Tags / 66 quotes from 16 sources
#identity
Atomic Habits
Your identity is literally your "repeated beingness"
Your identity emerges out of your habits. [...] More precisely, your habits are how you embody your identity. When you make your bed each day, you embody the identity of an organized person. When you write each day, you embody the identity of a creative person. When you train…
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
The hunt for Satoshi Nakamoto
of excitement and controversy. According to Wired magazine, people have been trying to unmask the true identity of Bitcoin’s author(s) ever since. Silicon Valley titan Marc Andreessen recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times explaining that the key innovation in Bitcoin is…
Dio odia il Giappone (Douglas Coupland, M. Howatson and Anna Mioni)
Lontane da tutti nella propria testa
» «Ci sentivamo… come se condividere la stessa aria e gli stessi spazi e la stessa scuola con tutti gli altri fosse una specie di casualità. Nella nostra testa ci sentivamo lontanissime.»
Perché un gaijin vive a Tokyo
E comunque, se sei un gaijin e ti trovi a Tokyo, i motivi per cui sei lì sono per forza tutti discutibili: ti stai nascondendo dal tuo passato o stai coltivando un aspetto della tua personalità che sei troppo fifone per esplorare in patria. Oppure ti piacciono le ragazze…
Ogni momento di lucidità è anche tristezza
L’unica nota dolente di questa prima fase modaiola erano i lividi che mi ritrovavo sul torso a furia di picchiare contro i vetri. Ma anche quelli si rivelarono utili, perché le ragazze li vedevano e volevano curarmi. E forse mi hanno guarito davvero. Mi ricordo che ero al terzo…
Lo specchio non inganna: sei giapponese
Parlavamo del fatto che sei giapponese. Lo specchio non inganna. Potrai imitare Michael Jackson e pasticciarti gli zigomi e il naso, o potrai essere un campione di rodeo texano che prende un vitello al lazo, ma ogni molecola del tuo corpo sarà al cento per cento…
Mai americani, mai più davvero giapponesi
. «È proprio questo che voglio dire. Non sarete mai americani o canadesi. Mai e poi mai. Ma una volta che siete stati qui, non potrete mai più essere giapponesi sul serio.» Gli dissi: «Nella mia testa non mi sono mai sentito molto giapponese». Tetsu lasciò cadere la forchetta…
Svegliarsi senza memoria per reinventarsi
Caro Clone, cosa spinge le persone a fare quello che fanno? Ci svegliamo la mattina, ci ricordiamo chi siamo e dove siamo e a volte ci dimentichiamo il giorno della settimana, oppure la stagione, e dobbiamo fare uno sforzo di memoria, ma prima o poi ci tornano in mente. A volte…
Durante (Andrea De Carlo)
Una vita ristretta a una sola scelta
Avevo la sensazione che la mia vita come la conoscevo stesse andando in pezzi, con una tale rapidità da lasciarmi incapace di reagire. Ero incredulo di non aver colto i segnali di quello che stava per succedere, di non aver elaborato per tempo una strategia di difesa o di…
Gli altri non esistono
“Non sei uno che ha bisogno di programmi, Piotr” ha detto lui. “Boh” ho detto. “Non lo so più, come sono. Almeno in questo momento.” “Ma di solito?” ha detto lui. “Come ti sembra di essere?” “Quello che penso di essere” ho detto. “Ma poi ogni tanto mi capita di vedermi dal di…
House Of Cards
Politicians
The identity of the next president of the United States is once again in the hands of a bunch of self serving, money-hungry, boot-licking, power-seeking politicians who can be seduced or sucker-punched or blackmailed into submission
L'imperfetta meraviglia (Andrea De Carlo)
I ruoli che si irrigidiscono nella coppia
«Nick Cruickshank?» Viviane diventa ancora più pressante, qualunque sia il motivo. «Può essere.» Milena Migliari scuote la testa. «Chi è?» «Come chi è?! Ma cavolo, Milena!» Viviane prende il tono da incalzatrice realistica che ormai fa parte della loro divisione di ruoli: una…
Il tatuaggio di Arte e Amore
Si guarda il tatuaggio che ha all’interno del polso sinistro, con le due A rovesciate formate da un serpentello che sale e scende in un cerchio, e che stanno per Arte e Amore. Se l’era fatto a vent’anni, come una dichiarazione d’intenti insieme al suo amico Luca, che tre anni…
La Formica Zen (italian Edition) ( )
Rimanere se stessi, la battaglia più dura
Rimanere se stessi in un mondo che giorno e notte si adopera per trasformare ciascuno di noi in un essere qualsiasi. . .vuol dire combattere la battaglia più dura della vita” (Romano Battaglia)
Lo specchio rotto: ritrovarsi negli altri
