‘The Music Breathing From Her Face’

The light of love, the purity of grace,
The mind, the music breathing from her face,
The heart whose softness harmonized the whole, —
And oh, that eye was in itself a soul!

(‘The Bride of Abydos’, Lord Byron, (1788–1824)).

In Philip K.Dick’s novel, (1928–1982), ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’, Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter charged with the task of tracking down and ‘retiring’ rogue androids; which is to say, killing them, although putting it that way raises a philosophical problem as to whether they were ever alive in the first place, whereas for now I am more concerned with addressing a different philosophical problem, that of personal identity. ‘Does any here know me?’ asked King Lear, ‘Why, this is not Lear. / Doth Lear walk thus? Speak thus? Where are his eyes? / Either his notion weakens, or his discernings / Are lethargied. Ha, sleeping or waking? / Sure, ’tis not so. / Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ (William Shakespeare, (1564–1616), ‘King Lear’, Act 1, Scene 4). Lear could with equal justification have asked, who are these people? Who is it that can tell me who they are? What am I? What are they? Numerous and diverse are the questions about ourselves that emerge by virtue of our being endowed with life, conscious beings that are also material objects, originating from somewhere; but from whence? At what moment did my being begin? Jean-Paul Sartre, (1905–1980), wrote, apropos this very problem of birth: ‘Actually it seems shocking that consciousness ‘appears’ at a certain moment, that it comes ‘to inhabit’ the embryo, in short that there is a moment when the living being in formation is without consciousness and a moment when a consciousness without a past is suddenly imprisoned in it. But the shock will cease if it appears that there can be no consciousness without a past’.

I will address that suggestion concerning identity being dependent, in some manner, upon a past in due course, but for now, I return to Deckard. The androids (called ‘replicants’ in the film adaptation of the novel, ‘Blade Runner’), are so human, all too human, that Deckard has to determine whether or not an object of his suspicions is indeed what he or she or it appears to be, that is, human, by subjecting he or she or it to the Voigt-Kampff test, which measures the degree of his or her or its empathic response, through solicitously phrased inquiries and comments. For this is a mark of the human, Dick is saying, this sense of empathy that we have, and I think he is correct; those that have very little sense of empathy, or none at all, if such be possible, we call psychopaths, though these latter do open up the possibility of Deckard retiring a human by mistake, were he to place too much confidence in the test; (and as to whether or not a sense of empathy does or does not compute, I do not know). ‘Agonies are one of my changes of garments’, said Walt Whitman, (1819–1892), ‘I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person, / My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe’.

And what of love? ‘Love goes by haps; Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps’, (Shakespeare, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’,Act 3, Scene 2). Alas, our hard-boiled bounty hunter does indeed put himself in danger through succumbing to this most desirable of emotions; letting down his defenses, neglecting his usual strategies, that serve his profession so well, through falling in love with Rachael, an android, though not one that he is charged with having to retire. And they make love. ‘Don’t think about it, just do it’, she tells him. ‘Don’t pause and be philosophical, because from a philosophical standpoint it’s dreary. For us both’. And they declare their love for one another. ‘“I love you,’ Rachael said. ‘If I entered a room and found a sofa covered with your hide I’d score very high on the Voigt-Kampf test”’. But then, this is what Rachael does, seducing bounty hunters, in an attempt to dissuade them from their missions to retire her fellow androids.

For Deckard to be able to carry out his missions, the androids have to be mere objects to him, so that he can then send them to their retirement without any feelings of guilt. Now, as it happens, one of the androids that he does have to retire, Pris, is of the same type as Rachael; it, Pris, matches its, Rachael’s, description; perhaps with a difference of hairstyle, or in the way it is dressed, but when Deckard finally confronts Pris, he hesitates, though fortunately for him he does see in time that it is ‘not quite’ Rachael, and thus he retires Pris before Pris can retire him.The clothes are not quite right, he noticed, but ‘the eyes, the same eyes’. There is something strange about this, and I am not sure if Dick quite thought it through, for Rachael is an android, and Pris is an android, one would expect the eyes of both to be the same; soulless, one might say. But were I charged with the assassination of what turned out to be an exact replica of my beloved, that would certainly give me pause, yet the discomfort would quickly pass, because I would see that my beloved is not there; she would not be present in the eyes; no Voigt-Kampff test necessary. ‘These lovely lamps, these windows of the soul’, saidGuillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, (1544–1590); just as Lord Byron, in another great literary work that explores the theme of personal identity, ‘The Bride of Abydos’, writes of the eye of Zuleika, the heroine of the tale, being in itself a soul; of her mind having its own distinctive music, breathing from her face.

