Context Is King, or the Everlasting Problematic of Identity
Once, during an intense and circuitous conversation with one of my favorite professors which had begun in class and continued through his office hours only to stretch late into the evening over cocktails and tapas, I came to what was, for me, a revelatory conclusion: in the best possible sense, I was drowning in a sea of context. The more I studied, the more I learned in various subjects as diverse as theoretical physics, literary theory, political science, U.S. history, continental philosophy, evolutionary biology, English literature, etc., the less I believed in the postmodern regimentation of knowledge and the more strongly I felt the deep interconnection of ideas, the inner oneness of human thought and endeavor. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that all of human history has been driven toward one goal, or even one set of goals or anything so grandiose and modernist as all that; rather, I’m asserting that certain ideas are so big as to shape others even as they are themselves being shaped by the ideas surrounding them. Let me give you all just a few examples, make the abstract, concrete, as it were.[1]
We can all agree right here and now that Sir Isaac Newton revolutionized the realms of physics and mathematics, yes? Good. Now, allow me to take that commonsense statement a step further and say that Newton ushered into the Anglosphere a new paradigm for thinking centered around his mechanistic conceptual framework. Consider the way that, in his letters, John Adams describes his vision for the various independent states to work as closely as the cogs of a machine, or indeed the deism of Adams’s contemporaries, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson among them, whose vision of God was as a clockmaker who had designed the universe so as to fit perfectly together like the gears of a clock before stepping back to watch His masterful machine hum along, perfect, into eternity. Even as late as 1795, at the cusp of the Romantic Period’s rejection of Newton’s mechanistic classicism in favor of a strongly holistic understanding of the natural world as sublime in its approach of an oft pantheistic God, British author Samuel Johnson used mechanical imagery to drive the action in several key passages of his early picaresque novel The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, though by that point in our intellectual history, the cracks were, admittedly, beginning to show: the mechanist whom Rasselas visits early in his attempts to cross the impenetrable mountains surrounding his home and so leave the utopia of Happy Valley meets a sad fate, as his newly invented flying machine proves worthless in the air and Rasselas is forced to save the half-drowned inventor.
A similar process can be seen time and again if one attends carefully to history’s broad strokes. After Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin published their early works on evolutionary biology, distinctly evolutionary ideas began soon to dominate philosophy under people like Alfred North Whitehead, political theory under Herbert Spencer, and medical science via phrenology. Later, Einstein’s work on relativity and the curvature of spacetime lead, in large measure, to ideas as diverse as cultural and moral relativism, the field of statistics, and John Dewey’s pragmatism; similarly, Freud’s psychoanalytic theories have manifested across cultural divisions within those societies familiar with his corpus. Today, the influences of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and especially the various technologies and techniques I’ll simply lump together as computer science but which must be understood to include everything from social media platforms to entertainment streaming services to robotics in the manufacturing industry to self-driving cars to, if Stephen Hawking was to be believed, artificial intelligence, seem to have so captivated the Western imagination as to have propelled science fiction from the basement to the megaplex even as the entire branch of philosophy concerned with the human mind has become so mired in topics more suited for a laboratory or an internet café than a traditional seminar room or lecture hall as to have almost removed the humanity from the human mind entirely.
What I’m getting at is this: everything is connected; ideas do not exist in a vacuum; context is king.
This primacy of context, if you accept my argument to this point, leads to profound consequences not only metaphysical but also aesthetic and political, as philosophers as ideologically diverse as Martin Heidegger and John Dewey well recognized. In his classic essay “Time and Individuality” (1940) [2], Dewey asserts that each person exists in an ever-changing world defined by possibility, that no person remained constant throughout a lifetime but instead changed along with and according to the changes in their world, that each of us is always capable of growth, positive or negative or neutral, in as much as and to the extent that there remains for us other people, places, things, or ideas with which to interact; for Dewey this meant, in his words, “that genuine individuality exists; that individuality is pregnant with new developments; that time is real.” Even so profound an insight as this was for Dewey not enough, and so we are left with two further gemlike conclusions.
First, Dewey reminds his readers that, while change is inevitable, progress is not, insisting that “change is going to occur anyway, and the problem is the control of change in a given direction.” Of course, how we go about directing change will vary depending on the context in which we are acting, but Dewey’s point is well taken; why write if not to change the world in some way, however minor? Indeed, this leads us to Dewey’s second conclusion, that “art is the complement of science” in so much that where science deals “wholly with relations, not with individuals,” art “is not only the disclosure of the individuality of the artist but is also a manifestation of individuality as creative of the future, in an unprecedented response to conditions as they were in the past.” That is, Dewey sees in art of all kinds humanity’s ability to express what he calls a vision of the “what might be but is not yet” such that “not just the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians” but rather anyone capable of “authentic expression of any and all individuality” can direct change in real, meaningful ways. We’ll revisit this point momentarily, but first we should return briefly to the main thrust of this post, the supremacy of context.
If, as Dewey says, our selves are always already in the process of being created as we interact with new people and new ideas, then our physical contexts matter profoundly to our ever-changing identities. Studies have shown that, placed into groups strongly identifying as either liberal or conservative, moderates will become more extreme ideologically in line with the beliefs of the people around them; I mention this not to warn of the dangers of groupthink, however real they are, but instead to emphasize the power of others to influence even our deepest beliefs and so to bring focus to the power of context in identity formation. A dialectic begins to form between sociality, that meaningful interaction that comes with knowing others, and reflexivity, that constant inner questioning that comes with knowing thyself, the synthesis of which is the self in its myriad complexity. Our identities, according to Dewey’s formulation, are in large part determined by those around us, such that to direct the inevitable change in our own lives into something resembling true growth is also to find our place in the world, to position ourselves around people who challenge us consistently but with love, people who see the best in us to so great an extent that we can see our better selves in their eyes, people with strong beliefs and deep passions – people, in short, who you won’t mind carrying around inside as you continue to accumulate further experiences.
Because that’s how it works, really: the people around you will leave an imprint in your psyche, as you will in theirs, and this will happen as inevitably and as predictably as finishing this very sentence with a cliché about the sun rising in the east. This brings us back to Dewey’s twin conclusions, that we must work to control the direction of change and that art is the medium by which that work may be realized, and to my own: ethically speaking, who we know and where we live matter not just to what we can accomplish but to who and what we can become. As novelist David Foster Wallace suggested to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College in his now famous speech entitled “This Is Water,” being educated means possessing the ability to choose the things about which we think, to choose how we view the world; at this point, we might go one step beyond Wallace’s eloquent conception and suggest that being our best selves means these things and more. Finding our unique places in the world, finding our true selves, also means creating for ourselves an environment suitable to our own individual needs. Whatever else these needs may be, one among them must surely be love.
So, yes, context is king because without it, nothing exists; without the social, the self is incomplete; and there is no true freedom from context when one takes seriously the notion that the world in which we live really does, in fact, exist, which just about everybody these days is likely to do. But more than that, it is up to us to control that context to the best of our abilities so that we all can flourish. After all, as Dewey would himself insist, it is only in a world wherein all have the equal ability to thrive that each of us has the optimal opportunity to find our truest selves.
[1] I’m inclined to draw my examples from science here, likely due to the influence of Jacob Bronowski’s excellent book The Common Sense of Science, wherein he nears, at times, an argument not too far from the one I’m making in this post, as well as Thomas Kuhn’s influential pronouncements about the evolution of scientific thinking within and through various paradigms in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and by the oft beautiful essays of Loren Eiseley; however, one could land at the same place if starting from theology, philosophy, politics, or any other galvanizing force behind humanity’s collectivized existence.
[2] https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0809314266
