Charles Guignon
The term “personal identity” was not commonly used by major hermeneutic thinkers until recently, when it came to be discussed by Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor.1 But the phenomenon this term designates has been central to the work of major modern hermeneutic writers at least since Wilhelm Dilthey. The hermeneutics developed by Dilthey was explicitly designed to lay a foundation for the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), and the sciences concerned with humans as culture-creating beings must be able to clarify what a person or human being is. The consequence is that some account of what we today call personal identity will be necessary to answer such questions as “What is a person?” and “Who interprets the expressions of humans?”
The question of identity, when referring to humans, has been clarified by Ricoeur, who points out that there are two major meanings of the word “identity.”2 There is the sense suggested by the Latin idem, which implies a permanence in time of the sort clearly evident in “strict” or “logical” identity (e.g., A = A). In contrast, the Latin ipse, when used to refer to a person, “implies no assertion concerning some unchanging core of the personality” (OA 2). For this sense of ipse-identity, what is crucial is the “sameness” or continuity of something through time. So, for example, a ship that is rebuilt at various times can be called the “same” ship even when all its timbers, masts, hardware, and sails have been replaced. In a somewhat similar way, a person changes constantly from childhood to old age, yet is presumably the “same” person. This kind of identity through change is often called “narrative identity,” because it is plausible to think that what unifies the whole has a story-shaped structure.3 The question of personal identity, then, is the question: In virtue of what is a person correctly considered the same person throughout a life-course?4 As we shall see, this question is central to the thought of Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Ricoeur, as well as other thinkers in the hermeneutic tradition.
Contemporary hermeneutics may be thought of as beginning with Dilthey, a multifaceted historian-philosopher whose initial investigations into the foundations of historical science led him to try to develop a full account of the human sciences. His life’s work was conceived in his mature years as working out a Construction of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, a project he referred to in a Kantian vein as a “Critique of Historical Reason.” The aim of the overall studies that make up this project is epistemological in a broadly Kantian sense: the question is, What are the conditions for the possibility of knowledge in the human sciences? Dilthey’s initial approach to this topic is found in his earlier Introduction to the Human Sciences, which appeared in part in 1883, in his Ideas about a Descriptive and Analytical [Zergliedende] Psychology (1894), and in a wealth of papers written during the last decades of the 1800s. The aim of these early writings is clearly epistemological: “The human consciousness and a valid description of its mental context [Zusammenhang] is the basis of epistemology.”5 But this epistemology is based on a description of processes of cognition that are studied by psychology: as Dilthey says, psychology is the basis for the human sciences because “its subject-matter, mental connections, are a directly experienced, living reality” (WD 91; translation modified).
Despite apparent similarities to empiricism, however, Dilthey’s claim that we have direct access to the mental has only superficial resemblances to the views of the empiricists. For Dilthey always sees human beings as psychophysical unities: if we want to examine mental life, he writes, we would need to abstract it out “from the psychophysical unity, which is the whole man” (WD 164). The “whole human being” is a being that is first and foremost enmeshed in a social context, where the mental and the environment form an interactive whole. For this reason, “[w]e must start from the culturally shaped human being … resorting to comparative psychology, evolutionary history, experiment and the analysis of what history has produced” (WD 91). The living, dynamic, historically embedded human being is always a complex whole. The advantage of starting with descriptive psychology is not that we have immediate access to incorrigible truths, but that it is, in effect, the only game in town. There is no way to gain access to anything except through our medium of our access to things, which is consciousness. What we must do, on this view, is avoid reading categories into our experience while remaining aware that what we experience in our lives is always conditioned by concrete circumstances “behind which we cannot go” (to use Dilthey’s phrase).
Dilthey sometimes called his starting point “psychology,” at other times “anthropology.” But, increasingly, he conceptualizes his field of interest using words built on the German term for “life” (Leben, Erlebnis, etc.). In his most mature works, he rejects the underlying assumptions of epistemology, especially those that appear in the Descartes–Locke tradition. In a memorable line, he writes, “No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume and Kant, only the diluted juice of reason, a mere process of thought” (WD 162). Reflecting on his early fascination with “psychology” in his later years, he says, “Only in inner experience, in the facts of consciousness, did I find firm anchorage for my thoughts…. All science and scholarship [comes from] perception, but all perceptual experience is originally connected, and given validity, by our consciousness (within which it occurs), indeed by our whole nature. … [U]ndistorted reality only exists for us in the facts of consciousness given by inner experience” (WD 161). Yet, despite his initial starting point, Dilthey had very little interest in epistemology as such. His interest from early on was sparked by a concern to grasp the achievements of the historical school of the second half of the nineteenth century, the work inspired by Leopold von Ranke, Johann Gustav Droysen, Wilhelm Windelband, and others. In this sense, the epistemological concerns of descriptive psychology were only preparatory to the Critique of Historical Reason.
