Identitäts-Bildung and open-mindedness

Abstract

This contribution presents key elements of a complex concept of personal identity. It shows how central terms of identity theory – such as ‘continuity’ or ‘coherence’ – have counter-intuitive, partly paradoxical meanings that have little in common with their use in everyday language. Among the most important aspects of the concept as it is employed here is the fact that personal identity entails the idea of open-mindedness (openness to experiences of the new, the other and strange as well as that of self-transcendence). This is what distinguishes this specific form or structure of a person’s relation to the self and to the world from other forms (namely those of ‘totality’ and ‘multiplicity’). Such open-mindedness is – like the partial and limited autonomy of subjects who are able to act and speak – a logical, psycho- and sociological implicature of the concept of identity. Finally, this paper – briefly and selectively – sets this concept into relation with such notions of Bildung that are still effective and relevant today so that, in the end, the somewhat idiosyncratic term of Identitäts-Bildung is made sense of.