The question of the identity or persistence of the self through time may be interesting for philosophers, but it is hardly a burning question for most individuals. On the other hand, the question of who I am, what or who I take myself to be, can be a vital, even burning question for most of us at some time in our lives. This is the notion of personal identity I take up in this paper. It is an identity that is not pre-given a priori but is always in some sense an open question, never completely decided. Here the narrative conception of self is relevant, since it is often a question of what story or kind of story my identity instantiates. This notion of personal identity is inherently temporal, but not in the sense of temporal persistence but of temporal coherence of past, present and future. And here the question of personal identity is inevitably social, since it is largely a question of what group I identify myself with, what social role I take myself to embody. And what complications occur when I identify myself with more than one group? Here many social conflicts and also intrapersonal conflicts have their source. My topic thus turns on ideas of personal identity that are reflected in the popular expressions “identity crisis” and “identity politics.”

对于哲学家来说，关于自我的身份或持久性的问题可能对于哲学家来说很有趣，但对于大多数个人而言，这并不是一个亟待解决的问题。另一方面，对于我们大多数人来说，在生活中的某个时候，关于我是谁，我是谁或我要成为谁的问题可能是至关重要的，甚至是令人生畏的问题。这就是我在本文中讨论的个人身份的概念。这不是先验先验的身份，但从某种意义上讲始终是一个悬而未决的问题，从未完全确定。在这里，关于自我的叙事概念是相关的，因为这通常是我的身份实例化的故事或故事类型的问题。个人身份的概念本质上是时间上的，但不是时间上的持久性，而是过去，现在和未来的时间上的连贯性。在这里，个人身份问题不可避免地是社会问题，因为这主要是关于我认同自己的人群，我要体现的社会角色的问题。当我将自己识别为一组以上时，会发生什么并发症？这里有许多社会冲突以及人际冲突的根源。因此，我的主题是关于个人身份的观念，这些观念在流行的表达方式“身份危机”和“身份政治”中得到了体现。