At the same time, Dilthey takes great care to be faithful to the concrete realities of life as it is lived and experienced by real people in worldly contexts. What such an examination reveals is that humans are dynamic, interactive beings whose life-experience contains an underlying structure. Dilthey uses the term “structure” to refer to various sorts of interconnected phenomena in the flow of life that exhibit recurring patterns of relations. Human life-experience itself exhibits a triadic structure, where certain characteristics (called “categories”) reappear in similar but not identical ways. First, every experience involves an apprehension of what is present in some way. This dimension of cognitive awareness gives us our sense of presence. Second, the experience of what is present almost invariably evokes feelings and emotions of some sort. These feelings arise because of past experiences that carry with them some element of sentimental response. Third, the emotions in turn motivate the person’s will. How we feel about things can impel us to decide on projects for the future that will change, preserve, or eliminate what presents itself at the moment. For this reason, there is purposiveness involved in any experience: humans are teleological, goal-directed beings, even though there is no pregiven purpose shared by all people. The structural relations underlying life-experience enable the inquirer to go back and forth over the structural whole: we grasp projects in terms of perceptions and feelings, we deal with feelings in terms of perceptions and the outcome of projects, while the present is always shaped by both past and future. These structures define the dimension of temporality, which is at the core of human existence. Life is “in” time in the dual sense that (1) it unfolds through some time, and (2) it defines what time is—how it counts or matters—for a human being.
Temporality is itself shaped by two crucial categories of life-experience. First, life is developmental: it is our nature to be going somewhere, accomplishing something in our lives, and this leads to development (Entwicklung). Second, there is a propensity in life to move toward self-formations or configurations of meaning that are experienced as definitive for a person, Dilthey’s category of Gestaltung. These categories are inseparable from “the category of meaning” (Bedeutung), the fundamental organizing factor in the life of a person, a nation, or humanity as a whole. Meaning seems to be Dilthey’s most general category, the structural element that binds all others into a life-unity and makes a life intelligible in autobiography. “Experience in its concrete reality is made coherent by the category of meaning.”6 Each individual has some sense of the meaning of his or her life as it runs its course, “right up to the time of death” (PM 90). But the complete meaning of a life can be grasped only at its last moment, that is, at death: “Only in the last moment of a life can the balance of its meaning be appreciated, so it can be done only for a moment or by another who retraces that life” (PM 74–75). Because an individual’s life provides the paradigmatic example of a meaningful whole, the foundational form for all history is autobiography (and its cousin, biography).
Dilthey claims that the “only complete, self-contained and clearly defined happening [Geschehen] encountered everywhere and in every concept that occurs in the human sciences, is the life-course. This forms a nexus circumscribed by birth and death” (PM 97). But even though individual lives are the basic building blocks, Dilthey, as we have seen, emphasizes that every human is a participant and placeholder in a wider sociohistorical context and shared world that provides his or her “possibilities” of self-understanding, self-evaluation, and enactment. Every individual “is a point where systems [such as religion, art and law] intersect….” (PM 78) “The individual person … is a historical being. He is determined by his place in time and space and his position in the interaction of cultural systems and communities” (PM 79). Thus, the historian always already has some prior grasp of the historical context because he or she is a historical being—a “carrier” (Träger)—of shared understandings and forms of expression that embody a structure held in common by all. As Dilthey says concerning the human sciences, “Here life grasps life” (PM 79).
Dilthey provides a vivid example of structure in a description of lying awake at night:
I lie awake at night worrying about the possibility of completing in my old age works I have already begun; I consider what is still to be done. My awareness of all this forms a structured whole…. I abstract the structural connections and isolate them…. I know about my works [which are linked in a] far distant past … Another element leads into the future; … I worry about it; I prepare myself inwardly for the task. All this ‘about,’ ‘from’ and ‘towards,’ all these relations to what has been lived and remembered or still lies in the future, carries me along backwards and forwards. [Because of the connectedness of experiences within a larger whole,] we are carried along in this way.
(PM 102)
The course of a life, its “happening,” is a whole in which every experience is related to the others and to the whole. “This connectedness of life is not a sum … of successive moments but a unity constituted by relationships which link all the parts” (PM 103). The present recovers memories, and these together propel us toward possibilities, which, Dilthey suggests, point to “over-riding purposes to which all individual purposes are subordinated, that is, as the realizing of a supreme good” (PM, 103). This whole contains the meaning of life: “The connectedness of a life can only be understood through the meaning the individual parts have for the whole. … Meaning is the comprehensive category through which life becomes comprehensible” (PM 105). Here we see Dilthey’s solution to the “problem of personal identity,” the question about what constitutes the connectedness and continuity [Zusammenhang] of a life-course. Identity is the result of an activity of self-formation (Gestaltung) through time, in which an overarching configuration takes shape, a pattern and organization that expresses a meaning (and “no life-course is so poor that a self-formation does not occur in it,” he says) (PM 106).
