L’identité et ses dilemmes

Abstract

After having addressed the question “by what criteria can personal identity be specified?” as this emerges from the current controversy in analytic philosophy, I discuss two alternative answers: the first is Parfit’s, the second is the view according to which identity is formed within collective forms of recognition. Both views are first analyzed in their general versions and subsequently confronted with their limits. While Parfit seems unable to explain who is responsible for establishing the patterns of connectedness among successive selves, the social constructivist view has difficulties in accounting for our subjective specificity. The second part of the paper goes beyond this tension between identity as the inescapable reference to an acting subject and recognition as the intersubjective process which bestows us with sameness in time by introducing the notion of self-recognition Self-recognition is defined as that narrative and selective operation which consists in ascribing a biographical unity to the public recognitions the agent receives, an operation by way of which s/he ‘converts’ social recognition into personal identity. Within this picture, personal identity is not so much a physical or cognitive fact but the product, continuously achieved, of recognition and self-recognition.

Keywords

• Identity
• recognition
• self-recognition