Encountering the Indeterminacy of the Self
Abstract
In recent decades, phenomenology and hermeneutical phenomenology have taken the lead in addressing the question of personal identity through the inquiry of “who are you?”. However, this lead has questionable aspects in capturing the relationality between self, others, and the surrounding world, characterized by its ever-changing state. To understand personal identity in its ever-changing state of becoming, the primary focus of this paper is twofold: firstly, exploring how to reconcile these complex relations into a unified conception of personal identity by following Husserl’s notion of “indeterminate determinacy” and his theory of variation, and secondly, considering the limitations of defining this unity as an “autobiography or biography" in accordance with Arendt’s notion of a "life-story". In the final analyses the notion of life-story will be revised together with Waldenfels’s analyses on “radical alien” and Sözer’s “in-between”. This will prompt a reconsideration of personal identity as a process, leading to a genetic phenomenological perspective that recognizes the “indeterminacy of the self”.
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