We find the defining meaning of our own lives through self-reflection (Besinnung).7 But Dilthey insists that we do not learn about ourselves from introspection: “It is not through introspection that we comprehend human nature” (PM 92). Our own consciousness is only an island that arises from “inaccessible depths” (PM 116). And, as we saw, the individual person is merely a crossing-point of social systems, where there is no distinction of I and Thou. Nevertheless, we can gain self-knowledge through the second major triadic structure Dilthey identifies. Our access to life starts with life-experiences, those fairly intense and self-contained occurrences that strike us in the course of our lives (such as visiting a favorite painting at a museum or a brief but intense conversation). Dilthey holds that life-experiences by their nature “press out” to take the form of expressions in the world: “Inner states find outward expressions” (PM 75). As a result, the world in which we are embedded is a totality of “objectivations” of life, manifestations of human creativity and responsiveness found in buildings and monuments as well as in poems and artworks. Finally, we grasp expressions, our own as well as those of others, by understanding, which involves comprehending particulars in terms of their place in the whole of the meaning-laden life-world. This human-created world embodied in concrete form Dilthey (following Hegel) calls “objective mind.”
Objective mind is the holistic background of life we always have some mastery of from childhood on.
From this world of objective mind, the self receives sustenance from earliest childhood. It is the medium in which the understanding of other people and their expressions takes place. … Every square planted with trees, every room in which seats are arranged, is intelligible to us from our infancy because human planning, arranging and valuing—common to us all—have assigned its place to every square and every object in the room. The child grows up within the order and customs of the family …. Before it learns to talk it is already wholly immersed in that common medium.
(PM 120)
It follows that our sense of our own identity (Selbigkeit), the defining nature of the individual’s own self, is accessible only through the “detour” of understanding expressions.8 I discover my fear of spiders, for example, only by seeing how I recoil in their presence. But even here, the feeling is not something different from the expression, for “both the gesture and the terror are not two separate things, but a unity” (PM 120). What defines my personal identity is neither the enduring presence of a substance nor the activity of a transcendental “I think” accompanying my actions. Instead, identity is defined by the constantly self-transforming connectivity of the life-experiences making up the dynamic whole of the life-course as this comes to light in my interactions with others, the environment, and what I do. It is a product of the circular interaction of life-experience, expression, and understanding.
Heidegger was explicit about his debt to Dilthey, even though the specific references to his predecessor are found more often in his lectures of the early 1920s rather than in his masterpiece, Being and Time (1927).9 Heidegger rejects the conception of the self as a substance, holding that even Dilthey had been too attached to the Cartesian cogitationes (res cogitans).10 Where Dilthey would have used “life” to refer to human being, Heidegger uses the ordinary German word for “existence,” Dasein. The primary subject matter of Being and Time is: What is it to be human? The issue of being a self is fundamental to this inquiry, obviously, but from its first introduction it is clear that the being of a “self” or an “I” cannot be taken as self-evident. Heidegger suggests that even “the Self … [is] ‘only’ one [eine] way of Being of this entity” (SZ 117; trans. modified). The very idea that we have immediate access to ourselves is denied: “… [E]ven one’s own Dasein becomes something that it can proximally ‘come across’ only when it looks away from ‘life-experiences’ and the ‘center of its actions,’ or does not yet ‘see’ them at all” (BT 119).
Another reason why the being of a human self is initially left undecided is that Heidegger, in contrast to Dilthey, shows very little interest in the distinction between human and natural sciences, with the consequence that the being of the human does not need to be made explicit at the outset. Distancing himself from Dilthey, he rejects the last traces of epistemology found in his predecessor, undercutting the “inner/outer” distinction altogether. The shift away from “life” to “Dasein” is achieved not by arguments, but by simply eschewing words that imply “subject” and “object,” words such as “mind,” “body,” “consciousness,” “representation,” and so forth. By avoiding the language of the tradition, Heidegger tries to show how much of human reality can be grasped without buying into traditional ontology and its accompanying pseudo-problems.
Heidegger replaces “descriptive psychology” with “phenomenological hermeneutics,” the description of our interpretive comportment toward things. In his account, Dasein is first and foremost the unified phenomenon of “being-in-the-world,” where this is conceived as a holistic field of interaction in which agency and equipment-in-use are interwoven (as, for example, in the “world of finance” or “the academic world”). The practical life-world is always a shared context of meanings, shaped by community norms, with a history that has established common understandings and practices. In this world, Dasein is at the most basic level a participant in what Heidegger calls the They or the Anyone (das Man, where the neuter man refers to anyone and everyone). The “who” of Dasein in the midst of average everydayness is “the They” (das Man), with the result that, initially and most commonly, there is no “person” that could have a self distinct from the “They-self” which all of us generally are. In our being as the They, “we take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; we shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as they shrink back; we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking” (SZ 126-7). Enmeshed in a world governed by public norms and conventions, Dasein finds its possibilities “and it does so first in accordance with the way things have been interpreted by the They. This interpretation has already restricted the options of choice to what lies within the range of the familiar, the attainable, the respectable—that which is fitting and possible” (SZ 194). As to the question of how one has personal identity in the midst of this conformism, the answer would seem to be that one does not. Heidegger suggests that something like personal identity is an achievement, not a given. It is something we can accomplish, not something that we already are when we first appear on the scene.
