This is the fifth essay in my series, The Phenomenological Papers, a series of essays on topics in phenomenology and metaphysics. You can find the first essay here, the second here, the third here, and the fourth here. Here I discuss the phenomenology of what I call 'concepts', ways entities (yourself, others, or institutions) conceive of people as being, and the effects applying these concepts have on the ways we are, but most especially how we relate to ourselves. This essay is very much a product of my engagement with Foucault, part of whose general methodology and views about how reality is constituted for and by us has always seemed to me to be fundamentally correct. Unfortunately the fundamentals about which I believe he is correct (as well as his importance) have been obscured for various reasons. The present essay is an attempt to bring out, in my own way, some of what I believe he has already shown with his work.
The term [“sexuality”] did not appear until the beginning of the nineteenth century, a fact that should be neither underestimated nor overinterpreted. It does point to something other than a simple recasting of vocabulary, but obviously it does not mark the sudden emergence of that to which “sexuality” refers. The use of the word was established in connection with other phenomena: the development of diverse fields of knowledge (embracing the biological mechanisms of reproduction as well as the individual or social variants of behavior); the establishment of a set of rules and norms – in part traditional, in part new – which found support in religious, judicial, pedagogical, and medical institutions; and changes in the way individuals were led to assign meaning and value to their conduct, their duties, their pleasures, their feelings and sensations, their dreams. In short, it was a matter of seeing how an “experience” came to be constituted in modern Western societies, an experience that caused individuals to recognize themselves as subjects of a “sexuality,” which was accessible to very diverse fields of knowledge and linked to a system of rules and constraints. What I planned, therefore, was a history of the experience of sexuality, where experience is understood as the correlation between fields of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity in a particular culture.I. There are specific ways that specific people are. One person will be outspoken, while another will be reserved. One person will be competitive, while another lacks any taste for it. One person will tend to be sexually attracted towards men, while another will tend to be sexually attracted towards women. What a person is, it seems, just is the sum of ways they actually are at a given point. Some of the characteristics people have are shared in common with others. Which is to say, people are, in particular respects, the same, or at least similar to one another, in some respect. Thus, just as we say of one person that they are competitive, or left-handed, we say of another that they are too, if, and only if, they have ‘the same’ qualities as the other. We try to capture these shared characteristics in collections of persons by classifying and categorising them.
– Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume Two, The Use of Pleasure
To classify and to categorise people is to abstract one or a cluster of common characteristics shared by different individuals and forming a concept out of them. A concept, for the purposes of this essay, is just that: a possible way, or a cluster of ways, that a subject could be. I mean this in the broadest sense as including everyday, moral, cultural, and scientific concepts. For example, we may describe subjects as being resilient, honest, suave, introverted or autistic. Or, we may say that they are a man, woman, mother, husband, influencer, dandy, manager, executive, scientist, king, or queen. These are all concepts in the sense used here. There are of course other concepts that don’t capture ways that people are but ways other things are, such as specific types of animals, plants, chemicals, or artifacts. However, unless otherwise made explicit, when I talk about concepts in this essay, I only mean those concepts meant to classify persons.
These concepts could be as complicated or as simple as we like. For example, we may have a concept of someone being ‘tall.’ This is about as simple as things get, because there is only a single dimension that is decisive for our application of this concept. Namely, the measurement of someone’s height. Other concepts are more complicated. For one that has an artificial simplicity to it, take our concept of ‘bachelor’, one well-known in philosophy for being analytically equivalent to ‘unmarried man’. While it is necessary and sufficient to being a bachelor that you are an unmarried man, the complications in the concept lie in its connections to the other concepts in its definition. Namely, ‘unmarried’ and ‘man.’ The former concept captures those who are not married, but what marriage actually is, is a sophisticated question about the social institutionalization of specific practices engaged in by actual and possible individuals at different times. Thus, to determine that someone is unmarried is to specify their negative relation to these social practices, and all that this might imply in a given situation.
This all being said, the complexity of a concept, or our web of concepts and their interrelations, is not what I want to discuss here. I want to discuss concepts in general, their form, structure, and most importantly, their effects on those who are conceptualised. In other words, I want to discuss in general what Foucault found of the concept of sexuality in particular.
II. Concepts do not merely describe specific ways people are. When they are actually deployed and used by people in practice they can have a complex normative dimension too. There are at least two important ways in which concepts can be normative. The first is their valence and the second is their perfectibility.
A concept has a valence if it is taken to be good or bad for a person to be that way. Whether a concept is good or bad is always relative to a social milieu, and it is thus a separate question whether embodying such a concept is actually or absolutely good or bad (if there is such a thing). For example, take the concept ‘gay.’ Historically, this concept has not merely described a person who is sexually and romantically attracted to those of the same sex. Rather, it is a concept with a complicated, and tumultuous normative history, most especially over the last seventy years or so. Across different times, places, and cultures, the concept has had a specific valence, it has branded those to whom the concept applied with a definite moral value. For many, especially historically, the valence of the concept was either unambiguously bad, or at least bad in a more mundane, but similarly valanced sense. It was then, as it still can be now, an insult to call or allege that someone is ‘gay.’ However, for many others now, especially young people, the concept mostly lacks normative valence, it is neither here nor there whether someone is gay. In some milieus it even has a positive valence; it is good to be gay. Or perhaps it is neutral whether someone is a homosexual, it just being their descriptive sexuality, but good that they are queer.
