Identity and Its Dilemmas: From Personal Identity to Social Recognition

This article seeks to show that the question of identity admits of two different approaches. For analytically oriented philosophers, identity must take root on a solid ground such as the truth about the mind and the body. For constructivists, identity is above all the product of a social context. I will also try to show that personal identity assumes the act of recognition While I emphasize, the circumstantial nature of identity, I describe the relative stability of the individual in different social contexts, in order to understand this mobile presence of personal identity. The fact that personal identity is constructed does not in any way mean that it does not exist, or that it is constantly erased and redrawn, according to the occasion. On the one hand, we must presume that there is a set of acts of recognition that have allowed the formation and establishment of a personal identity that unfolds over time, and on the other hand it must be recognized that there is also a process of recognition that guarantees the individual the risk of endless drift through different alternative forms. By identifying self-recognition as a process that enables us to develop a series in a unified manner for a certain number of acts of recognition that make us up as actors responsible for our choices, it proves that recognition of identity is not necessarily an unequal process, to the extent that we as recognized persons and as active persons participate in the game of mutual linguistic recognition.

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This article seeks to show that the question of identity admits of two different approaches. For analytically oriented philosophers, identity must take root on a solid ground such as the truth about the mind and the body. For constructivists, identity is above all the product of a social context. I will also try to show that personal identity assumes the act of recognition While I emphasize, the circumstantial nature of identity, I describe the relative stability of the individual in different social contexts, in order to understand this mobile presence of personal identity. The fact that personal identity is constructed does not in any way mean that it does not exist, or that it is constantly erased and redrawn, according to the occasion. On the one hand, we must presume that there is a set of acts of recognition that have allowed the formation and establishment of a personal identity that unfolds over time, and on the other hand it must be recognized that there is also a process of recognition that guarantees the individual the risk of endless drift through different alternative forms. By identifying self-recognition as a process that enables us to develop a series in a unified manner for a certain number of acts of recognition that make us up as actors responsible for our choices, it proves that recognition of identity is not necessarily an unequal process, to the extent that we as recognized persons and as active persons participate in the game of mutual linguistic recognition.

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