The issue of “identity” (Ständigkeit) emerges in Being and Time only after Heidegger has developed his conception of authenticity. Our condition as They-selves is one of dispersal, distraction, and forgetfulness, a condition Heidegger calls falling. But this “downward plunge” captures only one aspect of Dasein, Heidegger says. If we are to grasp human existence in all its dimensions, we must also give a description of the mode of authenticity, a capacity that is open to all of us. In order to be able to realize this capacity for authenticity, one must undergo a personal transformation, one that tears us away from falling. This is possible only given certain fundamental insights arising in a life.
The first major transformation can occur when one experiences an intense bout of anxiety. In anxiety, the familiar world that seemed to ensure one’s security suddenly breaks down, and in this world-collapse one finds that the significance of things is “completely lacking” (SZ 186). One finds oneself alone, with no worldly supports for one’s existence. In anxiety, Dasein encounters itself as an individual, ultimately alone. In Heidegger’s words, “Anxiety individualizes Dasein and thus discloses it as ‘solus ipse’” (SZ 188). The second transformative event is the encounter with one’s “ownmost” possibility, the possibility of death as the possible loss of all possibilities. In facing our own finitude, we find that we are always future-directed happenings or projects, where what is crucial to that ongoing forward movement is not its actualization of possibilities, but the “How” with which one undertakes one’s life. Heidegger tries to envision a way of life he calls anticipatory running-forward (Vorlaufen) as a life that clear-sightedly and intensely carries out its projects, no matter what they may be. The third transformative event is hearing the call of conscience. What conscience calls out to us is the fact that we are “guilty” in the German sense of that word, which means that we have a debt (Schuld) and are responsible for ourselves. Conscience tells us that we are falling short of what we can be, and that we are obliged to take up the task of living with resoluteness and full engagement. Such resoluteness is seen clearly in the case of vocational commitments, where one has heard a calling and feels pulled toward pursuing that calling.11
The three “existentialia” that structure Dasein’s being-in-the-world make up the “formal existential totality of Dasein’s structural whole,” what Heidegger calls care (SZ 192). To be Dasein, an entity must have some sense of what it is “coming toward” (Zu-kunft, the German for “future”), what has “come before” (what is “passed,” Vorbei), and what one is dealing with in one’s current situation (“making present”). The defining characteristics of Dasein’s potentiality-for-being are displayed in the transformative events that lead to the possibility of being authentic (eigentlich, from the stem meaning “proper” or “own”). When Dasein confronts and grasps its authentic possibility of being, it becomes possible to see the whole of Dasein, including both its being as a They-self and as authentic being-one’s-self. “Dasein is authentically itself in [its] primordial individualization,” where the “constancy [Ständigkeit] of the Self … gets clarified” (SZ 322). What defines the wholeness and unity of Dasein is determined not by an underlying substance (e.g., the sub-ject, that which underlies), but by the “steadiness and steadfastness” (beständige Standfestigkeit) of authenticity (SZ 322). This unified whole of Dasein’s “happening,” its finite and futural unfolding, is defined as “primordial temporality.”
The difference between Dilthey and Heidegger is striking at this point. Dilthey sees the identity of the self as residing in the connectedness of life-experiences through time, where time is just the “clock time” we experience in ordinary life—the sequential series of nows coming from earlier and extending into the future. In contrast, Heidegger does not think that the happening of Dasein is in time; instead, Dasein as a happening stretching itself along is time. In Heidegger’s words, Dasein, conceived as authentic, “is time itself, [it is] not in time.”12 Heidegger criticizes Dilthey for suggesting that human existence is to be understood as a string of life-experiences (Erlebnisse) that occur one after another during a pregiven stretch of time, where time is something that is there independent of and prior to human being.
When Dilthey asks about the “connectedness (Zusammenhang) of life,” he can account for the connection only by proposing another item in life, namely, “meaning,” where this is understood as what connects the series of events. However, explaining connectedness in this way is like trying to explain how a pearl necklace is held together by claiming that there is one additional pearl that does the job of holding them all together. For Dilthey, connectedness is found in “meaning,” but, since the concept of meaning refers to one more mental item among the others, it is unclear how it accounts for the connectedness of the whole. The Diltheyan picture is summed up by Heidegger as follows: the “upshot is that, in this sequence of life-experiences, what is ‘really’ ‘actual’ is, in each case, just the life-experience which is present-at-hand ‘in the current “now,”’ while those life-experiences which have passed away or are only coming along, either are no longer or are not yet ‘actual’” (SZ 373). Such an account is, of course, unable to make sense of personal identity.
Heidegger rejects the idea that life consists of a sequence of “life-experiences” (as opposed to the actual flow of experience, Erfahrung), and he sees the connection of life’s events not as just one more item in the mental box, but as the very existential being of Dasein as it “stretches along between birth and death” (SZ 374). “Dasein does not fill up a track or stretch ‘of life’—one which is somehow present-at-hand—with the phases of its momentary actualities. It stretches itself along in such a way that its own being is constituted in advance as a stretching-along” (SZ 374). The identity of Dasein consists in its ex-tensio, its stretching-along, its movement (Bewegtheit) in existing. Heidegger identifies this “stretching along and stretching itself along” with the word, happening (Geschehen, misleadingly translated as “historizing”) (SZ 375). This dimension of movement makes up Dasein’s being as historicity (Geschichtlichkeit), a concept that is supposed to give us a more concrete characterization of “temporality.”