Note also that the normative valence of a concept is not dependent merely on what we ourselves – who categorise ourselves and others as X or not-X – think of it. We may be entirely indifferent as to a concept’s goodness or badness but nonetheless be moving in a milieu that takes to be bad. How a concept’s valence is conceived of in different situations, and to different extents, is always ‘inherited’ from one’s social situation and milieu. This means that the valence will depend on where we are, when we are, and who we are with. If I were in a rural New Zealand town seventy years ago and considered myself ‘gay’ (or any of its cognates), my concept of what I am will likely have negative normative valence. I would take myself to be something that my social situation takes to be bad. This is because, even if we explicitly reject the normative characterisation of a concept, this does stop us from recognising that, within particular situations involving particular people, there is such a characterisation attached to it. This does not necessarily mean, or require, that everyone around us in these situations actually feels negatively or positively towards these specific characteristics of persons. It just means that there is a sense that it is good or bad for someone to embody these characteristics in these specific situations.
Thus, in any given situation, there are various ways that people could be that are further conceptualised as a good way to be, bad way to be, or a morally neutral way to be. This is a concept’s (normative) valence, and it is what makes the ways that people are conceptualised a distinctively ethical question, as well as a descriptive one.
The second way in which there is a normative dimension to concepts is their perfectibility. A concept is perfectible if there are standards internal to the concept that determine whether someone who counts as it is good or bad at embodying it. The distinction here is between the way someone counts as such and such concept versus someone embodying that concept well or badly. Which is to say, the difference between being X and being a good or bad X. For example, you might count as a professional triple jumper without being a very good one (relative to other professional triple jumpers). Whatever our conception of any particular concept X, some of them have standards internal to them that govern what it is that makes one a good or bad X. And again, what these standards are will be entirely dependent on the situation. The standards internal to the concept of professional triple jumper includes things like your personal best jump, technique, consistency, accolades, and so on.
The easiest and most salient way to bring this aspect of our concepts out is through social roles, such as mother, husband, or employee. They are classic examples of perfectible concepts, for, in such cases, there is a clear distinction between those that are or count as these concepts, but also between those that are good or bad at being them. Someone can be a better or worse mother, husband, or employee, according to our concept of these things. Further, these standards of perfectibility can equally apply to concepts with positive or negative valence. To take a trivial example, take ‘hero’ and ‘villain.’ By definition, the former has a positive valence – it is good to be a hero, while the latter has a negative valence – it is bad to be a villain. Yet, people can also be better or worse at being a hero or villain. Also, there is probably a level of competence at being these things below which they would not apply at all.
To take a more interesting example, consider the concept of ‘mother’. Part of what it is to be a good mother in our society is to look after your kids by caring for them and creating an environment in which they will (likely) flourish. However, this concept does not just include these more general imperatives, but also a bundle of highly specific doctrines, techniques, procedures, and technologies that you are supposed to deploy in playing the role of the mother, as they are the specific things which a social milieu thinks amounts to the best care for a child. For example, it is sometimes said by ‘experts’, and certainly other parents, that kids should never be left in the car by themselves, and that to do so is to maltreat them. Thus, performing or not performing this very specific action can constitute part of what it is to be a good mother, and the more (or less) you do it, the worse (or better) you are.
This is just one among many of the historically contingent and culturally specific activities that come to constitute the perfectibility conditions of certain concepts. Notably, in this case, the standards internal to it even include specific reference to recent technological developments (cars) and tropes of modern life (parking one’s car outside of a store while you enter it). What it is to be a good husband, employee, neighbour – or whatever else you might think of – contain their own highly specific, highly historically contingent quirks, too. For example, there have been many different variations, within many different social milieus of the good wife, one of which involved looking after an empty household while their family is at work and school, attending to domestic duties through the owning and operating of specific household appliances. Hopefully these examples give you a general sense of how, and the extent to which, social situations come to determine the perfectibility of a concept, the standards that determine whether one embodies a concept well, or poorly.
As with the valence of a concept, its perfectibility conditions are not dependent merely on how we conceive of what it is to do it well or badly, or our attitude towards the appropriateness of the standards it has inherited from its social milieu. It is given to us by our social milieu, and this means that the operative standards will depend on where we are, when we are, and who we are with.
This means we could either agree, disagree, or be indifferent to whether the accepted standards internal to a concept deployed in a particular situation are good standards, and we could feel this way to a greater or lesser extent. For example, some might feel strongly that to be a good philosopher, you must have a good grasp of advanced formal logic but largely move within situations involving others who think that more than the basics are unnecessary. In this case, this person disagrees with but recognises the standards operative in the concept. To take another example, people can be more or less polite – and at least within my milieu – the standards of politeness I’ve inherited seem to me to basically be good. But at other times and places, I find certain manners required for one to be considered polite, ridiculous or unnecessary. Yet, in spaces where these concepts are operative, someone running afoul of them does so palpably, and I must either grit my teeth and play along, or else be branded as someone badly mannered.
Thus, in any given situation, there are various ways that people could be good or bad at being some way or other. This is a concept’s perfectibility, and on top of the descriptive and ethical elements of concepts, it introduces a distinctly evaluative dimension to their application.
In summary, concepts – as they are actually deployed in our lives – do not merely describe specific ways that people are or could be, they also have a normative dimension. Specifically, they have a valence, their being good or bad, and perfectibility, their having standards which determine whether one embodies it well or badly. Further, their descriptive and normative elements depend on the milieu in which they are deployed.
III. I have now established that concepts have a descriptive and normative dimension. However, the discussion of their normative dimension raises a number of interesting avenues of thought. In particular, we might wonder how it is that we – those who create and deploy such concepts – concretely relate to them in different situations. In other words, we may start to wonder how these concepts affect us, as the people conceptualised.
One way of understanding how they relate to us is purely representative, understanding them, that is, to have no direct effect on us at all. On this view, in deploying concepts, we are capturing the total actual and potential ways people are in all places and in all times, including the normative valence and perfectibility of these ways of being in different places and times. To understand concepts in a way that is purely representative is to understand them as essentially just classifying all human subjects across possibility space into categories that capture their similarities and differences. Understood in this way, the process of concept-formation is separate from that which is conceptualized, such that there is merely a relation of correspondence between concepts and the reality that we conceptualize. Understood in this way, the process of conception-formation is not itself significant for the task of conceptualization.
