Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T21:56:23.387Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - A Moral Perspective: Identity as Self-Interpretation

from Part II - New Perspectives and Challenges

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2021

By
Svend Brinkmann
Edited by
Michael Bamberg ,
Carolin Demuth  and
Meike Watzlawik
Michael Bamberg
Affiliation:
Clark University, Massachusetts
Carolin Demuth
Affiliation:
Aalborg University, Denmark
Meike Watzlawik
Affiliation:
Sigmund Freud University, Berlin
Get access

Summary

There is a significant tradition in philosophy of conceiving of human identity in ethical terms. To have an identity is from this perspective to be committed to certain values and goods. This way of thinking goes back to the ancient Greeks, and it was rejuvenated in the twentieth century by thinkers who emphasized the “situatedness of the self” and rejuvenated the notion of virtue ethics. In this chapter, I shall articulate this tradition and show how it clashes with the ambition of much psychology and social science to be value-neutral. After tracing the historical background, I argue that Anthony Giddens’s idea of identity as self-interpretation is a useful starting point for ethical approaches to identity. Identity is here not so much a given, but rather a task of continuously interpreting oneself in light of situations and commitments. I then supplement Giddens’s approach with recent perspectives that are more explicit about the ethical. Charles Taylor’s notion of ethical sources of self and identity is drawn in to argue that human self-interpretation necessarily take place within an inescapable framework of ethical values. The virtue ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre emphasize how this takes place within evolving historical traditions, and the hermeneutic philosophy of Paul Ricœur stresses how the commitment to an identity project of “self-constancy” is a necessary condition for the realization of ethical values. Finally, I discuss how a contemporary consumer society in fragments challenges the ethical approach to identity, given the fact that ethical values are often presented as purely subjective.

Keywords

Identityself-interpretationethicsvirtueshermeneuticsconsumer society
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Identity , pp. 101 - 119
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aristotle, . (1976). Ethics. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Bauman, Z. (2007). Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Berlin, I. (1999). The Roots of Romanticism. London: Chatto & Windus.Google Scholar
Boltanski, L. & Chiapello, E. (2005). The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Brinkmann, S. (2004). The topography of moral ecology. Theory & Psychology, 14(1), 57–80.Google Scholar
Brinkmann, S. (2005). Human kinds and looping effects in psychology: Foucauldian and hermeneutic perspectives. Theory & Psychology, 15(6), 769–791.Google Scholar
Brinkmann, S. (2006). Mental life in the space of reasons. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 36(1), 1–16.Google Scholar
Brinkmann, S. (2008). Identity as self-interpretation. Theory & Psychology, 18(3), 405–423.Google Scholar
Brinkmann, S. (2010). Character, personality, and identity: On historical aspects of human subjectivity. Nordic Psychology, 62(1), 65–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brinkmann, S. (2018). Persons and Their Minds: Towards an Integrative Theory of the Mediated Mind. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, J. (2005). Giving an Account of Oneself. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.Google Scholar
Cushman, P. (1990). Why the self is empty: Toward a historically situated psychology. American Psychologist, 45(5), 599–611.Google Scholar
de Mul, J. (2004). The Tragedy of Finitude: Dilthey’s Hermeneutics of Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Dilthey, W. (1977). Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff (first published 1894).Google Scholar
Erikson, E. (1968). Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York, NY: Norton.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. (2001). The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. London: Taylor & Francis (first published 1966).Google Scholar
Heidegger, M. (1927). Being and Time. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers (this ed. published 1962).Google Scholar
Hogg, M. A. & Vaughan, G. M. (2005). Social Psychology, 4th Ed. Harlow: Pearson Education.Google Scholar
Honneth, A. (1996). Pathologies of the social: The past and present of social philosophy. In Rasmussen, D. M. (Ed.), Handbook of Critical Theory (pp. 369–396). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Honneth, A. (2004). Organized self-realization. European Journal of Social Theory, 7(4), 463–478.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Louch, A. R. (1966). Explanation and Human Action. Christchurch, New Zealand: Cybereditions Corporation (this ed. published 2000).Google Scholar
MacIntyre, A. (1985). After Virtue, 2nd ed. with postscript. London: Duckworth.Google Scholar
Richardson, F. C., Fowers, B. J., & Guignon, C. B. (1999). Re-Envisioning Psychology: Moral Dimensions of Theory and Practice. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.Google Scholar
Ricœur, P. (1992). Oneself as Another. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Rosa, H. (2003). Social acceleration: Ethical and political consequences of a desynchronized high-speed society. Constellations, 10(1), 3–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosa, H. (2004). Four levels of self-interpretation. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 30(5–6), 691–720.Google Scholar
Rose, N. (1999). Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Free Association Books.Google Scholar
Rose, N. (2007). The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Schatzki, T. R. (2001). Practice theory. In Schatzki, T. R., Knoor Cetina, K., & von Savigny, E. (Eds.), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (pp. 1–14). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Sennett, R. (1998). The Corrosion of Character. New York, NY: Norton.Google Scholar
Sennett, R. (2006). The Culture of the New Capitalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, N. H. (2002). Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Smith, R. (1997). The Norton History of the Human Sciences. New York, NY: Norton.Google Scholar
Sugarman, J. (2005). Persons and moral agency. Theory & Psychology, 15(6), 793–811.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, C. (1981). Understanding and explanation in the Geisteswissenschaften. In Holtzman, S. M. & Leich, C. M. (Eds.), Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule (pp. 191–210). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Taylor, C. (1985a). Atomism. In Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (pp. 187–210). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, C. (1985b). Self-interpreting animals. In Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (pp. 45–76). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, C. (1985c). What is human agency? In Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (pp. 15–44). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, C. (1991). The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, C. (1999). Two theories of modernity. Public Culture, 11(1), 153–174.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, C. (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wittel, A. (2001). Toward a network sociality. Theory, Culture & Society, 18(6), 51–76.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×