively unrevisable values however we characterize them and if those are given up,
then it is not clear whether it is a change in the ordinary sense where the overall identity remains
constant, but a change in value takes place, or whether the overall identity itself is changed. This
analogy, though inexact, is all the same roughly intuitive and reflects our ordinary talk, when in a fit of
nationalist sentiment, we say things such as I will lose my sense of self, of who I am, if I betray my
country (or, as in Forsters British schoolboy morality, I will lose my sense of self, I will not
recognize who I am, if I betray my friend), the sorts of things we are not likely to say of other things
we value. Compare these to, I will lose my sense of self, if I give up my love of desserts, which
because of its implausibility, shows such first order values to be more analogous to beliefs or
propositions at the periphery for Quine. (These are mere examples intended to convey the structural
point of the analogy intuitively. Of course it is possible, though perhaps not routine, that someone
may value his sweet tooth in the way a stereotypical nationalist or British public schoolboy values
country or friendship, that is, analogously to Quines centre of the web rather than the periphery. The
possibility in no way spoils the analogy; it merely shows that identities might be eccentric or bizarre
on occasion.)
So much for the significance of unrevisability. But 1) was the task of defining it. We are seeking to
define a way of endorsing ones valuing of some characteristic one possesses, which shows that value

to be relatively unrevisable compared to other values one holds. Since we have already seen that
coherence cannot provide such a special way of endorsement, let us return to the idea of second-order
valuing of a first order value to explore the sort of endorsement needed. What do we need to add to a
second order value to make the first order value endorsed (relatively) unrevisable in ones
psychological economy? An example may help to make the question and an answer to it less abstract.
Let us take some of the more absolutist Muslims in Iran over the last two decades. They have often
urged something that approximates unrevisability of their Islamic values. One way they have done so
is to argue that Iran needs to protect itself, in fact not just others in Iran, but even they the absolutists
themselves, should protect themselves against their own moral weakening and corruption in the face
of the inevitable spread of the pernicious values of modernity in general and the West in particular.
And they have argued (like Ulysses did, anticipating the sirens) that this protection should be ensured
by entrenching Islamic values so deeply now that were Muslims even to be so weakened, the social,
political and legal institutions would not make it easy for them to shed their Islamic ways of life. Such
a form of endorsement of ones Islamic values vividly shows it to be more unrevisable (in a very
special sense) than other values one has and endorses having. Consider that the endorsement takes a
counterfactual form: we value something in a way that we want ourselves to be living by the value,
even if we (counter to present fact) do not value it, anymore. At the time of valuing it, then, such a
value stands out as very distinctive. The sort of unrevisability here is quite special because it is not so
much that the value (at the first order level) itself is permanent or immutable, but even though we may
revise things later and cease to value it, the fact is that at the time of valuing it in this way, one (at the
second order level) yearns for the value to be unrevisable and relatively permanent, unlike all the other
values which we endorse in the more ordinary way. That surely makes it part of ones deepest selfconception since one would so utterly disapprove of oneself if we did not have the value at some
future point, that we now try and make sure that ones self, at that future point, will live according to
the value. Identity-imparting, self-constituting, etc., seem apt descriptions for values held and
endorsed with such deep commitment.
Task 2) remains. Not all values which are unrevisable in this way are rational. What needs to be
added is that these unrevisable values must also cohere with our other values. Coherence of a value,
conceived as unrevisable in this special sense, with ones other values, allows for the rationality of this
form of unrevisability since reluctance to revise could only be irrational if the value one does not
revise is one that does not have rational support from ones other values.
Before closing, I should make one important cautionary remark to protect against a misunderstanding
of the notion of subjective identity as just defined. One should not be put off by the specific example
given above, to think that the sort of endorsement that generates identity in this way, is a sign of
fanaticism or illiberalism, just because we have become used to thinking of Islamic absolutism to be