Is this an appropriate way of thinking about the way we deploy concepts? To some extent. For, there certainly seems to be no issue in taking this approach to so-called ‘natural’ objects. When we conceptualize water or iron there seems to be no interesting interaction between our forming the concept and the object of our conceptualizations, in the sense that the process does not change the object under consideration, only our understanding of it. This can be true for persons too. There are ways peoples are, and things they tend to do, which we ably categorise, and which remain no matter what we do. For example, the category of: ‘taller than 180cm’. Our fixing of height conventions and then applying them to this or that person seems to have no interesting effect on that person.
However, for the most part, this is not true of concepts we apply to people. Indeed, I would go further and say that in most cases it is clearly false. In contrast to how we normally think of concepts like gravity, water, or iron, persons are – to use a term of Ian Hacking’s – ‘moving targets’, in the sense that our processes of concept-formation can and do have an effect on that which is conceptualized, the persons themselves. We might even say that our own concepts affecting the ways we are is a distinctively human feature of our reality. For example, even the point just made about the concept ‘taller than 180cm’ I do not fully buy. Height classifications can and in fact have made a difference to those conceptualised according to them. For example, people sometimes make a lot out of whether someone is six feet tall, and fashion themselves around this fact. Thus, setting out to investigate this or that way someone could be has the potential consequence of changing their way of being, what and how they do what they do, as well as how we conceive of that person.
Consider the mother from earlier. Once experts, scientists, book sellers, and advice-givers begin to investigate the ‘dos and don’ts’ of parenting, different practices come to be embedded in the perfectibility conditions of being a parent, at least within milieus in which these people have sway. (In cultures other than my own, such conditions are more likely to come directly from a mother’s immediate family.) Consequently, those parents to whom the concept applies become subject to the ways in which the internal standards of the concept changes. They become someone who does or does not engage in the activities now newly constitutive of good parenthood, and they are considered as such irrespective of their attitudes towards these changes. Suddenly, a mother’s friends and family are critiquing their outdated techniques, exhorting them to try this or that new formula, vitamin, or ‘brain training’, and suggestively saying things like “it’s dangerous to leave children in the car” with the undisguised implication that a parent who does such a thing is a bad one. It can easily be seen how these interactions come to change the mother, who wants nothing less than to harm their child, and be a bad mother.
To take another example, consider an autistic person (whatever that amounts to at any given point in time). Once someone is classified in this way, their world does not remain the same as it was before their diagnosis, even if the same ‘symptoms’ are present. Rather, several changes begin to take effect, and their relations with the world begin to transform. Doctors obviously treat them differently. The person becomes, for the doctor, someone who needs to be treated in accordance with their autism, and taught a series of techniques to ‘cure’ or manage their diagnosis. In situations where their autism is disclosed, say, at school, for a job, or as an applicant or participant in some other course, process, or activity, a box may be ticked in an information system that means this person receives different treatment to others.
Further, once an autistic person’s classification as this concept starts to become known to other people around them, they start getting treated differently by them too. Friends and family begin to treat them as autistic, as being someone who’s being is characterized by their autism. They may conceive of them as one who, for the most part, cannot recognize the same system of social norms that they can, as someone who will fail to recognize conversationally implied expectations, and therefore as someone who is not to be blamed for violating these things, if and when they do. This is not just a single mental act performed by these people. Their conception of a particular autistic person, as well as their (often idiosyncratic) conception of what it is to be autistic, actually leads them to act and react to this person in ways different to how they otherwise would have.
An autistic person’s own relationship to themselves changes too, both because they recognize what they are recognized as by others, but also because their own autism is something through which their own actions are made and interpreted. Their social behaviour, rather than being their own awkward, failed attempts to fit in becomes the ‘mask’ they put on to shield themselves from those situations. Their masking behaviour is no longer identified with as the core of themselves, but instead as a kind of performance. They are no longer a putatively ‘normal’ person failing to be normal, but an autistic person being (or hiding) what they are. The character of the relation to their self, and in particular, to their own social being and behaviour, has changed entirely.
What these examples show is that, whether it is the person that changes, or simply the environment in which they inhabit, once a concept is taken to apply to a person, they are understood to be different by themselves, by others, and by specific institutions. In consequence of this, they are treated differently too. As we can see, these effects are not merely ‘in the head’, in the sense that it is merely a matter of persons or institutions registering some concept as applying to them. Rather, they figure in a whole system of concrete relations to these entities, and systems of norms that govern them. These changes are material changes, through and through; aspects that modulate the very nature of one’s concrete situatedness in the world. Concepts, therefore, rather than just being descriptions of the world change it too.
However, what I have described so far is merely a sketch of their power, with some examples. To take a more synoptic view of such effects, I want to say that, roughly speaking, we could carve up the kinds of effects the deployment of concepts have on an individual into effects involving the self, effects involving others, and effects involving institutions.
Self: effects involving the self include any effect the understanding of a concept to apply to a person by that person has on them, the ways in which this self-understanding modulates their material relations and the ways they are. For example, what effect understanding oneself as having specific mental illness, having a specific job, or being part of a specific group has on one’s own person.Not having the historical or technical chops to discuss the institutional effects of concepts (for that, among other works, see Foucault’s Discipline & Punish and his History of Sexuality series, Ian Hacking’s Rewriting the Soul, or even Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star), and with the intention of tackling our relations with others another time, the rest of this essay will only discuss the effect concepts have on one’s relation to oneself (both of which are also covered extensively by Foucault and Hacking).
Others: effects involving others include any effect the understanding of a concept to apply to a person by other persons has on them, the ways in which this understanding modulates their material relations and the ways they are. For example, what effect people understanding another person to be a doctor, autistic, tall, or a furry has on that person.
