The Sort of Person We All Are

The sort of person we are is something that is ultimately not up to any of us to decide. Should it be so, we would all, apart from the occasional Calvinist, be very good people, which even the non-Calvinists have reason to believe we are not. How we describe ourselves as persons, however, is, to a certain extent, our own affair. The descriptions we get from philosophers and scientists, as metaphorical as the descriptions laypeople improvise about themselves, are more ambitious in scope. We have variously been described by others as organisms, clocks, computers, fields of forces, souls, minds attached to bodies, bodies attached to something not quite bodily, auras detached from everything else, language speaking-through-something, and so on.

There is, however, a sense in which our less ambitious self-descriptions are important. It might matter, for instance, whether I describe myself as Napoleon or as Saint Francis. It might matter even more whether I fashion my actions and decisions according to a certain description of Napoleon or Saint Francis. If the description of Napoleon after which I fashion my actions and thoughts is very particular or unusual, someone else might very well take me for Saint Francis. And, of course, all attempts to imitate practical models are liable to misunderstanding, given that I don't control the consequences and the descriptions of my actions in the same way that I control my decisions. I can therefore spend a whole life imitating Saint Francis, performing the sorts of actions most people believe are more or less Francis-like, imitating a very current description of the saint—addressing animals in particular ways, for instance—only to realize on my deathbed that most of my acquaintances had always taken me for Napoleon. Something must have gone terribly wrong, I then think. It was the Napoleonic way in which you went about imitating the saint, someone uncharitably tells me.

One need not consider, of course, high and well-known models for imitation and example. In most cases, our examples are not the subject of descriptions widely known (a certain unforgettable uncle, friend, grandmother, who are not famous). This kind of imitation is so common that the ambition to act like a historical model, which was still very much present for Napoleon, is now considered to be a sign of mental disturbance. It is a sobering experience, and painful to some, to realize that the long array of Plutarchian examples has moved into the insane asylum. We find the likes of Pericles and Werther, Elizabeth Bennet and Alexander, in mental institutions, not in moral shrines. Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, as indeed Don Quixote and Madame Bovary the characters, remain portents of this moving of models away from moral pantheons and into psychiatric clinics. Anonymous uncles, on the other hand, are still all right, probably among the last few remaining, if privatized, instances of a spent capacity for in-public admiration.

It should also be added that one need not be permanently wedded to one particular model. The story of a life can be told as a polygamous sequence of models, some of them so brief-lasting that they only acquire such dignity within the retrospective insights allowed by self-description. Their precincts were sometimes punctuated by acute crises, which often caused them to make room for some new unforgettable model, according to circumstances. The whole sequence appears in its entire chaotic splendor whenever we ask the question, "How did I learn this?" Behind the answer lies almost invariably a person, a we-as-someone-else. Consider a simple case, such as handwriting. Handwriting is often taken to be among the most personal things about us. Still, as soon as we concentrate on the particular history of a given trait in our handwriting, we may actually see someone else's. Behind the crossing of my t and the dotting of my i, I can, if I am so inclined (not everyone is), detect many different models. Very often the models have been very modified by usage, and only with great effort, using the same kind of paleontological imagination...