Note that Heidegger creates a family of words with related meanings, from “happening” (Geschehen), “history” (Geschichte, a word that also means “story”), and historicity (Geschichtlichkeit, translated as “historicality”). In section 74 of Being and Time, he provides an account of “the basic constitution of historicity,” an account that fills out our understanding of authentic temporality. The characterization of authentic temporality had already shown that Dasein as authentically temporal is always futurally directed, a “being-towards-death.” This new discussion starts by emphasizing not where a life “between birth and death” is directed, but where it starts—its “beginning.” Heidegger asks where Dasein’s possibilities come from—the existential correlate of “birth” or “natality”—and answers, as always, by saying that all possibilities come from the They. But now the emphasis is on two ways of thinking about this source of possibilities. Throughout Being and Time, the distorted source of possibilities had been called “tradition.” In this new development at the end of Being and Time, the suggestion is that one can take over one’s background of possibilities as coming not from the tradition, but from what Heidegger now calls the heritage (Erbe) (SZ 383). Understood in this way, the historical resources for our being are understood as the guidelines “of the community, of the people (Volk)” of which one is a part. Understood in this light, our lives are always already guided in advance by what Heidegger calls the shared destiny (Geschick) of a historical culture.
Experiencing history as a destiny completes the idea of the story-shaped history of a people, its authentic “happening.” Authentic historicity is living according to a sense of a destiny shared by a community. To be fully human, in the sense of that word that implies personal identity, is to be a happening (Geschehen) bound up with the lives of others in a community (Geschick), embodying a narrative structure (Geschtlichkeit), and contributing to the unfolding of a communal history (Geschichte). Authentic identity is inseparable from its belongingness to an interwoven happening as “the repetition of the heritage of possibilities” that make steadiness and directedness possible (BT 390). As bound together in a shared undertaking, we “hand down” and “transmit” a range of possibilities that impart meaning and connectedness to our lives. Personal identity, then, is found in the self-constancy and steadfastness of the “stretching out” of a life, from start to finish.
As a student in the 1920s, Gadamer attended courses taught by Heidegger, such as “Ontology—Hermeneutics of Facticity” (1923).13 At this time, Heidegger was intensely involved with the late Wilhelm Dilthey (as is evident from his Kassel lectures of 1925, Wilhelm Dilthey’s Research and the Struggle for a Historical Worldview),14 as well as a broad conception of ontological hermeneutics that is concerned not with methods of interpretation, but with the being of the entity that interprets and understands, namely, Dasein. In his 1922 essay on Aristotle, Heidegger wrote that philosophy is “simply the explicit and genuine actualizing of the tendency to interpretation which belongs to the basic movements of life in which what is at issue is this life itself and its being.”15 As this indicates, Heidegger conceived of interpretation as built into practical life itself, and he saw philosophy as fundamentally a matter of interpreting life in its concrete, temporal unfolding. The primacy of epistemology in philosophy, still evident in Dilthey, has been abandoned.
When Gadamer takes up the title “hermeneutics” for his central project, the concern is with what has come to be called “philosophical hermeneutics,” not the technique of interpretive method formerly denoted by the term “hermeneutics.” Gadamer asks about the nature of understanding and how it is possible, and he addresses these questions by drawing on the fundamental ontological approach of Heidegger’s question of the being of Dasein. In contrast to Heidegger, Gadamer is interested in clarifying the distinction between human and natural sciences, and shows little explicit interest in questions about personal identity or the being of a person. In agreement with his teacher, he thinks that Western philosophy has gone wrong in thinking of the human self as a “subject,” as an individual mind or field of consciousness, with the consequence that the event character of the wider context of the intelligible world is overlooked. Even though personal identity is not thematized, however, Gadamer’s hermeneutics has important consequences for that topic.
Truth and Method, which first appeared in German in 1960, makes a point of criticizing many of Dilthey’s core ideas. This is evident in his rejection of Dilthey’s suggestion that the historical sciences should be founded on autobiography. Even though, as we have seen, Dilthey opposes the Western tendency to privilege the Cartesian subject, “he was not able to escape his own entanglement in epistemology:”
Self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung) and autobiography—Dilthey’s starting points—are not primary and are therefore not an adequate basis for the hermeneutical problem, because through them history is made private once more. Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live. The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life.16
Dilthey’s most fundamental concept—the relatively new idea of “life-experience” (Erlebnis), understood as an intense, holistic unity of apprehension in the present—should be replaced by the concept of experience as Erfahrung, where this is seen as an unfolding development of life that is often a story of disappointed hopes and expectations (as in a “person of experience,” who has become aware of the limitations and discouragement endemic to life).
