Alexander Douglas, Against Identity **

The introduction to this book of philosophy acknowledges the importance of one's personal identity:

Each of us is born with a deep biological urge for self-preservation. But consciously pursuing self-preservation requires some notion of what our self is. ... Some believe that we can find out by introspecting and looking within to find our true self. But ... there is no map highlighting which qualities truly define us: which are our defining traits and which our fleeting states. Nor does who you happen to be right now define who you essentially are. 

While our basic appetites are biologically determined, our desires beyond these basic appetites arise from a fundamental psychological drive for identity—a drive to be a certain sort of person.

You decide who you are, and then this determines how you want to act, what you want to possess, who you want to connect with, what you want to believe. ... In making value judgements, you define who you are, more than through any other human activity.

The author emphasizes that the existential importance of identity leads us to violence when our identity is threatened. He promises to examine the thought of three very different philosophers (Zhuangzi from ancient China, Benedict de Spinoza in the 17th-century Dutch Republic, and René Girard in 20th-century France) who counseled us to abandon our identities.

This introduction reinforces the idea that we (necessarily) construct identities to understand ourselves and fit into our social environment. How can we possibly do without them? 

In the early chapters, Douglas seems to suggest that we simply accept our internal multitudes and stay open to change. Later, it sounds like he is recommending Buddhist-style detachment. In the end, he settles on proposing "communion in a shared identitylessness. If I see that you and I are both identityless expressions of superdeterminate being then we are not simply as one in shared identity; We are one."

Douglas' descriptions of other philosophers' ideas are notably vague, and his conclusion waffles between saying we should transcend our identities through spirituality and telling us to choose better exemplary models for our identities (like Christ perhaps, or Spinoza's God). None of it provides a viable alternative to identity.

For a much better treatment of this topic, see Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Ethics of Identity. I believe that I myself have written a more insightful essay on this topic.