Is there a more philosophical question?
Professor Smythe of North Carolina College said that the most fundamental philosophical questions we can ask are, "Who am I?" and "What is this?" He might have been quoting Martin Buber.
Am I who you thought I was? One time I was with my friend Nick and we were outrageous together. He had this way of laughing at my jokes, sort of supporting me while I talked. I thought that I supported him in that way, too. Then one day, and I don't remember if he even marked the emotional occasion with any words, he just stopped laughing. Conversations which had been really good before were just slow, and had various awkward silences.
It was much more dramatic to me about a week afterward. Now, seeing it written down, I realize that a story about how there's no drama isn't that interesting.
Am I who you thought I was? I always think of the subjunctive when saying things that require the subjunctive. I sort of feel the subjunctive dying out in the English language. Sort of feels like there needs to be a 'were' there. Am I who you thought I were doesn't feel right, either, though. Are we who you thought we were? But when do we ever ask that? Why would any group need to prove themselves to an individual? Or another group?
That is, being in a group is self-justifying. The very act of being in there is a comforting process. This scary stuff, when we put some cognitive dissonance theory to it: if a group never thinks that it is unjust as a group, then there are not any checks and balances.
Am I who you thought I was? Posters cover my walls in my house. Posters dot my dormitory in my room at the University and then disappear. Am I who you thought I was? Doesn't involve the present tense for the thought. What an oblong sentence! "Am I" is in present tense because we have the default sentiment that the self never changes. We also think that we do not change how we are viewed by people.
Am I who you thought I was? Charles Dickens wrote 2 dimensional characters. He wrote about people who simply have one act, one thing that they do. He would write a character called, "Mrs. Washtub," who would take a bath every time she was in a scene (every time she were in a scene? The subjunctive is dying out). But we don't want to be two dimensional characters. It's a sin, in the United States, to be two-dimensional. Call it the Denzel Washington problem: we don't want to be cast in the same role over and over.
E.B. White said something to the effect that it seems like people want to be considered evil rather than silly, a lot of times. What I take home from this is that people want to be taken, perhaps not seriously, but honestly, and importantly.
Now more than ever, we have stuff telling us who we are and what we do. So there's mob mentality, there's facebook with our pictures on it, there's myspace with our pictures on it. There's school identifications, there are thousands of people who "really know us". Nine inch nails has a song "You know what you are?" Coldplay has a song, "Lost!" Millions are fascinated about Kanye West's struggles of identity (is he pompous or does he simply have very low self-esteem?). The punchline to the joke is that the more that we are told who we are, the more we want to break out of that. A friend told me that I'm a libertarian this past semester. I was enraged. Everyone has heard the phrase (at least everyone who has heard the Ludacris song) "Get back, you don't know me like that." The other punchline is that the more we do build the self, the more we want to build the self more; in other words the more we build the self, the less we know ourselves.
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