Selbst und Identität: das „Zwischen” als Sphäre der Eigentlichkeit (English shop)

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In this book, the author sets out in search of individual identity.

He begins in a distant past, in antiquity and early Christianity, in order to seek here—with an eye to the historicity of all human relations—the background or the source of conceptions that even today exert a perhaps intuitive but nonetheless effective influence on thinking and feeling.

Alongside sources from the history of philosophy, however, socio-economic considerations are also repeatedly drawn upon in order to make clear the recursive influence, the interlocking of actual living conditions and thought. The turn towards the Hellenistic antiquity of the Stoa, the Epicureans and the Sceptics at the beginning of the Renaissance was constitutive for the break of the early modern period with the Middle Ages and led to humanism, the turn towards the this-worldly dimension of the human being and his concrete circumstances, and to the development of abstract and concrete individualism. Nevertheless, the ancient and Christian influences remain effective and, right up to the present day, give rise to incessant countermovements to the prevailing currents of materialist or idealist stamp. From its origin onwards it was the concern of the philosophical tradition to reduce reality to superordinate higher principles, to a single all-encompassing principle. In modernity these currents still shape the metanarratives of spirit, the emancipation of humanity, the teleology of spirit and the hermeneutics of meaning, as an idealist or secularised version of salvation that promises a mover of history and, with it, of the individual towards a final salvation. In postmodernity, finally, the “end of the metanarratives” is proclaimed (Lyotard) and gives way to an open plurality of anthropological conceptions. Whereas modernity was still characterised by its confidence that, with the superiority of reason, disorder and irrationality could be tamed, the unity of opposites increasingly appears irresolvable, and in postmodernity the difference of values is dissolved in indifference. Here a decisive role is played by exchange value, which permeates all areas of society ever more strongly; the hitherto veiled “spirit of calculation” pushes qualitative values in, for example, politics, culture and sport into the margins. The autonomy of market society has indeed liberated the individual from feudal tutelage, but on the other hand has reduced him to his quantifiable components as producer or consumer; his negative freedom as freedom from constraints (“freedom from…”) does not automatically lead to the positive freedom (“freedom to…”) to realise his wishes, longings and life projects. The social inequality that continues to exist in the opportunities for shaping one’s life, as an unequal distribution of resources of the most varied kinds, makes projects of self-organisation and self-invention a precarious process, which not even a postmodern credo can elevate into a realm of freedom.

With radical detraditionalisation, the loss of unquestionably acceptable life concepts and identity patterns (Keupp), the “memory of traces” (Giddens), which spanned like an inner horizon behind the individual biographies of individuals, also evaporates.

Whereas the development of identity was initially still seen as the exploration of a quality already present deep within and as an accumulation of inner assets, the perspective increasingly shifted towards the dimension of construction logic. In developmental-psychological terms, identity arises from the tension between substance and social prescription; it has a dialogical character, it arises in interaction processes and is always oriented towards the other person and the other. The self becomes a “self” as a result of a process of reflection of the “I” in its social context, but the development of intentional states itself is, like intersubjectivity, an emergent phenomenon that arises in early childhood developmental processes (Fonagy et al.). Psychoanalytic developmental theories, symbolic interactionism, developmental psychology, explicitly cognitivist identity theories, concepts and schema theory are discussed in detail, as is narrativity, as theories of identity and self-development still effective today. A section on recognition emphasises the tension resulting from the intimate interrelation between identity and recognition. Intersubjectively experienced recognition is a precondition of successful self-realisation, not the result of a completed process of self-development, but a “fundamental human need” (Taylor), an enabling and empowering of a positive relation-to-self and thus also an expression of the intersubjective structure of our self.

A section rather unusual for the customary treatment of the topic is devoted in detail to reflections in action theory, for identity is formed in the sphere of (intersubjective and interobjective) action. The question of the nature of action influences, as Taylor emphasises, the question of cultural self-image and extends into ethical questions. Is action a product of evolutionarily acquired reflexes, invisibly steered by pre-existing codes or driven by affect, guided by interests or norms, by cultural codes and/or by the repetitiveness of routinised affective-cognitive practice? This is by no means trivial but touches most intimately on questions of human self-understanding. Inevitably this also raises questions concerning micro-macro relations, the influence of structural facts and the reciprocal “evolution” of the social as well as of the individual. The abstraction of the social as a “determining structure”, virtually present in the actors, as incorporation of the social field (Bourdieu) or as “duality of structure” (Giddens), actualised through action, brings about a recursive dynamic micro-macro causality which shows that both the social and the individual level are phenomena of emergence characterised by a fundamental fragility. They realise merely states of limited stability.

The concluding main part of the book is devoted to the question of the relationship between being and self, starting out from the concept of the “between”, which already in Heidegger appears somewhat mythically transfigured. Is being more than the self or identity? Starting from the controversy between a being constituted in consciousness, the neo-Cartesian interpretation of Husserl, and a being in Heidegger that can be understood only in the lived fullness of the enactment of life, the concept of the “between” is taken up as a sphere in which “the relations between human being and world arise”, a “sphere of equiprimordiality” (Heidegger). In this book the “between” is explicated as a relational field of relations, as a structural relationship, as a web of at times complex relationships among a multitude of entities or agents interacting with one another, within which the individual is positioned. These relations form—on the basis of a fundamental openness of Dasein—dynamic spatio-temporal patterns of human-human and human-object connections. The basis for residing in such an asserted openness lies in the capacity of the mental as a dyadic phenomenon that is not solely agent-intrinsic and local but constituted relationally and realised multiply. The mental arises in continuously changing intersubjective and interobjective fields, which come about through the interplay between them, and it is embedded therein.

For Heidegger the “between” is the dimension in which world and Dasein pass through one another and in doing so traverse a middle from which they are borne out. This bearing-out is effected by the so-called “dif-ference” and it is inseparably bound up with language. Derrida later took up this concept and formulated “différance”. Language is a network of differences, and the “play of différance” or the function of the “dif-ference” is the process of differentiation, because speaking is preceded by a thinking within a very heterogeneous network of oppositions. Here the connections to the philosophy of difference become visible. Every perceptual experience of any kind is constituted by differences, yet the bearer of this differentiation is language. But difference is also a form of belonging-together; the differences are interlocked with one another and the poles exist only in the manner in which they appear in the reflected glow of the differences. Identity is thus a difference, and it is fundamentally fragile because it likewise changes with the change of the differences. Self and identity, as a temporary unity of difference, trace a fragile track through a changing and mobile continuum of differences. The perceived unity of the self is only synthetic; the I is, as Dennett said, a “centre of narrative gravity”.

The self is therefore not the whole of being, but only a self-theory, a reflexive self constituted with language, which moreover is only a self of differences.

Dasein is predominantly characterised by pre-reflexive, routinised doing, which resides in fields of spatio-temporal patterns of entities that affect this Dasein and influence its mental contents. These fields are meaningful and significant, they are contexts of activity, and this Dasein is occasionally interrupted by “islands of self-awareness”; propositional intentionality intermingles with the pre-reflexive like islands of awareness in a pre-reflexive flow of Dasein.

Although we experience this Dasein as a directed flow, as a flowing chain of event-presents, on closer inspection it consists of events or situations that succeed one another and have a beginning and an end. The moment of change marks the beginning: things pass through one another, and only through the process of differentiating, through the “play of différance”, do they become for us what they are supposed to “mean”: out of the undifferentiated unity of the beginning a perceived world arises, and this is the “mode of generation” of the reality we perceive.