fanatical and illiberal. That would be to allow substantive opinions to blind us to the merits of the
theoretical analysis we have come to, that is to say, blind us to the structural feature of the
endorsement of a value that generates subjective identity. After all, the special way we value our own
basic constitutional rights reflects just such an endorsement of our own identity-generating values as
liberals, since all it does is reflect the same structure as the Iranian absolutists in the earlier example.
We elevate a very few of the many values we more or less coherently hold to fundamental
constitutional rights, for example free speech precisely because we want to protect our future
selves from giving in to any weakening of those values, as when in the face of strong dislike of
anothers substantive views, we might in the future find ourselves wanting to censor him. What our
elevating these values into fundamental rights does is express the fact that we now want that we
cannot later censor someone we strongly disagree with if we later have indeed weakened enough to
wish to censor him. A liberals deepest self-conception, i.e., a liberals identity, and a Muslims
identity, therefore, whatever the differences between them on other matters may be, is given by the
same counterfactual structures of endorsing and identifying with their cherished values that our
theoretical analysis has proposed. Neither is any more fanatical than the other, at least in matters of
subjective identity.

Objective Identity
When we turn to the objective aspects of identity, identification on the part of the subject in question
with the identity-imparting characteristic(s), is not a necessary condition. Thus, for instance, identities
when they are thought to be given by characteristics of descent, such as race is sometimes said to be,
are objective in this sense. Chromosome-based ways of defining gender identity are similarly
objective. But biological criteria are not the only criteria that are routinely invoked. Inter-subjective
and social criteria are also much favoured. Thus, for instance, Marxists often claim that ones identity
is given by ones place and role in a particular economic formation in a given period of history, that is
to say, ones class identity as class is defined by Marx.
Many oppose the purely biological ways of thinking of various kinds of identity, such as racial and
gender identity, claiming that these identities are socially constructed by the perceptions and attitudes
of ones fellows, by the zeitgeist of a particular period, by the conceptual categories and social
institutions at a given time. Foucault and those influenced by him have made much of this and
Foucault himself gave detailed historical and social accounts of particular concepts and institutions in
Europe as determining identities. In fact it is interesting that Foucault and his followers claim that it is
not only the biological and other scientific criteria that are caught up in social factors of this kind, but
the subjective ones we discussed in the last section as well. These too are shaped by conceptual and

institutional formations far removed and hidden from the exercise of our reflective self-understanding,
thereby showing the ideals of individual autonomy that we assume to reside in the idea of
identification, to be illusory. This entry will not take up these issues raised by Foucaults influence.
It will look instead briefly at the motivations for looking at objective factors of identity at all, over and
above the subjective ones.
Many subjects may identify with some characteristic they possess which is not what is most salient
about them to others. And it is thought important by many political philosophers that nevertheless, it is
these latter, the ones that others think are more salient that often define the identity of these subjects,
no matter what the subjects may conceive themselves to be. A good example of this can be seen in
Stalins well-known definition of a nation, which stresses the importance of historical and economic
criteria for national identity, with a view to providing a corrective to what were seen as somewhat
premature and ungrounded subjective identifications of nationality found in many secessionist
demands in different parts of the world. Here the motivation for objectivist criteria of identity is (at
least implicitly) political.
But underlying these is a more interesting theoretical rationale that points to important issues of a
more philosophical nature. The claim that agents may have a certain identity even if they do not take
themselves to do so, implies that what one takes oneself to be can be mistaken, a kind of selfdeception, or at least a self-myopia. (The latter does not involve the motivated element often
associated with self-deception, but involves instead the idea that one may sometimes simply be too
deep for oneself where deep is not intended as a bit of eulogy.)
It would be philosophically clarifying to make a distinction between two different sorts of appeal to
objectivist identities which are said to be (possibly) hidden from a subjects own self-conception. a)
One claim the weaker one is that subjects often betray signs of a certain identity in much of their
behaviour, even if they do not endorse and identify with what is reflected in their behaviour. b) The
other, stronger, claim does not even require that something in the subjects behaviour reflects the
identity given by the unendorsed characteristic; rather the characteristic and the identity is given by the
deliverances of some (social, political, economic, or biological) theory regarding these subjects.
a) The weaker claim, not surprisingly, is less controversial since it requires that the characteristics of a
subject which are going to define his identity are something that he at least reveals in his behaviour.
The subject may not endorse them, he may not even acknowledge them, but if the only good
explanation of his behaviour is that he has those characteristics, and if those characteristics are salient
compared to others, then some claim can be made regarding how they impart his identity. Within this
view, the more extreme cases will be where the subject does not even acknowledge the characteristics

