Who am I? The unnecessary quest for self-definition

I don't really like columns that wax philosophical; more often then not such articles take up some myriad of words without actually saying anything at all. That being said, what of course you must have realized by now is that I am going to do so anyway and take the risk of not saying anything at all. Actually, what I have sometimes found is that not saying anything at all is often times much better than saying something.

Glancing at the columns of the last few weeks, I realized that they have a certain similarity. The particular current that has run through recent articles concerns how we define ourselves, whether they are about the eating clubs, race, or OWL and body image. People love to ask this question of how we define ourselves; we refuse simply to live, but take a perverse pleasure in attempting to situate ourselves within some larger and more meaningful context, even though we are never really sure that context exists. Let me pick the last topic to discuss as model of this trend as I have written numerous times about the first two topics. Hopefully from my discussion of the last topic I will be able to extrapolate a certain way of thinking that can be applied to the other to topics and perhaps clarify that vexing topic of "who we are."

Last week OWL promoted a campaign for girls to wear Hooters T-shirts, and before that a campaign that asked: "Can you be feminine and still be a feminist?" Both had as their goal an attempt to demonstrate that women were not merely sex objects and that they cannot be defined by their bodies, but rather by who they are as women. Furthermore the Hooters T-shirts, with the words "We are not just Hooters" emblazoned across the breast, is an attempt to acknowledge that women do in fact have breasts and demystify them.

These campaigns were met with criticism ranging from the t-shirts being just plain lewd, to their hurting the cause of feminism. In fact, on this note, posters for an upcoming a cappella sing that featured a recent Maxim cover depicting a provocative picture of a women, were both criticized and torn down.

What makes this second group wrong is that who we are is not a product of our anima. On the most basic level we are both a body and a mind; we could no more exist without our bodies than we could without our minds, thus both are important to our constitution. Yet for some reason we claim that our body is simply our persona and that to know a person as he or she is one must look beyond such superficialities. Perhaps, it might be claimed, our wills and reason, those attributes that supposedly separate us from the animals, constitute the true nature of ourselves. Very well, but would anyone seriously deny that our exteriors are in fact the outward manifestation of that putative true nature? How we show ourselves physically to the world is as much who we are as who we show ourselves mentally to the world. When we play at life, are the costumes we wear, the forms we take, really any more of a veneer than the words we speak? Search inside yourself good reader, and see if you can come up with a self that comprises more than a bunch of adjectives. Are you outrageous? Cowardly? Or perhaps man or women? Black or white? Add the adjectives up and what do you have but a list? That rational, immanent nature, is itself diaphanous.

Many people recognize this and where introspection fails, introduce exogenous factors that define themselves. To bring this back to OWL in particular, by either identifying yourself with the Feminist movement, or with ideologies, you miss the fact that there is an individual self apart from all others that cannot be articulated, and that rational thought is in fact founded upon it. What must be recognized, therefore, is that women are no more defined by their personality than they are by their bodies, but both are a part of them. Why should feminism elevate one aspect of women and debase the other? Women are hooters, but not just. Women are minds, but not just. They are free to choose what combination they would be. Is this not the primary purpose of feminism to begin with, that women will not be defined by society? To reject society's ostensible definition and fly to the diametric opposite is still to let society dictate what one is. It is better to ignore all dictates.

Now that we have established this method of thought, we can see how it can apply to race, or the eating clubs. These are groups that we belong to and are just as arbitrary as introspective definitions. We are what roles we choose because this is the essential nature of our lives, not our personalities or our bodies. This both takes into consideration society and rejects it. We are always part of a society, but we are also always ourselves. Ultimately this means that we should do what we would do without trying to define ourselves as such or such. "Who am I?" is a banal and irrelevant question. Be in a club, be a member of a race, be a woman; don't pretend however, that by this you suddenly have found yourselves.

Maybe I've said something, and maybe I haven't. It's probably more to the point if I haven't. Daniel Ostrow is a politics major from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at dtostrow@princeton.edu.