ABSTRACT
If the word “crisis” has been worked to death in our time—and it has—the phrase “identity crisis” has been beaten equally into the grave. Yet a cliche always reveals something about a going culture and men avoid confronting cliches at the peril of being absent-minded about their own moment in history. The so-called “identity crisis” must, I am convinced, be located within the larger context of those myths which not only cluster around modernity but which are woven into the fabric of its very essence. I shall argue in this essay that the Western crisis of identity is our recent past; that identity—most especially personal identity—is no longer experienced as a serious dimension of human existence by millions of young and even older people today; that this loss of identity is not even sensed as a loss by contemporary man, but that everybody talks about the loss precisely because the loss is no longer a bereavement. This situation is by no means unusual because we tend to articulate the past when it is precisely that: a past. As temporal beings, we are built this way. Nobody can articulate the future with any degree of success. This movement from exercised to signified act (to use a scholastic formula), from corso to ricorso (to borrow the terminology of Vico), from play to re-play (in the jargon of contemporary technology), follows the curve of history, both personal and corporate. Collectively the West has become aware that it lost its identity after it ceased to want one. Where is our much vaunted identity? That identity was dropped into the broom closet of the recent past, a discarded utensil as serviceable today as is a mop without a handle.