The bride’s sorry tale goes like this. Selim, the putative son of the Turkish pasha, Giaffar, is the individual that is obliged to confront the existential problems concerning who or what he is. The enraged pasha castigates Selim, abuses him with contempt and with affronts to his dignity, upon the discovery that he is in love with his putative half-sister, Zuleika, Giaffar’s actual (not putative) daughter. He forbids their marriage, and Zuleika seemingly acquiesces, without stating as much, for of course she loves Selim, and they meet secretly in a grotto. Ah me, but as we know only too well, ‘the course of true love never did run smooth’, (William Shakespeare, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Act 1, Scene 1). Selim appears to Zuleika dressed as a pirate, declaring to her that not only is he not who she thinks he is, but he is not who he thought he was either, and that she is not his sister; for he has learned of his true identity from the servant Haroun, that his real father, Abdallah, was killed by Giaffir, who then raised Selim, but as an object of loathing and fit only for maltreatment. And now Selim has assumed the identity of a pirate, for ‘the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge (William Shakespeare, ‘Hamlet’, Act 3, Scene 2).

Had Selim focused on love rather than revenge perhaps he and Zuleika might have absconded and lived out their lives happily together, rather than both of them coming to grief, but such is the significance that Selim gives to his identity that it does not turn out that way, and they both die. Had Selim not come to comprehend the character of his proper identity, he would have persisted in a condition of impotence at the court of the pasha, where he was reputed to be effete and unmanly, reviled continually by Giaffir on account of either a lack of the combative skill or the belligerence to be expected of a warrior. Selim laments:

What could I be? Proscribed at home,
And taunted to a wish to roam;
And listless left — for Giaffir’s fear
Denied the courser and the spear —
Though oft — oh, Mohammed! how oft! —
In full Divan the despot scoff’d,
As if my weak unwilling hand
Refused the bridle or the brand:
He ever went to war alone,
And pent me here untried — unknown;
To Haroun’s care with women left,
By hope unblest, of fame bereft.

Deprived of his masculine identity, Selim is spurred on to thoughts of revenge. As Selim’s story demonstrates, when confronting the question of who or what we are it is tempting to focus upon certain attributes, or perceived attributes, of ourselves to which we have a particular impression of connection, or proprietorship; as Lear (see above) in questioning his identity refers to personal traits that he perceives to mark him out as Lear; but as we can see with Selim, and the other cases considered here, (all taken from fiction, the astute among you will have noticed, but, ‘there is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth’, as Doris Lessing, (1919–2013), said), endeavouring to understand personal identity through those features that we take to define ourselves as a person, or that make us to be the person we are, however that may be understood, will not take us very far.

The reasons for this are as follows. Selim claimed the right to define himself in terms of his masculine identity, and today, identity on the basis of sex or gender (for there is a distinction) has gone so far as to become a political matter; a political consciousness, having usually to experience some kind of a reformation, is then influenced, and shaped, one might say, in accordance with the beliefs or practices of a minority movement that defines itself in terms of a gender identity; homosexual, bisexual, transgender, and so on. And how has it transpired that one’s sexuality or gender has come to be granted a special significance in defining who we are? (Whether we want it to or not. I, for instance, am identified as cisgendered, even though I do not consider my sexuality or my gender having much to do with my identity). Michel Foucault, (1926–1984), in ‘The History of Sexuality’, suggests an answer: ‘We demand that sex speak the truth… and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves which we think we possess in our immediate consciousness’.

So, for instance, and according to Foucault, the contemporary conception of homosexuality arose out of a desire to regard sexuality as a fundamental aspect of who we are. Once a criminal act, sodomy is now, though constitutive of a personal identity, merely one of the ways in which that person’s homosexuality exhibits itself; homosexuality, as it is now conceived, is associative of an identity; a means by which we may interpret that person; to comprehend the manner in which they comport themselves. But it was not always thus. The ancient Greeks were without the terms to express, and hence the means to effect, a bifurcation of heterosexual and homosexual; the answer to who or what they were lay not there. Indeed, being attracted to men was thought to express masculinity; for although in the U.K. homosexual citizens have been allowed to serve openly in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces only since the year 2000 AD., Plato, many centuries ago, had argued the case for an army constituted exclusively of same-sex lovers; as he explains:

‘Suppose a lover to be detected in the performance of some dishonourable action or in failing through cowardice to defend himself when dishonour is inflicted upon him by another; I assert that there is no one, neither his father nor his friends nor anyone else, whose observation would cause him so much pain in such circumstances as his beloved’s. And conversely we see with regard to the beloved that he is peculiarly sensitive to dishonour in the presence of his lovers. If then one could contrive that a state or an army should entirely consist of lovers and loved, it would be impossible for it to have a better organization than that which it would then enjoy through their avoidance of all dishonour and their mutual emulation; moreover, a handful of such men, fighting side by side, would defeat practically the whole world. A lover would rather be seen by all his comrades leaving his post or throwing away his arms than by his beloved; rather than that, he would prefer a thousand times to die. And if it were a question of deserting his beloved or not standing by him in danger, no one is so base as not to be inspired on such occasion by Love himself with a spirit which would make him the equal of men with the best natural endowment of courage. In short, when Homer spoke of God ‘breathing might’ into some of the heroes, he described exactly the effect which Love, of his very nature, produces in men who are in love’.