Chi sono? Indagare dentro per conoscere l’essere? Ritornare in se stessi per riscoprirsi? Pensare e quindi essere sicuri di esistere? Navigare all’interno per trovare la sorgente dello spirito? Ricercare il dolore purificatore? Mortificare la materia? O non sono altro, che…
Leielui (italian Edition) (de Carlo, Andrea)
Adattarsi all'altro fino a perdere se stessi
A pensarci in questa prospettiva le sembra di capire perché non si sente mai del tutto se stessa quando è con lui: dipende dalla sua determinazione iniziale a correggersi rispetto agli errori del passato, tagliare via le sue parti caratteriali difettose, essere una persona…
La chitarra messa da parte
Al piano di sotto mangia l’ultima pesca e poi prende la vecchia Eko che tiene appoggiata nell’angolo dietro al divano, suona qualche accordo. È una grossa chitarra costruita in Italia negli anni Settanta con legni laminati, pesante e con le corde troppo alte, comprata di…
Rifiutare la scelta tra bianco e nero
A pensarci da qui, con la stanchezza e la tristezza della situazione finita che le invadono i pensieri, le sembra davvero un gioco ridicolo di opposti: ordine-confusione, allegria-rassicurazione, superficialità-profondità, divertimento-noia. Non ha mai accettato l’idea di dover…
Life, The Multiverse And Everything: An Introduction To The Ideas Of Humberto Maturana Interpreting Maturana
Our self or identity
By emphasising the interweaving of languaging and emotioning, Maturana unpacks further his notion that conversations are structural perturbations which have far- reaching effects on our bodyhoods. Our 'self' or 'identity' is defined by the totality of all the systems of social…
Lo Spirito del Giappone (Leonardo Vittorio Arena)
Il gruppo garantisce l'identità
Non si correrà mai il rischio di sottovalutare l’importanza del gruppo nella formazione della mente giapponese. Ciò vale per i samurai, legati al proprio clan e al signore, ma anche per il personale di una industria al giorno d’oggi. Il gruppo, oltre a dare sicurezza…
L'azienda come seconda identità
Non si valuta tanto, o non solo, lo stipendio o il salario, quanto piuttosto l’appartenenza a una certa azienda, un riconoscimento sociale in termini di reputazione. Si tende ad attribuire un’anima e alti ideali alla ideologia della compagnia: la ditta non è soltanto una…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
Fromm on the automaton personality
In the words of Erich Fromm, an astute observer of the roots and fruits of the Personality Ethic: Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to…
The social mirror distorts who we are
These visions are disjointed and out of proportion. They are often more projections than reflections, projecting the concerns and character weaknesses of people giving the input rather than accurately reflecting what we are. The reflection of the current social paradigm tells…
Frankl and the last of the human freedoms
One day, naked and alone in a small room, he began to become aware of what he later called “the last of the human freedoms”—the freedom his Nazi captors could not take away. They could control his entire environment, they could do what they wanted to his body, but Viktor Frankl…
Difficult experiences forge character
Of course, things can hurt us physically or economically and can cause sorrow. But our character, our basic identity, does not have to be hurt at all. In fact, our most difficult experiences become the crucibles that forge our character and develop the internal powers, the…
A changeless core lets us live with change
People can’t live with change if there’s not a changeless core inside them. The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value. With a mission statement, we can flow with changes. We don’t need prejudgments or…
Security, guidance, wisdom and power
Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power. Security represents your sense of worth, your identity, your emotional anchorage, your self-esteem, your basic personal strength or lack of it. Guidance means your source of…
Where our life-support factors sit
Your security lies somewhere on the continuum between extreme insecurity on one end, wherein your life is buffeted by all the fickle forces that play upon it, and a deep sense of high intrinsic worth and personal security on the other end. Your guidance ranges on the continuum…
Everyone has a center
Each of us has a center, though we usually don’t recognize it as such. Neither do we recognize the all-encompassing effects of that center on every aspect of our lives.
