Locke,Kierkegaard and the Phenomenology of Personal Identity

Abstract

Personal Identity theorists as diverse as Derek Parfit, Marya Schechtman and Galen Strawson have noted that the experiencing subject (the locus of present psychological experience) and the person (a human being with a career/narrative extended across time) are not necessarily coextensive. Accordingly, we can become psychologically alienated from, and fail to experience a sense of identity with, the person we once were or will be. This presents serious problems for Locke’s original account of “sameness of consciousness” constituting personal identity, given the distinctly normative (and indeed eschatological) focus of his discussion. To succeed, the Lockean project needs to identify some phenomenal property of experience that can constitute a sense of identity with the self figured in all moments to which consciousness can be extended. I draw upon key themes in Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of moral imagination to show that Kierkegaard describes a phenomenal quality of experience that unites the experiencing subject with its past and future, regardless of facts about psychological change across time. Yet Kierkegaard’s account is fully normative, recasting affective identification with past/future selves as a moral task rather than something merely psychologically desirable (Schechtman) or utterly contingent (Parfit, Strawson).     

社会认知与同感现象学

社会认知主要围绕"理论理论"与"模仿理论"两个经典模型来解释人际间的理解。这一主流框架既包含重要的洞见,也隐含着成问题的理论预设。同感现象学及其当代的代表"直接感知理论"对上述框架提出挑战,认为他人认知的起点不是认知者的理论推理或者心智模仿,应该回溯到认知者初始的感知经验,认为感知是通达关于他人心智生活的一种不可或缺的方式。     

The Social and Personal Identities Scale: A Measure of the Differential Importance Ascribed to Social and Personal Self-Categorizations

A new measure sensitive to differences in the importance that people ascribe to their social (group) and personal identities is described. The Social and Personal Identities (SIPI) scale distinguishes between the interpersonal level of self which differentiates the individual as unique from others, and the social identity level of self whereby the individual is identified by his or her group memberships. In contrast to perspectives that emphasize the context-dependence of self-conception, our measure was designed to capture individual differences in participants' readiness to categorize themselves using group and personal self-categories as measured by the degree of importance or centrality assigned to each. Factor and reliability analyses support the scale's stability as a two-factor structure with high internal consistency, and these factors are modestly correlated. Results from six studies substantiate the scale's criterion and construct validity.     

Personal Identity And Integration: Von Balthasar's Phenomenology Of Human Holiness

In the view of Hans Urs von Balthasar, what is needed to bring a human life to fulfilment—to become 'whole'—is the death of one's 'personality', and the acquisition of one's specific 'personhood', which is given to one, along with one's mission, by God. Moreover, according to von Balthasar, a human being becomes a 'unique person' when encountering God in contemplative prayer. And it is within contemplative prayer that one comes into contact with one's 'Idea', which is actualised when one' personal identity is fully developed, and which it is one's mission to conform to. Thus this article shows how the fundamental components of von Balthasar's distinctive phenomenological model of human holiness fit together, in actual practice as lived, around his core concept of 'mission'.     

Personal and Social Facets of Job Identity: A Person-Centered Approach

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to examine ego-identity (Erikson, Psychol Issues 1:1–171, 1959; Identity, youth and crisis, Norton, New York, 1968; Marcia, J Pers Soc Psychol 3:551–558, 1966) and social identity (Tajfel and Turner, In: Austin WG, Worchel S (Eds.) The social psychology of intergroup relations. Brooks/Cole, Monterey, pp 33–47 1979; Turner et al., Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory. Blackwell, Oxford, 1987) theories within the organizational literature. We adopted a person-centered approach to analyze whether employees classified in various identity statuses and identification profiles exhibited differences in job outcomes (i.e., burnout, job satisfaction, and organizational citizenship behaviors). We also analyzed interconnections among identity statuses and identification profiles.

Design/methodology/approach

Participants were 515 employees (85.4 % women) between 24 and 64 years old. They completed self-reported questionnaires assessing personal identity, social identity, and job outcomes.

