Mirroring Part 2: Knowing Who I Am Like

J. David Velleman's idea of mirroring as a family-resemblance concept

I was born in one of the relatively few states in the U.S. that allows adult adoptees born in them to obtain copies of their original birth certificates, with no restrictions or conditions.¹ I petitioned that state’s department of vital records for my original birth certificate, and I received it a few weeks later. I could not at the time explain to myself what drove me to do this, beyond my consciousness of an obligation to my two (biological) children to learn whatever I could about my family health history. I had survived testicular cancer six years earlier. Though not a disease that typically recurs in families, it reminded me of the omnipresent possibility of medical surprises. The fact that even today, proponents of adoption and of reproductive technologies like anonymous gamete donation will argue that knowledge of family health history is, all things considered, secondary in moral importance to the value of safeguarding genetic anonymity in creating families through those means, should be amply sufficient to stir outrage even in people who have their family health histories. It should be, but it is not. But that is not my topic in this post.

I opened the envelope, pulled out my original birth certificate, stamped “THIS IS NOT A LEGAL RECORD,” and saw my mother’s name for the first time. My file also contained a few documents pertaining to my subsequent adoption, but there were no records about my family health history. I knew that to learn more, I would need to find her family. But when I saw her signature in her youthful, loopy cursive—a beautiful script, betokening what I later learned about her impressive artistic talent—I knew that I needed more than heath history. I needed to see her, if only in photographs.

Her name, as far as I can tell, is unique. I had a rich set of identifying facts about her after a few minutes of online search. Because her father had died a few months before, I found an obituary, with a full list of kin that comprised her parents, her siblings, and her nieces and nephews. It enabled me to infer the likely place of her upbringing, which made it easy to authenticate the photos I quickly found at Classmates.com.

I was stunned at the feeling of looking into a face I had never seen, yet was entirely familiar. In my previous post I spoke of growing up with an incomplete body-image, of a sense of being “a mere bundle of attributes,” “a collection of spare parts,” origins unknown. This high-school yearbook photo of my mother at age 17 instantly transformed that sense; now it was a hunger to know more. As I studied the photo I felt I could know what lay behind her face, in a way that reminded me of Wittgenstein’s remark in Philosophical Investigations §297 about the picture of the steaming pot. There need be no boiling water pictured in the pot for me to understand that it is a picture of a pot of boiling water.

Similarly, I felt certain that I knew what lay behind her pictured face. And I felt something deeper. I felt that the more I could learn about what lay behind that face, the better I could understand what lay behind my own.

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J. David Velleman is a philosopher who has written about questions of identity, self-knowledge, and their implications for the ethics of reproductive technologies, in particular anonymous gamete donation. He is neither adopted nor donor-conceived, but he believes that people cut off from their biological family histories lack “a basic good on which most people rely in their pursuit of self-knowledge and identity formation. In coming to know and define themselves, most people rely on their acquaintance with people who are like them by virtue of being their biological relatives.”²

The likeness that biological relatives share, Velleman thinks, is an instance of what Wittgenstein called “family resemblance.” Wittgenstein famously says that games form a family, in which there is no universally shared attribute among them, but rather an overlapping network of likenesses. (Think of chess, tennis, Ring Around The Rosie, solitaire, football, and the simple act of bouncing a ball against a wall. There is little to say about what all these activities have in common that “make” them games.) Wittgenstein introduces the phrase “family resemblance” (Familienähnlichkeit) to denote this notion of likeness. And he explains it explicitly by reference to the likenesses that members of a family share:

I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.— And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family. (Philosophical Investigations §67)

It is a rich list of likenesses: not just facial features and body shape, but movement and “temperament.” And, as people who know their biological relatives are aware, these various likenesses “overlap and criss-cross” among family members. Mirroring consists in these family resemblances. We cannot summarize them. There is no such thing as “what it is,” definable in terms of a unique conjunction of attributes, to be a member of my or your family. We gain a more or less full sense of our mirroring of our relatives through experience of them.

Velleman’s idea is that your sense of yourself, of your identity, involves this mirroring (he says “family-resemblance”) concept.

