Personal identity is social identity
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Personal identity is social identity David Carr 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The question of the identity or persistence of the self through time may be interesting for philosophers, but it is hardly a burning question for most individuals. On the other hand, the question of who I am, what or who I take myself to be, can be a vital, even burning question for most of us at some time in our lives. This is the notion of personal identity I take up in this paper. It is an identity that is not pre-given a priori but is always in some sense an open question, never completely decided. Here the narrative conception of self is relevant, since it is often a question of what story or kind of story my identity instantiates. This notion of personal identity is inherently temporal, but not in the sense of temporal persistence but of temporal coherence of past, present and future. And here the question of personal identity is inevitably social, since it is largely a question of what group I identify myself with, what social role I take myself to embody. And what complications occur when I identify myself with more than one group? Here many social conflicts and also intrapersonal conflicts have their source. My topic thus turns on ideas of personal identity that are reflected in the popular expressions “identity crisis” and “identity politics.” Keywords Personal identity . Phenomenology . Identity crisis . Identity politics . Sociality .
Group identity . Narrative identity
It is a widely accepted view that there must be an a priori unity to consciousness if experience is to be possible at all. Called the “minimal self,” “core self” or “experiential self” in recent literature (Zahavi 2005, 2014), this concept echoes earlier notions of prereflective self-consciousness (Sartre 1966) and mine-ness (Jemeinigkeit- Heidegger 1957). Husserl (1966) anticipates this notion in his lectures on time-consciousness and elsewhere. This concept solves certain traditional philosophical problems concerning the unity of experience while avoiding some puzzles about reflexivity or infinite regress. At the same time some hold that this minimal self can be considered
* David Carr [email protected]
1
New School for Social Research, 72 5th Ave, New York, NY 10011, USA
D. Carr
contingent, since under certain circumstances its unity may dissolve and experience itself may disintegrate. Thus psychosis and schizophrenia may be seen as disturbances of the minimal self, we are told (Durt et al. 2017). Here we face the possibility that there can be consciousness without unity, that is, consciousness, but not experience. The idea of the minimal or experiential self is persuasive; it makes an extremely important point against those who would reduce the self to a fictional or social construction. But apart from possible pathological implications, minimal selfhood does not tell us much about selfhood or personal identity in the full sense. Nor is it intended to do that. Hence the term “minimal.” It is at most a necessary but not sufficient condition f
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