And indeed such an army did exist, in the 4th century BC; the Sacred Band of Thebes, celebrated in the ancient world for their mettle in battle; a corps of specially selected soldiers, one hundred and fifty pairs of male lovers. As Foucault has explained, ‘the manifold sexualities — those which appear with the different ages (sexualities of the infant or the child), those which become fixated on particular tastes or practices (the sexuality of the invert, the gerontophile, the fetishist), those which, in a diffuse manner, invest relationships (the sexuality of doctor and patient, teacher and student, psychiatrist and mental patient), those which haunt spaces (the sexuality of the home, the school, the prison) — all form the correlate of exact procedures of power’.

And this lays bare the fallacy of accounting for the difficult philosophical issue of personal identity in terms of personal attributes with which we identify. Personal identification of one’s own gender is supposedly based on an internal awareness, but awareness of what? We may not even have the attributes that we think we have; and further, no one may have such attributes, because they are mere fabrications. It has been maintained, (e.g., Judith Butler, (1956 — )), that gender is a social construct; how gender is perceived is constructed through particular cultural and social practices, and such a perception does not, therefore, represent reality; and that gender and assigned (sic) sex may not always align… but then, how many genders are there, and how do we distinguish an authentic type of gender, (the concept of which presumably has to evolve over time), from one that is merely invented? Woman, man, transgender woman, transgender man, cisgender woman, cisgender man, non-binary gender, genderfluid, intergender, agender, omnigender… … … … …

Once again Foucault offers a suggestion of what is really going on here, (although he was writing about sexuality and sexual practices rather than gender); there is a power to be exerted in creating boundaries, in making distinctions, on the basis of gender identity; not with the purpose of oppressing those that then assume the identity, but just the opposite; with the purpose of inventing a minority category that then achieves power through an acquired victimhood and claims of oppression; thus transgender or non-binary, etc., rights are born and pursued; the words ‘ladies’ and ‘gents’ on toilet doors are denounced as discriminatory; (see the case of Morganna Snow, for instance; I exaggerate not. How desperate the craving for an identity, any identity, must be, when toilet habits become an essential expression of it); like Selim, they are incensed, their identity is constantly subjected to violation, and they are offended… and the ever increasing attention directed to more and more different forms of gender and sexuality is all a part of what Foucault calls ‘spirals of power and pleasure’.

To return to the problem of birth, for a problem it remains, Sartre, employed the term ‘facticity’ for that about ourselves that we have not chosen; the facts about ourselves, within the context of which he can then argue that, in a certain sense, we choose to be born, (though I have never quite been able to clarify to my own satisfaction in what ‘sense’ he means):

‘I am ashamed of being born or I am astonished at it or I rejoice over it, or in attempting to get rid of my life I affirm that I live and I assume this life as bad. Thus in a certain sense I choose being born. This choice itself is integrally affected with facticity since I am not able not to choose, but this facticity in turn will appear only in so far as I surpass it toward my ends. Thus facticity is everywhere but inapprehensible; I never encounter anything except my responsibility. That is why I can not ask, ‘Why was I born?’ or curse the day of my birth or declare that I did not ask to be born, for these various attitudes toward my birth — i.e., toward the fact that I realize a presence in the world — are absolutely nothing else but ways of assuming this birth in full responsibility and of making it mine. Here again I encounter only myself and my projects so that finally my abandonment — i.e., my facticity — consists simply in the fact that I am condemned to be wholly responsible for myself. I am the being which is in such a way that in its being its being is in question’.

What, then, does ‘my being is in question’ actually mean? Being responsible for myself, what does that entail? How do I know that I really have the attributes that I am ready to assume responsibility for? Is my sexuality and my gender a part of my facticity? It would seem so, but whatever the case it is certainly possible that I may have an attribute that for me is central to the way I define myself, that I take to be an essential element of my identity, and at the same time my belief that I have such an attribute is false. What is a person anyway? Could an artificial life be a person, though a non-human one, i.e., having a sense of empathy may be a mark of the human, but is it an essential part of personhood?. And given that the attributes that I do have may be changeable and contingent, were my identity to be defined by them then my identity would change over time. So what is it that makes me the person that I am? Another approach to the problem of personal identity is required if I am to make any progress here. The question now becomes, what is there about me that persists through time, and on what evidence do I base my persisting existence, if indeed it does persist… which brings me to the thorny subject of memory…

To be continued…………