This paper examines the nature of human identity through philosophical and personal lenses, tracing ideas from pre-modern fixed social roles through Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke and Rousseau, to postmodern theorists like Michel Foucault. The paper argues that identity is not a stable, pre-given quality but is always relational, situational, and in flux. Drawing on personal experience as a mother, student, spouse, and professional, the author illustrates how a single person inhabits multiple identities simultaneously. The paper concludes that modern life, with its abundance of social roles and choices, places new burdens on individuals while also offering unprecedented freedoms to construct a meaningful sense of self.
Human identity is not a given. In other words, human beings are seldom born with a clear sense of who they are and what their individual and collective purpose is within a larger society. Instead, it is up to every human being to invest meaning in his or her life — or so implies the popular postmodern conception of human identity, proclaimed from every self-help book on the shelves. Find your true self! Build your best self! Make your identity matter in today's multicultural world! But according to academic and postmodern critical theorists of identity such as Michel Foucault, identities are not something that certain people have or do not have, or even something that people find. Rather, identities are about particular people in specific situations (Gauntlett, 1998).
Once upon a time, as anthropologists and historians of philosophy like Foucault observed, humanity's notions of identity were givens. A person did not "find" him or herself from within. Rather, one simply was a mother, a daughter, a son, a father, a child of God, or a servant of the king — according to the collectively determined constructs of identity. Who one was born was who one was as an identity. Society and outer forces clearly determined identity by custom and law.
Then, classical modern philosophers such as Rousseau and Locke suggested that human identity was not a given. Instead, all human beings, regardless of their socially determined status, had a right to construct and to change that status. "Locke declared that if a government did not adequately protect the rights of its citizens, they had the right to find other rulers," because the king was a man just like any other man, woman, or person (Jesseph, 2005). Simply because someone was born into a certain role did not mean that the integrity of his identity mattered more than the human life or interests of a cobbler.
In other words, the Enlightenment's stress upon human reason concluded that all human beings possessed integrity as people — as well as identities — rather than only those born with the right to rule others. Before the idea of the human dignity of the individual became common, the ideals of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights would have seemed incomprehensible. Before the Enlightenment, only having a position and identity in society granted one "rights," not simply one's identity as a human being.
The postmodern theorist Michel Foucault went one step further than the Enlightenment ideal of human dignity for all identities, regardless of nation, race, or class status. He suggested that there are no real, pre-existing specific groups or identities — not old ones determined by society and custom, nor even new ones, such as being a man or a woman, a mother or a father. As Gauntlett explains in his overview of Foucault's thought, identities are always situational rather than fixed categories that people simply inhabit (Gauntlett, 1998). This is a powerful notion, even if it initially seems counterintuitive, because it liberates individuals from the assumption that any single role or label can wholly define them.
"Personal roles as mother, student, and spouse illustrate flux"
"Racial and class identity shown as contextual and relational"
"Modern freedom of identity brings confusion and pressure"
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