Associateship of

King’s College
2019/20
Identity, authenticity and recognition .................................................................................. 2
Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast: How to Build an Inclusive University ................... 4
Identities and Communities in the Diaspora: The Case of "Religion" ............................. 5
Religion and (In)Equality ....................................................................................................... 7
Identity, authenticity and recognition
Identity in philosophy: metaphysical, personal, political
 What is identity
Aristotle: ‘the fact that a thing is itself’ - Metaphysics // self-perception changes in
time
Augustine: individual identity – ‘the self’ – Confessions = memory, human capacity
to reflect on its own past, seeing who I am and not who I am
What does it mean for human beings to be themselves? = fated and fixed? free and
fluid?
What role does ‘being oneself’ play in leading an ethical life, or human flourishing,
especially when one takes into account the social nature of human life?
Can we collectively attempt to flourish, do we contain others by flourishing?
Is it a good thing to be seen?
‘to live well you must live unseen’ – Ovid
Sceptics about personal identity: the existentialists
Ideal of authenticity stretches back much farther than the 1940s
 Jean-Paul Sartre
‘existence precedes essence’ = no general, non-formal account of what it means to be
human can be given, since that meaning is decided in and through existing itself.
Existence, for Sartre, is a process of self- making. Another way of putting this: one’s
identity is not exclusively constituted by nature nor by nurture, since to ‘exist’ is to
make your identity.
Facticity: contingent and unchosen properties, some of which a 3rd
person investigation can establish about me (weight, height, skin colour,
race, class, nationality, family)  the importance: I may not be thrilled about
how it shapes my interactions with others)  ‘hell is other people’ - Sartre
3 levels of embodiment:
as I live it (unselfconsciously: it hears, feels);
instrument, object of study (acknowledging);
as it is seen by others
Sartre – at the 3rd level we suffer at the hands of each other because of
facticity reductionism (single dimension), reducing to object (denying
that we are conscious subjects in the process of self-making)
world includes people who perceive the world otherwise than I do
We are not only a first-person perspective, therefore, but an aspect of our existence is
for others. And when others reduce us to objects (i.e., reduce us to a single aspect of
our facticity, denying that we are conscious subjects in the process of self-making) we
experience them as ‘hell’.
We also experience anxiety (not as psychological phenomenon but as ‘existential
mood’).
Anxiety (existential angst): we are free to make ourselves = a huge weight (becoming
the kind of person we want to be)
War Diaries (waitress brought wine and bread) = you have to make decisions all the
time (your choice of self has to be re-made, again and again, over time, because we
are free to negate the resolutions of past selves)  but we avoid it  anxiety arises
because we are ‘condemned to be free’, we are always in the process of choosing the
kind of selves we want to be  we indulge in bad faith (over-identification with one
of the poles of selfhood = facticity/freedom)
How much weight to be given to facticity, how much to freedom to make
yourself
Authenticity: holding these two at a correct balance

 Simone de Beauvoir’s challenge to Sartre

‘what kind of freedom can a woman in a harem achieve’
since ‘situations’ are different, so are ‘freedoms’...
distinction: freedom (abstract, all possess) / power (concrete ability to do what you
want to with that freedom)
Hegel - being seen by others (always moving between: mastery/slavery)
being seen by others is not always objectifying and problematic (looking to & at) –de
Beauvoir

 Gunnar Myrdal & Richard Wright

Discussion of race in America, ‘An American dilemma’
‘every individual may practice his freedom inside his world, but not everyone has the
means of rejecting, even by doubt, the values, taboos, and prescriptions by which he
is surrounded’ (Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 98.)
In The Second Sex Beauvoir turned to the values, taboos, and prescriptions
concerning women, and came to the conclusion that women were persistently ‘looked
at’ in ways that reinforced their lack of concrete power in the world, and that they
were socially encouraged to ‘look to’ or conform to others’ imaginations in ways that
prohibited them from becoming themselves freely.
Culture perpetuated problematic structures of power
Authenticity for de Beauvoir: acknowledging facticity, freedom, and situation,
recognizing that all situations involve other human beings and it’s incoherent to value
your own freedom without valuing the freedom of others, since the self is relational,
your authenticity must always take other people into account.

 Conversation: philosophy & religion

Existentialists/liberation theologians/anti-colonialists
Frantz Fanon/James H. Cone
Identity politics
Francis Fukuyama – Identity
who I can be in view of my facticity
Identity politics: the desire for recognition (Hegel, Rousseau) used to be
the case: place in the society tied to facticity
Identity: ‘a person’s understanding of who they are of their fundamental defining
characteristics as a human being’ – Taylor

People lacked vocabulary to talk about their oppression

 Divergent developments: what kind of recognition do people want? (as a

human/as a particular human), what kind of equality?
Politics of dignity: move from honour to dignity (monarchy – honour-based)
Corruption and injustice come into society when people desire esteem – Rousseau
To counter it – universal dignity
Politics of universalism → emphasis on equal dignity of all citizens with
equalization of rights and entitlements as its content
e.g. civil rights movements US 1960s
Politics of difference: modern notion of identity (everyone should be recognized for
his/her unique identity)
Also universalist in the claim that everyone should be recognized for his or her
unique identity; The demand for recognition is not based on the equal dignity of all
human beings, but on particular features of the identity of an individual or a
particular group

