This article was originally published at Aeon on April 20, 2020, and has been republished under Creative Commons.
Human beings are self-conscious creatures: we can conceptualise ourselves as psychological beings, forming beliefs about who and what we are. We also have identities: self-beliefs that are sources of meaning, purpose and value, and that help to constrain our choices and actions.
In addition to being able to think about ourselves, self-conscious beings can recognise that we are the objects of other people’s thoughts. This opens up the possibility of a conflict between our own identities and how we are perceived by others. This potential for conflict gives us unique power over each other, and also makes us uniquely vulnerable: only self-conscious beings can kill with a glance or die of embarrassment.
Our vulnerability to how others regard us might create obligations to try to regard others in some of the ways they desire – ways that are consonant with their own identities. But what about identities that we think are false or absurd – or that we simply don’t understand?
A plural is a human being who says things like: ‘I’m one of many people inside my head.’ Although they are quite rare (it’s impossible to say how rare), plurals are increasingly visible on social media and in the occasional popular media article. At present, there is a handbook online about how to respond to a co-worker’s ‘coming out’ (as the document puts it) as plural.
You might think you’ve heard of plurals if you’ve heard of dissociative identity disorder (DID), because, like plurals, people with DID experience themselves as being psychologically multiple. But many plurals don’t meet the diagnostic criteria for DID. Often, this is because they don’t find their plurality per se to be distressing or impairing. In other cases, it’s because they don’t meet the amnesia criterion for DID, since the multiple beings that plurals experience as being inside them can share experiences or communicate to each other about their experiences. Conversely, most people with DID aren’t plurals. Plurals don’t just feel as though they are psychologically multiple – they believe that they are. And they take each of these psychological beings, inhabiting one shared body, to be a full person: let’s call each of them a personp, where the little ‘p’ stands for ‘part of one human being’. As one personp puts it: ‘You presume that there’s a “real person” underneath all of us who’s conjuring up “imaginary friends”. No, we’re just people, thanks.’
According to plurals, then, a plural human being isn’t a person, but a co-embodied group of people. Each personp takes him or herself to bear social relations to the others, as members of a household might. Different peoplep might speak of liking or disliking, respecting and disparaging, cooperating and arguing and negotiating with each other.
The most striking feature of plurals is that they don’t say things such as: ‘I am many peoplep.’ Rather, they might say, as one personp put it in an open letter:
I am only myself; I have one identity, one sense of self, one personality. Although I am conjoined inseparably from the other members of my group … phrases like ‘your other selves’, or ‘when you were that other person’, or ‘the other you’ … [are] non-sequiturs. I don’t have ‘other selves’. I am never anyone but myself.
Plurals are defined by what I will call their plural identities. These plural identities can be difficult for singlets (including me) to wrap our heads around. Singlets experience ourselves as being ‘alone in’ our bodies, and our strong default assumption is that all people come, one per body, in this way. Meanwhile, plurals’ grounds for distinguishing between different peoplep seem to be essentially first-personal and phenomenological – that is, based on their own private experiences. They deny that different peoplep need to be unaware of each other personp’s thoughts and experiences, or necessarily have radically different characters. Instead, plurals’ grounds for distinguishing between peoplep seem to be that each personp has his or her own sense of self and agency.
The discontinuities that mark the boundaries of peoplep, in other words, aren’t bodily; nor are they psychological attributes that can be observed from the outside, like differences in memory and personality. This is a challenge for understanding the plural identity claim, on two levels: one, because we can’t access other people’s experiences just in general; and two, because singlets don’t have these same types of experiences. (A singlet will, of course, experience another human being’s actions as not mine – but that person’s body will also be visibly distinct.)
