Introduction
All people experience their identities differently, but all experience who they are. We act in the world and interact with our peers as the person we think we are. In this essay, it will be defined that the identity of a person is the individuation of a person, which can never be the same as another, the recognition of the self, the public self, the real self, our optimal self and how they can influence moral values for the formation of our identity.
There will also be talk of variants about ontological identity and self-recognition, which some modern philosophers criticized who insisted that self-consciousness and self-recognition were necessary elements of human identity.
Moral values from the point of view of identity
In closed societies, with more structured cultures than ours, being a child, entering adulthood, working, forming a family, growing old and dying are stages that are lived within a model similar to that of parents, grandparents and the other ancestors. All members have and maintain a strong community identity and their roles are demarcated by religion, myth and law (Erikson, 1979).
In our current society, the model that seems to prevail prioritizes change and the new, with a not only critical but also devalued analysis of the past. If the meaning of life is understood as the set of values to be and to do, configured in the representation of oneself in relation to the world, in that inter-subjectivity that Mead raised as the internal interlocutors, the I, the Me and the Another, identity turns out to be a continuous construction, necessary to elaborate a life project. This representation of oneself, in interaction with the representation of the world, is also intention and attitude, as Moscovici (1985) pointed out.
Among the representations and valuations of our civilization that have changed in the last forty years, for which I will mention some in this work:
• The value given to growth and maturity: Currently being older is a problem of care and maintenance throughout the world. The knowledge that is required for work and for a dignified survival does not pass mostly through experience, but through technological change, not easy to update for the elderly.
• The value of the stability of the couple and of the family organization that had spaces and times to attend and understand the youngest and the oldest. Currently television is in charge of educating our children and it is caused by little family coexistence.
• The value of choosing the labor field according to interests and preferences: today, unemployment and the changes in skills required, limit individual choices, increasing the choice of the environment (ILO, 2004). This causes crises in the middle-aged who are threatened by mergers and company closures in a neoliberalism that is entering crisis. And therefore it is easy to fall into a lack of values such as stealing, not to work or kill in the worst case.
• The value of time for communication of intimacy and reflection. Time is short to listen, to understand or to think.
• The value of relaxation. The exciting is sought to the point of irreversible damage caused by anxiety and stress.
• The dissociation between being and doing (Veinsten, 1994).
In this climate of revision, doubts and fears affect all evolutionary cycles.
Young people know that when they leave adolescence they are faced with the demand to choose their future, the orientation cannot be only vocational, but existential.
It can be said that moral values are those that perfect man in the most intimately human but these arise by influence and within the family and these will help us to insert ourselves effectively into social life.
It can then be said that personal identity is the result of a process of individuation, that is, of the differentiation of an individual from the rest of the people.
Social identity can be defined as the result of a process of distinction between a "us" versus a "them", based on cultural differences. There are two conceptions about the origin of identity.
Various specialists identify two main currents of thought about how identity originates: an objectivist conception and a subjectivist conception.
Objectivists: define identity from a certain number of determining criteria, considered "objective", that is, given by inheritance and genealogy, and therefore as attributes of the group of origin to which the individual belongs. Among these attributes, some of the main ones would be:
-the language
-religion
-the collective psychology or "base personality"
-the natural characteristics of the territory.
Subjectivists: consider that identity is a feeling of belonging or an identification to a more or less imaginary community (according to the representations that individuals make of social reality).
The concept of identity has different meanings and is used in a variety of contexts that need to be distinguished to avoid confusion. A first meaning of identity is found in the scholastic and Aristotelian metaphysical traditions that conceived it as one of the fundamental principles of being and as a logical law of thought. The ontological principle of identityor "non-contradiction" affirms that every being is identical with itself and, therefore, a thing cannot be and not be at the same time and from the same point of view. As a rule of logical thought, the identity principle states that two contradictory propositions cannot be true or false at the same time and that a contradictory idea (for example a square circle) does not make sense. As a property of all beings, identity does not necessarily depend on whether a particular being is capable of reflection or not.
