Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-020-09702-1

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 concep-
tion 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 pre-
reflective 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
dcarr@emory.edu

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 for personal identity. The question of the identity or persistence of the self
through time may hold conceptual interest, but it is hardly a burning question for most
individuals.
On the other hand, the question of who I am, of what or who I take myself to be, can
be a vital, even burning question for most of us at some point in our lives. This is the
sense 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 question is not “am I identical?” but “as what do I identify myself”? What does it
mean to identify myself as something or someone? In the following I propose to
examine this question from various angles, including its relation to reflection, narrative
and we-intentionality.

1 Reflection

If we ask what it means to identify oneself as something or someone, it should be clear

that we are dealing not with a pre-reflective but with a reflective self-consciousness.
Here I take a certain distance from myself, if not a fully objectifying stance, and this
form of identification can be seen as a response to an implicit or explicit question: who
am I? Or, the question can come from someone else: who are you? Simply replying with
your name is in most cases not going to satisfy anyone else, much less yourself. As a
response to a question such identification suggests that the answer is not obvious or
determined: a range of answers is possible. At the same time this range is limited. Since
we are speaking of identifying oneself as…, it is clear that we are operating within a
certain conceptual realm, or what Heidegger calls the as-structure of understanding. To
identify myself means placing myself in a certain category or subsuming myself under a
certain concept. Certain obvious answers would be relevant only under special circum-
stances: “I am a human being,” “a person” “a man” would be ways of saying: I am not an
animal, I am not a robot, I am not a woman. A certain range of replies would be ruled
out, except perhaps for literary or metaphorical purposes: I am a lump of anthracite, I am
a binomial equation, I am “a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent
seas.”
Typically the identification of a person refers her or him to a certain character, a social
role, membership in a certain group. If I identify myself as “affable,” as “a father,” as “an
academic,” I am referring to properties or activities that extend over time. If I identify
myself as the tallest in the room, I am not making a claim about my personal identity.
But character, social roles and membership are aspects of identity that manifest them-
selves in more than a moment. They unfold in temporal sequence, in the actions,
Personal identity is social identity

projects, and accomplishments of a life. But this unfolding is more than a mere
sequence. A person certainly exists in time or through time, and is always located at a
certain place in time, a now. But human experience is not merely a succession of such
now-points. Rather, the now can be seen as a vantage point from which we survey the
past and the future. As Husserl showed, each moment is surrounded by its temporal
horizons, and is possible as a phase in human time by being the point where the future is
transformed into the past. This is of course not a metaphysical statement about the nature
of time but is a description of the experience of time. For Heidegger too the human self is
a kind of stretch that encompasses past and future in its grasp. For Husserl temporality
exhibits the logic of wholes and parts rather than the accumulation of individual points.

2 Narrative

For this reason narrative structure has suggested itself to many as a key to understand-
ing personal identity. To tell a story is to find a certain structure in a sequence of events,
experiences and actions, usually those of persons. A narrator relates events in the life of
a central subject or protagonist, which unfold from a beginning through a middle to an
end. A plot emerges which makes sense of this unfolding of events. The story is
addressed to a certain audience, usually told from a retrospective point of view.
Wilhelm Dilthey (1970, 242ff.) characterized human experience as a search for a
“coherence of life” (Zusammenhang des Lebens) running through the vicissitudes of the
temporal flow of events. Dilthey likens this search to the art of autobiography, in which
an individual looks back and tries to find coherence in the events of her life. But for
Dilthey it is clear that autobiography is only the literary expression of the kind of
reflection on life as a whole that we all engage in from time to time, whether we ever
write it down or not. The self emerges as the hero or protagonist of a story whose author
is able to order the diverse elements of life into a coherent whole. Heidegger (1957, 129)
invoked similar notions when he described inauthenticity as a kind of fragmentation
(Zerstreutsein) which has to be restored to wholeness (Ganzsein) by resolutely facing up
to death. Selfhood is then a kind of coherence which makes sense of the diverse elements
of one’s life. This is the idea of personal identity as narrative identity that has been taken
up by various authors such as Ricoeur, MacIntyre, Wilhelm Schapp and others (Carr
1986). Living your life in a reflective way is like telling and acting out a story of which
you are the hero.
But the liver of life has certain disadvantages compared with the teller of a tale. If he
avails himself of a retrospective point of view, he does so within an ever-changing
present. Each moment offers a new perspective on the past as it faces a future of
unexpected new points of view. So this hero may seem a tragic hero, a Sisyphean figure
always scrambling to restore order to a disorderly course of events that spirals repeatedly
out of control as things have a tendency not to fit the story-line. This is one reason why
many critics have thought that the idea of narrative, at home in the realm of fiction, is ill-
suited to an understanding of personal identity in the real world. Not only must we
change the story-line to adapt to changing circumstances, often the radical change,
including a transformation of the past, is the story itself, as in so many conversion
narratives. See Augustine’s Confessions, which Dilthey (244) was fond of citing as an
example of autobiography. The innocent pursuit of life’s pleasures is now recast as a life
 D. Carr

