Hilde Lindemann, Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities, Oxford University Press, 2014  

Anna Gotlib
Brooklyn College, CUNY
Brooklyn, NY, USA

One of my favorite sentences in Hilde Lindemann’s lucid and remarkable book, Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities is this: “To have lived…as a person is to have taken my proper place in the social world that lets us make selves of each other” (159). With this phrase, as with the rest of her book, Lindemann manages to pull off that rarest of rare feats in academic philosophical writing: to say something that is at the same time philosophically insightful and universally relevant for beings like ourselves—something that not just describes and categorizes the modes of being a person, but says why personhood matters morally, why it deserves closer philosophical attention, and in the end, why it is so very dependent on the many interpersonal practices of empathetic recognition through which we can call each other into personhood. This book, then, is primarily about the necessity of paying attention—serious, philosophical attention—to what for too long has been either ignored, or summarily dismissed: that we, as human beings, cannot help but create and undo each other as persons; that this process begins before birth and does not end with death; that it is about time that we, as philosophers (although not exclusively, as Lindemann’s book manages to be both rigorous and accessible) recognize this most quotidian work as a profoundly powerful moral practice; and that in the service of this recognition, what is required is a careful, rigorous lens that perhaps only philosophy could offer. Lindemann offers just such a lens—and then some.

As a moral theorist and bioethicist—and among the pioneers of narrative approaches to both disciplines—Lindemann sets out to examine the concept of personhood, and the process of becoming persons. Unlike many of her philosophical peers, however, she does not conclude that personhood is a quality that one can seek and find (or fail to do so) within a particular human specimen. Instead, she argues—through stories, conceptual analysis, and most often, in that most fertile space where the two meet—that personhood is a practice: it is something that we reify through our actions, attitudes, and attunements toward others. Both socially and morally, we create persons by holding them in certain ways—we maintain their identities through stories about what most matters to them, their loves and hates, their commitments, and so on—or we destroy personhood by failing to do so. To speak about the moral personhood of individuals, therefore, is a task quite different from the one envisioned by supporters of more ideal theories of self that view personhood at best as a collection of qualities or attributes that add up to something more than the sum of their parts; and at worst, as an honorific that does not refer to much of anything in particular, other than to our desire for moral (and perhaps social and political) recognition. Lindemann suggests that in missing the background (the non-agential, the non-voluntary) conditions of how we become persons is precisely where philosophy has taken a wrong turn: in a non-trivial way, what, and who, we are is not constituted solely by a collection of reasoned positions or endorsed choices, but by moral communities that work to create, or to undo, themselves, as well as their individual members. We hold each other well, not so well, or not at all—but it is in these many acts of holding that our identities, and our personhood, form, change, and sometimes disappear.

This monograph is not Lindemann’s first take on identity-centered moral and epistemic dilemmas. In her previous work, most notably Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair (2001), she focused on the narrative construction of identity as well as on the possibility of its destruction, especially in the cases of disadvantaged social groups through oppressive master narratives—and on how such damage can be repaired through counterstories that re-frame and re-define the oppressed group’s moral agency as worthy of respect, and, importantly, of equal participation in the shared universe of human relationships, responsibilities, and care. In her past and current work, she often moves against the grain of analytic moral philosophy’s focus on the juridical rather than on the contextual and the social—against fixation on moral rules that seek the “what” and the “how” without also asking about the “who” and the “why.” However, rather than falling back on relativism—whether moral or epistemic—she makes the naturalizing move that is “a rejection of a priori, idealized judgments that have no connection with actual on-the-ground practices” (x). While in Damaged Identities this naturalized moral epistemology was deployed in the service of social and group identities, in Holding and Letting Go, Lindemann turns to the personal identity of individuals “to describe a moral practice we engage in constantly, but that has not received much recognition as a moral practice: it is the practice of initiating human beings into personhood and then holding them there” (ix). Again taking on the task of reminding us—philosophers and non-philosophers alike—that the work of storytelling, and listening, is fundamentally moral work that has the capacity to both create and destroy the objects of its practices, she looks at individual selves, and asks: How do we become persons? How are individual identities formed, how are they maintained—and how can they be undone? How is holding one in her personhood and in her identity connected? Finally, how can the practices of holding continue after catastrophic changes in people’s lives—and indeed, even at the end of life itself?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lindemann’s arguments unfold with, and through, stories. The book can be understood as consisting of four parts: the introduction of the idea of holding (chapter 1) by offering the very personal story of her cognitively impaired sister, Carla. Here, Lindemann poses a number of questions that are fundamental to the rest of her argument, including why philosophers continue to overlook the possibility that personhood is “made and maintained through the activity of other persons”; how, why, and by whom is this activity started; how is it related to holding someone in their identity, and so on (ix). The processes of being called into personhood and identity formation are then addressed in chapters 2 and 3. The work of expressing and maintaining already-formed identities, including examples of what badly-done holding might be like, are discussed in chapter 4. Lastly, what I call the “difficult holding” of complicated (or “impossible”) identities, as well as those identities at the end of life, are the subject matter of chapters 5 and 6. From all of these chapters emerge Lindemann’s claims that morality is fundamentally constituted by human beings holding (or failing to hold) other human beings; that holding someone in her personhood requires recognizing and responding to her as one finds her (rather than as one would like, or imagine, her to be); that the “holding” response must be as flexible as the changing identity of the recognized because the stories that comprise who we are never stand still; and that our identities are not only narratively-constituted, but grant and express our agency as moral beings.

