Saying and Doing

 I consider the purpose of a blog to be a kind of mental diary; a reminder of what I have read or reflected upon. I also consider it to be useful to collect my thoughts in written form, since all too often thoughts tend to float around, disconnected at times. I am under no illusion that a blog can possibly reflect an entire person. In fact, I go so far as to suggest that writing can stray from a person's lived experience, by providing an idealized self. But lived experience is really quite messy. Can there ever be a reliable narrative that can speak the truth about an entire person? Somehow, reflecting on this makes me realize how writing can only really be 1% of who a person is.
   What is the function of a narrative if it cannot reveal all of who a person is? I have recently been reading Julian Baggini's book The Ego Trick: What Does it Mean to Be You? and this book has made me ever more skeptical that one can really pin down a unified 'identity', particularly through biography. What struck me the most about this book was the mention of Gilbert Ryle's theory of mind and 'performance'. Ryle is critiquing the idea that one's mental life can be reduced to a kind of 'thing' like a substance. Instead of trying to locate the mind in a separate mental domain, Ryle suggests that thoughts are what brains and bodies do; that is almost to say that bodies and brains are nouns, thoughts are actions (p.63). But under the same token, one can also suggest that one's personal identity can never be reduced to a single 'thing' or even a set of memories. Rather, identity is something that is performed in some community with other beings. There just isn't any way to even begin to elaborate on the endless possibilities that come from this network of beings. At that point, one can give up trying to 'find' the self, and yield to a wider view that 'self' is exactly what is happening now in one's experience with other selves.
   What's the implication of this view? I think it means lessening the illusion that one can represent their full self in any form, be it through social media or writing. It also means appreciating silence as much as words. But more importantly it might entail not trying to search for the self 'in one's own thoughts', but to allow one's actions and feelings to naturally connect with others and to allow for unpredictability in the process.

Baggini, Julian (2011), The Ego Trick: What Does it Mean to You? London, UK: Granta