of sin. In political conversion tales, a life of service to world revolution and the salvation
of mankind is now treated as youthful enthusiasm, idealism and gullibility. In psycho-
analysis: early family life is radically recast as an Oedipal drama full of trauma, sex and
violence. In a sense the identity of the protagonist has changed because the story has
changed: the sinner becomes a saint, the communist a crusader for freedom, the neurotic
a healthy individual capable of love and work. The transformed past, of course, does not
disappear from the convert’s life, but is worn as a badge of pride. My past evil and
ignorance make my present virtue or enlightenment shine all the more brightly.
Clearly we are moving here in the territory of what Erik Ericson (1950) famously
called the “identity crisis,” associated by him primarily with adolescence. If personal
identity can be in crisis, then it is hard to see it in terms of the “central subject” or
protagonist of a story.
These considerations have led some theorists to see narrative as having its origin the
realm of fiction and phantasy which is ill-suited to the reality of human life. It would
serve as a key to the understanding of personal identity only for a Walter Mitty-like self-
delusion. Hayden White (1973) follows Northrup Frye in seeing narratives as cultural
archetypes imposed upon reality in a literary act. Of course White, like Louis Mink
(1987), who holds a similar view, is speaking about narrative accounts of historical
events, not individual lives. But they seem to hold that if human life, individual or
collective, is portrayed in narrative form, it is being falsified. These authors always
seemed to me to hold a very dark view of personal identity. Life is at best a tale told by
an idiot, signifying nothing. In other words it is meaningless, and our narrative attempts
to find meaning in it are necessarily falsifications. White, also influenced by Foucault
(1971), sometimes sees such meaning as imposed on events by those in power.
But the problems connected with narrative as a model for personal identity do not
stem from the contrast between fiction and fact. To understand oneself as the central
figure in a story is not to identify with some fictional character participating in a plot
that unfolds like a fictional story. When comparing personal life with narrative, what
counts is the differences of temporal perspective. Not all narratives are fictional, as the
case of autobiography shows. Some stories, after all, are meant to be true, including
pre-eminently historical narratives. What fictional and non-fictional narratives have in
common is that they typically recount events that have already happened. Retrospection
offers a certain kind of clarity in a course of events and actions. We know how things
turned out, the unintended consequences of actions are now manifest to us, hindsight
confers a certain wisdom on our understanding of ourselves. If, late in life, we can
secure a certain personal identity for ourselves that emerges only in retrospect, we can
clear away some of the false starts and detours that might have made us into a different
person.
Yet there is always a chance that things can go awry. Aristotle pointed out that
misfortune late in life, like that of Priam, can still radically alter the tale. He suggested
the paradox that one can count a person happy only at the end of her life, when all the
evidence is in, so to speak, or perhaps after she is dead, when the person is in no
position to enjoy it. (See Nic. Ethics 1100a) Dilthey repeats the same insight: “only at
the hour of death” he says (1970, 288), could one assemble all the parts into a
meaningful narrative. This leads him to suggest that the biographer, who writes after
the death of his subject, has a distinct advantage over the autobiographer. He is able to
understand his subject better that the subject understands himself.
Personal identity is social identity

