One problem with the ethics of Cold War philosophy concerns what I will call “disidentification” (Hegel called it Entäußerung, or “externalization”). Whatever I choose has at least one alternative, for otherwise there would be no choice. And if I identify myself with any member of my plurality of alternatives, I cannot choose any alternative to it (or them). Since alternatives are incompatible with one another (otherwise there would also be no choice), doing that would end my identity and so be suicidal, physically or morally. Therefore, any alternative in a rational decision must be something I can walk away from and still be me.
This is not an issue for rational choice theory, which was originally developed to cover cases of consumer choice and related contexts. In such cases, my identity is not at stake; no matter which brand of toothpaste I choose to buy in the drugstore, I will still be me. But when rational choice theory becomes Cold War philosophy, it applies to everything I do that can claim to be “rational,” and so to more important matters.
One inevitable result is that commitment comes to look like choice, in spite of the fact that commitments are, precisely, what you cannot walk away from. Instead of seeing myself as committed to my religion, for example, I may find myself trying to choose it in a Cold War way. But choosing a religion implies, as commitment does not, that there are other religions which I might choose—alternative religions.
But then, before I make the choice, I can have no religion at all.
Suppose, for example, I am “choosing” Catholicism. There must then be an alternative religion on the table which I might choose—say, Hinduism. If I already identify as a Catholic, however, this choice is fake: I cannot choose to become a Hindu without changing my identity. So for my choice to be real, I must put aside the religion I already have—Catholicism. I must “disidentify” with it.
Cold War philosophy, claiming as it does to apply to everything rational, bids us to take this stance on all things. Everything about me then becomes an object of my choice, and at the limit I can have no identity other than that of being a rational chooser, i.e. an algorithmic machine who first ranks her preferences in accordance with transitivity and completeness and then opts for the highest utility. (As Rawls might say, everything concrete about me is behind the “veil of ignorance.”)
When Hegel unpacks disidentfication as “externalization” in the central sections of his Phenomenology of Spirit, it is an emancipatory process: it frees me from all kinds of identities imposed on me by my upbringing and social conditions. The difference is that Hegel does not present externalization as a process involving choice among alternatives. It is rather a “negation,” or rejection, of various predominantly natural features as constituting my identity. In doing that, I come to see them, not as features of my identity, but as mere circumstances which I can change or abandon. (I discuss this at length in my Poetic Interaction.)
The resulting identity, however “emancipated” it may be, is a pretty thin one, and in any case the emancipation is a bit of a sham. No matte how many of my own properties I have negated, denied or ejected from my identity, others will treat me differently: they will continue to see me as having, or performing in accordance with, specific traits of gender, race, class, nationality and so forth—and it is not I who write the scripts for the various scenes I am forced to perform.
Who does?Who makes this a sham emancipation? The question is a pretty big one, but the answer is pretty commonsensical. I’ll get to it soon.