Liquid Selves, Empty Selves: A Q&A with Angela Franks

In this month’s Q&A, contributing editor Serena Sigillito interviews Dr. Angela Franks about her new book, Body and Identity: A History of the Empty Self.

Serena Sigillito: I’ve just finished reading your fascinating new book. Can you give PD readers a brief description of the argument you make there.

Angela Franks: Sure. I argue that our concern with the body is usually a smokescreen for deeper questions about identity. I try to show historically why and how identity became a problem for us—why our culture is going through a systemic identity crisis. I try to show that this is not simply a new development, but it has its roots in phenomena that go back centuries, and even millennia.

SS: You’ve mentioned elsewhere that you were inspired, in part, to write this book by Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. I found that a really helpful and thought-provoking comparison. My sense is that your book is more unabashedly academic than Carl’s. Your book seems like it’s aimed at the kind of people who write for places like Public Discourse, who can then draw on your scholarly work and translate it into a more accessible register and help popularize the ideas you articulate. Does that seem right to you?

AF: Yes, I think that’s accurate. I had already been working on my book when Carl’s came out. We got to know each other pretty soon after that, and—as I told him—I was very relieved that his book was not making mine superfluous! I think Carl’s book is primarily a work of translation, whereas mine is a more academic synthesis. One of the books that was really helpful to me was Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self, as well as A Secular Age. Those books are similar to what I’m trying to do—a work that’s lengthier, with an abundant use of footnotes, that really gets into texts at a deeper level. The hope is that it shifts the scholarly discussion around identity.

I think it’s easier to impact both the scholarly world and the popular world if you’ve done the scholarly work first. Because if you’re operating at a more popular level, there’s a snobbish tendency among academics to just dismiss you. I strongly feel like the Holy Spirit is calling me to do this heavier academic work. There are a lot of really great popularizing voices out there who hopefully will benefit from what I’m doing. But I don’t feel like I have to do all of both the academic and the popularizing work.

SS: Are there certain aspects of your research or your argument that you especially hope that others will help popularize?

AF: The fact that our identity problems have a long history—that Christianity contributed to our identity problems indirectly, and then secularism contributed a lot more to our identity problems. Secularism took what was, in Christianity, really an identity solution, and then removed the most important part: God’s bestowal of purpose on each individual. Secularism took that part out. So, you’re left with these liquefied identities that don’t have anything to rely on. Because, according to Christianity, “solid” identity markers—like our family or our nation or our race—are important but not the most important part of who we are and who we’re meant to be.

I think that might help Christians be a little more sympathetic, a little more understanding. Then they can realize, “Okay. It’s not just trans people who are struggling with this. This is really what we’re all swimming in. We’re all swimming in the sea of liquid identities.”

The trans-phenomenon is not some crazy bolt from the blue that had no precedent in the last several hundred years. There really are precedents. If we understand that history better, even if we understand it in a less technical or specific way than I presented in the book, it can help us be more sympathetic and also help us make choices. We can say, “Oh, this strand of identity theory is something I can reject. I don’t have to accept a fundamentally modern understanding of the human person as a doer and not as a being. I can examine that critically and reject it.” And I think that’s very helpful.

SS: I was really struck by your emphasis on that question of doing vs. being. I’ve been thinking a lot about the existentialist vision of the self, because I’ve been engaging with the thinking and the impact of Simone de Beauvoir. It was so fascinating to read your book, which goes further back in history and helps explain where that idea of personhood and identity comes from. You argue that it has roots in Immanuel Kant’s concept of self-legislation, through which you constitute yourself. That helped pave the way for existentialism, which places a strong emphasis on the will and says that you must create yourself as a person by exerting your will on the world.

You then tell the story of the reaction against the existentialist self in postmodernism. Structuralism and post-structuralism hollowed out the idea of the human being as a subject with individual agency by saying, “Really, we’re just all determined by the structures around us.”

If those were the thesis and antithesis, what comes next? If you’re trying to synthesize and say, “No, we’re not these radically individual self-constituting existentialist actors, but we’re also not these totally powerless products of our environment,” then … what are we? Where do we go from here?

AF: In my next book, I am going to propose a more fleshed-out theological understanding of identity, which I summarize briefly both in the book and in my recent Fairer Disputations article.

As far as predicting where the wider world is going to go, I think we’ll continue to see a resurgence of group membership as a grounding for personal identity. So, in a sense, it’s a return to the kind of solid identity categories that were very significant in the Roman Empire. In the pre-Christian world, those solid categories pretty comprehensively defined who you were. That reality was disrupted by Christianity. We’ve seen a return to that, beginning in the nineteenth century with the rise of nationalism, and really accelerating in the twentieth century. In the book, I present both the version of that on the right, which is seen in Heidegger and his Nazism, but then also on the left, where group membership, such as your sexual identity or your race, is considered the overriding thing of importance.