Of course, there may be other reasons why someone else may understand me better
that I understand myself. But the point here is that there are specifically temporal limits
to self-understanding, which turn out to be a version of the hermeneutical circle. The
whole is discernable, if at all, from the perspective of one of its parts, that is from a
point in time. Yet the part is understandable, if at all, as belonging to the whole.
“Understanding always hovers between these two points of view,” Dilthey writes. And
because the present is always changing, “our view of the meaning of life is always
changing.” (288).
We can see that the narrative view of the self is useful up to a point, but has its limits
in illuminating personal identity. The idea of life as a constant struggle to craft a
narrative identity, while repeatedly having to revise and update it, makes sense only if
we accept the premise of the view that living life is like telling a story, or more
properly, like living and acting out a story. But there are three things that the narrative
conception gets right, when applied to the concept of personal identity. 1) Such identity
must be seen against the background of temporality. If personality is to some degree a
matter of constancy, to be somebody in a more or less consistent way, it is time that
always threatens this constancy. Or to put it in another way, temporality is the theater of
operations in which the issue of personality plays out. 2) Personal identity is always to
some degree an accomplishment, something that always has to be achieved. It is not a
given, it can never be taken for granted. 3) the third thing that emerges from this
discussion is that it involves a concept of meaning that is tied up to the logic of wholes
and parts. As we can see in the passages from Dilthey and Heidegger we have quoted,
wholeness and coherence are always at issue here. Wholes and parts are interdependent,
and meaning lies in the relation among them.
In describing personal identity as a kind of constancy that is an achievement, I
hedged a bit. I said this was true “to some degree.” The qualification concerned not the
concept of constancy, though some might question this: Do not some people pride
themselves on their unpredictability? But that too is a kind of constancy, carefully
cultivated by some people. The more pressing question is whether personal identity is
an achievement. This harks back to the Heideggerian concept of authenticity, according
to which I wrest myself from the anonymity of “das Man” and forge my own identity
ex nihilo. Closely related is Sartre’s notion of radical freedom. In terms of narrative this
can be seen as self-authorship: I am the author of my own story, not acting out a script
authored by someone else. Of course, this is just another version of the modern idea of
self-determination or autonomy. According to this view my personal identity is some-
thing I create. Of course I can fail at this and succumb to Das Man, but then my identity
is precisely not mine: it belongs to everyone and no one.
Alasdair MacIntyre among others objects to this idea of self-authorship as an idol of
modern individualism and self-centeredness. We are at most the co-authors of our own
stories, he says, (MacIntyre 1981, 199) and the stories we take over and act out are in
large measure written by others. Our lives and personal identities can be seen as
consisting of interlocking narratives with multiple origins which we take up rather
than invent. Even Heidegger backs away from his idea of authenticity in his chapter on
historicity, where he suggests that we look to the past for heroes to emulate.
What is peeking through in this discussion of pre-existing narratives, thanks in part to
MacIntyre, is what is most lacking in discussions of personal identity that are based on
narrative. That is the social dimension of personal identity. In the classic existentialist
 D. Carr

view, identity seems purely a matter of self-relatedness, and social relations assume at
most a negative role which detracts from my personal integrity. Social roles are at the
heart of Heidegger’s notion of das Man, and for Sartre they are the models of bad faith.
But whether or not they deserve the existentialist opprobrium, social roles are involved
in how we identify ourselves. And these have to do with how as individuals we stand in
relation to a social group. For this we must turn to intersubjectivity.