Findings

Cluster analysis indicated that participants could be classified into four identity statuses (i.e., achievement, early closure, moratorium, and searching moratorium) and into four identification profiles (i.e., orthogonal combinations of high vs. low organizational and group identification, respectively). Employees classified in the various identity statuses and identification profiles reported meaningful differences on job outcomes. Further, findings highlighted significant associations between identity statuses and identification profiles, giving rise to various identity configurations associated with job outcomes.

Implications

This study highlights the importance of integrating different facets of job identity. These findings have relevant implications in terms of suggesting which dimensions of identity should be promoted in order to reduce workers’ burnout, and enhance their satisfaction and organizational citizenship behaviors.

Originality/value

This study provides evidence for integrating ego-identity and social identity theories. In doing so, it bridges developmental psychology literature on personal identity with social and organizational psychology literature on social identity, setting the basis for a comprehensive line of research.     

Phenomenology of Phenomenology

I explore some interpretations of the practice of international market reliance that forms the focus of Aaron James' book, and I wonder how our actual practices help to settle what we should go on to do now.     

A Phenomenology of Depth

In this paper, I re-vision the depth metaphor in a more contemporary epistemological frame. Rather than using depth as a “vertical” metaphor referring to the hidden, remote, or regressed, I use depth as a “horizonal” metaphor referring to the dimensionality of experience, to the ways in which all experience is structured in a figure–ground relationship. A foreground is always contextualized in relation to its background, and the series of relationships of form to field, self to world, subject to other constitute the ways in which meaning is formed, unformed, and transformed in a movement that characterizes how experience becomes what it is. The analyst’s role in deepening involves attending to the immediacy of the immersive perceptive moment, where embodied feeling-states might emerge from an unspecified ground, where the gap between what forms and its context becomes the crucible for new meaning. This entails receptivity to absence as much as presence, to the ways in which formation is always a play between what becomes and what it is not yet there.     

Personal Autonomy,Social Identity,and Oppressive Social Contexts

Attempts to articulate the ways in which membership in socially subordinated social identities can impede one's autonomy have largely unfolded as part of the debate between different types of internalist theories in relation to the problem of internalized oppression. The different internalist positions, however, employ a damage model for understanding the role of social subordination in limiting autonomy. I argue that we need an externalist condition in order to capture the ways in which membership in a socially subordinated identity can constrain one's autonomy, even if one is undamaged in one's autonomy competencies and self‐reflexive attitudes. I argue that living among those practically empowered to harass, to engage in racial profiling, and to treat as expendable is incompatible with a freedom‐condition required for unconstrained global self‐determination.     

思辨现象学与实践现象学--从现象学视角诠释马克思哲学

马克思哲学与康德、黑格尔、胡塞尔等的思辨现象学思想的互释表明:思辨现象学有一种自我超越和回归实践的倾向,但在现实意义上却没有实现这种指归;思辨现象学在纲领、直观、世界、实践等方面脱离了对现实问题的关注,学理式地指向哲学逻辑的根据;而马克思哲学则通过实践还原与实践直观对哲学逻辑的前提发问的根本转换而扬弃了思辨现象学的缺陷,赋予现象学以现实的存在学和历史学的纬度,确立了一种逻辑在先意义上的、具有本真“同一性”的科学实践现象学思想。     

个人偏好与社会公德

个人偏好是人的个性中能够表现出来的比较稳定的特征.社会公德作为全社会的基础道德共识,发挥着调节人际关系、限制和引导个人偏好、维护公共利益的职能.个人偏好的自发性和随意性、自我中心的潜在价值取向、偏离"常规"的行为方式等,不可避免地导致对公共秩序的侵蚀.适时更新社会公德规范,使其符合人性化的发展要求;适度限制和矫正个人偏好,使其向维护公共秩序的方向发展,有机协调二者的内在冲突,是建设和谐社会的内在要求,也是实现人的全面发展的必然趋势.     

