On his book The Politics and Ethics of Identity: In Search of Ourselves
Cover Interview of February 15, 2013
In a nutshell
We are multiple, fragmented, and evolving selves who, nevertheless, believe we have unique and consistent identities.
What accounts for this illusion? Why has the problem of identity become so central to post-war scholarship, fiction and popular culture?
I contend that the defining psychological feature of modernity is the tension between our reflective and social selves.
To address this problem, Westerners have developed four generic strategies of identity construction that are associated with four distinct political orientations: conservatism, totalitarianism, liberalism and anarchism.
I develop my argument through the reading of ancient and modern literary, philosophical and musical texts.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
In a nutshell
We are multiple, fragmented, and evolving selves who, nevertheless, believe we have unique and consistent identities.
What accounts for this illusion? Why has the problem of identity become so central to post-war scholarship, fiction and popular culture?
I contend that the defining psychological feature of modernity is the tension between our reflective and social selves.
To address this problem, Westerners have developed four generic strategies of identity construction that are associated with four distinct political orientations: conservatism, totalitarianism, liberalism and anarchism.
I develop my argument through the reading of ancient and modern literary, philosophical and musical texts.