That This

Ignorance and indifference regarding the question or mystery of identity are part and parcel of an inordinately or irrationally quantified approach to reality, termed quantophrenia by Pitirim Sorokin now a lifetime ago. That we have a word for wayward quantification as a mental disorder is a fitting index of the spiritual nature of the problem, how it concerns one's personal inner sense of the absolutely radical fact of individual existence. That there are popular “ ‘self-tracking” or “quantified self” movements, largely focused on well-being, which promise a “self-knowledge through numbers” having nothing to do with this question is another. Perhaps in an age of numerocracy, it is inevitable for persons to attempt to cure and control themselves through quantification, as if performing reflexively the inversion of private and public, subjective and objective, which such “rule” generates. And yet it is just with respect to the non-quantifiable and unexchangeable nature of the individual, the status of everyone as irreparably themselves, that we register the injustice or error of over-quantification: “this world in prey to rampant quantification, or even quantophrenia […] represents an affront to the irreducible individual on an intimate level, the level of his or her dignity.”

Seeing that counting functions as a procedure of familiarization, a translation of multitudinous and multidimensional things into digits we grasp in the medium of homely hands, it seems natural for quantification to blur the question of identity, wherein one faces paradoxically the utter strangeness of oneself. “For the essence of my self arises from this—that nothing will be able to replace it: the feeling of my fundamental improbability situates me in the world where I remain as though [comme] foreign to it, absolutely foreign.” And this as, the virtuality or seemingness of one's absolute foreignness, is crucial, it being identical with a familiarity nearly too close, too oneself, to recall or conceive—the inescapable vast intimacy of identity itself. The fact that I am myself escapes me by the same circuit wherein I am bound to it, just as “escape is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I [moi] is oneself [soi-meme].”