For beings like ourselves, who have long been a “conversation” (in Hölderlin’s famous words), our primary experience is one of “belongingness” and participation in an ongoing dialogue. Gadamer’s account of language shows that the center of being of dialogue is not the discussants, but the subject matter (Sache) being discussed. On this view, the participants in the conversations are what they are only through the mediation of the topic at hand, just as the players in a game are what they are only through the ongoing flow of the game. What is primary about human beings is not that they are a collection of individuals who come together, but that they are participants in a dynamic event of life where each is defined by his or her place in the whole.
In Gadamer’s view, the crucial turning point to this new way of thinking about our being is found in Heidegger’s early recognition of the “fore-structure of understanding” (see BT §§31–2). For Heidegger, Dasein is a way of being that involves projecting possibilities of future interpretation within the contexts of intelligibility into which it is thrown. In Gadamer’s formulation, this fore-structure we inherit in growing up into a world consists in prior understandings or prejudgments (prejudices). Regarded as a thrown projection, human existence cannot be grasped as a series of life-experiences given with the immediacy of presence in a sequential way through time. This positing of the immediacy of the present as primary is a product of the epistemological outlook that has dominated philosophy since Descartes. In contrast, Gadamer claims that, with Heidegger, “the whole idea of grounding itself underwent a total reversal. … Heidegger’s thesis was that being itself is time. This burst asunder the subjectivism of modern philosophy—and, in fact, as was soon to appear, the whole horizon of questions asked by metaphysics, which tended to define being as what is present” (TM 257). As interpreted by Heidegger and Gadamer, the “self” is always enmeshed in a wider context of understanding (called a horizon), which is shaped in advance by a background of traditions that are themselves given their meaning and vision by projections into the future. As Charles Taylor describes this, “we are aware of the world through a ‘we’ before we are through an ‘I.’”17
Heidegger and Gadamer present a conception of the human not as a mental receptacle for experiences and not as a subject regarded as a “substance” of any sort. Instead, in their “event ontology,” to be human is to be an unfolding event directed toward possibilities of the future, an event that derives its meaning from the historical reservoir of intelligibility of the traditions in which it is enmeshed. Human existence itself has the structure of a hermeneutic circle in this sense: just as understanding a text requires a prior sense of how the story will come out, the “anticipation of completion” that is constantly revised in the light of what appears along the way, so human existence itself is an ongoing event given meaning by anticipations of where it is all going to come out “in the end,” anticipations which are constantly being revised in the light of developments along the way. We exist as ever-revisable stories that are coming to realization in interaction with the vicissitudes of our decision-making and suffering of chance events, stories we are enacting even if with little conscious awareness of what we are doing. We are thrown projections in the sense that we draw on traditions and background interpretations within our shared world in moving toward the realization of projects we have undertaken with others.
Seen in this light, being an individual is just one set of social practices among others, a way of being for humans that emerged in a particular place and time and someday may disappear. What constitutes “personal identity” for us, then, is the story or stories (Geshichte) we enact in our lives together. In this sense, our lives are inseparable from ongoing traditions in which what has come before is transmitted (the verbal sense of “tradition”) in forming the shared horizon of understanding of the present.
The primacy of tradition brings to light the way in which our identity is enmeshed in a wider historical context that shapes and sustains our day-to-day sense of things. It follows that our relation to the past is not something constraining, something we need to overcome in order to achieve a presuppositionless outlook on things. On the contrary, in Gadamer’s words, “our usual relationship to the past is not characterized by distancing and freeing ourselves from the tradition. Rather, we are always situated within traditions, and this is no objectifying process—i.e., we do not conceive of what tradition says as something other, something alien. It is always part of us, a model or exemplar.” (TM 282). Given this picture, there is no role to be played by the old conceptions of “substances” revered by Western philosophy, including such static entities as “mind” and “body.” In their place, there is the “matter at hand” (die Sache) that is dynamically in play between us, the topic that matters, what counts for us. Our being, the being of the interlocutors who are seeking agreement by a fusing of horizons, is derivative from this Sache.
Ricoeur’s major contributions to hermeneutic theory are evident in a number of books and collections of papers from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. But his work on the topic of identity appears in a collection of related volumes from the 1980s and culminates in what is arguably his greatest work, Oneself as Another, published in 1990 (with the English translation appearing in 1992). The views on narrative identity developed there engage the manifold directions his thought took over the years, while also showing how he confronts recent developments in analytic philosophy. The distinctively hermeneutic approach Ricoeur takes to identity in Oneself as Another is fully visible only in light of Time and Narrative, his magnificent three-volume study published in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
In this multivolume work on time, as well as in a number of working papers written at the same time, Aristotle and Heidegger play a crucial role in providing a basis for Ricoeur’s conception of narrative identity. From Aristotle’s Poetics, he takes the thought-provoking characterization of plot (muthos) as a presentation (mimesis) not of people, but of action and life: “For tragedy is an imitation not of men but of actions and of life” (Poetics, 50a: 16–17).18 The idea that emplotment pertains to action and life leads Ricoeur to regard the being of agents as secondary to the structure of agency and life itself. Life and action are to be seen as a movement toward the realization of a whole where that is understood as a meaning-filled, concordant intertwining of events that are initially given as discordant. Aristotle’s account of this interweaving and movement toward wholeness provides Ricoeur with a way of understanding identity in the sense of idem.