as being revealed in the behaviour. Many of the identities that surface in Freudian and psychoanalytic
theories make much of this sort of case (Oedipal, narcissisticidentities). The less extreme cases will
be those where there isacknowledgement of the characteristics, but no endorsement of them on the part
of the subject. These are likely to be more common. What may be called silent identities, as in
silent majorities often consist of subjects who are not self-identified with a certain pattern of
behaviour, but will not be in any particular state of denial (as they are in the more extreme cases) about
whether their behaviour reveals the characteristics they are seen to have. It is very likely, for example,
that many ordinary Muslims, who do not identify with absolutist or fundamentalist Islam, may all the
same admit that much in their behaviour mutedly plays along with these Islamist elements in their
societies.
b) The stronger claim very often appeals to biological criteria, but is most interesting when it does
not. Since the biological criteria are in any case usually caught up with social factors (see the point
made about them above during the brief discussion of social construction of identity), they will be
ignored here. Perhaps the most well known, well worked out, and widely discussed of the stronger
objectivist version of identity, which is not biologically based, is due to Marx and those influenced by
him. What makes for having a class identity, say, a proletarian identity, is not any kind of selfidentification with the working class, not even any behaviour that suggests certain unacknowledged or
unendorsed allegiances to that class, but simply the objective fact of having a certain place and
function in the relations of production during the modern capitalist period of economic history. What
is remarkable and controversial about this view, more so than anything found in a) above, is that
something regarding the self and its identity is being attributed, without any basis or manifestation
required in the conscious or unconscious behaviour of the selves or agents concerned. A working class
person, who exhibits no proletarian consciousness nor any of the solidarity and forms of behaviour
appropriate to the class, and none of whose behaviour reflects an unconscious betrayal of such
solidarity or consciousness, is nevertheless said to have proletarian class identity, albeit with a false
consciousness. It is only because he has this identity that there can be cause to call such a subjects
consciousness false. It is false precisely because he fails to conceive himself aright, fails to see his
deepest self, which is determined by objective historical and material relations.
It is such a view of self and identity (where self and self-conception can come so radically apart)
which filled Isaiah Berlin with anxiety in his discussion of positive liberty, since what it encourages
is the idea that the achievement of self-realization of individual citizens, that is the achievement of
their own autonomy and liberty (in the positive sense) is now left to states or to the vanguards of
political parties, which lay claim to greater understanding of what some subjects self really and
objectively is. On such a view, according to those alarmed by the view, there is no paradox in the

expression forcing someone to be free. (Leninist vanguardism was sometimes frank about denying
any such paradox.)
Underlying political anxieties of this kind is a more philosophical issue, which is much discussed in
contemporary moral psychology, the issue of external as opposed to internal reasons. An internal
reason is a reason for one to do or believe or value something, which appeals to some other evaluative
element in ones moral-psychological economy. An external reason makes no such appeal to an
internal element; it requires only some objective fact that need not even be recognized by the subject
for whom it provides a reason. Thus in the orthodox Marxist tradition, a proletarian, given his
historically determined identity, has (an external) reason to be a revolutionary even if there is no
element in his moral-psychological economy which values it. Berlins anxieties about statist tyranny
carried out in the name of self-realization, autonomy and positive liberty, were thus implicitly and
more deeply about the very idea of external reasons, even though he never quite articulated them as
having that underlying target; however, it becomes very explicit in a denial of the cogency of the very
idea of external reasons in a brilliant essay by Bernard Williams (a philosopher much-influenced by
Berlin), though the point is marred in that essay by a somewhat confused equation of internal reasons
with a Humean notion of value and motivation.
This last set of points provides a good resting point for this entry on identity, which has distinguished
fundamentally between the subjective and objective aspects of the concept. To a considerable extent,
which of these two aspects we emphasize in our study of the concept will be a matter of theoretical
decision, a decision which, in turn, depends on non-arbitrary philosophical considerations having to
do, as we have just seen, with themes at some distance from identity, such as autonomy and moral
reasons. In itself, this is to be expected since self, freedom, and reason have been closely connected
themes in philosophy ever since Kant, both in the analytical and the European traditions of the
discipline. Though much more needs to be said in detail to make the links between these themes
perspicuous and explicit, it is safe to say that that the more inclined we are to be uneasy about the idea
of external reasons, the more likely we are to stress the subjective rather than the objective aspects of
identity.