Notably, Lindemann’s last chapter (chapter 7) does not neatly fit into any of the above categories. On the one hand, it serves both as a conclusion and as a promissory note, raising issues that I hope Lindemann will take up in her next book—the reciprocity of identities, the concept of “preservative love” that “preserves people from harm,” and others. On the other hand, it introduces worries about certain practices of holding and letting go that are quite theoretically broad, extending not only Lindemann’s work in moral theory, but moving further into social and political concerns. Thus, while earlier in the book she notes the moral harms of being cast out of personhood—for example, through the story of Kaspar Hauser—in this last chapter, she suggests that different kinds of letting go can indeed be acts of love, such as releasing one’s hold on harmful, vicious, or just plain ill-considered characterizations. And because the kind of stories we tell matters, Lindemann urges us to move beyond narratives that depict the morally corrupt as moral monsters—because attributions of monstrosity can be mistaken, and because, I suggest, they might absolve us from addressing the very real human acts of difficult-to-comprehend evil either morally or politically, relegating the perpetrators to the category of “not-us.”

A few issues remain less than clear, and await treatment in Lindemann’s future projects. Holding people in their personhood when they might be unmoored, or disconnected, or alienated from, among other things, place or a sense of self—whether because of trauma, displacement, or other identity-threatening situations—can require more than a web of stories, or a “narrative tissue,” because sometimes it might simply not be enough to restore what was lost, or what is perceived as lost. In cases of war- or migration- or assimilation-induced traumas, there might not be the storytellers whose words would ring true to either the individual whose personhood is at stake, or to the narrators themselves. In cases such as these, we might just have to reconcile ourselves to periods of protracted lostness and wandering without finding or defining—at least for a while.

Moreover, I wonder if there are certain classes of people (women, care-givers, and so on) who are socialized into being “holders” more than others, and if so, does this make “holding” a gendered, class-relative, or other difference-making activity that is all-too-responsive to existing intersectional oppressions? This, of course, does not speak against holding as a practice—just like the problematizing of care-giving does not argue against the giving of care. But it does raise worries about how to talk about the practices of holding in ways that avoid the issues of unfair burden-distribution (gendered and otherwise) that care, and care theories, have encountered.

In its hopeful concluding paragraphs, Lindemann’s final chapter suggests a way for philosophy to move beyond its longstanding focus on the “the chosen” (in the form of moral agency, free will, and so on) in its moral and epistemic analysis of persons and communities, gently nudging the discourse toward a more balanced view that includes “the given” (our first and second natures that are both biological and social, but mostly outside of our direct control or volition). By so doing, Lindemann shows how modern philosophy can matter in the larger social contexts, where, Western quasi-libertarian ideations aside, people live lives that are built neither of top-down theoretical endorsements nor of individualistic belief-desire analyses. That philosophy ought to speak to these non-ideal conditions is not controversial; that it is mostly inadequate in its efforts and exclusionary in its tactics is becoming quite evident. Lindemann reminds us all, philosophers and laypeople alike, not just how to think about personhood and identity, but how to engage with them as practices that are constituted by stories—multivocal, shareable, and ultimately fundamental to human life. At the same time, she challenges philosophers to reconsider how to do moral philosophy itself, showing how the discipline’s ongoing pleas for relevance might be answered. One comes away from reading Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities with the distinct idea that doing rigorous moral philosophy and engaging with our relational, narrative natures are not at all at cross purposes—and that we are all storytellers whose practices of mutual holding deeply matter.

Anna Gotlib
Brooklyn College, CUNY
Brooklyn, NY, USA

REFERENCES

Lindemann, Hilde. 2001. Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.