The difference with premodern society, of course, is that now, when we approach group membership, we do it from this fundamentally liquid place. As Zygmunt Bauman says, we just drop anchor temporarily in an identity port, in a particular group. But generally, we pick groups that do not make significant demands on us, so that we can pull up anchor and depart pretty easily. That’s one of the differences between our understanding of group membership and how this was conceived in pre-Christian times.

I think Christianity has always had salient criticisms of that way of constructing your identity. And I think people do not find it ultimately very satisfying to answer the question “Who am I?” by saying, “Well, this is the group I belong to.” So, I think Christianity will continue to have something to say about that attempt.

SS: I’m very curious about the vision of identity that you’re going to lay out in your next book. The Aristotelian concept of substance plays a really big role in your intellectual history of identity. You argue that, in modernity, substance has been hollowed out and rejected. That’s what leads to the empty self that we have to construct.

Your argument reminded me of Abigail Favale’s discussion near the beginning of The Genesis of Gender about a constructivist versus a correspondence theory of language, which differ in their conception of how language relates to reality. In other words, is language used to name a corresponding reality that already exists, or does language construct that reality? Is that distinction similar to what you’re getting at?

AF: The rejection of substance is, to some degree, a rejection of Christian theology and the scholastic philosophy that developed as a support for that theology. The two aspects of Aristotelian substance were really filled out metaphysically and philosophically by Christian theologians trying to make sense of the Trinity and the person and natures of Jesus Christ. Because Jesus Christ is the son of God made man, that had a lot of ramifications for the human being, for who and what we are, how we understand ourselves. And “substance” was used in both of its meanings, both as “a thing existing in itself” and also as the nature of that thing.

The modern rejection of substance rejected the need to have linguistic clarity around who and what the triune God and Jesus Christ are. I think the motive for that is really just the modern obsession with freedom. Because if I am not limited by a certain nature, by my human nature, if I am not limited by being this finite substance, then this whole new world of possibilities opens up.

In that sense, it is harmonious with the constructivist understanding of language, because it’s a constructivist understanding of reality as a whole. It’s not only my language that constructs, but everything that I’m doing is in the service of this project of making me into the thing that I want to be. And you can’t do that when you have a metaphysics of substance that is acknowledging necessary limits for the human person.

SS: It seems like a rejection of receptivity. Because the other option, if your identity is not a project that you’re constructing, is a willingness to receive what and who you are as a created being. You do that by, for example, discerning your vocation, which is a call that comes from outside yourself.

AF: Exactly. And that’s why secularism is such an important historical moment in my book. Secularism really shifts from an anthropology of receptivity, which would be a Judeo-Christian anthropology, to one of construction, because there’s no accessible deity who’s there to provide your identity and to provide your nature and to watch over all of this in loving providence. All of that gets rejected as secularism becomes more and more intellectually accepted. That’s why it’s so important to identity, because it creates the rationale for the shift from receptivity to construction.

SS: This idea of receiving an identity from someone that you trust, who exists and loves you, who you can actually encounter, makes me think about your discussion of C. S. Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces. There, the main character finally realizes that we cannot meet the gods face to face “till we have faces.” It’s one of my favorite novels, and I loved your analysis of it.

Most of the book is a history of philosophy, but then you have this chapter in the middle where you pause your historical narrative and take a detour into literature. What made you decide to include that chapter, which you describe as an excursion from the main argument? And what made you choose the novels you did? You’ve got C. S. Lewis, Jane Austen, and then … vampire and zombie novels. How did you land on those three?

AF: I hoped it would be fun to read! So that’s part of why I included it. In the book, I primarily trace the history of philosophical ideas, because we act and exist in the world based on the horizons that we think are possible, and those horizons get formed in part by the ambient culture’s sense of what our possibilities are and who we are. So, I think that understanding the philosophy is really essential. But literature is important, too, because it gives us not only the ideas, but also the images and the emotional states of people surrounding the changes in ideas that are happening.

To be honest, the horror literature section was a bit of a surprise to me. But it really seems like vampires and zombies are how “liquid bodies and empty selves” show up in literature. You can argue that the monsters of any age are a way of a culture working through its fears. We have this fear, but we also see that there’s a way to overcome the thing that we’re afraid of, and that provides a sense of catharsis. The liquidity of modernity is something that people are really playing with and trying to understand through stories.

In Dracula, one of the minions quotes Leviticus and says, “The blood is life.” What does it mean when we have this understanding of blood as transfusable? Historically and scientifically, that was just about to become possible when Stoker wrote Dracula. What does it say about me as an individual if I’m so liquid? What does it mean when aristocratic bloodlines stop being identity markers? The vampire is almost always an aristocrat of some kind. So various aspects of liquid bodies and the empty selves express themselves in these horror stories.