For his conception of the temporality of a life, Ricoeur draws on Heidegger’s account of a life as an ongoing unfolding toward a future, with its related dimensions of “motivation and the ability to mobilize in the present [the] experience inherited from the past …” (TN 1: 61). Ricoeur summarizes what he says is “well known” about Heidegger (though it is actually quite contentious):
Heidegger reserves the word temporality (Zeitlichkeit) for the most originary form and most authentic experience of time, that is, the dialectic of coming to be, having been, and making present. … The words ‘future,’ ‘past,’ and ‘present’ disappear, and time figures as the exploded unity of the three temporal exstases. … As is also well known, being-towards-death imposes, counter to Augustine, the primacy of the future over the present and the closure of the future by a limit internal to all anticipation and every project.
(TN 1: 61)
As should be clear from this passage, Ricoeur’s account of temporality draws not only on Heidegger, but also on threads in Dilthey and Gadamer. This hermeneutic account of connectedness (Zusammenhang) provides the basis for his account of personal identity in terms of the Aristotelian model of emplotment or narrative.
For Ricoeur, typical humans can be understood as having a stable, enduring personal identity not by virtue of having permanent character traits, and not just in virtue of having an enduring body, but because the events in their lives can be intelligibly grasped as having a narrative structure that weaves the initially discordant assemblage into a concordant whole. Ricoeur goes beyond the proto-narrative accounts of identity found in Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer by distinguishing different levels at which life can be seen as having a narrative structure.
First, there is the most basic is the level of prefiguration of plot that lies in an inchoate form in the actual course of action in a person’s life. What this means is that we all have some tacit or pre-articulate sense of a story line in the course of our absorbed activities in life. The next higher level of explicitness about narrative organization in actual life events is called configuration. At this level, segments of our lives—and, to some extent, our lives themselves—can be understood as having a story-structure. We discern a point to what we do, and we see our actions as part of a larger project, as realizing (or failing to realize) a life-plan. Ricoeur echoes Gadamer in saying that this structuring “constitutes a history that has all the characteristics of a tradition,” where this term refers not to the inert transmission of some deposit of material, “but the living transmission of an innovation always capable of being reactivated by a return to the most creative moments of poetic activity” (TN 1: 68). In other words, the possibility of what Heidegger calls repetition is always built into the meaningful course of events. From configuration, narrative history as we typically understand it is possible in the form of refiguration. The act of telling, stabilized in writing, draws on and yet reshapes the sequence of events (TN 1: 64–71). Story lines become paradigmatic models by the ways they appear in legends, myths, and novels.
The structure of narrativizing is that of the hermeneutic circle. The prefiguration, colored and given initial form by our “thrownness” into a context of intelligibility, presents itself as pointing toward a higher degree of articulation, the ultimate refiguration. We tacitly experience events in the light of our pre-articulate sense of a potential telling of how story lines of certain sorts will “come out.” At the same time, the anticipated refigurations redefine the initial background of prefigurations, letting different modalities stand out. Configurations take shape through the back-and-forth movement of prefiguration and refiguration. Moreover, as action is always embedded in and indebted to a shared context, there is an interdependence of an individual’s actions and the wider context of a community’s undertakings. Narrativity in life both depends on and makes possible the historicity of a community. History and historiography emerge from the irreducible narrativity of life and action.19
In the Sixth Study of Oneself as Another, “The Self and Narrative Identity,” Ricoeur clarifies his own view of personal identity by comparing and contrasting it with the influential account worked out by the Irish-American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue.20 According to Ricoeur, MacIntyre examines “the idea of gathering together one’s life in the form of a narrative” to provide a basis for speaking about a “good life,” a conception that is the “cornerstone of his ethics,” Ricoeur says, “as it will be of ours” (OA 158). On MacIntyre’s view, stories are enacted before they are told, which means that the problems connected with refiguration through fiction are not pressing for his account.
Ricoeur considers four main criticisms of MacIntyre’s account. First, he suggests that MacIntyre fails to give due attention to the fact that stories are always embedded and therefore are not “authored” by us but are generally co-authored, with the result that identity cannot be unequivocally explained in terms of “authorship.”
Second, by overlooking the relationship between life and fiction, MacIntyre cannot adequately see the problem of identifying beginnings and ends.
Now there is nothing in life that serves as a narrative beginning; memory is lost in the hazes of early childhood; my birth and, with greater reason, the act through which I was conceived belong more to the history of others … than to me. As for death, it will finally be recounted only in the stories of those who survive me. I am always moving toward my death, and this prevents me from ever grasping it as a narrative end.”
(OA 160)
Third, the lack of a clear beginning and ending means that at most I can trace out a number of episodes and itineraries, “weave several plots” (OA 161). But from these multiple story elements, I have no basis for developing an overarching story that might capture my identity as a life story.
Fourth, and finally, given our thrownness—our entanglement in history—there seems to be no way to still speak of the narrative unity of a life (OA 161).
