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AIPPh Documentation Leusden 2009
3. Approaches and concepts of (national, cultural, ethnical, religious) identity
Classical approaches to the notion of identity as well of culture are very often
essentialistic: typical traits or characteristics are isolated from experience and are
generalized: some sort of mental substance then is defining what we mean in difference
to other identities or cultures.
This may be dangerous especially if we compare national or religious identities to others:
Protestants are more educated than Catholics, the French are more elegant and refined
as the British, Russians are more brutal than the peace-loving Scandinavians, Muslims
are more traditional than Christians. This sort of superficial generalization is likely to
produce prejudices and is apparently the worst method of defining identities.
Following Descartes’ “cogito” Kant chose a more formal way based on subjective thinking
“that must accompany all my acts”, a mental substance which is not specified
individually.
John Locke criticized the notion of spritutal substance (“soul”) and reduced it to
pragmatic experience: personal identity means consciousness, namely the fact that at
one moment in life we remember other moments and feel them all as parts of one and
the same personal history and experience. “Our personal identity then consists, for
Locke, solely in pragmatically definable particulars. Whether, apart from these verifiable
facts, it also inheres in a spiritual principle, is a merely curious speculation. Locke ...
passively tolerated the belief in a substantial soul behind our consciousness.” (James
1967, 68f) But what, if we lose our memories? Do we then lose our personal identities
as well? This hints at the fact that there has to be an additional, outer and more
objective perspective ensuring the continuity of our being an individual person not only
with a personal history, but also with personal relations as well.
Of course one could define identity by material substances as well: we all have human
DNA, and genome analysis can figure out not only personal profiles, but even ethnical
affiliations. And our cultural identity could be described by certain languages, books,
theatres, inventions, traditions, monuments, museums, and so on, which all determine
our thought in one particular way that makes us different from or similar to others.
In fact the Wittgensteinian approach with certain “forms of life” goes in this direction. It
is neither essentialistic, nor nominalistic, but relationistic rather and can identify similar
cultures by “family resemblances”, an expression which could be found in Hume before.
Essentialist definitions suggest that each ethnic or cultural group has an absolute and
fixed set of historical characteristics of identity shared by all its members. Furthermore
each cultural identity has one important and essential defining characteristic, said to be
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