ABSTRACT
The central topic of this paper concerns personal identity, understood broadly as the identity of a person through its changes over time. I wish to show that approaching this issue requires a special focus on the relationship between personal and collective identity. I will not, however, deal with the epistemological or psychological issues of personal continuity or the mind-body problem. I also do not intend to develop a systematic theory of the self or of self-consciousness. Instead, my starting point is the simple statement that everyone experiences himself or herself consciously as “someone,” as a person, as an “I,” no matter how this is defined or understood ontologically. In particular, I will refrain from dealing with the general criticism against identity, advanced by postmodern “difference”-thinkers as a critical trend against modern (especially idealistic) conceptions of identity. The identity I wish to describe is not a totality that swallows and annihilates every difference, but rather a “relative identity,” an intersection made up of both identity and difference as its constitutive dimensions. Although I will not go any further into this topic, I would like to stress the fact that this is not an attempt of relaunching an old concept of absolute identity. In fact, postmodern philosophy has concentrated upon difference as opposed to identity, since the latter has been seen as a kind of metaphysical remainder of modernity. It is possible to agree with the need of refusing a static or essentialistic concept of identity, but this does not imply that the idea of personal identity as such has to be refused. As I will try to show, identity can be conceived as an open and dynamic structure where difference is also involved in the form of change and openness to self-correction and re-orientation.
