Kwame Anthony Appiah writes:

I want to make the case for the power of thinking in the third person. The first person, of course, comes quite naturally to us. We have a vivid sense of our experiences and perspectives: This is who and what I am. People will live their lives with “main character energy.” Yet, with a little more work, we can also view ourselves the way historians and social scientists might: as creatures shaped by larger forces and bound by a culture’s pre-written scripts. That means seeing ourselves as the inheritor and inhabitant of various social identities — and, therefore, as a person like every other.

Something shifts once you reframe color, creed, gender and so forth within the more abstract concept of social identity. When a dimension of our life is grasped as a social identity, it becomes a phenomenon to take its place alongside a plentitude of other identities, each with points of commonality and distinction. We gain access to a third-person vantage on our first-person perspectives.

From the first-person perspective, the scripts of identity are often below consciousness. We’re Black or gay or female, trans, Latino, a conservative, a Mormon — perhaps in some combination — and we experience these things as essential aspects of our selfhood, things we live rather than things we think about. In video game terms, you might say we’re never a non-playable character to ourselves.

But when you fully apprehend an identity as an identity, you can see it is something historically mutable and contingent: not less powerful, but perhaps less permanent — perhaps something you might join with others to try to renegotiate. If we do this, we can be subjects of an identity without being wholly controlled by it, precisely because we recognize it as a version of something that others have, too. We can live it from the inside while also seeing from the outside. We can learn to think in the third person. [Continue reading…]