Becoming Human
By seeing every human being
as consciously or unconsciously
acting out an idiosyncratic fantasy,
we can see the distinctively human,
as opposed to the animal portion of each human life
as the use for symbolic purposes of every particular person,
object, situation, event, and word encountered in later life.This process amounts to redescribing them,
thereby saying of them all,
“Thus I willed it.”Seen from this angle,
the intellectual (the person who uses words
or visual or musical forms for this purpose)
is just a special case—
just somebody who does with marks and noises
what other people do with their spouses and children,
their fellow workers, the tools of their trade,
the cash accounts of their businesses,
the possessions they accumulate in their homes,
the music they listen to,
the sports they play or watch,
of the trees they pass on their way to work.Anything from the sound of a word
through the color of a leaf to the feel of a piece of skin can,
as Freud showed us,
serve to dramatize and crystallize a human being’s
sense of self identity.
For any such thing an play the role in an individual life
which philosophers thought could,
or at least should, be played only by things
which were universal, common to us all.It can symbolize the blind impress
all our behavings bear.Any seemingly random constellation of such things
can set the tone of a life.
Any such constellation can set up
an unconditional commandment
to whose service a life may be devoted
—to a commandment no less unconditional
because it may be intelligible to,
at most,
only one person.
–Richard Rorty
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 37
