Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities by Hilde Lindemann (review)

One of my favorite sentences in Hilde Lindemann’s lucid and remarkable book, Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities is this: “To have lived. . . as a person is to have taken my proper place in the social world that lets us make selves of each other” (159). With this phrase, as with the rest of her book, Lindemann manages to pull off that rarest of rare feats in academic philosophical writing: to say something that is at the same time philosophically insightful and universally relevant for beings like ourselves—something that not just describes and categorizes the modes of being a person, but says why personhood matters morally, why it deserves closer philosophical attention, and in the end, why it is so very dependent on the many interpersonal practices of empathetic recognition through which we can call each other into personhood. This book, then, is primarily about the necessity of paying attention—serious, philosophical attention—to what for too long has been either ignored, or summarily dismissed: that we, as human beings, cannot help but create and undo each other as persons; that this process begins before birth and does not end with death; that it is about time that we, as philosophers (although not exclusively, as Lindemann’s book manages to be both rigorous and accessible) recognize this most quotidian work as a profoundly powerful moral practice; and that in the service of this recognition, what is required is a careful, rigorous lens that perhaps only philosophy could offer. Lindemann offers just such a lens—and then some.

As a moral theorist and bioethicist—and among the pioneers of narrative approaches to both disciplines—Lindemann sets out to examine the concept of personhood, and the process of becoming persons. Unlike many of her philosophical peers, however, she does not conclude that personhood is a quality that one can seek and find (or fail to do so) within a particular human specimen. Instead, she argues—through stories, conceptual analysis, and most often, in that most fertile space where the two meet—that personhood is a practice: it is something that we reify through our actions, attitudes, and attunements toward others. Both socially and morally, we create persons by holding them in certain ways—we [End Page E-1] maintain their identities through stories about what most matters to them, their loves and hates, their commitments, and so on—or we destroy personhood by failing to do so. To speak about the moral personhood of individuals, therefore, is a task quite different from the one envisioned by supporters of more ideal theories of self that view personhood at best as a collection of qualities or attributes that add up to something more than the sum of their parts; and at worst, as an honorific that does not refer to much of anything in particular, other than to our desire for moral (and perhaps social and political) recognition. Lindemann suggests that missing the background (the non-agential, the non-voluntary) conditions of how we become persons is precisely where philosophy has taken a wrong turn: in a non-trivial way, what, and who, we are is not constituted solely by a collection of reasoned positions or endorsed choices, but by moral communities that work to create, or to undo, themselves, as well as their individual members. We hold each other well, not so well, or not at all—but it is in these many acts of holding that our identities, and our personhood, form, change, and sometimes disappear.

This monograph is not Lindemann’s first take on identity-centered moral and epistemic dilemmas. In her previous work, most notably Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair (2001), she focused on the narrative construction of identity as well as on the possibility of its destruction, especially in the cases of disadvantaged social groups through oppressive master narratives—and on how such damage can be repaired through counterstories that re-frame and re-define the oppressed group’s moral agency...