3 Intersubjectivity and we-intentionality

Here phenomenology can offer interesting resources. The topic of intersubjectivity has
largely been treated, in phenomenology as elsewhere, by examining the so-called face-
to-face encounter. It is the locus of important features of human existence: desire and
the erotic, friendship, sympathy and empathy, obligation and sacrifice. The other is my
alter ego, mon semblable, my mirror image. But the irreconcilable difference of
perspective also reminds us that this is the place of conflict and opposition, of
antagonism and struggle, of domination and oppression.
The face-to-face encounter is rightly taken to be central to how we relate to others.
But is it the only way we relate to others? I think it is not, and in order to make this
point I would like to turn to a topic that is much discussed among phenomenologists
these days: we-intentionality. If we examine this concept, we shall see that it opens up a
new way of conceiving of intersubjectivity and personal identity.
Clearly, the concept of intentionality is the heart and soul of phenomenology.
Directedness to a content, of-ness or about-ness, as introduced by Husserl in the
Logical Investigations, leads eventually to the phenomenological reduction that be-
comes the phenomenological method. If intentionality is a property or characteristic, to
what does it belong? The seemingly obvious answer: consciousness. “All conscious-
ness is consciousness of something” is the usual formula used in explaining the concept
of intentionality, and Husserl introduces intentionality in the context of a discussion of
consciousness. And of course, consciousness is implicitly tied to the individual.
But the question that has been raised since Husserl introduced the idea of “person-
alities of a higher order” (Husserl 1962, 156) is whether we can attribute intentionality
not only to individuals but also to communities or groups of individuals. We are
encouraged to answer in the affirmative by observing ordinary language usage. “Parlia-
ment decided,” “Germany invaded Poland,” “the electorate can’t make up its mind,” etc.
Social entities of various kinds, according to our way of speaking, have experiences, take
decisions, act, find themselves in moods, feel anger. Of course these groups are made up
of individuals, and it may seem easy to think of these expressions as shorthand for
describing the thoughts, actions and feelings of individuals: members of Parliament,
German generals, individual voters. This is less easy to do, however, when we think of
cases where we speak not of “they” or “them” but of “we” or “us,” i.e., of communities to
which I consider myself to belong. It is because of these differences that collective
intentionality is usually referred to as “we-intentionality.”
But what exactly is the difference between “we” and “they” in this context? There are
in fact many important differences, and the linguistic one is the least of them. Many uses
of “we” involve no collective intentionality at all. When my friend and I say, “we saw
the Eiffel Tower,” there is a common object of our experiences, but the expression may
Personal identity is social identity

mean no more than that I saw it and you saw it, perhaps even at different times. But if we
saw it together, then we have not only a common object but also a shared experience,
which is properly ascribed not to me and you individually, but to us jointly. If we go to
the store, nothing more than two separate actions, and two agents, are implied. But if we
do the shopping, or play a game of tennis, or build a cottage, then we are engaged in
activities whose only proper subject is we. When I say we in this sense, I am referring to
a collection of persons to whom I stand not in a subject-object relation, as if I were
observing them from outside, like a sociologist or an anthropologist. Instead I relate to
them as a participant in our shared experience or activity, however fleeting. My relation
to the group is one of membership.
What I want to stress first here is that this is one of the primary ways we relate to
others. And then I want to go on and say that this is also one of the primary ways we
relate to ourselves.

4 Membership and participation

As we saw, phenomenology, with its origins in describing first-person singular expe-

rience, has largely framed the problem of intersubjectivity, or alterity, in terms of the
face-to-face encounter, in which the other stands over against me. But in we-experience
we relate in a different way. And when as phenomenologists we try to describe this
experience, it should be noted that we do not give up the first person point of view, but
rather attend to its plural rather than its singular form. The phenomenological approach
allows us to describe and understand collective existence not from the outside but, so to
speak, from the inside, consulting our experience as members or participants.
The term “personalities of a higher order” occurs several times in Husserl’s later
works, notably in the Cartesian Meditations and in the Crisis. In paragraph 56 of the
Fifth Meditation, Husserl says he has completed the clarification of the “first and lowest
level” of intersubjectivity, (Husserl 1962, 156) or of what he calls the communalization
of monads, and can now proceed to “higher levels” of intersubjectivity, including “pre-
eminent types that have the character of ‘personalities of a higher order.’” In using this
phrase, Husserl is in effect attributing personal characteristics to certain kinds of
communities.
The phenomenological approach to this matter is found if we consider it not as some
version of the realism/nominalism dispute in metaphysics, or the holism/individualism
distinction, but as a matter of describing and understanding the social experience of
those involved. As we have seen, part of our social experience involves identifying
ourselves with groups, and our relationship to these groups is not one of observation
from the outside but one of membership and participation. This is exemplified in some
(but not all) of our uses of the we-subject, and when we say “we act” or “we believe” or
“we feel,” this is not just shortcut for describing a collection of individuals actions,
thoughts and feelings. The “we” refers to a group with which I identify myself. For me
the “we” with which I identify myself, and in whose actions, decisions and thoughts I
share or participate, is something real. This means that the we-subject is dependent on
the individuals that make it up, to be sure, but in a very special way: in good
phenomenological language, the we-subject is constituted by the individuals who make
it up.
 D. Carr