However, for many modern philosophers, reflexivity was crucial to human identity and marked an important difference from the identity of inanimate things and animals. That is why they insisted that self-awareness and self-recognition were necessary elements of human identity. Therefore, the problem for them was to establish what it was that guaranteed self-recognition in time. In many philosophers memory seems to have played a fundamental role in this process. Thus, for example, Locke argued that "as far as this consciousness can extend backwards to any past action or thought, that person reaches the identity there." The continuity of consciousness: in time it was crucial for the constitution of the identity of the subject,and identity mattered because moral responsibility depended on it. Similarly, Leibniz maintained that "the intelligent soul, knowing what it is and being able to say this self that says so much, not only remains and subsists metaphysically (which it does more totally than the others), but also remains morally the itself and constitutes the same personality. Because it is the memory or the knowledge of this self that makes it capable of reward and punishment.Because it is the memory or the knowledge of this self that makes it capable of reward and punishment.Because it is the memory or the knowledge of this self that makes it capable of reward and punishment.
It should be noted, however, that the main concern of these philosophers was not so much identity itself, as the fact that moral responsibility seemed to depend on it. Of course, if this was their main concern, it would have been enough for them to link responsibility with self-recognition, and this with memory; there was no need for them to make identity dependent on memory and self-awareness.
It can be argued that any human individual who loses his memory continues to be ontologically identical with himself, although not necessarily morally responsible for the acts he cannot remember.
Be that as it may, the point is that in both variants; Ontological identity and self-recognition, identity is reduced to a problem of individual selfhood. The individual is someone in particular (a self) and who can experience his being with various perspectives or modalities, such as perception, conceptualization and imagination. The structure of the self is closely related to the success of the person.
A more adequate meaning of identity leaves aside individual selfhood and refers to a quality or set of qualities with which a person or group of people are intimately connected. In this sense, identity has to do with the way in which individuals and groups define themselves by wanting to relate - "identify" - with certain characteristics. This conception is more interesting for social scientists because what someone identifies with can change and is influenced by social expectations.
In exploring this concept of qualitative identity, Tugendhat has highlighted the subjective nature of the qualities that constitute identity and the fact that they can change. The qualitative identity answers the question about what everyone would like to be. The answer to this question may be influenced by the past, but it basically refers to the future.
Tugendhat believes that most of the identity literature, from Erikson's earliest writings to Haber mas's more recent ones, has been affected by a confusion between individual identity and qualitative identity, and that only the latter is an adequate conceptualization. There is no doubt that qualitative identity provides a more relevant conception for the social sciences and that Tugendhat's description of it is profound. But this notion is still very incomplete insofar as it does not clarify how and why different people identify with different qualities.
Tugendhat proposes that the qualities that constitute identity are what Aristotle calls "dispositions," consisting of the ability to act in a particular way. But the problem with this explanation is that identity appears determined by pure internal and subjective factors. It may be true, as Tugendhat argues, that Erikson confused two different notions of identity, but at least he had a clear notion that the social environment plays a fundamental role in its construction and that to answer the question 'who would I like to be? » the judgment of others is crucial. Tugendhat would have done well to realize, like Erikson, that recourse to internal regulations is not enough.
The three component elements of identity
If identity is not a given innate essence but a social process of construction, it is necessary to establish the constitutive elements from which it is built.
First, individuals define themselves, or identify with certain qualities, in terms of certain shared social categories. By forming their personal identities, individuals share certain group loyalties or characteristics such as religion, gender, class, ethnicity, profession, sexuality, nationality, which are culturally determined and help to specify the subject and their sense of identity. In this sense, it can be affirmed that culture is one of the determinants of personal identity. All personal identities are rooted in culturally determined collective contexts. This is how the idea of cultural identities arises. Each of these shared categories is a cultural identity.During modernity, the cultural identities that have had the greatest influence on the formation of personal identities are class identities and national identities.
Second is the material element that in William James's original idea includes the body and other possessions capable of delivering vital elements of self-recognition to the subject. In his own words:
“It is clear that between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the dividing line is difficult to draw… In the broadest possible sense… a man's self is the sum total of all that he can call his own., not just his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and jobs, his land and his horses, his yacht and his bank account. "
The idea is that by producing, possessing, acquiring or modeling material things, human beings project their selves, their own qualities into them, see themselves in them and see them according to their own image. As Simmel put it, “All property means an extension of the personality; my property is what obeys my will, that is, that in which my self expresses and realizes itself externally. And this happens before and more completely than with anything else, with our own body, which, for this reason, constitutes our first and indisputable property ”.
