Abstract
What is the relationship of “strong evaluation” and self-identity? What exactly is personal
identity? Does identity consist of interpretations or facts? Do strong
evaluations have a constitutive role in identity-formation? If there is no
given individual essence or true self waiting to be found, but identity is
dialogically construed in self-interpretation, then can identities be
criticized at all, when there is no pre-given true self, which would serve
as the basis of criticism?
I follow Charles Taylor in defending an interpretational and evaluational
conception of self-identity, but I hope to be more precise in distinguishing
several meanings of “identity” and correspondingly several different
roles that strong evaluation has for identity in different senses. Further, I
try to show that identities are criticizable despite the lack of pre-given
essences.
I will first differentiate between various meanings of identity: idem-identity,
ipse-identity, collective identity and species identity (4.1). Then
I take a closer look at ipse-identity in four different meanings: practical
identity, biographical identity, qualitative identity and “singularity” (4.2).
This survey tries to capture the most important meanings of the concept,
but the concept of identity is used in philosophy, social psychology and
human sciences in so many different ways that a comprehensive survey is
probably impossible. However, this survey may help to sort out what
sense of identity is relevant for strong evaluation, or for what “identities”
strong evaluations are crucial.
Having distinguished these several meanings, I turn to the formation
of identity in self-interpretations. Charles Taylor has been (wrongly)
accused of presupposing a pre-political identity that persons or groups are
supposed to have, and for which they want recognition. That would
overlook the way in which identities are constituted dialogically, and in
interpretations. I will defend the view that personal identity is a matter of
self-interpretation, and collective identity is a matter of collective selfinterpretations.
While dialogues and recognition by others plays a crucial
role in the formation of one’s identity, the views of others are not directly
constitutive of a person’s identity, unless the contents are known or
accepted by the person herself.
Being a person or a self is an active business. Having a self in a fullfledged
sense means having a conception of oneself, and having
conceptions is an active business. People don’t have beliefs like things
have properties. As Sellars (1963) has stressed, the relation of two mental
episodes has to be normative if it is to count as knowledge; it cannot be
merely causal. And as the “transcendental tradition” from Kant onwards
has stressed, being a subject is not merely a matter of having mental
contents (which could possibly be caused by the world) but being aware
of the reality, taking the mental contents to be about the world.144 In
addition to normativity and intentionality, the activity of self-defining is
one aspect of the spontaneous activity of the subject. One’s self-identity
does not rest simply on having features, but on one’s activity, on
identification with some actual or possible features. In this sense,
everyone’s identity is self-made. The point in saying this is not to
overlook the cultural and social mediations that are intertwined in this
self-definition, but to stress the fact that one’s identity is not a matter of
natural features. Self-identity is a tentative result of an ongoing process of
self-interpretation. Depending on the precise meaning of self-identity,
strong evaluation has a more or less central role (4.3).
In the last section I ask whether identities can be criticized, or
whether (in the absence of pre-given true selves) self-interpretations are
the ultimate “court of appeal” not only in the sense of what constitutes
identity, but also in questions about their ethical and existential worth, or
coherence, or authenticity or epistemic adequacy. I hope to show that
self-interpretations stand open for criticism in these respects, even though
self-interpretations are directly constitutive of one’s identity (4.4).