We-subjects, then—communities large and small—have their reality in the social

experience of individuals that constitute them by identifying with them and with the
thoughts, actions and other intentional functions they perform. We all know of and
participate in such communities: family, profession, religion, ethnic and linguistic
group, political adherence, citizenship.
We said that we-intentionality involves more than just the constitution of communi-
ties by their members. It also marks one of the most important ways we as individuals
relate to other individuals. We relate differently to fellow participants and to non-
participants. Shared membership and participation take the form of shared beliefs, shared
actions, shared projects. A distinction between insiders and outsiders is created, an us-
versus-them division. This need not be antagonistic but often is. Social conflict is most
often conflict between groups, and involves individuals only as members of opposed
groups. But it still takes the form of relating to individuals as either fellows or non-
fellows. This is different from the distinction between friend and foe. Fellow participants
in some association may not be my friends, but I am still joined to them by virtue of
shared membership.
Antagonisms within one’s community may exist as well, but they may be about
differing over means to achieve shared goals. The possibility of internal antagonism
and strife, however, alerts us to the fragility and finitude of communities. They may be
torn apart if disputes become insurmountable. As we saw, communities exist through
the participation of their members. But this participation is not simply a given. It must
be maintained to keep the community in continued existence.

5 Identities

So far we have spoken of the ways communities are constituted by their members. And
we have seen how membership affects the relations individuals have to each other. But
there is a further relationship, and one that is most important for our purposes.
Membership determines the relationship I have to myself. We have seen that groups
are constituted when members “identify themselves” with the group. To identify myself
in this way means that I am constituting my personal identity in terms of some group. I
am a liberal, I am a Canadian, I am an Anglophone, I am a Professor. These are ways I
would answer the question “who are you?” or “what are you?” depending on the
context. Such identifications can differ considerably in strength, commitment, engage-
ment. Some are chosen and affirmed, others are passively acquired. Sometimes there is
a movement from passivity to activity. In classical Marxist theory, there is a difference
between class struggle and class consciousness. Being a member of the proletariat is a
factual situation determined by the structure of industrial society. It may be something
the individual is hardly aware of, if he identifies himself primarily as a believer, a child
of God, a sinner. But Marx sought to make the proletariat aware of its status as a class
exploited by the capitalist system. “Class consciousness” brings about a shift in the way
the individual identifies himself. Similar changes were mirrored in the early days of
(second-wave) feminism, when “conscious raising” was the order of the day. The
difference was between simply being a woman, which can be seen as a given, either
biologically or socially, and identifying oneself as a woman within a patriarchal social
system. We encountered the phenomenon of shifting identities when we spoke earlier
Personal identity is social identity

of conversion narratives. Here we see that such shifts often involve the question of
which community one identifies with. Concomitant here is the phenomenon of the
group becoming conscious of itself as a community, capable of we-intentionality
manifested in experiences, feelings and projects. As we said before, such an emerging
we-subject is possible because of individuals identifying themselves with it. Thus we
can say, as we did before, that the group owes its reality to the individuals who make it
up. But we can also say that individuals owe their identity to the groups with which
they identify themselves.
Another thing that emerges from this discussion is the obvious point that an
individual can have more than one identity. We have spoken of shifting from one
identity to another, but an individual can also have two or more identities at the same
time. And often this presents no problem. I can be a responsible parent and a
responsible citizen, two roles that entail very different activities and commitments,
but need not infringe on each other. But when they do, they can engender the most
intense personal conflicts, those of divided and conflicting loyalties, memorialized in
literature. Antigone is torn between her commitments to the polis and to the family.
Romeo and Juliet both face the struggle between their identity as lovers and as
members of their clan. In the abortion dispute, some may feel torn between religious
doctrine and political beliefs. All of us “identify with” more than one community, and
in this sense we can say that our personal identity in an amalgam of such identities. But
when these identities conflict, we are often required to choose one over the other, to
decide, or perhaps to discover, what our true identity is.
With all this talk of multiple identities, conflicting loyalties, and choosing among
identities, it may seem that we have strayed from our topic and that a philosophical
understanding of “personal identity” may have eluded us. Do we all suffer from
multiple personality disorder? Surely not. Maybe it is just this profusion of identities
that has led to the positing of a minimal or core self which underlies them all. Sartre
thought that social roles were all examples of bad faith, that the waiter was just
playing at being a waiter, that all identities are just pretense. Even the revolutionaries
who stormed the Bastille, submerging their individuality into a group-in-fusion,
were destined to see that fusion dissolve into its seriality when the fervor of the
moment passed. And of course for Sartre, the core self underlying all that bad faith
was a core of nothingness, coiled at the heart of being—like a worm. (Sartre 1943,
56).
Such gloomy negativity is probably not what Zahavi and others have in mind when
they speak of the minimal self. Their point is that the constitution of personality at the
social level presupposes a deeper lying unity of consciousness. But to dismiss personal
identification as a superficial and even insincere manifestation of reflection, as Sartre
seems to do, does a radical injustice to the intensity and depth of certain social
commitments, which are deeply felt and a source of often courageous and risky action.
No doubt some identities are casually adopted and easily compromised, but we rightly
honor the freedom fighter, the revolutionary, and the patriot who sacrifices personal
well-being and even life for a cause. Of such people, we could say that their personal
identity is more important than their minimal self.
Clearly we are steering into territory familiar in today’s political discourse: identity
politics. What does this have to do with personal identity? Quite a lot, actually. To its
detractors such politics results when individuals take their identity with a particular we-
 D. Carr

