Persons and their Personas: Living with Yourself

Public life is usually understood to be whatever we do or say in our formal and professional relationships. At the workplace, at the doctor’s office or at the café, we need to make a good impression and we cannot say everything we think or do anything we want. We need to appear a certain way to be liked, get ahead, or simply stay out of trouble. The distinction between private and public presupposes that we invest efforts in maintaining a public “persona” whereas at home we can “be ourselves.” A closer examination, however, reveals that we also have a persona within the circle of our immediate family and close friends. We often censor ourselves with the people closest to us, in order to be seen by our loved-ones as caring partners, devoted children or loyal friends. Can we ever relax and really be ourselves without maintaining a persona? Even in our most private moments, at home alone, we are under the pressure of a private persona, a self-image we want to maintain even when nobody else is looking. We also want to impress ourselves, so to speak, to feel and think about and interact with people in a manner that reflects the way we think we are, or should be, in our social world. On occasion, we explicitly endorse certain values or character traits that we see as guiding our social interactions as well as our private thoughts and emotions. Naturally, most of us probably think that who we are, as reflected from our actions and reactions, thoughts and emotions, matches quite well our private persona. But when we consider those around us, especially those we know well enough to know what they think about themselves, we often notice patterns of behaviour that are in tension with their private persona. We could say that they have a false, or at least a partially blind, self-image. The philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear provides a good example to think about these tensions in one’s private persona. In A Case for Irony, he describes a woman who displays prototypical femininity in some of her mannerisms, gestures and her style of clothing, and self-consciously comports herself according to traditional gender roles. Yet, Lear notices that she also exhibits “boyish” behaviour without realising it, a behaviour that further demonstrates that she cares about being “boyish” (42-71). Consider other examples such as: a proud anti-authoritarian whose gestures and reactions reveal that he evaluates people according to their social hierarchy; or a person who fiercely defends her independence in close relationships and yet remains financially dependent; or the delicate flower that cannot hurt a fly with a killer instinct. Around us, many people hold onto a self-image that captures only a part of their social ways of being and ignores other parts that are apparently in tension with it. We ascribe to one another the ability to turn a blind eye to what is there to see. In such cases, it appears that some patterns of social interaction fit well with what we may call one’s endorsed private persona whereas other identifiable patterns do not. Those, in turn, seem to fit a hidden private persona, certain values or character traits that the person does not acknowledge having. In other words, one’s private persona may include an endorsed aspect that is in tension with its hidden aspect. In this paper, I critically examine Jonathan Lear’s suggestion as to how to understand and deal with such tensions. In particular, I examine how one’s private persona may get caught up in such tensions in the first place.