Institutions: effects involving institutions, which is to say, any organisation (social, political, economic, knowledge-producing, governmental or non-governmental) whose material functioning involves the classifying of different kinds of persons, and then acting in accordance with these classifications, involves any effect this classification has on the classified, the ways in which this classification modulates their material relations and the ways they are. For example, what effect the classification of people as having specific ‘physical’ or ‘mental’ conditions have on the drugs that they take, or what effect the government classification has on the assistance you are eligible to receive.
IV. Concepts have a real effect on the way a person constitutes themselves to themselves. By “constitute” I mean something like: the particular way in which we experience an object, which is in this case ourselves. When we constitute ourselves differently to how we have before, we feel ourselves to be different, to have a different set of possible courses of action, and to act or react differently too. We actually become a different person.
This effect of concepts – the effect they have on the relation to ourself – is something we are all familiar with, but which is seldom recognized. The basic structure of this is as follows. In certain situations, we recognize ourselves as satisfying a specific concept, X, and once we recognize this, we take ourselves to be X. Then, we use our being X to inform thought and action. This happens in three different ways, one corresponding merely to the descriptive content of a concept, the other two corresponding to the two normative dimensions of concepts. I begin with the descriptive.
When we conceive of ourselves as X, we take the descriptive specifications involved in X as a premise delimiting our own possibilities in thought and action. The idea is simple enough. You are out for dinner and need to go to the toilet. You walk towards two doors, there is one bathroom for men, and one for women. You take yourself to be a man, so you enter the men’s bathroom. Or, if you take yourself to be a woman, you enter the women’s bathroom. Our conception of our own possibilities being determined in this way falls straight out of the descriptive content of our conception of X: I am a man or a woman, therefore I do not belong there, therefore I will go there instead. Examples can easily be multiplied, especially involving gender concepts, which furnish us with many very obvious examples that are formally and informally inscribed into the fabric of our social existence.
However, a great many other concepts can do the same work, such as our age. The general idea of our being young, old, or middle-aged can guide our action, but so can more specific ages, such as being a teenager or being retirement age. Some seem to think that their turning an arbitrarily selected age like thirty (rather than turning thirty less one day) constitutes an incontrovertible transformation of their own being, from which point onwards they must change their life. This also applies to the kinds of political groups we understand ourselves to be a member of. We may ask ourselves what the libertarian, socialist, or voter of X political party would do or believe in some situation, and proceed accordingly. Or even when making simple social calculations: “no, I’m an introvert, I don’t like that kind of thing”, “come on, we’re all adults here”, “it’s a little…unsophisticated, isn’t it?” The kind of person we take ourselves to be informs the kinds of things we think and do.
Never does this accounting of ourselves come into sharper relief than when we enter a room filled with people who we take to be some way that we are not. This could happen in a number of different contexts. For example, in professional settings you might walk into a meeting with only people that are well above you. You take yourself to stand in a direct relation of hierarchical inferiority to them, at least with respect to your role. From the way you conceive of your role relative to theirs, you deduce certain expectations of deference, formality, and relative proficiency at the job, what you should and know, what it is appropriate for you to bring up, etc. that you then enact when you engage with them in these contexts. But of course, this often breaks down as professional relations are also established in any particular workplace that elide outward distinctions. Here, a more subtle but equally judicial system of concepts we understand ourselves to embody governs what we can and cannot do.
A professional environment is a case where the relevant concepts are often transparently known and agreed to by those you engage with you. However, the sharp distinction between yourself and everyone else in a room is more often felt in cases where it is initially just you that conceives of yourself as in some way different, absent a formal structure that explicitly encodes this. For example, you may conceive of yourself as having a deficit of knowledge in some respect relevant to a social situation. Suppose you walk into a room of new people, and they are all conversing about something you have no real knowledge of. Immediately this comes into focus: you are someone who does not know about this topic, they are people who do. People have various (and interesting) ways of responding to these situations: they might pretend to know about the thing and fake their way through conversation; they might assume the role of someone who wants to learn about it, they ask the others questions; they might actively (and even overtly) disengage, “I’m not someone who is interested in this”. In each case, you account for what you take yourself to be, and act accordingly.
To take another example, this also occurs if you are the only adult around children, and vice versa, if you are the only child around adults. From your conception of yourself as the adult you adopt a certain comportment towards others you didn’t have before and which you deduce from your adulthood. Most importantly, adults are to look out and be responsible for children, other things being equal. This generally means that if anything goes wrong, or if a child needs help, you, as the adult, are the one who is expected to provide it. Further, there is a general expectation that this task is taken up with some gravity, at least in the absence of someone else doing the same.
Of course, whether you actually do these things as an adult is irrelevant here. It is enough, phenomenologically speaking, that you recognise yourself as an adult, and in doing so, recognise that these are things you are to do as one. So, in each of these cases, the form of reasoning is the same: “I am X, therefore, I can or cannot do this”. However, the sense of “can” at play here is not the “can” of possibility. I can, in one sense, enter any bathroom, or ignore a child in need. But this is clearly not the sense of can in which we delimit our possibilities according to concepts we understand ourselves to fall under. Rather, the sense of can is a normative one that circumscribes thought and action appropriate to the particular concept under consideration. The reasoning is something more like “I am X, therefore it is expected of me to do this and not this, as these are the activities circumscribed by being X.”
