August 09, 2006: The Sense of Identity on the Other Side of the Chaos Coin

I prepared the above diagram after reading Plato's "Theaetetus." This dialogue is often invoked by the knowledge management crowd for its definition of knowledge as justified true belief. However, if you go to the source itself, you discover that, in the course of the dialogue, definitions of knowledge are considered (justified true belief being the last of these); and all of them are found wanting. The dialogue concludes by accepting (almost in the Kubler-Ross sense) the fact that Socrates and Theaetetus have failed in their attempt to define knowledge. What Socrates manages to demonstrate, though (although he never says this explicitly), is that the difficulty of defining knowledge may have to do with how tightly coupled it is to at least three other equally fundamental concepts: memory, being, and description (which may be a poor translation of the Greek λόγος).

I raise this summary because I think that the concept of being (along with the related concept of identity) must not be neglected in considering the strategy of embracing chaos that I discussed yesterday. This occurred to me while reading some of the business literature invoking terms such as "network organizations," "boundary-less organizations," and "virtual organizations." I realized that, from the point of view of actually getting the work done, this kind of language can raise some challenging questions of identity, for both individual workers and the "entities" (who knows what we want to call them any more) that, at least nominally, serve as their employers. As I suggested yesterday, this issue of identity is critical, because it is only through our sense of self that we can engage our own subjective skills of perceptual categorization, which are all we have in order to manage ourselves in that chaotic setting that we may be obliged to embrace. To some extent Social Psychology has recognized this with its sub-discipline of Identity Theory and the roots of that sub-discipline in George Herbert Mead's symbolic interactionism. In that respect it should be no surprise that Habermas' work on his theory of communicative action draws heavily on Mead's symbolic interactionism. However, what matters at the end of the day is how the issue of identity surfaces when each of us faces the prospect of going to work every day or confronts the fate of having lost one's job. Pop psychology has trivialize the phrase "identity crisis;" but it may be that one of the most critical consequences of the Internet has been the cultivation of an identity crisis of global proportions. As I have already suggested, these consequences have economic, social, and political implications, all of which have received little more that gratuitous lip service as a price for the worship of innovation. However, an emerging identity crisis may be an instance of what Malcolm X had called the chickens coming home to roost!