In terms of Austen, I had been thinking for a long time about how one of the major threads in her work is the danger of deception: the fact that people can present themselves other than they are, and the ripple effects of that dishonesty. Her novels really deal with the question of identity. For Austen, deception is an ethical question, but it’s a deeply anthropological question, too.

Alasdair MacIntyre gets at this when he’s talking about the villains in Mansfield Park, Henry and Mary. He says that it doesn’t occur to Henry that you would be a clergyman because you wanted to be a clergyman. Being a clergyman was a role that you played. For this brother and sister pair, life was simply about putting on a good show. That, I think, is the result of this empty self. There’s no self inside, but you’re still compelled to engage in all of this social interaction. So, your task is to pretend that there’s a self inside. You get the rise of the importance of the image, or of the “doxic,” as I call it. Life becomes more and more about doxic show, about presenting yourself as a person, instead of actually being a certain kind of person.

Austen comes pretty soon after Kant and Locke. She is portraying the fallout of the person not being a human being, but a human doing. She’s presenting how psychologically destructive this is.

SS: Your analysis of Mansfield Park reminded me of a novel that I’m listening to on audiobook right now that deals with similar themes: A Girl of the Limberlost. It was published in 1909 by a writer and naturalist named Gene Stratton-Porter, and was a bestseller in its day.

The protagonist is this girl, Elnora, who’s grown up in the wilderness and has a very Fanny-ish moral character. Toward the end, there’s a romantic triangle with a man who is engaged to a woman who’s more of a Mary Crawford type: beautiful, but only concerned with self and the construction of self through wealth and beauty and social engagements. The author emphasizes the fact that Elnora has this deep, unshakable sense of self and commitment to virtue, not only because of the trauma she’s been through, but also because she has been so deeply immersed in the beauty of nature. At one point, Elnora’s mother watches a moth emerge from its cocoon and tells her daughter, “The Almighty has done this. You can’t watch this and not see God’s plan for creation.”

As a parent, you don’t want your kids to get trapped in this sea of toxic identity and obsession with self-creation. With all of the recent pushback against giving kids smartphones, it seems like there is beginning to be more of a sense of how important it is for kids to have contact with physical reality, testing their body’s strength in dangerous play and having encounters with nature. That seems like an important first step.

As a mom yourself, do you have any guidance for parents who want to keep their kids from getting lost in the sea of performative identity?

AF: I think the doxic is something that people sense can be really dangerous—what social media can do to young girls. There’s certainly much more conversation around that now than there used to be. There’s a lot more concern about this emphasis on appearance. There’s just no place to rest if the only basis for identity is your appearance. You can always be prettier or thinner or richer. There’s no end point. It’s exhausting, and people feel that it’s exhausting, and they feel that it’s false.

For kids, and really for all of us, it’s so important to experience our limits and to be able to appreciate them as good, even if sometimes we can learn to push past them. I think it’s good to do things that are physically challenging.

In my current workplace, I’m up on the fourth floor. The ceilings are pretty high, so it’s quite a few steps. There are elevators, but I try whenever I can to take the stairs. When I do, I experience how reality pushes back against me. There’s something good about that—about experiencing that I’m limited. Hopefully someday I won’t be as breathless when I get to the fourth floor as I am today. But I think it’s good to normalize the experience of limits, as well as the judicious pushing back against those limits, without the myth that we can live without limits.

SS: That’s so interesting. I’m a runner, and it’s cross-country season here. I have one daughter who really loves to run and to push herself, and another one who does not. I sign that daughter up for the team anyway, because I think it’s good for her character. I tend to think that it’s good for her to learn that she can choose to keep running, even when it feels hard. But you’re emphasizing the flip side, which I appreciate. There really is a physical limit there. It’s important to acknowledge not only the capacity of your will and your agency, but also your ultimate limitation.

AF: Yeah. We can do hard things, and we often think that we can’t. But we’re always going to experience things that are hard. That just means we’re the creatures that we are. We can’t just power through all hard things on will alone or on intellect alone. Sometimes our bodies say, “I’m done here.” Sometimes we have to stay in bed and get over the fever, and that’s just part of who we are. Our intellects and wills give us this incredible ability to transcend space and time, but we’re always still embedded in them.

SS: One of the things that I really appreciate about your writing is that you don’t just dismiss thinkers whom you deeply disagree with. You spend so much time really trying to understand their arguments. You look for the inchoate good that they’re reaching toward or the truths that they’re half sensing.

I’m still mulling over your use of Gilles Deleuze. You use this quotation as your epigraph: “Flows, who doesn’t desire flows, and relationships between flows, and breaks in flows?” It strikes me that the postmodern attraction to flows is, arguably, a misdirected manifestation of what a Thomist might call the “great circle of being”: the idea that God creates us out of love, and we have to go out from Him, and become more fully ourselves, and then freely choose to come back to Him. There’s a sense of motion here. Maybe this is the Christian liquidity that you talk about—the sending out and the calling back. I think that’s also mirrored in what psychologists call the “dance of attachment,” when the child gradually individuates by repeatedly separating from the mother and then coming back to her.