Rather than taking these arguments as grounds for simply rejecting MacIntyre’s view, Ricoeur takes them as a way of developing his own view more forcefully. With respect to the first objection, he agrees that the position of the author is equivocal, but argues that I am still the coauthor, and that a careful study of fiction can help us understand the way that stories and myths inhabit and shape our lives, with all their inbuilt equivocalness (OA 162). With respect to the second issue, grasping beginnings and ends, Ricoeur suggests that the study of fiction can help us “stabilize the real beginnings” formed by initiatives we take, and thereby fix the outlines of possible or anticipated ends in contrast to the end as such (OA 162). Concerning the third criticism, he points out that this shows “I can trace a number of itineraries, weave several plots; in short, I can recount several stories, to the extent that to each there lacks that ‘sense of an ending’ so stressed by Kermode” (OA 161). Finally, concerning the fourth criticism, he suggests that “the intertwining of life histories with one another” enables us to frame one narrative within another, richly displaying the interactivism within actual life. Since our exposure from earliest years to stories gives us a treasury of narrative frames, both fictional and supposedly biographical, that enable us to storyize our own experience in living out our lives, expanding our account of personal identity by reflecting on the stories we learn can only enrich our understanding of personal identity. As Ricoeur says, “Narrative is part of life before being exiled into writing; it returns to life along the multiple paths of appropriation and at the price of the multiple tensions just mentioned” (OA 163).21
Despite the deep differences among hermeneutic thinkers on the topic of personal identity, there are areas of common ground that enable us to formulate a general view that is distinctively hermeneutic. By way of conclusion, I shall lay out some of the core ideas that make up a hermeneutic view of identity.
As is the case generally in hermeneutics, in thinking about identity, the goal is not to discover causal connections or provide explanations of empirically observable phenomena. On the contrary, the goal is describing and understanding what shows up in our lives in order to make clear the intelligibility already inherent in it. The “hermeneutic of life” (or, as Heidegger calls it, the “hermeneutic of facticity”) displays the structures and bases of meaning common to agents in a shared cultural context. The most important component of life, as seen by all hermeneutic authors, is temporality, the unfolding, meaning-laden “happening” or “event” of a life-course. The illuminating descriptions arrived at by hermeneutics show us a great deal about what is commonly found in the being of individuals, of course, but all hermeneutic thinkers agree that individuals cannot be understood apart from their ties to others—and to a wider context of meanings and fields of significance—in a historically evolving, concrete life-world. Time in this specifically human sense is not merely a series of “nows” measurable by clocks. Instead, it is a dynamic interplay in which the future (in the form of anticipations of completion) lights up the relevance of past experiences so that the present moment can be taken as a site for initiating actions or responding to forces. In its richest form, this view of temporality holds that humans are not in time; they are time. The dimensions of time—thrownness, facticity, tradition, the moment of vision (kairos), the projects and life-plans of shared undertakings—all demarcate a human lived time in which occurrences can have their meaning and place.
Insofar as hermeneutics is the attempt to disclose meanings, hermeneutic philosophers see life as inhabited by meanings and (in most cases) by an overarching meaning that endows the entire course of events with a point and direction. This directedness binds things together and gives them the significance they have. Because my life matters for me—because it is going somewhere, adding up to something—that which I discover around me shows up as meaningful, just as my life itself has meaning (or meanings, as the case may be). Meaning shows how such concepts as purposiveness, achievement, and development can be applicable to human existence. Life understood as meaningful in turn makes it possible to see that the hermeneutic circle structures human existence in much the same way that understanding a text has a circular structure. We are motivated to act by our futural anticipations and expectations, and those futural projections make it possible for the past to emerge-into-presence as having significance as promising, obstructing, or challenging. Note that, given such a circular image of time, the present is not primary or “directly given,” but is instead derivative from the thrown projects that determine the “stretching out” of life as an ongoing story.
Ever since Dilthey’s introduction of the triad life-experience, expression, and understanding as definitive of human existence, human inner life—the conscious experience of what shows up throughout a life—is seen to be inseparable from its ways of being “ex-pressed” in the public world. And those expressions themselves are shaped and defined by their ways of being taken up and understood. These connections imply that the sharp distinction between “inner” and “outer” inherited from the Cartesian tradition is an untenable dualism that should be put in question. Moreover, it shows us that experience naturally presses outward toward action in public life, generating a world that is affected by what we do while it affects how we can experience anything. The final picture is of a holistic totality of interactions in which there is no way to draw sharp lines between what is me and you or between what is inner and outer. The growing tendency to question the objectifying ontology of the tradition and to move toward an event ontology is one of the products of hermeneutics. Its impact on the issue of personal identity is self-evident.
Finally, we can see that it is part of the human condition that we are always, as Wilhelm Schapp says, “entangled in stories” (In Geschichten verstrickt).22 What this means is that it is through the stories we hear in our early years that we absorb a shared understanding of the patterns of action that make sense in our cultural world, and on that basis we are evaluated and understood by those around us. It follows, then, that we are the stories we enact: while storyizing provides the basis for what can make sense in a historical culture’s life, we all realize versions of stories in our actions and lives as a whole. We are in this sense always historical (geschichtlich) and participants in a shared tradition.