I remember the first time someone told me that I could not be whoever I wanted to be. I was in high school, and the dream-buster was my piano teacher. At a lesson one day I made some sort of offhand joke about going to Juilliard and becoming a professional musician. My teacher, a wiry man in his mid-sixties, looked at me wryly over his glasses and said, ‘Uh, no.’
I had never taken my piano lessons very seriously. I played for fun, and I was under no illusions about how talented a musician I was (answer: not very). But it was still a shock to hear someone tell me that there were limits to who I could be. I was a teenager, trying to navigate the messy business of discovering who I was as a person. Up to that point, identity had felt like such a private journey: I alone determined who I was. Yet here was my piano teacher, pointing out that, in a lot of ways, who I was wasn’t up to me. Society could open doors, if it deemed me worthy, but it could also slam them in my face. I may not have particularly wanted to become a musician, but I wanted to be able to become a musician. So I was confronted with a deep question that remains with me to this day: how much say do we really have over who we are?
Broadly speaking, there are two philosophical camps. On the one hand, there are the existentialists. According to them, we ourselves are the authors of our own identities. Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, insists that for humans ‘existence precedes essence’. We do not have an essence until we give ourselves an essence. In short, ‘man first exists: he materialises in the world, encounters himself, and only afterward defines himself.’ I define myself.
On the other hand, there are feminist philosophers. In their view, who you are doesn’t come about by individual fiat. Instead, your identity is determined by social forces. As Iris Marion Young says: ‘our identities are defined in relation to how others identify us …’ Cressida Heyes agrees: ‘None of us are at liberty to become any kind of person we want, and to align oneself with a particular identity formation is a necessarily intersubjective activity.’
In my view, both camps are correct because they are referring to two different kinds of identity: metaphysical identity and existential identity. Metaphysical identity has to do with who you are, as a frank and straightforward matter of fact. There is some fact of the matter about whether one is a firefighter or a schoolteacher, Christian or Muslim, Canadian or Swedish. It might not be that all of these facts are immediately obvious to a passing observer, but they are the sort of thing you could learn about a person by learning about their behaviours, relationships or history.
Here is a fresh set of 4 advanced, CAT-level Reading Comprehension questions based on the provided passage, utilizing diverse conceptual testing formats with no arrows and short options where specified.
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