If this is so, then objects can influence human personality. The extent of this influence was clearly appreciated by Simmel, both in the case of artistic creation of material objects and in the case of monetary exchange. Regarding the former, Simmel argued that "the unity of the object we create and its absence influence the corresponding configuration of our personality." Regarding the second, he argued that the self is so supportive of its specific possessions that even "the delivery of values, either in exchange or as a gift, can enhance the feeling of personal relationship with that possession."
It is through this material aspect that identity can be related to consumption and traditional and cultural industries. Such industries produce merchandise, consumer goods that people buy in the market, be they material objects or forms of entertainment and art. Each purchase or consumption of these commodities is both an act by which people satisfy needs, and a cultural act insofar as it constitutes a culturally determined way of buying or consuming commodities. Thus, for example, I can buy a ticket to go to the cinema because with cinema I experience an aesthetic pleasure. But I can also buy a movie ticket to see a movie that I don't like very much, to be seen in the company of certain people that I consider important or of high status.I can buy a special car because it is aesthetic and I need mobility, but I can also buy it to be seen as belonging to a certain group or particular circle that is identifiable by the use of that kind of car. In other words, access to certain material goods, the consumption of certain goods, can also become a means of access to an imagined group represented by those goods; it can be a way of gaining recognition. Material things make one belong or give the sense of belonging in a desired community. To this extent, they contribute to shaping personal identities by symbolizing a collective or cultural identity to which they want to access.but I can also buy it to be seen as belonging to a certain group or particular circle that is identifiable by the use of that kind of car. In other words, access to certain material goods, the consumption of certain goods, can also become a means of access to an imagined group represented by those goods; it can be a way of gaining recognition. Material things make one belong or give the sense of belonging in a desired community. To this extent, they contribute to shaping personal identities by symbolizing a collective or cultural identity to which they want to access.but I can also buy it to be seen as belonging to a certain group or particular circle that is identifiable by the use of that kind of car. In other words, access to certain material goods, the consumption of certain goods, can also become a means of access to an imagined group represented by those goods; it can be a way of gaining recognition. Material things make one belong or give the sense of belonging in a desired community. To this extent, they contribute to shaping personal identities by symbolizing a collective or cultural identity to which they want to access.it can also become a means of access to an imagined group represented by those goods; it can be a way of gaining recognition. Material things make one belong or give the sense of belonging in a desired community. To this extent, they contribute to shaping personal identities by symbolizing a collective or cultural identity to which they want to access.it can also become a means of access to an imagined group represented by those goods; it can be a way of gaining recognition. Material things make one belong or give the sense of belonging in a desired community. To this extent, they contribute to shaping personal identities by symbolizing a collective or cultural identity to which they want to access.
Third, the construction of the self necessarily presupposes the existence of "others" in a double sense. The others are those whose opinions about us we internalize. But they are also those with respect to which the self differs, and acquires its distinctive and specific character. The first sense means that "our total self-image involves our relationships with other people and their evaluation of us." The subject internalizes the expectations or attitudes of others about him or her, and these expectations of others are transformed into his own self-expectations.
The subject is defined in terms of how others see it. However, only the evaluations of those others who are in any way meaningful to the subject truly count for the construction and maintenance of their self-image. Parents are the most significant others at first, but later a wide variety of "others" begin to operate (friends, relatives, peers, teachers, etc.).
Mead argued that in the relationship with each of these "others" a variety of elemental selves is formed in a person ("we are one thing for one man and another for another"), but that if the significant others are considered in As a whole, they can be seen to organize themselves into a 'generalized other' in relation to which a 'complete self' is formed. The other generalized, is composed of the integration of the evaluations and expectations of the significant others of a person. In this way, the socially constructed identity of a person, being the result of a large number of social relationships, is immensely complex and variable, but at the same time it is supposed to be capable of integrating the multiplicity of expectations into a coherent and consistent total self in its activities and trends.
Therefore, identity supposes the existence of the human group. It answers not so much to the question who am I? or "what would I like to be?" as to the question: "who am I in the eyes of others?" Or "What would I like to be considering the judgment that significant others have of me?" Erikson expresses this idea by saying that in the identification process "the individual judges himself in the light of what he perceives as the way others judge him." According to Erikson, this aspect of identity has not been well understood by the traditional psychoanalytic method because it "has not developed the terms to conceptualize the environment." The social environment, which is expressed in German by the term Umwelt, not only surrounds us, but is also within us.In this sense, it could be said that identities come from outside to the extent that they are the way in which others recognize us, but they come from within to the extent that our self-recognition is a function of the recognition of others that we have internalized.
