Paloma and Priscilla asked:

Is there a true answer about who we are?

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Who we are is certainly a question for philosophy, at least, when that question is understood in a
particular sense which I shall explain in a moment. An answer given to that question might be true —
if any philosophical answer can be true. I am not sufficiently confident to say that I know thetrue
answer. But here are some of the lines I would explore.

We are human beings, members of the genus homo sapiens,the only intelligent animals to inhabit
the Earth (so far as we know). These are matters of verifiable fact, not philosophy. If there is a
philosophical answer to the question who we are, it must concern those aspects of what it is to be us
that are not merely matters of fact, but in some sense necessary.In saying this, I am already entering
into a highly disputable area. The name sometimes associated with this inquiry is 'philosophical
anthropology'.

On the traditional, Cartesian view, the fact that I am a human being, a man and not a woman, the fact
that I had a childhood, that I was born and will die — these are all accidental, contingent features of
my true 'I'. Essentially, I am a substance that thinks and has experiences. There is no logical
necessity that such a thinking substance should possess a physical body, let alone a body of a
particular kind.

Descartes was led to this view by powerful arguments. There is not the space to dispute those
arguments here. Suffice it to say that they can be disputed. I would argue that it is essential, not
accidental that I have a physical body, which is capable of physical agency. Many philosophers have
now come round to this view. More contentiously, I would argue that it is an essential fact about who
we are that we were all once infants, that we went through a period of helpless dependence on
another being or beings who cared for us — in the many cases, but not necessarily, our parents. It is
an essential fact about who we are that we grew up, acquiring a character and personality that is
unique to each one of us.

I would recommend that you read John Macmurray's Gifford Lectures 1953—4, published as The Self
as Agent(Faber, 1957) and Persons in Relation(Faber, 1961). The work of Macmurray, who has
been called the 'English existentialist', is not as widely known as it should be.

Most importantly, our lives are finite, they have a beginning and an end. These are facts everyone
knows, yet when viewed from the perspective of philosophy they acquire a special significance. One
philosopher famous for raising the question of what it is to be a subject who faces death as an
inevitable end is Heidegger, in Being and Time.The deepest exploration of these issues that I know
of, however, which takes in such aspects as love and sexuality, the family, and our contribution,
through our offspring, to the unending sequence of generations is Emmanuel Levinas Totality and
Infinity(Alphonso Lignis tr. Nijhoff 1979), without doubt one of the half dozen greatest works of
twentieth century metaphysics.

It is not a surprise to learn 'who we are'. It is the consequences of those facts, the philosophical
interpretation placed upon them, that makes that question so significant.

Geoffrey Klempner