France: only one race: human race (colour-blind public policy), distinction =
discrimination, François Holland’s 2012 campaign included a promise to remove
‘race’ from the French constitution

UK: ‘Equality Challenge Unit’ states that ‘race’ is a ‘social construct’, and that the use
of terms concerning race and ethnicity depends ”on the context in which you are
using them, why you are using them and how you have decided which terms to use.”
ECU is focussed on advancing equality and eliminating discrimination and as a
consequence regularly refers to the barriers and discrimination faced by minority
ethnic groups.”, Advises use of ‘BME’, acknowledges limitations of this label and the
need for data disaggregation in some contexts,
https://www.ecu.ac.uk/guidance-resources/using-data-and-evidence/use-language-
race-ethnicity/.
Kara Walker – the only thing people want to hear from me is about slavery because,
apparently, the only thing I am is black

Visible Identities: Linda Alcoff – race is not a social construct

The lies that bind – Kwame Anthony Appiah – identity is constantly in the making

What about Richard Wright’s daughter?

Single individuals often feel fidelity to multiple ‘identities’
Ironic imperialism of American identity politics?

Scepticism & suspicion (Westphal)

Truth claims/evidence, basis for claim
Motivations for claim (avoid)
Acquisition responsibility vs revision responsibility (Cassam)
We are acquire beliefs
We should not blame people for it but we should correct them

Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast: How to Build an Inclusive

University
What has culture got to do with strategy

You can have the best strategy, but if you do not have a healthy culture, it will fail

Exclusion – Separation – Integration – Inclusion

Do you see me? Do you care that I’m there? Am I enough for you, or do you need me
to be better in some way? Can I tell that I’m special to you by the way that you look at
me? – Maya Angelou
True inclusions involves decision-making

Still, more recently studies are challenging the reliance on the business case for
inclusion and focusing on the ethical argument. Historian, Caitlin Rosenthal, argues
that in the case of the Atlantic slave trade:

“In some cases, innovation and violence went together and built on each other, and
that’s totally contrary to most narratives of innovation.” (HBR, 2018)

https://hbr.org/ideacast/2018/11/why-management-history-needs-to-reckon-with-
slavery.

‘if you don’t see colour, then you don’t see me’

Identities and Communities in the Diaspora: The Case of

"Religion"
1. Identities and representation
Representations are never neutral
Thinking about identities makes them representations of ourselves

Stuart Hall – Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies

Identity is constantly changing, in the making = it also has history

The concept of identity deployed here ... accepts that identities are never unified and,
in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but
multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses,
practices and positions. They are subject to a radical historicization, and are constantly
in the process of change and transformation.’ (Stuart Hall, Introduction: Who Needs
‘Identity’, in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay,
London, 1996, pp. 3–4.)

Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new
cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a ‘production’
which is never complete & is always constituted within, not outside, representation. -
SH

2. Diaspora = Greek ‘to disperse’

perceived as a curse (context of Jewish history) – exile, away from Jerusalem

two aspects of diaspora: experience of violent dispersal, loss (destruction of the
Temple, expelled from Spain) ; reconstitution of communal connection after the
violent experiences
horizontal/vertical diasporas
Three Dimensions of a Diaspora:
 homeland (loss & longing for origins, re-telling, re-creating)
 territorial nation states, ‘dialogue of power and resistance’
 diaspora community (new connections, combinations)
‘Though they seem to invoke an origin in a historical past with which they continue to
correspond, actually identities are about questions of using the resources of history,
language and culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not “who we are”
or “where we came from”, so much as what we might become, how we have been
represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves.’

3. Jewish diaspora

Hebrew did not have a world for religion

Advocating Jewish emancipation:

Judaic organization; they should not be allowed to form in the state either a political
body or an order. They must be citizens individually.’ (Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre,
‘Opinion. Le 23 Decembre 1789’, Paris, 1789, p. 13.)  demands of a secular nation-
state

Synagogues in the ‘Oriental’ or ‘Moorish’ style (19th century) = affirmed long diasporic
routes (especially history in medieval Spain) and re-imagined Europe as a place where
Muslims and Jewish communities could interact productively and flourish with
Christianity

Little agreement about how to respond to demands to assimilation = fragmentation

‘Society cannot be reduced to individuals, and so integration must be about bringing

new communities, and not just individuals, into relations of equal respect.’ (Tariq
Modood, ‘Multiculturalism: Not a Minority Problem’, in The Guardian, 7 February
2011)
Religion and (In)Equality
Soviet Union: Everybody was supposed to believe that religion was a form of false
consciousness (used to subordinate the working classes)

But: religion was not fading away in the SU

Guy’s Hospital (patients deemed incurable in other hospitals)

Sir Thomas Guy

John Harward and Queen’s Head Tavern  Harvard

Cross Bones Graveyard (Southwark)

Brompton Cementary

Moravian Burial Ground (any social hierarchy = ungodly)

Completely flat burial places

Church of Christ the King, Bloomsbury

Members anticipated they would emerge as the destined few for eternal salvation