‘Most people are other people,’ wrote Oscar Wilde. ‘Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.’ This was obviously meant as a criticism, but what exactly is the criticism? Most people are other people, in a different sense to how Wilde meant it: the vast majority of people are not me. The enormous size of this majority – billions to one – guarantees that there will be somebody better than me at anything I can think of. If I make a dress for the first time, I am wise to follow a pattern. If I cook a meal for the first time, I am wise to follow a recipe. This is (as far as I know) my first time living as a human being, so why wouldn’t it be wise for me to emulate a successful model of living, especially when there are so many candidate models, past and present?

When Wilde was writing, literary culture had reached the pinnacle of Romantic individualism. In that culture, it was obvious what’s wrong with being other people: doing so is a betrayal of your true self. Each of us was thought to possess a unique, individual identity, sewn into the very fabric of our being. Walt Whitman celebrated ‘the thought of Identity – yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me,’ and defined it as: ‘The quality of BEING, in the object’s self, according to its own central idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto – not criticism by other standards, and adjustment thereto.’

In the 20th century, the assumption would be famously challenged, for example by Jean-Paul Sartre, who proclaimed that humans come into existence with no definite identity – no inborn ‘central idea and purpose’ at all: ‘man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself’. This is a logically tricky point, since it’s unclear how something devoid of all identity could ‘make itself’ into anything. We can’t suppose, for example, that it makes itself according to its whims, or inclinations, or desires, since if it has any of those then it already has an identity of some sort. This gets us into a quandary. Simone de Beauvoir – Sartre’s partner in philosophy, life, and crime – responded to it by admitting that self-creation can work ‘only on a basis revealed by other men’.

But popular culture has by and large responded by retreating uncritically to the old Romanticism. Apple’s Steve Jobs advised a graduating class at Stanford not to ‘let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice’ and to ‘have the courage to follow your heart and intuition’, which ‘somehow already know what you truly want to become’. Advertisements for shampoo and travel money apps advise you to dig deep inside and find the True You. The question of how we each came to be pre-programmed with this unique true identity, this articulate inner voice, is left aside, as is the more troubling question of how the advertisers can be so confident in betting that your true self is going to love their products.

How would things look, philosophically, if we cleared this Romantic notion out of the picture? I think we can get a sense of it by looking at the great philosophical tradition that flourished before the formation of the Qin dynasty in what is now China. The most well-known philosopher from this tradition is Confucius (Kong Qiu, 孔丘), classically believed to have lived from 551 to 479 BCE. In reality, books ascribed to him were probably written by multiple authors over a long period. The most famous of these, the Analects, propounds an ethical ideal based on emulating admirable examples. The philosopher Amy Olberding wrote a whole book devoted to this topic, Moral Exemplars in the Analects (2012). For Confucius, being ‘other people’ is precisely what you should be aiming at – as long as you emulate praiseworthy people like the great sage-kings Yao and Shun or indeed Confucius himself. The objection that this would betray your true inborn identity doesn’t come up. The idea that we each have an individual, inborn, true identity doesn’t seem to appear in this tradition.

Detail from a handscroll painting illustrating the ‘Nushi zhen’ (‘Admonitions of the Instructress of the Ladies in the Palace’), a text composed by Zhang Hua c232-300 CE. Courtesy the British Museum, London

What the tradition does recognise is role-identities. Confucius was concerned that these were being lost in his time. In the Analects, he declares that his first act in government would be to ‘rectify names’ (zheng ming, 正名). This........

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