In the fifth Star Trek movie, The Final Frontier there is a character, Sybock, who forces people
around him to confront their greatest pain in their life experience. By making the people around him confront
their greatest pain he can then release them from it. Once they are no longer under their pain,
Sybock believes they can be who they truly are.
The only problem is he thinks everyone is essentially the same with no
individuality once their pain is removed.
All the basic person wants is to be at peace with each other and know
some sort of god. Naturally, after his
brainwashing, Sybock steps in as their leader to show them the way to god and
peace.
However,
Captain Kirk has a different take on what a person identity is:
As Kirk states in the clip, our individuality is
our identity. What we have done, what we
have felt, the choices we have made, good and bad, is what defines our
individuality and that in turn is what defines our identity. In other words our individual life
experiences are what make us who we are.
Without them we would end up looking like carbon copies of each other. Our experiences are what set us apart from
each other.
This brings up a distinction that needs to be
made between two types of identity, individual and collective. In light of what Kirk said I would say our
individual identity should be defined not by a fixed list of attributes but by
the differences between one another.
Based on what Sybock believed, collective identity is what a group has
in common. For example, Sybock thought
that there was a collective desire for the same thing that made everyone a
member of the universe. A more general
example would be the attributes that define us as humans, it is not individual
but collective and within that collective we can have individual identity
seeing the differences between us.
"In the fifth Star Trek movie, The Final Frontier there is a character, Sybock, who forces people around him to confront their greatest pain in their life experience. By making the people around him confront their greatest pain he can then release them from it. Once they are no longer under their pain, Sybock believes they can be who they truly are."--sounds like Batman Begins in a way--Batman faces his fears and comes to know himself in a way that was unexpected. Kirk's ideas come in here as well because every person has a different collection of experiences.
ReplyDeleteYou highlight really well Locke's idea of the Tabula Rosa--for Locke, we are simply a collection of our experiences. That idea is interesting when we look at Kant who believed that we have a prior categories like the perception of time and space in order to organize our perceptions.
These ideas of collective and personal identity also bring up Bacon's idols as well.
How would you connect the Borg from Star Trek (collective identity)?
Hmmmm, that's an interesting question, I would say that they really only have the collective identity. When they are assimilated, all aspects of their personal identity are erased and they are wired into the common collective to preform tasks for whatever the collective conscientiousness needed. Because there is no individual consciousness, no individual memory, and no individual emotions (assuming the Borg experience emotions), according to this view there is no personal identity.
ReplyDelete