Identity and the Making of Meaning

How we find our purpose in life is deeply intertwined with the identity we develop. Yet this identity is often constrained by categories of separation and holds us captive. How can we find a new form of identity that also enables a new form of meaning?

It is not easy to wrap one’s head around the idea of a meaning crisis. At first glance, it seems rather abstract, distant, and beyond the concerns of daily life. My mind jumps to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the answer to the question “What is the meaning of life?” was…42. But if we step away from the idea of an answer, and look at meaning as something we do, and that we are doing all the time, meaning starts to feel very close. Perhaps one could even say, breath is to the body as meaning is to the soul. Who would we be without meaning?

The “activity of being a person is the activity of meaning-making,” writes the eminent developmental psychologist Robert Kegan in The Evolving Self. I find a lot to unpack in that simple statement. It covers the big questions that are also the most intimate: Who are we? Where are we? What does it mean to be, and to be here?

Personal and Cultural Meaning

Kegan also observes that we become persons, individuals, to the extent that we make meaning. The dying mother gorilla delights in seeing the first human who took care of her decades ago. But even though the gorilla’s recognition of her visitor brings a smile and excited chatter, she doesn’t hold an understanding of the meaning of death or thoughts of a possible afterlife. We humans do. We become persons by absorbing layers and layers of meaning, embedded in stories, rituals, archetypes, symbols. We aren’t some kind of impenetrable units that make meaning in a vacuum. Kegan makes the point that becoming a person begins by becoming embedded in the culture in which we are raised and then, often, dis-embedding ourselves and moving into other cultural niches that make sense of things in new ways that encompass greater breadth and depth. 

WE BECOME INDIVIDUALS TO THE EXTENT THAT WE MAKE MEANING.

Personal meaning and cultural meaning intersect in identity—gender, race, religion, class. At this moment in time, each of these is a battleground—a conflict over the meaning and purpose of our lives. When I think of the meaning crisis from this perspective, I see identity confusion, identity politics, “Men Going Their Own Way,” Black Lives Matter vs. All Lives Matter, racism, and white supremacy, alongside soaring depression rates, addictions, and suicide, particularly among the young. The hope to find an identity, a half square meter within which things make sense and life is worth living, is eluding more and more young people. The reason why this is tragically so has to do with the narrowness of the identities that our modern world offers.

The Daze before Identity

Herculine Barbin stands on the other side of modernity—hovering in the barely visible premodern world before masculine and feminine, homosexual and heterosexual, became “natural” categories into which human beings would shape themselves. The philosopher Michel Foucault found Herculine’s diary, written in the mid-19^th century, in the French Department of Public Hygiene where he was doing research. Today we would call Herculine “intersex,” a person with genitals that have both male and female characteristics. Despite being mesmerized by the rounded bodies of her schoolmates and colleagues, and her deep love affair with another schoolteacher, it takes her years to seek help to understand what is happening. Devoutly Catholic, she confesses to a benevolent Monseigneur, leading to a doctor’s examination and “reclassification” as male. She shows enormous courage in making a choice to protect her lover and radically transform into a man. After adopting a male identity, Herculine faces rejection and poverty and ends their own life at the age of thirty. Barbin can no longer make sense of their life. The desperate question that echoes through this story is: why couldn’t I have been left as I was?

For us, standing beyond modernity in our postmodern age, Herculine’s story seems like the “pre” version of the “transgender” movement. Herculine gives us a hint of a premodern social world where one’s role, not one’s sex, determined one’s place in society and the purpose of one’s life. After puberty, Herculine was quite obviously an unusual-looking young woman—with an embarrassing mustache (that she shaves because it is unattractive), dark hair on her body, a flat chest, and narrow hips—but no one in her world seems to take notice. She fulfills her obligations as a daughter and as a gifted teacher. Herculine is Herculine, a valued member of her community. This value of role over sex was not uncommon in the middle ages—or in a small provincial town where Herculine lived. In fact, there was a custom, known in Albania, India, and other places, of changing a daughter into a “son” (short hair, men’s clothes, men’s work) when a family had no male child to fill the social role as the head of the household.

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Living within a Category

Growing up, and usually until puberty, most of us can remember defying the norms for girls or boys—playing in some way with both. I can still see my brother, dressed as a fireman, hanging onto a stuffed dog with bells in its floppy ears. He cared for and sang to his fuzzy friend as if it were a baby. At a time when most sports were for boys only, I remember loving to catch and throw an American football with my father, which made my mother very uncomfortable. And I was a rebel: making wisecracks to my teachers, organizing my peers against the teacher’s authority. But this was all, in a sense, premodern—before puberty, which is when the categories of modern division take root in the mind.

Our identities are formed in adolescence when the human mind starts to grasp how our social worlds are organized: What is cool for a boy, what is not? What is normal for a girl, what is not? Identity development is a profoundly intimate invasion of our interiors by the hierarchies and divisions that shape our society. My body is male or female or…not? So that means that I am a man or woman or … what? My skin is light or dark, so that means I belong here—in this school, this group, this nation—or not? Too often one’s identity becomes not this or not that because the teen mind is not able to hold complexity. Who I am and what I stand for may be far less clear than the recognition that I am not…a man, Black, or Muslim. My identity ends up being not the Other—and projecting onto the Other all that I fear. Is it even possible to find deep meaning and wholeness from such a fundamentally defensive and fragmented self?

IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT IS A PROFOUNDLY INTIMATE INVASION OF OUR INTERIORS.

Identity development is only the first step toward becoming a mature adult—maturity involves integrating what we have split off and opening to our fundamental relatedness. Our current conflicts around identity suggest that many of us are not getting very far. An acquaintance of mine who is biracial said, “I just wish that white people would admit that they have a race.” It’s funny: this is also what women often say about men: why do men think that only women have a gender? Up until recently, “white” and “male” have been the normative categories in Western culture, the equivalent of “human.” In these last few decades, the equation of “man” (particularly “white man”) with “human” has been contested by the women’s and human rights movements. While this has allowed a new flourishing for women and men to develop beyond narrow identities, it also has led some to hang on to their identities for dear life. For white men whose meaning in life depends on being not women and not dark-skinned, the changes in these past decades have often been experienced as an existential threat—a loss of belonging and of meaning that can trigger defensiveness and aggression.

From Pre to Trans

Meaningfulness depends on coherence between self and culture. This gives a sense of belonging that, ideally, offers the opportunity for integration and development. However, modern culture holds within it a developmental trap that has led Western culture into increasing fragmentation and desperation. As each generation reaches puberty, the categories that have structured the social world around gender, race, religion, and class embed themselves into the growing psyche and perpetuate social divisions. We all, in one way or another, become like Herculine, who lost her capacity to just be herself. So, if Herculine offers a premodern glimpse of a self that is not divided and if modernity gives us the divided and dichotomized self, what lies beyond this that could allow us to live in integrity and wholeness?

The transgender movement seems to be trying to get beyond the binary of masculine/feminine, male/female. But at this point, the transgender project seems to be creating ever more categories of persons, adding to the chaos and confusion. Could there be another kind of “trans”? I think so. Could we hold our humanness—which includes the qualities and capacities of both genders, the dignity of all races, the wisdom of our traditions, and our material solidarity with each other—as the ground of relatedness? Can the infinite depth of our interiors open into a living space between us, the ground of a new culture? If so, then self and culture consciously can arise together, in nonseparation and mutual meaningfulness. Then when each generation comes of age, their young minds don’t have to be trapped by modernity’s categories. The question of identity—“Who am I and what am I doing here?”—can be an invitation to an exploration of the ever-expanding potential of human relatedness.

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