Indeed, there does not even have to be a word for a concept to affect our reasoning in this way. Consider, for example, the kind of reasoning operative when someone is asked after a first date if they would like to go back to their date’s place to stay and they reply “oh, I’m not that kind of person.” Here they conceive of there being a kind of person who engages in some activity, but don’t have a word for this kind. Despite this, it is clearly something that structures your experience of yourself in the same way as a named concept does. There is a set of actions done by, not done by, done well by, and not done well by the kind of person you take yourself to be. You fall or do not fall under a concept, and therefore can or cannot do, well or badly, those actions. Of course, there is a sense in all of these cases in which one can (at least try to) engage in these actions, it would just go against how one conceives of one’s own nature, and we feel ourselves in such situations going against it.
There are two important features of this process that need to be brought out. First, there is always a possible descriptive distance between a person and a concept taken to apply to them. Which is to say, there is always the possibility that what is specified by, or is taken to be essential to, a concept does not accurately describe those who apply the concept to themselves. There is always the possibility that the act of self-conceptualisation is not rooted in the reality of the conceptualised. Of the cases discussed, this is most obvious in the case of gendered concepts. Here, all kinds of different traits and actions, in all kinds of different times and places, are circumscribed by the concepts of ‘man’ and ‘woman.’ For example, their possible social roles, strength, tact, skills, and so on.
But because no actual person is the paradigm man or woman, there will always be an extent to which persons who understand themselves to be one or the other are not accurately described by the concept’s descriptive dictates. And to the extent that they are not, the concept will be a poor guide to thought and action, as any inferences involving reference to it will be either unduly limiting or beyond the scope of their possible action, even where they may have actively tried to change to fit themselves to the concept. For example, many men have overestimated their own physical ability due to a certain self-conception, and many women have probably nurtured an aspirational self-hatred at their lack of maternal instinct.
Second, we must separate the consequences of being some concept from us believing that some or all of those consequences to actually apply to us, as well as whether we actually adopt these consequences as premises in thought or action. For example, if I take myself to be a philosopher, and I understand being a philosopher to involve wearing a tweed blazer with elbow pads, I might nonetheless think that this should not be involved in the concept. Given my attitude, I might refuse to act on this part of the concept, while still thinking I am a philosopher. In such a case, I simply think that we – my, or a specific milieu I have in mind – should reconceive our concept of a philosopher to be different. But thinking this presupposes that there is a pre-existing concept I wish to be overthrown. And it is this pre-existing and institutionalised concept that still modulates my action, as well as my own revised concept. The same can be, and very often is, the case with those who explicitly lean into, or rebel against gendered concepts. We may wish to change, expand, or narrow these concepts from how we understand them to be, but until then still feel ourselves, in some situations, to be subject to them. In other situations, we may wish to eliminate a concept from our self-conception altogether, even if others continue to apply it to us.
In summary, the descriptive content of concepts we take to apply to ourselves affects the way we conceive of our own possibilities, of what we can and cannot do, and thus the way we end up acting. And while the effect of this may seem minimal in considering this or that example, it is staggering to think of all the ways in which our self-conception is refracted through a multitude of concepts, all the time, and at every juncture. And indeed, as we begin to discuss the other aspects of concepts, we’ll see that their effects are far more profound than just a consideration of their descriptive content lets on.
V. The normative valence of concepts, whether we understand it to be good or bad to be a particular way in a particular situation, also has an effect on the relation we stand in to ourselves. The specific respects in which the valence of concepts affects the relation of ourselves to ourselves, as with the descriptive content, are multitudinous. However, the structure is largely the same.
We recognize ourselves as satisfying a specific concept, X, and further recognise that our milieu takes it to be good or bad. Once we recognize this, we take ourselves to be X. Then, we use our being X – and therefore our being good or bad – to inform thought and action. Specifically, at any point at which we experience ourselves as some concept X, we further experience ourselves as the potential object of (moral) approval or disapproval by anyone we may encounter who accepts (or denies) the normative valence of that concept as it is handed to us. How likely we expect to encounter approval or disapproval will determine what valence will be most salient to us in our self-conception in any given situation.
When we are in places where people have overwhelmingly negative feelings towards those who are X, the feeling is especially strong. We often feel shame at what we are, leading us to modulate our behaviours that embody or suggest X to avoid discomfort, disapproval, or ostracism. If people don’t know about you being this way, we may attempt to mask or even repress this aspect of yourself, at least in those milieu’s that disapprove of this way of being. If people do know, you’ll feel forced to get away from them in the quickest and most painless way you can. Further, we may even come to ‘internalise’ this conception, which is to say, we might have accepted as valid the normative valence of the concept, as it has been handed to us. We conceive of what we are as bad, and shame of being what we are transforms into guilt of being what we are. This may even lead people to stop being this way entirely. There are certainly many ways of being that, for better or worse, and there are many cases of this being good and bad, certain ways of being have been systematically marginalised into non-existence by society.
The most obvious examples, again, are those drawn along the ‘canonical’ identity markers of gender, sexuality, class, race, culture, nationality, and religion. Different people at different times and to different extents will conceive of their own being along these lines as an ethical matter, as their being, within certain milieu’s, good or bad in virtue of these aspects of themselves. The direct effects of this are phenomenologically palpable, and potentially overwhelming. Frantz Fanon, in a particularly striking passage from Black Skin, White Masks, partially a study of precisely the kinds of dynamics I am talking about here, writes of his own experience as a 'black' man in Europe and Africa constituting himself through the concept of blackness handed to him by his European colonial milieu:
Below the corporeal schema I had sketched a historico-racial schema. The elements that I used had been provided for me not by “residual sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character,” but by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories. I thought that what I had in hand was to construct a physiological self, to balance space, to localize sensations, and here I was called on for more.Part of Fanon’s project in this book is to describe the concrete effects these racial concepts have on people and their relation to themselves, but also to emancipate people from them, “to teach the black man not to be a slave of their archetypes.” But as he notes, this can only happen through a material change of the milieu that furnishes us with these concepts: “There will be an authentic disalienation only to the degree to which things, in the most materialistic meaning of the word, will have been restored to their proper places.”
“Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.
“Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me.
“Look, a Negro!" The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.
“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.
I could no longer laugh, because I already knew that there were legends, stories, history, and above all historicity…assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema…
I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho' good eatin’.”
On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? But I did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a man among other men.
The other obvious examples of valenced concepts are specific jobs or kinds of jobs, such as doctors, lawyers, bankers, consultants, businessmen, any type of public servant or bureaucrat, people that deal with rubbish, cleaners, manual labourers, service workers. For a lot of people, whether they are someone with a specific kind of job is a direct measure of their moral worth as a person, typically owing to the fact that they’ve internalised certain concepts handed to them by their parents and social circles growing up. Their being or not being, for example, a doctor or a lawyer (‘good’ jobs), as opposed to being a cleaner or service worker (‘bad’ jobs), might be the primary thing that motivates them to act in specific ways from the time they are young adults for the next ten to fifteen years. For others, lawyers, bankers, business people, or public servants are the source of all evil in society, their own negative relationship to such concepts guiding them towards other, more noble pursuits.
This could even apply to the lack of a job. Consider what it is like to conceive of yourself as unemployed, an undeniably maligned way to be in our society. Think about the feeling engendered in you when you meet someone and they ask the magic question: “so, what do you do for work?” Or, when you are in an interview, and you are asked what you’ve been doing for the last year. If the perceived demands of sociality require that your unemployment come out, the question then becomes: how do I represent myself in a way that mitigates the blight of unemployment? We experience ourselves as the ever-present possibility of disclosing ourselves to others as ‘lazy’ or ‘useless’. It doesn’t matter whether there is a mitigating explanation for why we are unemployed, some way of escaping culpability for our being this way. Nor does it matter whether we think it is good or bad ourselves. The indignity of being unemployed is always there for us to reckon with, and if not directly through ourselves, then through the mere possibility of others. Through this, we feel and act differently, we relate to others in different ways. Through this we become different. The explanation for this is the negative valence of the concept as it is deployed in milieus within which we move.
The ways in which an individual concept affects our self-conception and actions, in any given situation, may be slight. But the cumulative effect of all the different ways we see ourselves as being good, or bad, comes together to form a matrix of intelligibility through which our own ethical being is interpreted, and through which our practical reasoning is therefore refracted. Most obviously this comes out in our desire for approval and to avoid disapproval, and what these desires mean for action. The perceived valence of our systems of concepts as they are handed to us lays down a clear path for being, in any given situation, a good or bad kind of person. Say, as a white, masculine father, with a job and ‘traditional values’ in some milieus, as a well-to-do, independent, aesthetically sophisticated woman with an education and high-status job in others, or as an aggressive, charismatic, and violent criminal who has ‘done time’ in yet others. As we move through our lives, considerations about what we are and could be are always seen in the light shone on them by the valence bestowed upon them by our milieu, and will always, in different ways for different people, have an effect on how our life unfolds. So much for valence, onto perfectibility.
VI. The perfectibility of concepts, the standards internal to them that determine whether someone embodies it well or badly, also has an effect on the relation we stand in to ourselves. As with the previous aspects of concepts, the specific respects in which the perfectibility of concepts affects the relation to one’s self are manifest. From our being a good X it follows that we can or cannot do certain things, just as other things follow from our being a bad X. For example, if people take themselves to be a bad singer or dancer, they resolutely refuse to do these things. But this is nothing new, in the present context.
What is uniquely affecting about a perfectible concept is the direct effect on us of our experiencing ourselves as subject to the standards internal to it, which is separable from our experiencing ourselves descriptively as a good or bad X. We further understand our being X against the standards for judging an X to be good or bad, the characteristics or abilities that would make us good or bad at being it. Taking ourselves to be this way comes to inform our thought and action all the same, but in distinctive ways.
First, we take ourselves to be good or bad relative to other actual or possible people we also understand to be X. Which is to say, we compare ourselves with others. Depending on your temperament and of course what concepts you happen to care about enacting well or badly, such comparisons can have a transformative effect on the ways you live your life. Some people seem to be preternaturally competitive, such that for any X they take themselves to be, they must be better than any others they take to be X in their immediate milieu in the sense that they are constantly taking actions to make this the case. However, it is not just those that are extremely competitive that are like this. We all feel this to some extent, sometimes, for some concepts we take ourselves to be.
For example, suppose you work in a relatively close-knit team at your job, and in working it, you cannot but have some oversight of the quantity and quality of the work the others are doing. There are four others with the exact same role as you, which can clearly be done better or worse. Where you place yourself relative to these people is irrelevant, it’s not hard for this to have an effect on how you are, at least at work. For some, it will be a matter of being the best, for others it will be a matter of doing at least as well as the worst person, and for others it will be a matter of leaning into their being the worst in order to get the easiest work (for better or for worse, for them). Others may not care much; in which case it would hardly modulate their behaviour at all. But still, it’s hard for it to have no effect, once you see and think about it.
Further, these kinds of comparisons are not limited to specific spaces we inhabit, they emerge all the time everywhere in our social lives, not just at places like your job where comparisons are, to some extent, formalised. Among family, friends, and your social milieu more generally, there are a multiplicity of things you could be better or worse at, whether it be specific activities, like bowling, writing, and dancing, or more general characteristics such as your economic class, your being funny, or your being liked by others. By itself, there is nothing necessarily wrong with conceiving of yourself as a good or bad X, relative to others. However, once we allow comparisons to have an effect over our actions, they can quickly become pernicious, giving rise to and entrenching habits that vainly perpetuate certain fruitless ways of being at the expense of other, better, ways to be.
