A Category of the Human Mind
Notes from our third session, on Mauss's genealogy of the person — masquerade to mask to role to the modern self — and on how much of a person is left once the social layers are subtracted.
The Reading
Marcel Mauss's 1938 Huxley Memorial Lecture, "A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person, the Notion of Self", circulated in both full and excerpted form. A text of French sociological anthropology, it traces the historical evolution of personhood through personage, persona, person, and moi (the "me" or self). The group treated it as a dated but productive piece of time travel.
Overview
This session worked through Mauss's genealogy of personhood. Discussion centred on whether personhood is intrinsic or socially and culturally constructed, on scepticism toward the essay's progress narrative culminating in Kant and German philosophy, and on the recurring theme of masks and role-playing. Several threads carried the text forward into contemporary questions of AI personhood, privacy, cryptography, and online identity. The session closed with logistics for selecting the next reading.
Key Points & Themes
- Socially determined, or intrinsic? The clearest takeaway for one reader was that personhood in the text is not intrinsic but socially determined — a function of one's role, one's ancestors, and other external factors. That raises the question of what, if anything, is left of a person once the cultural and historical accretions are subtracted. For ancient cultures — a Roman stripped of citizenship and freedom — there may be very little left, a frame that is hard to inhabit from a modern, Enlightenment-inflected assumption of a core intrinsic self. A structural counter held that humans are fundamentally individuated at a basic physical level, independent of any social recognition; the real difficulty is the technique for socially constructing individuation across billions of people — names, legal identity, social security numbers, hierarchy.
- Person as role, descending from the mask: The main idea was read as person-as-role-playing, descended from masking, with the first paragraph of the conclusion compressing the whole argument from masquerade to mask to modern personhood. Mauss's sequence of terms was mapped out: personage, a rule-based and relational mask; persona; person, the moral and responsible subject; and moi, the interior self that Mauss claims is present in every culture and era. The person/persona distinction is genuinely tangled in the text itself.
- Masks are not historical: Masks as identity and expression are far more ubiquitous across continents, cultures, and eras than the essay's limited ethnography suggests — Venetian carnival masks and a Kenyan mask owned by a participant were offered against it. They are also alive and well today in avatars, usernames, and pseudonyms, despite the text framing them as belonging to the past; the image of masks within masks was singled out as the striking one.
- Scepticism about the progress narrative: The essay was criticised for writing from a supposedly impartial vantage point observing the past, rather than acknowledging its own situated and contingent position — a possible systematic error in positing a detached observer, a "god's view" or Cartesian detachment, while describing situated subjects. Crediting Kant and German philosophy with bringing "closure" to personhood was called a bridge too far within what is a narrow, if important, philosophical tradition. The suspicion was that philosophy and social change coevolved endogenously, with social change more likely leading philosophy than following it, and the modern recognition of universal human dignity is a recent and imperfectly realised turn.
- Public self, secret self: Is "the self" the public self plus a secret self, or is one of the two the real person? We tend today to treat the secret self as the real one, but that may not always have been the case.
- Ritual, extraction, and keys: One thread took ritual as constitutive of the person — performance shapes the person and the person shapes the performance — and, drawing on a cypherpunk reading workshop, framed the modern self as something extracted and tracked on platforms. Privacy is not secrecy but the power to reveal oneself selectively; over-disclosure could destroy the person, and the exposure of private thought carries a specific political danger. The analogy offered: the private key is the soul of the digital person, the public key is the mask.
- Personhood as relational, and the AI question: Consciousness (compositional) and personhood (political — who gets what) had been held separate, but the text prompted a reading of personhood as an extension of a relational view of consciousness: our self-understanding is entangled with how others see us and how we think they see us. That bears directly on social and parasocial relationships with machines, which may require extending some form of personhood in order to delineate the lines better. Against this sits a tension of control — we can change masks, but law and the immutable experience of being constrain how much control we actually have.
- A meta-project for the group: Separate out the different aspects of personhood and self that the text runs together — the internal self, the moral person, the rational person, and the legal person, which may lack subjectivity altogether, as a corporation does — and find the boundaries of Mauss's framework. The private/public self maps onto the private/public key analogy.
- Translation: One participant, confused by the terms, downloaded the French original: in French, "moral personhood" overlaps both the moral subject and the legal entity, a distinction that fades away in that language. Coming from a French-Canadian, Québécois, secular society with deep Catholic roots, this landed personally and prompted a re-examination of their own understanding of personhood. This genre and era of academic writing is also famously badly translated, with meaning lost in the English.
- From the opening chat: The recent symposium showed wide divergence in participants' views on AI and protocols, from strong scepticism through to a view of AI systems as beings we are creating — but the debates were respectful.
Questions & Disagreements
- Is there an intrinsic person left once the cultural, historical, and social layers are subtracted? Unresolved; the physical-individuation argument offers one answer.
- Did philosophy drive the social change toward individual dignity, or follow it? The session leaned toward social change leading, while granting that Mauss himself would credit the philosophers — and that it is most likely a coevolving, endogenous mess.
- Is the real self the public self, the secret self, both, or neither? One answer was that the self is fluid rather than constant.
- What does it mean to locate subjectivity outside of the self? Asked as a genuine rather than a critical question, and left partly unresolved amid overlapping audio.
- The distinction between persona and person confused nearly everyone, which appears to be a property of the text rather than of the readers.
- Nobody was certain what the essay is for — whether Mauss is arguing a stance or simply observing how personhood developed.
References Mentioned
- Marcel Mauss, "A Category of the Human Mind" — the reading under discussion.
- David Graeber, Debt — the discussion of the gift, and of slavery as a kind of death, a denial of personhood.
- Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, recommended as the modern follow-on to Mauss; also his work on asylums, stigma, and the "management of spoiled identity".
- Immanuel Kant — rationality as fundamental to personhood, discussed sceptically.
- Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock — history of science; Cartesian detachment against a Leibnizian perspective, and the agency and autonomy of living things.
- The Bourgeois Virtues trilogy — on the Western, Eurocentric evolution of respect for individual dignity. The author was not named in the session; commonly Deirdre McCloskey.
- Margaret Jane Radin, "Property and Personhood" — raised again as a candidate reading, and already on the prospective readings list.
- Public-key cryptography as a metaphor for soul and mask, by way of a cypherpunk reading workshop.
- Venetian carnival masks, and a Kenyan mask owned by a participant.
- Venkatesh — cited for the view, aired at the recent symposium, of AI systems as beings we are creating.
Action Items & Next Time
- Next reading: one text has already won a prior poll, and two others are tied — Paul Schiff Berman's "Rats, Pigs, and Statues on Trial" and Margaret Jane Radin's "Property and Personhood". Members: emoji-react in the main channel to break the tie.
- Four new texts to be proposed for November.
- Discord audio: help offered to debug the setup of a participant who could hear the call but could not be heard on it.
- Next session: 11 October, in the earlier slot — 17:00 organizer's local time, on the Sunday.
- Standing aspiration, and the session's running joke: masks, if the group ever meets in person or on video.
Memorable Quotes
"We're all pretty individuated when we have to use the bathroom, and I'd prefer it that way."
"The private key could be, like, the soul of the digital person, and the public key is the mask — the thing everyone can see."
"I feel like I'm so close to the group now after spending last week watching all the talks."