On sentimental objects and personal identity
In the last few months, the fire alarm in my house has gone off at two, three in the morning, seemingly without cause. I’ll be asleep on a regular Tuesday night, only to be awakened by sirens and automated verbal warnings that there’s a fire in my house.
Each time, it’s been a false alarm, but each time it brings up the same fears and concerns. What if it were real? What if my house were to burn down? I would lose everything. Yes, my fire alarm (when functional) is likely to save my life. But everything I own, all my art, my journals, gifts, books, photographs, trinkets, etc. would all burn. And if that were to happen, it feels like it would break me.
Yes, I’d still have my body, my mind, my health, my life–all things to be immensely thankful for. But if I were to lose my treasured things, it would represent a loss that would cut the deepest parts of my self. My possessions are not merely reflective, but constitutive of my selfhood. My treasured letters, gifts, and photos are pieces of me that if I were to lose them, it would represent a loss of my personal identity. My things represent who I am, and additionally, they represent my relationships with those I love, with memories I treasure, and aspects of my past and present self. While I may be unusually sentimental, this form of attachment is far from unique.
We treat certain objects not merely as possessions, but as vessels of love, value, trauma, memory, meaning, and selfhood.
The loss of these objects constitutes a partial loss of identity.
This essay explores the philosophical and psychological significance of the relationship between sentimental objects and personal identity. Drawing on the theory of the extended mind (Clark and Chalmers), Paul Ricoeur’s notion of narrative identity, and an analysis of memory and loss, I argue that sentimental objects function as external repositories of memory, meaning, and our personal identities.
Human beings offload to physical objects not just cognitive tasks, as Chalmers and Clark describe, but meaningful parts of their personal identities as well.
These objects curate just as much meaning and psychological significance as the immaterial content of our thoughts and inner personality structures. I contend that our sense of identity should not be understood as something solely contained within the skin and skull. Objects imbued with meaning become nodes in a network of our personal identity and emotional landscape that blends our immaterial inner and material outer worlds.
It is the combination of these two that forms our identities. Additionally, if we were to lose these material objects in some way, that would constitute a loss of our personal identity, which can have profound moral and interpersonal consequences for our lives.
2.
The first conceptual anchor for my argument is the theory of the extended mind by philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers. Their famous paper outlines instances where cognitive processes can extend beyond our biological boundaries when certain conditions are met–particularly when these external resources are closely intertwined with the individual.
Clark and Chalmers’ famous example involves two individuals, Inga and Otto, who attempt to recall the location of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Inga uses her memory to recall that the MoMA is on 53rd Street and goes there. Otto, however, has Alzheimer’s, and thus needs to consult his notebook instead. This notebook contains many true facts about the world Otto has uncovered in the past, including the fact that the museum is located on 53rd Street. Clark and Chalmers argue that Otto believes the museum is on 53rd Street just as much as Inga does. The key distinction lies in the location of the cognition–Otto’s cognition is externalized into the physical world. This illustrates their point about the extended mind–that it is possible to have certain cognitive functions take place outside the domain of the skull. They instead speak about cognition as more distributed throughout the world, challenging the metaphysical boundaries of where the self is located. These philosophers argue that the mind doesn’t stop at the skin.
My argument is merely an extension of Clark and Chalmers’: if certain cognitive processes–like belief, or decision-making–can be offloaded into external objects, then so too can core elements of our personal identities and selves.
Otto’s notebook serves as a material mechanism for a functional cognitive process. We have relationships with many other non-functional objects that serve as material representations of sentiment, identity, and deep psychological structure. Imagine Jefferson, a husband who has a polaroid of his deceased wife from their first date. He has held onto this photograph for the 10 years of their relationship, and the three years since her death. This polaroid carries real, significant ties to Jefferson’s emotional landscape, memory, personal identity, trauma, and character structure. The photo doesn’t just trigger his memory, it houses it; it is a centerpiece of his emotional life. His identity as a man exists within the photo just as much as it does within the stream of consciousness in his head. To say that Jefferson’s identity exists only in his mind seems wrong. The photo is a marker of who he was and presently is as a man. Who Jefferson is and what his life signifies exists within his mind, within his immensely important physical artifacts, and the relationship between those material and immaterial things. These important physical objects are non-trivial aspects of who we are.
Our conception of who we are is not simply something that takes place within our minds, but by the entire scaffolding of our mental lives enmeshed with our physical environments. Physical objects are vessels for ourselves.
3.
The second conceptual anchor for my argument is from Paul Ricoeur’s paper, “Narrative Identity.” According to Ricoeur, the self becomes intelligible as a story that weaves together the events, actions, and motivations in our lives at any moment into a singular, unified arc of meaning. To use his words, “we equate life to the story or stories we tell about it. The act of telling or narrating appears to be the key type of connectedness that we evoke when we speak.” To Ricoeur, the self is held together by the memory and narrativization of our lives.
My contention is that the sentimental objects we own contain these narratives within them. They are the repositories of these narratives that constitute our lives. Jefferson’s photo of his deceased wife contains within the narrative of his love, his loss, who he is as a man, and what his life means to him. Ricoeur’s narrativity doesn’t exist solely in the mind, but in the objects around us. These objects are parts of the chapters of the arc of our lives. Sentimental objects represent the beats, the plot points, the critical junctions in our own narratives.
These objects act as triggers for our memory, to remember our own narratives and how we see ourselves.
4.
If you agree with me that physical objects are non-trivial repositories for individual meaning and identity, then it follows that the loss of those objects would constitute real loss for the agent. If Jefferson were to lose the Polaroid of his wife, he would experience true existential loss. If my apartment were to burn down and all of the important artifacts I’ve spent over twenty years of my life collecting were to burn, I would lose critical pieces of myself. I would not be the same person, psychologically and spiritually, on the other side of that fire.
When we lose our objects of meaning, we become fractured. Parts of our narrative and extended mind have been severed.
When someone develops dementia and loses cognitive faculties, we often describe it as a loss of self. Their own internal narrative threads also fracture and unravel. My argument is that we can refer to a similar type of identity loss when physical objects are lost, instead of mental capacities. The loss is similar because not all of our self exists within our skin and skulls. It exists out there, in the world, housed and distributed in all sorts of places beyond our heads. If Jefferson loses his mental capacities from dementia, we characterize that as a form of identity loss. If he loses his wife, he’s lost a part of himself because part of who he is exists within his wife’s very being. If he loses the polaroid which represents the narrative of their lives together, he has also lost a part of himself because that physical object contains his memories, his love, his passion, his grief, and his very identity.
5.
The self, then, is neither bounded by the skull nor confined to introspective states. Instead, the self emerges from the complex interplay between our inner immaterial worlds and the material outer world. To lose a treasured object is to suffer not a merely symbolic loss, but an ontological one. This can have moral implications when we think about harm, honoring others’ identities, destruction, warfare, etc. My point is that this isn’t mere sentimentality; it’s who a person is.
Personal identity is not something we possess only in our minds, but something we create in tandem with our relationship to the physical world.
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Unpacking My Library. (New York: Schocken Books, 1969)
Clark, Andy and Chalmers, David. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis, Vol. 58, No 1. (Jan 1998): 7-19
Ricoeur, Paul. “Narrative Identity.” Philosophy Today, Vol. XXII, No 66. (Spring 1991). 73-81