For example, a person who strongly desires to always be the ‘coolest’ in their social milieu (whatever that might mean to them in a given situation) will have to subordinate, or at least filter through, all of their other actual or possible ends to this one. They constantly have to ask themselves “Is being this way cool? Is doing this cool? Is wearing this cool? Is saying this cool?” But due to the highly elusive and highly changeable nature of the concept, it is not only that there is an opportunity cost involved with pursuing it – you become a certain way when you could have become another, better way – it is also that any hard won excellence in being the concept quickly becomes obsolete, and you quickly have nothing to show for your working on yourself. So it can be, and is, for other concepts too, especially those involving an element of shifting social comparison. This is not to say, of course, that there aren’t comparisons borne out of perfectible concepts – even social ones – that are not good for us and others. There is such a thing as healthy and mutually self-actualising competition, for example, among artists and sports-people, as well as among friends. Motivating comparisons among altruists might be good for the (possible) recipients of that altruism.
Second, in seeing ourselves as a good or bad X, if X also has a normative valence, our being good or bad at something also has an ethical dimension. This is because, insofar as we are good or bad at being X, where X is something that we understand to itself be good or bad, then in proportion to how well or badly we are X we conceive of our ourselves as good or bad, we conceive of ourselves as living up, or failing to live up to some standard of ethical conduct. For example, we might conceive of ourselves as a good or bad mother, husband, friend, or lover, things which clearly have an ethical dimension to them. Insofar as we take ourselves to be good or bad at these things, we take ourselves to be good or bad people.
Our understanding of ourselves as being set against these descriptive-cum-ethical standards may continually motivate us because they allow us to strive for excellence in these domains, they may bear down on us as a complex and demanding set of inescapable obligations we feel duty bound to perform, or they may even motivate us because we want to appear virtuous to others. In any case, it can easily be seen how such concepts can come to transform our behaviour, even independently of the specific relations against which the evaluation of these concepts will take place – our particular children, partners, friends, or lovers. Whether we desire to transform ourselves against these standards as a matter of becoming excellent, as a matter of duty, or because of a certain vanity, alongside our desiring to do (or appearing to do) right by the people in our lives, we also desire to play our role in relation to them well. We want to be a good mother, husband, friend, and lover, and we want to avoid being a bad one.
However, as there is in all cases, there is always a possible difference between what specific standards of evaluation are internal to a concept, and those standards we think are proper to it. It could be that the standards which pass as appropriate in your social milieu are – according to you – entirely misconceived. For example, it seems to me that a lot of popular culture among young people today gives pretty terrible relationship desiderata, conditions under which one is a good boyfriend, girlfriend, partner, and so on. Similarly, the techniques, technologies, and performances supposed to be involved in good parenthood may seem to particular parents entirely superfluous. Yet, despite this, when we are in these milieus, we inevitably come to conceive of ourselves as good or bad relative to these standards. Whether the perfectibility conditions of some self-applied concepts leads one to argue, and fight against them, to wholly internalise them, and eventually make them one’s own, to conceal oneself behind them, only enacting them to the extent that you can get away with it, or to flee to another milieu more commensurate with one’s own attitudes, the specific standards internal to some concept are always having an effect.
It can easily be seen how the proliferation of such standards can, cumulatively, have a significant, transformative, or even oppressive effect on one’s life, especially if you move within a social milieu where you do not agree with how these standards are distributed to concepts. The perfectibilities within our system of concepts, as it is handed to us, lays down the conditions for doing anything you may want to do, any way you may want to be, well or badly. And as we move through our lives wanting to be this or that kind of person, how it is perceived to be done will always, in different ways for different people, have an effect on how our life unfolds. Further, after enjoining the standards of a concept to its valence, we not only feel obligated to embody specific categories, we also feel obligated to engage in certain practices to some degree of excellence circumscribed by our environment, practices that may even be vain or fruitless, and unrewarding.
VII. In summary, concepts, as I’ve used the term, are specific ways people are, or can be. Concepts have a descriptive element to them, they specify the conditions under which they apply to someone. But they also have separable normative elements, valence and perfectibility. The valence of a concept is whether it is understood to be good or bad in an ethical sense. The perfectibility of a concept is the collection of standards that determine whether someone embodies it well or badly. The descriptive and normative elements of a concept are relative to specific social milieus – they do not have descriptive or normative significance outside of how people understand their milieu to deploy that concept.
The deployment of concepts, rather than being merely descriptions and evaluations of people as they presently are, come to have effects on us in various different ways. At the most general level, this is because the deployment of concepts, plus certain attitudes and motivations, by some entity – self, other, or institution – influences how that entity thinks and acts in relation to the persons conceptualised. Depending on the concept, the attitudes and motivations the entity has in relation to the concept, and the person conceptualised, this might have any number of different effects on the ways the conceptualised become.
There is a lot of doom and gloom about these effects. This is partially because there are moral and political stakes in them: there is clearly actual harm being done to people by their deployment, all the time everywhere. This is so, whether it be self-inflicted (in the sense expanded upon above), other-inflicted, or institutionally-inflicted. I have done nothing to alleviate this doom and gloom, having mostly focused on examples that are mostly bad for the person enacting some concept. This is because I think that the effects of concepts, at least when deployed by ourselves and others in conceptualising ourselves and others, especially when it is the kinds of concepts I have discussed in the examples provided, have a largely negative effect on one’s immediate social relations.
This is due to the fact that, thinking our relation to ourselves and to others in such generalities, which is necessarily what concepts are, we sacrifice the specifics of the person to whom we apply a concept. This is necessarily the case, as no specific concept ever perfectly coincides with any specific person. Therefore, to think and act around a conception of someone, including yourself, based not in the particularities of their being, but the generalities of a concept we understand to apply to them, is to think and act in a way that systematically misrecognises what they are. (Arguably, this is something like what Sartre means by ‘bad faith’.) Furthermore, we have also seen how the mere deployment of concepts actually leads people to transform themselves into that concept, irrespective of whether it is good for them, and sometimes irrespective of whether they even desire to.