Family as a center undermines the family
Another common center is the family. This, too, may seem to be natural and proper. As an area of focus and deep investment, it provides great opportunities for deep relationships, for loving, for sharing, for much that makes life worthwhile. But as a center, it ironically…
Money as a center
Sometimes there are apparently noble reasons given for making money, such as the desire to take care of one’s family. And these things are important. But to focus on money-making as a center will bring about its own undoing. Consider again the four life-support…
Work-centered people
Work-centered people may become “workaholics,” driving themselves to produce at the sacrifice of health, relationships, and other important areas of their lives. Their fundamental identity comes from their work—“I’m a doctor,” “I’m a writer,” “I’m an actor.” Because their…
Possessions as a center
A driving force of many people is possessions—not only tangible, material possessions such as fashionable clothes, homes, cars, boats, and jewelry, but also the intangible possessions of fame, glory, or social prominence.
Self-worth that fluctuates with status
If I’m in the presence of someone of greater net worth or fame or status, I feel inferior. If I’m in the presence of someone of lesser net worth or fame or status, I feel superior. My sense of self-worth constantly fluctuates. I don’t have any sense of constancy or anchorage or…
Friend- or enemy-centered people have no security
The individual who is friend- or enemy-centered has no intrinsic security. Feelings of self-worth are volatile, a function of the emotional state or behavior of other people. Guidance comes from the person’s perception of how others will respond, and wisdom is limited by the…
Identifying your center
IDENTIFYING YOUR CENTER But where do you stand? What is at the center of your own life? Sometimes that isn’t easy to see. Perhaps the best way to identify your own center is to look closely at your life-support factors. If you can identify with one or more of the descriptions…
Roller coasting between centers
If you are... Self-Centered Security Your security is constantly changing and shifting. Guidance Your judgment criteria are: “If it feels good... “What I want.” “What I need.” “What’s in it for me?” Wisdom You view the world by how decisions, events, or circumstances will…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Feminists dealt capitalism the body blow
Rather than the terrorists, it was the early feminists who dealt capitalism the body blow. Their work offered the first critique of Western society as a whole and provided the first tools with which revolutionaries could begin to revolutionize themselves—to question their very…
Acid as an intelligent entity
No doubt it was reprehensibly primitive thinking, but I was beginning to find it difficult not to see acid as something akin to an intelligent entity, capable of autonomous action. Jung’s concept of “the Self ” was as close to making this intellectually acceptable as I could…
Driving through myself
I LOOKED UP THE passage, the one I had remembered under the holly, from Suzanne Segal’s Collision with the Infinite: In the midst of a particularly eventful week, I was driving north to meet some friends when I suddenly became aware that I was driving through myself. For years…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Belle de Jour chose the work that suited her
Reading Belle’s Best Bits, a kind of greatest hits collection from her two volumes of blogs, I quickly suspected not. It seemed Magnanti went into this line of work because it suited her. She sounded sexually experimental, easily able to divorce the erotic and the emotional…
A pseudonym is not a second self
The banal reality is that the maintenance of different identities does not go deep to the core of Magnanti’s soul, but was simply a necessary means of keeping up some barriers for reasons of confidentiality and privacy. Most obviously, there is nothing philosophically profound…
Not a character, just a mouthpiece for work
Nor did going to work require her to ‘get into character’, to become a different person. ‘It wasn’t really a character so much as just suppressing some things and bringing other things to the fore. It wasn’t really playing a character because it was me. I mean, I remember…
The fantasy of giving all of yourself
People have this fantasy of “I give 100 per cent of myself to the world, all the time.” And online they also have this fantasy of “when I choose to hide things about myself that’s completely…
Good Brooke and bad Brooke
‘My now obviously ex-boyfriend was very keen to represent me as though there was a good me and a bad me. Anything that I did that he liked – you know, I knit – that was good Brooke, and then if I behaved in a way he didn’t like that was bad Brooke, as if there were two of me…
The social self
We been looking inwards, when perhaps all the time we should have been looking outwards. Is the key to identity to be found not in our minds, but in the social world? The idea that the self is ‘socially constructed’ has been rather in vogue in some intellectual circles for some…
When self-image and others' view diverge
First, it usually really matters to someone if there is a disconnect between how they see themselves and how others see them.
Are we social constructions?
