Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Washington Post:
I want to make the case for the power of thinking in the third person. The first person, of course, comes quite naturally to us. We have a vivid sense of our experiences and perspectives: This is who and what I am. People will live their lives with “main character energy.” Yet, with a little more work, we can also view ourselves the way historians and social scientists might: as creatures shaped by larger forces and bound by a culture’s pre-written scripts. That means seeing ourselves as the inheritor and inhabitant of various social identities — and, therefore, as a person like every other.Something shifts once you reframe color, creed, gender and so forth within the more abstract concept of social identity. When a dimension of our life is grasped as a social identity, it becomes a phenomenon to take its place alongside a plentitude of other identities, each with points of commonality and distinction. We gain access to a third-person vantage on our first-person perspectives.
More here.
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