ABSTRACT
Language, culture and community both precede our individual lives and constitute necessary conditions for the construction of a life that is meaningful, both in the sense of being comprehensible and of having direction and purpose. We are born into multiple and interconnected linguistic, ethnic, political, spiritual and other communities that have habituated certain kinds of knowledge, value, cultural practice and institutional form. Every new generation constructs individual and collective identity by negotiating these inherited ways of life with personal proclivities and contemporary contingencies. As Alasdair MacIntyre (2007: 218) argues, the concepts of narrative, intelligibility, social accountability and personal identity mutually presuppose each other. ‘For the story of my life’, he observes, ‘is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity’ (MacIntryre 2007: 221). A generation earlier John Dewey argued that human individuality is not an innate quality waiting to be discovered and expressed, but an achievement, a ‘release and fulfillment of personal potentialities which take place only in rich and manifold association with others’ (Dewey 1927/1990: 150).