In light of these obstacles to understanding the plural identity claim, it would be natural to hope that plurals mean the claim metaphorically. After all, there are many familiar metaphors involving something like multiple selfhood: I’m someone else when I’m with her; I don’t identify with who I was then; What I said before – that was my father speaking. The problem is that plurals explicitly reject these metaphors as not what they mean. As one personp puts it:
It’s completely true that people express different sides of themselves according to different contexts. However, this is different from multiplicity. Members of a multiple group will individually experience themselves as having these ‘different sides’, just like everyone else.
Even if the plural identity claim must be metaphorical somehow, it’s not clear what it could be a metaphor for.
Our identities matter to us. It also generally matters to us that other people respect those identities. But one might wonder whether it’s possible to respect an identity claim that one doesn’t believe, or perhaps even understand.
There are identities that we shouldn’t respect, because they reinforce unjust social arrangements (say, ‘patriarch’). But plurals’ identities aren’t like this, and they evidently help plurals make sense of their experiences.
Some might say that we shouldn’t respect identities that are delusional, whether or not they’re harmful. But even if this were true, plurals don’t seem to be deluded, exactly, since they realise that they can’t provide singlets with any observable evidence that peoplep exist. As one personp writes:
I don’t bother [engaging with skeptics] … because the experience is subjective and cannot be tested, all that I could say would be that I have experienced something that was real to me; I can do nothing tangible to convince anyone that I’m not alone in here.
Someone else might protest that we can’t be obliged to believe, or even try to believe, identity claims that strike us as absurd or simply wrong. But respecting plural identities doesn’t require us to believe them. What it does require, at a minimum, is not correcting plurals when they act on the basis of their self-image, and not treating their plural identities dismissively. It also requires that singlets not engage with plurals for the purpose of persuading them that they’re wrong.
More strongly, respect might require that singlets themselves accept, in the context of interacting with plurals, that peoplep are truly distinct people. By ‘acceptance’ I mean something articulated in 1992 by the philosopher L Jonathan Cohen, something different from belief. To accept something, in the way I mean, is to commit to treating it, in a particular context, as though it were true. For example, a defence lawyer, acting on behalf of a client, might accept that he is innocent, whether or not she believes that he is.
This view of what it means to respect plurals’ identities is modest but not toothless. It asks singlets to try to see a plural through their own eyes – that is, through multiple peoplep’s eyes. It also asks singlets to set aside how they might otherwise be inclined to respond to manifestations of plurals’ own identities.
The reasons for showing this respect are partly social and moral. Plurals live with a discord between what they believe about themselves and what everyone else believes. Out in the social world – that is, the social world outside their heads – they mostly live as if they were the way that singlets see them. Perpetually acting in conformity with what others believe about you, and with what you disbelieve, is a way of living a lie. It’s a lie even if everyone else is right and you’re wrong. Many plurals would like to be able to live more truthfully yet without having to constantly defend themselves.
Another ground for respecting plural identities is epistemic. I became interested in this community because some of their writings were clearly the work of thoughtful, analytical people. They made this one big claim that seemed (still seems) outrageous – just obviously false. But it’s something that they’ve thought about a lot and that has been informed by aspects of their experience that I can’t access. It therefore seems reasonable for me to conclude that I don’t yet understand what they’re claiming to be. And sometimes the only way to understand an idea is to ‘try it on’.
The trying-on, in this case, can happen only in the context of respectfully engaging with a plural – engaging with them as a group of peoplep. This engagement will establish a relationship out of which understanding might emerge. Of course, I might achieve this greater understanding without coming to believe that what plurals say about themselves is true. A relationship, however, would put me in a position to grasp what their plural identities mean to them – what this does for them, what it scaffolds or supports in their lives. And that is the position we should work towards – the position we should always reach before challenging people about who they really are.
This Idea was made possible through the support of a grant to Aeon from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation. Funders to Aeon Magazine are not involved in editorial decision-making.
Written by Elizabeth Schechter, who is an associate professor in the department of philosophy and in the cognitive science programme at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of Self-Consciousness and ‘Split’ Brains: The Minds’ I (2018).