Personal Resources and the Social Distribution of Depression

This paper addresses the hypothesis that gender, age, marital status, and SES matter for depression partly because of associated differences in the availability and/or impact of the personal resources of mastery and self-esteem. It is argued that findings indicating that the social distributions of these resources complement those for depression would provide preliminary support for this hypothesis. Based on a large urban community sample (n = 1,390), our findings fail to support the availability hypothesis in relation to marital status, provide only modest support in reference to age and gender, but yield compelling support in relation to socioeconomic status (SES). Indeed, variations in the availability of these resources, especially mastery, provide a largely, if not entirely, adequate explanation for the SES–depressive symptoms relationship and accounts for nearly half of the SES–Major Depressive Disorder relationship. Although the significance of mastery was more pronounced among women and unmarried persons, such differences did not contribute to understanding observed gender or marital status variations in depression.     

胡塞尔思想发展脉络中的心理学与现象学:从对立到调和

胡塞尔早期在对心理主义的批判中指出心理之物或心理学经验指涉相对于意向对象的实项内容,心理学则是有关于心理事实的经验科学。这时,现象学与心理学是被严格区分的。20世纪20年代初开始,心理学经验逐渐取得新的涵义,在1925年的《现象学心理学夏季讲稿》中,胡塞尔指出心理学经验本身也具有意向对象,心理学经验与超越论经验遂形成平行关系,甚至成为迈向超越论经验领域或超越论现象学的途径之一。胡塞尔对于心理学两种不同的看法是如何转变的?为了说明这个问题,我们有必要针对相关的文本进行考察,其中包括《逻辑研究》(1900/1901)、《现象学的观念》(1907)、《哲学作为严格的科学》(1911)、《观念》第一卷(1913)以及《第一哲学》(1923/1924),等等。胡塞尔在1913年的《观念》第一卷以及1917年的《现象学与心理学》讲稿中虽仍然严格区分心理学与现象学,但从20世纪20年代中期开始,胡塞尔已经不再严格区分现象学与心理学。为了说明这项演变,对于"心理现象"概念进行阐释是十分必要的。     

Aging as a Social Form: The Phenomenology of the Passage

If philosophers have discussed life as preparation for death, this seems to make aging coterminous with dying and a melancholy passage that we are condemned to survive. It is important to examine the discourse on aging and end of life and the ways various models either limit possibilities for human agency or suggest means of being innovative in relation to such parameters. I challenge developmental views of aging not by arguing for eternal life, but by using Plato’s conception of form in conjunction with Simmel’s work and Arendt’s meditation on intergenerational solidarity, to evoke a picture of the subject as having capacities that offer avenues for improvisational action. This paper proposes a method for analyzing any social form as a problem-solving situation where the real “problem” is the fundamental ambiguity that inheres in the mix between the finite characteristics of the action and its infinite perplexity. I work through the most conventional chronological view of aging to show how it dramatizes a fundamental ethical collision in life that intensifies anxiety under many conditions, always raising the question of what is to be done with respect to contingency, revealing such “work” as a paradigm of the human condition.     

Phenomenology and Critical Social Psychology: Directions and Debates in Theory and Research

There has been significant growth in critical approaches to social psychology in recent years. Phenomenological, discursive and psychoanalytically informed perspectives, amongst others, have become increasingly popular alternatives to ‘mainstream’ cognitive social psychology. This paper describes the fundamental philosophy and methodology underpinning phenomenological psychology along with discussion of a number of key issues in qualitative research in social psychology. In particular, I discuss the role of interpretation, the turn to language and need for political engagement within critical social psychology. More recently, there has been a growth in phenomenologically informed narrative theories and methodologies and in this paper I introduce my own development of a critical narrative analysis. In the process I discuss some of the most pressing debates about research within the phenomenological tradition and provide rebuttals, solutions and possible future directions for phenomenological theory and research that may lead to yet greater recognition for this social psychological perspective.