Much of what I know about myself is contained in this family-resemblance concept and cannot be articulated. I know that I am like this, where the import of ‘this’ is encoded in the self-concept of which anyone just like me would be an instance. Hence much of my self-knowledge is, so to speak, knowledge about my family resemblance to myself. This family-resemblance knowledge about myself includes information not only about how I look but also about my personal manner, my styles of thinking and feeling, my temperament, and so on. This ellipsis is difficult to fill in without resort to figurative expressions, because family-resemblance information is unanalyzable by definition.³

If my sense of my own identity involves a sense of what I am like, what I might develop into, what my strengths and weaknesses are, what goes with and what goes against the grain, then it is “very difficult,” as Velleman says, to acquire this sense—certainly a reasonably full sense—without actual acquaintance with my biological relatives. Everyone needs mirrors by which to see themselves more clearly.

Not all mirrors are biological. Close friendships can give us mirrors. It was through friendships with musically talented people that, in high school, I was spurred on to develop my own musical abilities, something for which I had no model at all in my adoptive family. It is surely no accident that “like” can mean both “akin” and “be fond of.” We form bonds with others largely through what we see that we share.

But biological mirroring is given; it is not sought through the self-selective activity of seeking and forming relationships with others. There is no doubt that people commonly register it in their biological kin—as, for example, my uncle did when, after I told him about my fondness for strenuous cycling, he informed me that strong legs run in the family. And as I have gotten to know better my biological family, and their individual personalities and histories, I have come to feel more fully at peace with aspects of myself that I once struggled with. And both at the level of particulars and at a more global level. My sense of what makes life good, of how to fill one’s days, has striking affinities to what I see in my biological relatives. I didn’t feel this sort of harmony with my adoptive family. (Although there were exceptions.) I am “like” my biological relatives in specific respects I can name, but also in more subtle ways that elude description, and which only actual acquaintance could teach me.

Biological mirroring can afford people more of those subtle relational affinities—of “getting” each other, of feeling a kind of natural, spontaneous sympathy, of being “simpatico”—that can make the family relationships easier to navigate, and that can be of aid in the hard task of raising a child. Velleman believes that without biological mirroring, parents and child have a harder path to travel. He likens it to raising a child “with one eye closed.”⁴

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I cannot say how biological mirroring would have changed my life’s course if I’d had it during the first 39 years of my life. The counterfactual is so wild that it is idle to speculate about it. In any case, I am one of the lucky adoptees: my adoptive family gave me resources for developing aspects of my potential, and they loved and welcomed me as one of them. I believe that one important way I was disadvantaged as an adoptee was not by the loss of mirroring as such, but by the torment of knowing that mirroring was being withheld. I knew there was a treasure (my birth and adoption records) locked in away in a castle (state and private agencies) that powerful forces were keeping from me. The sense of self-alienation that came from loss of mirroring was a deeply private experience that I did not know how to explain to other people. But my sadness at knowing that I was orphaned from my history not by an act of God but by legal contrivance: that was something I could state very directly, but never dared to.

How do you assign a moral value to mirroring? For one thing, not all adoptees who know their biological families do report experiencing mirroring to any great degree. Nor do all kept people. (Although here I would caution that it is perhaps easier not to notice the presence of something one has always taken for granted.) And after all, that is precisely the nature of a family-resemblance concept: two things in the family may have little in common with each other. (Compare chess with bouncing a ball against a wall.) But for all this, I think it’s undeniable that an awareness of the extent and nature of their mirroring of others in their family is a basic resource people draw on in forming their sense of themselves. If I do not know who I am like, I cannot guess at what, and how much, is latent in me that I might develop. Surely, not knowing this is a way of not knowing who (and what) I am.

I don’t think of mirroring as the bedrock of a moral argument against severance and genealogical concealment. I think of its absence as a part of the existential situation in which many adoptees and donor-conceived people live. The hunger to have it is widespread; survey after survey of adoptees and the donor-conceived proves this. To deny its importance, as advocates of adoption and reproductive technologies often do, will in fact always ring hollow in our ears. To me, the moral argument against hiding one’s genealogy is simple, and it goes deeper than a right to mirroring. It is just this:

Like you, I deserve to know who my parents are, and if you deny it then you are kidding yourself, and you certainly aren’t fooling me.

1. There are ten such states, with Vermont on the cusp of becoming the eleventh, pending the governor’s signature of H629, which has passed both houses of the state legislature. https://bastards.org/local-united-states/

2. “Family History,” p. 67. All further citations of this essay refer to the edition found here.

3. “Family History,” p. 68.

4. “Family History,” p. 72.