subject—usually a racial, ethnic, religious, or linguistic minority—as the sole source of

their political adherences, feelings and struggles. Such minorities may consider them-
selves victims of disrespect, disadvantage and oppression by a reigning majority. Even
those on the left who sympathize with such grievances, and recognize their validity,
nevertheless lament the divisiveness of identity politics. Minorities, in turn, point out
that it was the majority, after all, with its practices of exclusion, which effected the
original identity politics, even if they didn’t know it or acknowledge it. The rise of
white supremacist groups, which imagine themselves the victims of all sorts of
injustice, only make explicit a majority identity politics that had always been there.
In Europe, they call themselves identitaires.
These considerations lead to the view that all politics is identity politics, a never-
ending struggle of different groups against each other, and that all politics comes down
to choosing between friends and enemies, à la Carl Schmitt. This has led some
Enlightenment-inspired liberals to seek a notion of personal identity that lies not below
or prior to group identification but beyond it. Inspired by Lawrence Kohlberg’s
developmental psychology, J. Habermas (1983) has envisioned the idea of a post-
conventional identity in which group membership and identification would be replaced
by a discourse ethics involving a commitment to reason and the force of the better
argument. Devotion to home and hearth, blood and soil, the consolations of the familiar
community of family and friends are replaced by a community in which personal
identity is based on commitment to such principles as equality before the law and
mutual respect.
Hegel’s concept of mutual recognition has inspired theories of personal identity by
Frankfurt School theorists such as Honneth (1995) and even, more recently, by Francis
Fukuyama (2018). Hegel held that self-consciousness in the full sense is possible only
when recognized by others. Personal identity, then, would be possible in a social
situation where all recognize all as equals. In a similar vein, more Kantian than
Hegelian, Anthony Appiah (2018) champions cosmopolitanism as an advance beyond
group identity as an alternative to identity politics.
The problem with such notions is that they cross the line between the real and ideal.
Their proponents are quite aware that they are telling us not how we do conceive of
ourselves but how we should. Some are willing to admit that group identification exists
everywhere and may even be a necessary feature of social existence. They just want to
regard it as a stage that can be surpassed. And it is not the case that these theorists want
us to identify with no group at all. What they want is that we identify ourselves with
that ideal community of autonomous, rational subjects, those cosmopolites we think we
ought to be.

6 Conclusion

Personal identity ought to be something simple. The account we have presented here
seems to make of it something annoyingly complex. The hapless individual appears to
be caught in a web of multiple personal identities that sometimes tear at each other and
threaten to tear the individual apart. He or she, on our account, seems constantly
obliged to answer the question: Who am I, anyway? Who am I, primarily? Who am
I, really?
Personal identity is social identity

This may be an overdramatic picture of something quite ordinary. I think it is true

that each of us identifies himself/herself in different ways, some of which are incom-
patible with each other. It is as if our wallets contain multiple cards of identity, which
we produce to fit different circumstances. But for the most part, most of us manage this,
most of the time. It is also true, however, that our personal identities can on occasion be
a source of agonizing decisions and inner turmoil.
What is clear in any case is that our personal identity is not something that exists
independently of our social interactions and commitments. Our social world gives us
our identity, or it is that world from which we choose our identity. Personal identity is
social identity.

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