“It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person,” philosopher Amelie Rorty wrote in examining what makes a person through her taxonomy of the seven layers of identity. I have thought about Rorty often in watching the steamroller of our cultural moment level the beautiful, wild topography of personhood into variations on identity politics, demolishing context, dispossessing expression of intention, and flattening persons into identities. Half a century ago, James Baldwin shone a sidewise gleam of admonition against this perilous tendency as he contemplated freedom and how we imprison ourselves: “This collision between one’s image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish.”
During a tense recent dinner table conversation about these tensions, I was reminded of a lesser-known legacy of the great Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue (January 1, 1956–January 4, 2008), who has written beautifully about selfhood and the crucible of identity.
In 1997, the Irish broadcaster and radio producer John Quinn conceived of a summer series titled “Webs of Wonder” — a modern embodiment of Descartes’s conviction that “wonderment is the first passion of all,” exploring the elemental sublimity of wonder through poetry, music, literature, and philosophy. Quinn enlisted O’Donohue in the philosophical component of the program. In a hotel bar in Kinvara, the two sat down to explore the tessellations of wonder in a roaming hourlong conversation, the transcript of which was published as Walking on the Pastures of Wonder: John O’Donohue in Conversation with John Quinn (public library).
[For more on this story by MARIA POPOVA, go to https://www.brainpickings.org/...-pastures-of-wonder/]
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