The Paradox of Ego-Identity: from Person to Nation

Back in the middle of the past century, philosophers understood that the freedom open society gave people would become a serious challenge for them. The accelerated processes of individualization, informational variety and almost no boundaries for communication require special personal qualities that contribute to super-adaptation based on excess psychological and social lability. As the social structure becomes more complex and the speed of the scientific, technological and social progress grows, the issue of a person’s self-determination becomes relevant. This is confirmed by a wide public discussion of the problem of ego-identity at various levels: ethnic, religious, national, political, gender, professional, etc. The study of human identity is impossible without analyzing the concepts of the crisis of self-determination and the individual’s identity. The article describes the essence of the crisis of identity, its historical genesis from the standpoint of contemporary philosophy, it also identifies relevant areas of research strategies to overcome such crises. The results of the research allow concluding that the ego-identity problem has a paradoxical essence. Based on this, it is assumed that one of the possibilities to resolve the identity crisis is to oppose the conditional variable of identity to its own opposite. It is shown that this method of resolving the crisis of self-determination is vicious, both in terms of epistemological grounds and in terms of ethical and aesthetic expression. Thus, the future research will focus on the following tasks: the analysis of the logical and epistemological foundations of the ego-identity problem; the clarification of the connection between reflexive self-consciousness and the self-determination crisis; the study of cultural and historical features of national identity on the example of different peoples; the determination of constructive mechanisms of self-determination, at the level of both the individual and society.

Keywords

Authors

References