Are there other misguided ideas that you look at and think: I wish that people of faith could see and acknowledge the good that these people are grasping for here?

AF: Oh, that’s a great question. Let’s see if I can do that justice.

I am very fond of Deleuze. I pray for him. I hope he goes to heaven. I want to meet him in heaven. And one reason why I’m fond of him, ironically, is that I think he is so comprehensively wrong. He has a system in a time when a lot of postmodernists were saying, “Oh, I don’t have a system of philosophy.” He really provides a comprehensive ontological explanation that I think is wrong at almost every turn. But I think it’s really impressive that he recognizes that he has to do that. And I think that he is embracing things that have a goodness to them. The flows epigraph really captures that.

One thing that I’ll do in the next book is talk about the goodness in liquidity. I think it’s very easy for Christians to be like, “We’re in this untethered, unstable world, and we need anchors, and we need institutions, and we need enduring truth.” And all of that is true. But there’s a tendency, I think, as a counter move against liquid modernity, to double down on solidity. And that’s ultimately a pre-Christian intuition, not a Christian one. Because Christianity really does unleash a lot of liquidity, including identity liquidity, in the world.

I gave a talk once to a society on liturgy. I talked a little bit about liquid modernity—what’s wrong about it, but also the goodness in it, and what in Christianity contributed to liquid modernity. There was a priest who came up afterward who had worked as a missionary in China. He said, “What you are talking about—Christian liquidity—is exactly what the Chinese government fears. They can see that Christianity destabilizes and relativizes nation and race and government. They see that, and they reject it. They don’t want that liquidity. They want the solidity of their governmental system.”

I think we need to recognize that liquidity is not all bad. I mean, “For freedom, Christ set us free.” That’s really the root of Christian liquidity.

With the “empty self” as well, there’s an instinct there that’s good. In a way, it’s similar to the poverty of Christian receptivity, where we don’t hold onto possessions or our own ideas about what we want ourselves to be. We strive to be really available to God and open to his molding of our selves. So the empty self has a lot of Christian elements. But ultimately, the self can’t be this deconstructed subject that that is simply lost in the sea of liquidity, where there’s no way forward toward having an identity. Those are some of the things I’ll talk about in the second book.

I think it’s never helpful evangelically to just dismiss people. If there’s an idea that’s become compelling, even if it’s really, really wrongheaded, there’s something in it that people are grasping onto that appears to be good. I’m all for refuting bad ideas. I have no problem with that. But the way you really convince people is to show them that what they want, they’re not getting from the wrongheaded idea, but they can get it from a correct understanding of what’s good and true.

SS: As you talk about the appeal of the empty self, it reminds me of the Christian concept of “kenosis,” or self-emptying. Caryll Houselander uses the image of being an empty reed and allowing God to work through you and to fill you. That image illustrates the distinction between the Christian conception and the postmodern one, I think. Because even in that metaphor, the reed still has boundaries and sides. It still exists. I think at one point you used the musical metaphor of polyphony, of these many voices blending together yet remaining distinct. This is such a sharp contrast to Deleuze’s conception of the univocity of being, where personal identity is an illusion that will ultimately fade away.

I remember studying Dante as an undergraduate and coming across this quotation from a critic named Lino Pertile that has stuck with me—that “the achievement of beatitude does not entail the end of individual identities, but their fullest and freest realization.” This seems like an essential element of the Christian understanding of identity.

AF: Exactly right. Postmodernity really has a nihilistic edge to it. You see it in Louis Althusser. He really manifests that postmodern nihilism where what he wants is the nothingness. That’s the demonic version of the Christian kenosis, which is that emptying of self, so that I can become the self that I am really supposed to be and not the sinful self that I currently am. You have to still be in order to become who you are meant to be. It’s not an elimination of being, but an enrichment of it.

SS: These ideas are so psychologically damaging. You can’t be happy, or even be an integrated person, if you actually believe and try to live out some of these ideas.

AF: That was one reason why I started the book with narcissism, because people who aren’t philosophers and who probably aren’t Christians—namely, psychologists—are the ones noticing this empty self and how destructive it is. It’s a culture-wide phenomenon, as Christopher Lasch observed. It’s not just simply that we have some individuals who are narcissists, but that we have this narcissistic spectrum that most people seem to be on. And how did that happen?

We can see that there are concrete effects on the ground and in people’s lives of this way of thinking. So that question is, how in the world did we get here? That of course, is the question I try to answer in the rest of the book.

SS: Thank you for this wonderful conversation and for your decades of work. I’m so thankful to have this book to draw on—and I can’t wait for the next one.

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.