Laboring in Anonymity

Abstract

Anonymity is rich, its rewards many and its dangers, too. Anonymity troubles writers and readers, teachers and students, and philosophers, historians, and sociologists, too. Anonymity troubles individuals.1 Offering fairness, it can also mask bias.2 Offering protection, it can also cover those who would deceive, whether published novelists, plagiarizing sophomores, or internet avatars. Martin Heidegger thinks that must be overcome to establish authentic individuality (Natanson 1979).3 Other people, less loftily, do not care whether their individuality is authentic; they aim to make marks on others and on society, to achieve fame or even celebrity. Such persons today are not, it is true, panicked, hysterical, or fearful about sinking lower and lower into whirl of indistinguishable atoms, of being lost in mass civilization, as Henry Seidel Canby described his fellows in 1926 (qtd. in Natanson 80). Today, we do not sink into surely we are born into it, into mass civilization that dwarfs the one Canby saw but we may nevertheless strive mightily to emerge from it. That is, if is fact of modern life, fact we are used to, it is not one we celebrate; it is not state or condition most people strive to achieve; it has bad reputation. But is that bad rap justified? Philosopher Maurice Natanson thinks not, precisely because is fact of modern life: asking people to transcend anonymity is tantamount to seeking remedy for being normal (539). Anonymity is a constitutive feature of the social, an invariant and standard