The self-recognition that makes identity possibleAccording to Honneth, it takes three forms: self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem. But the development of these forms of relationship with the self for any individual depends fundamentally on having experienced the recognition of others, whom he also recognizes. In other words, identity construction is an intersubjective process of mutual recognition. Self-confidence arises in the child to the extent that the expression of his needs finds a positive response of love and care on the part of the others in his charge. Similarly, a person's self-respect depends on others respecting their human dignity and, therefore, the rights that accompany that dignity. Finally, self-esteem can exist only to the extent that others recognize a person's contribution as valuable. In sum,a well-integrated identity depends on three forms of recognition: love or concern for the person, respect for their rights and esteem for their contribution.
Simultaneously, Honneth, argues that there are three forms of disrespect concomitant with the three forms of recognition that can contribute to the creation of social conflicts and a "struggle for recognition", in sectors that are deprived of these forms of respect. The first form of disrespect is physical abuse or threat to physical integrity, which affects self-confidence. The second is the structural and systematic exclusion of a person from the possession of certain rights, which damages self-respect. The third is the cultural devaluation of certain ways of life or beliefs and their consideration as inferior or deficient, which prevents the subject from attributing social value or esteem to their abilities and contributions. The negative emotional reaction that accompanies these experiences of disrespect (anger,indignation) represents for Honneth the motivational basis of the struggle for recognition: "because it is only by regaining the possibility of active behavior that individuals can get rid of the state of emotional tension to which they are subjected as a result of humiliation."
Finally, it is worth mentioning some of the parts of the structure of the "I":
The concept of the I is the image we have of ourselves, what I think I am. It often includes an estimate or evaluation of the self as "good" or "bad."
The I is the unique and special identity, the person, the personality.
The ideal I is the person or the I that we think we should be.
The public I is our image to society in general. The way we want other people to see us, we often hide our true selves.
The real I is a bit mysterious; it implies the perception of our own being.
Our optimal Ego is the aspect of the personality considered by ourselves as the best we can create, whether in private or in public.
conclusion
The identity of a person is acquired as we put into practice the moral values that have been instilled in the family. Identity is the real and unrepeatable "I" in each person, it is acquiring the very consciousness of identity, the values of our society or civilization.
Identity is what can help us or serve to develop a life project in order to improve it.
The term "I" structure refers to our sense of identity. The structure of "I" includes the concept of the self (the beliefs that the person has about the self), the ideal of the self (one's opinion about how one should be), the public self (the way one wishes others to do it). see) and our optimal self. The concepts that people have of themselves have an important influence on their actions, since we all behave like the person we believe and can be. T he image that a person has of himself is influenced by the definitions that others make of him. We continually instruct others about how they should perceive us. The concept of the self is made up of one's own body, of special objects identified with the self.
Our ego ideal is the basis of consciousness, the instrument for making moral judgments about ourselves. We acquire our consciences by adopting the moral precepts of the people who raised us. Our conscience can be too strict, authoritarian and incompatible with the personality. Identity interests benefit if a person examines and periodically re-formulates the ego ideal so that its conformity is compatible with a way of life that promotes health both physically and mentally.
Bibliographical sources
- Álava Curto, Cesar. (2004). "Psychology of Emotions and Attitudes". Editorial Alfaomega. Mexico.
- Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition (Cambridge: F'olity Press, 1995), pp. 118-123.
- Erikson, Identity, Youth and Crisis p. 22.
- Georg Simmel, Sociology (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1939), p. 363.
- Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1976), pp. 571.
- Goleman. (2000). "Emotional intelligence". Editorial. Vergara. Mexico.
- Ituarte, by Ardavin. (1998). Adolescence and Personality. Threshing Editorial. Mexico, p. 39,89.
- J. Locke, Es.ta \ Concerning on Hun'.iin Undemanding (London: George Routlcdge, 1948), book II, chapter xxvii, section 9, p. 247. G. Leibniz, Philosophical Writings (London: JM Denl & Sons, 1973), p. 44.
- E. Tugendhat, "Identity: personal, national and universal."
- Jourard, Sídney M. The healthy personality: the point of view of humanistic psychology.-Mexico: Trillas, 1987