You can’t just live in your private reality. What this suggests is that, like the body, the social matters primarily for how it helps frame and shape our psychological sense of self. However, some claim that this way of putting it gets things precisely the wrong way round. It…
All the world's a stage
As Jacques famously put it in Shakespeare’s As You Like It: All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts …2 This theatrical metaphor has become the dominant means of…
We are the sum of our roles
So the theatrical metaphor makes no sense if it posits the real self as the off-stage actor. The other interpretation is suggested by Jacques in As You Like It: that we are ‘merely players’. We are the sum of our roles, no more and no less.
Quantitative versus qualitative identity
For philosophers, ‘identity’ comes in two main forms: quantitative and qualitative. Two or more things are qualitatively identical when interchanging them would make no difference. For instance, if you have two qualitatively identical bowling balls, it makes no difference which…
Leibniz's law
Quantitative identity is governed by a strict logic, summed up in what has become known as Leibniz’s law. In essence this says that if x and y are the same object, then what is true of x at any given time is also true of y at that same time. This is why two merely qualitatively…
The ship of Theseus
The problem is that this logically strict notion of sameness only works for reasonably solid, stable objects. In all sorts of real-world cases, notions of ‘sameness’ are vaguer and more context-dependent. Take Hobbes’s famous example of the ship of Theseus.21 This vessel is…
An empty question about sameness
As long as you know what aspect of sameness matters to the questioner, you can provide an answer. If you’re a forensic investigator searching for traces of DNA left before the ship went into dock, the boat you want is the one rebuilt from original parts. If you’re Theseus, your…
Not identity but what matters
As with the ship of Theseus, the important question is not about identity but about what matters. The same is true when we talk about people in the late stages of dementia. Are they they same persons we knew before the disease took its hold? In some ways yes, in some ways no…
Ricoeur: selfhood is not sameness
Not all philosophers have suffered from this misapprehension, of course. The best, to my mind, are precisely those who manage both to be no less precise than necessary, but no more precise than is possible. Paul Ricoeur is a rare example of a philosopher who seems to appreciate…
Pragmatic identity and counting sex
The distinction I am making here is between strict logical identity and what we might call pragmatic identity. There are numerous examples of words and concepts that are not strict sortals yet which can usually be used as though they were. Take the act of ‘having sex’. I’m…
Ātman as a depersonalised self
Ātman is a kind of depersonalised self, lacking individual personality and identity. So if ātman succeeds in becoming fully reintegrated with brahman, personhood is destroyed.
Identity formed through actions
Your identity, your sense of being a person is formed through your actions, and that is only possible because there is not a fixed self. There is no unchanging essence or substance to which those attributes are then attached at all.’
Stability without a core
‘There’s a stability and it’s actually like the stability of everything else in this world. It’s like the stability of the ship of Theseus. There’s no core of the ship of Theseus, but there are some parts that last longer than others and there’s an overall structure and if you…
Do we create our own identity?
If character has to be built in important ways, could one go further and say that identity itself is not just given, but is something we in some way create ourselves, by our actions? One of the most persistent recent advocates of this view is the philosopher Christine Korsgaard.
Greenfield's speculations on changing identity
Greenfield has received a lot of flak from colleagues for her self-confessed speculative musings on how the very nature of human identity might change.
Brain connections make each of us unique
‘When you’re born, you’re born with pretty much all the brain cells you’ll ever have, but it’s the growth of the connections between those brain cells that accounts for the growth of the brain after birth. So, even if you’re a clone – that means an identical twin – you will…
The Tao Of Topic Maps
Subject identity in topic maps
The goal with topic maps is to achieve a one-to-one relationship between topics and the subjects that they represent, in order to ensure that all knowledge about a particular subject can be accessed via a single topic. However, sometimes the same subject is represented by more…
Theories of Childhood, Second Edition (Carol Garhart Mooney)
Erikson's eight ages of man
Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, which is called the Eight Ages of Man, covers the entire life span of a human being. It is Erikson’s idea that there is a task that must be accomplished at each stage of development. Successful resolution of each stage affects the…
Thesauri Of Historical Periods – A Proposal For Standardization.
Periods defined by style
Style can be used to sort and distinguish spatiotemporal cultural groups culture includes style (Hodder 1987) - by specific characteristics; through a specific shape or decoration, style represents the specific society, which produced it (Renfrew and Bahn 2001). In such…