Nevertheless, there is nothing intrinsically bad about the effects of concepts, nor anything intrinsically good about them. Rather, it depends on the capacity in which they are deployed and how they come to interact with people. It depends on whether the particular effect itself is good or bad. For example, it is incredibly useful, to an extent that cannot be underestimated, for institutions think and act in terms of the concepts they apply to people, especially the state. The classification of people is absolutely necessary to running a functioning justice system, as well as to be able to administrate even its most basic bureaucratic functions. Population statistics of all different kinds are necessary for good policy making, even if it is possible for them to be used in ways that are obviously bad for the people to whom they are applied to, or in ways which systematically misrecognise outliers and invisibles. Indeed, many significant and culturally transformative political causes of the past seventy years have not just been fights to transform our social milieu such that people who identify with certain ways of being and people who identify others as that way of being update their concept of X, but also so that institutions update that concept too. That is, they are fights to affect the thought and action of legal, political, and commercial institutions by changing their understanding of specific ways of being, fights to change their actions insofar as they relate to those who embody that way of being. These are movements to make the effects of concepts good, rather than bad. In closing, I would therefore like to discuss a couple of positive ways in which concepts can come to have an effect on us. I will limit my discussion to effects they can have on our relation to ourselves. Specifically, I want to point out that concepts can be things that play a positive, self-actualising role in our lives. Or, more accurately, a transformative role. As it is not through concepts that we become what was somehow latent in us; rather, it is through concepts that we create the ways we are, and conceive ourselves to be. We actually make ourselves up through our concepts, and we can do so with agency, and in a way that is obviously good for us. Let me explain. One of the things that seems to give us a deep and lasting satisfaction or contentedness with our own lives, as well as form an important part of our own self-conception, is our mastery of something, our becoming-good-at and being-good-at some practice, our becoming and being a good X. This seems to be the case whether it be our being a football player, surfer, wood carver, music critic, cook, baker, fashionista, runner, hiker, bird watcher, poet, musician, DJ, entertainer, your particular job, or type of job, stamp, coin, or Pokémon card collector, Taylor Swift fan, influencer, or whatever else it may be. In each case these are things which need not have grave ethical or political stakes (though of course they could), but which we can become good at through the constant honing of ourselves against the standards determining their excellence. Their prior existence as concepts that we can come to know means that we are furnished with already formed avenues of becoming that we can mix and match at our pleasure, and such that even when we invent ourselves, we do not have to do so whole cloth. For my own part, a big part of what I am and take myself to be is tied up with doing the things that I do, and my doing those things well. I try my best to be a good philosopher, a good writer, and to be someone with good aesthetic taste, by which I mean, someone who has the ability to appreciate a wide variety of art (especially music and movies). I have, do, and will, continue to subject myself to the complex, shifting standards that the pursuit of these things have involved, and will involve, for as long as I will pursue them. My attempts to get better at these things, to be excellent in these respects, are not merely some things among others I am pursuing in my life, mere plans, or goals. I plan on going to the supermarket, and my goal is to do it quickly. Yet these do not transform my life in any interesting sense. What I am talking about here are concepts involving complex and, in my lifetime, likely inexhaustible standards around which I have, and likely will, organise my life. They are things towards which I plan to strive, and which are marked by my actions, in my own and others memory, as well as deposited in any works (such as this) that have been the fruit of these pursuits. When someone does not understand my existential orientation towards doing philosophy and being a philosopher, towards experiencing art and having taste, I feel as though they do not understand (at least a part of) me. But I do not just feel this way, it is true that this is the case, as these concepts, as well as any concepts that contribute towards them, are the concepts according to which I have organised and transformed my own life. This is what I am now, and if there were no concepts guiding my transformation, and against which I have shaped my existence, then I could not have become what I am. So it is, and can be, for others too. Concepts, especially those that are perfectible, afford us opportunities for meaningful self-transformation into socially regulated forms that we otherwise could not have taken. This is what, at one point, Foucault calls “arts of existence” (and what he calls elsewhere “arts of living”):
I am referring to what might be called the “arts of existence.” What I mean by the phrase are those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.If even half of what I’ve said so far is right, it can easily be seen that such arts of existence permeate our social reality and therefore cannot but be involved with constituting what it is we are. However, crucially, as can be seen now, which of them we engage with, which of these we style ourselves in accordance with, is, at least in part, up to us, up to our voluntary and spirited engagement with them.
What does all this say for the doctrine of the ‘true self’? This is the idea that, beneath all of the discursive layering spread over ourselves by society, there is a nascent set of core characteristics that would emerge, but for the quashing of it by society’s norms, demands, and expectations. While I cannot argue for this here at length, I believe what I’ve said casts such a view into extreme doubt. I will limit myself to the following remark: there is nothing to us other than what we actually are at any given time of our life, those characteristics and abilities that make us up, and if you let society shape you to be a certain way throughout that life, then you are those ways, not some nascent set of dispositions that would have come to be if things were different. (See also my previous post, which makes this point.)
The mistake is in thinking that we are not, or cannot be, wholly constituted by the force of concepts, that there is some essential element of our being that is resistant to discursive capture. However, there is no reason to think this is so. Rather, it is through the concepts which mediate our relations between ourselves, others, and institutions that we become what we actually and potentially are, whether this mediation is a quiet, unconscious shaping of dispositions and attitudes, or a voluntary becoming-otherwise. The idea that there remains beneath this an essential core of us is a stubborn illusion, born out of a desire and self-conception that we are in some sense separable from the forces operating on us in the world. The reality is that if you want to be a certain way, you must harness these forces, and shape yourself accordingly. It is up to us to forge – with the help of carefully curated, productive and enabling environments – the difficult path of constituting ourselves as the kind of being we want to be.
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