Some of your rules are vows and some are only fences, and from the inside they feel the same.
Most people know someone who turns down every drink at the wedding, stays off the dance floor, and leaves before the late conversation gets honest. Ask him why and he rarely says he dislikes alcohol or music. He says something closer to “that isn’t me.” He identifies with control, and each of the states on offer (tipsy, swept up in the crowd, confessional at two in the morning) would require him to be himself with his ordinary control switched off. Declining them is a way of guarding the edge of what counts as him.
The usual way to describe him is by temperament: some people are buttoned-up and some are loose, and the loose ones are assumed to be freer. Alan Watts gave the two temperaments their best names:
The prickly people are tough-minded, rigorous, and precise, and like to stress differences and divisions between things… The gooey people are tender-minded romanticists who love wide generalizations and grand syntheses… Prickly philosophers consider the gooey ones rather disgusting — undisciplined, vague dreamers who slide over hard facts like an intellectual slime which threatens to engulf the whole universe in an “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum”… But gooey philosophers think of their prickly colleagues as animated skeletons that rattle and click without any flesh or vital juices, as dry and dessicated mechanisms bereft of all finer feelings. — Alan Watts
The joke works because each side sees the other’s failure clearly. Goo can rot into vagueness, and prickles can harden into a mind that is all bones and no blood. Both accusations are accurate, so the question of which temperament is better has no good answer. Kevin Simler’s essay “Prickles and Goo” and Venkatesh Rao’s “Getting Gooier” point toward a more useful question: how should a person build an identity without either calcifying into a skeleton or dissolving into soup?
A circle around the states you call “me”
Simler’s move is to treat identity as a shape rather than a substance. Imagine drawing a circle around every state you are willing to call “me.” The man at the wedding draws his circle with many rules: I am me only when I am sober, controlled, rational, independent, consistent, productive, and immune to the herd. Only a few states make it inside. That is a prickly identity: clear, legible, reliable, and brittle, because any experience outside the rules registers as a threat.
Now remove some of the rules. Drunk-you, tired-you, playful-you, grieving-you, foolish-you, and dependent-you all still count. The self gets smaller as a list of conditions and larger as a field of possible states. It is a formal version of the old Zen paradox: shrink the hard self and the lived self expands.
So the two words name different things. Prickles are identity conditions: what must be true before an experience counts as yours. Goo is state inclusion: how much variation you can take in without deciding you have betrayed yourself.
That distinction explains what the man at the wedding is actually refusing. He is not just declining a drink. He is refusing evidence that he could remain himself while his control system is offline. If he chose the altered state and came out of it intact, his identity would lose one of its necessary conditions, and from inside a control-based identity that feels less like growth than like erosion. The cost of refusing is real too. The more states you exile as “not me,” the more energy goes into patrolling the border, and the more of your life is spent defending an identity rather than living in it.
Some prickles should stay
It would be easy to conclude that softer is always better, and the man at the wedding should simply loosen up. But a person with gooey moral boundaries is not enlightened. He is unreliable, because his commitments melt whenever keeping them becomes inconvenient. Meanwhile a scientist with prickly empirical beliefs is not being rigorous, because he has made a hypothesis into a condition of his own identity and will sacrifice the truth to protect it. Hardness is a virtue in the first case and a vice in the second. Boundary Identification states the rule that separates them: a boundary is healthy while it improves perception and action, and pathological once it hardens into identity.
So the question has to be asked one domain at a time: what must be invariant here, and what must stay revisable? Put that way, identity works when your deepest commitments are prickly and your ordinary self-model is gooey enough to keep learning. A marriage needs a hard vow and soft preferences about restaurants.
Moving a trait from prickle to goo has a social price. To experiment on yourself is to make something gooey long enough to see what else can be true, and the people around you experience that as a kind of betrayal, because they built their predictions on your prickles. If the man at the wedding one year stays until three and dances badly, he has done more than change his behavior. He has changed the API other people were using to call him.
Moving the border
The tempting compromise is balance: be a little prickly and a little gooey. But the man at the wedding does not need an average of hardness and softness spread evenly across his life. He needs hardness in some places and softness in others, because identity is a portfolio of hardness and softness, and the allocation should match the game. Too much hardness makes you legible, reliable, and dead. Too much softness makes you adaptable, inclusive, and untrustworthy.
For the man at the wedding, then, the goal is not that he get drunk. It is that he be able to tell which of his rules are commitments and which are only fences. “I keep my word” may deserve every prickle he has. “I am never seen out of control” may be a fence that keeps out grief, play, and friendship along with embarrassment.
A mature self is one that can move the border deliberately: hard where betrayal would destroy the game, soft where learning would expand it. That is the practical form of Watts’ no-self. It does not require the annihilation of identity. It requires the discovery that identity can be loosened without disappearing.
References:
- Kevin Simler, “Prickles and Goo” — Melting Asphalt
- Alan Watts, quoted in Simler’s essay
- Venkatesh Rao, “Getting Gooier” — Contraptions