more on existentialism

I'm not a philosopher, I don't really claim to be one. Fancy labels/jargon are useful because the establish language structures that other people can enter. However...jargon alienates people for that very reason. Sometimes it's hard to enter the structure. [notice I use the tag 'academentia'...a funny meme I heard from a professor]

At any rate, what I understand from briefly reading the wiki article is that existentialism seeks to understand stuff from the perspective of the individual and their experiences. That is to say, the world can only be understood internally and that there is no "objective", external world.

In the case of adoption, as I said before, it can be divided roughly into two perspectives. The existentialist one, and...another one for which I know no fancy philosophical term. Adoption as an economic mechanism of capitalism surely exists external to the individual, yet all that which people experience due to adoption must surely be, well, experiential, or internal to the individual.

The classification "adoptee" itself is derived from adoption as an external mechanism. A classification seeks to group people together for conceptual convenience, and the only way we are able to avoid logical fallacies is to group people together based on objective criteria, criteria that are external to individuals. Thus we could define "adoptee" as one that, as others have noted, is separated from her biological family and raised in another.

This "logical fallacy" we wanted to avoid would occur if we group together "adoptees" based on adoption as an internal mechanism. It would entail our grouping together people based on subjective, widely variant experiences. If we did this, then our category of "adoptee" would not be consistent with itself; one person could base their classification on their feeling of loathing towards his adoptive parents, while another could base it on her desire to meet her birth parents.

Moreover, a nasty case of circular reasoning emerges if we examine the classification of adoption as an internal experience:

"I don't like being adopted because it makes me feel disconnected."

If you replace "being adopted" for an internal experience, you get

"I don't like feeling disconnected because it makes me feel disconnected."

Therefore, adoption as a classification based on experience holds no explanatory power. When we speak of "being adopted", it must be in reference to an objective, external condition.

Despite all that, the condition of adoption is what binds people together. Imagined community, or what have you, powerful feelings swell up when you realize there are other people that have been through the same situations, and may hold the same or similar feelings as yourself.