Narrative personal identity and national identity

CFS lecture by Olay Csaba, Director, Institute of Philosophy, Eötvös University Budapest, Hungary

The lecture is open to all and all are welcome.

Abstract:

In this talk, I’m elaborating an account of the narrative structure of explicit national identity. I argue that collective identities are necessarily articulated in language, since the constitutive experiences and expectations for a community can only be shared in this way. The talk seeks to clarify why narratives are needed for understanding national identity. Narrative theories of personal identity will be discussed on the conviction that they provide a productive model and framework to investigate the narrative structure of national identity. The basic similarity that makes this model productive is that in both cases an account is needed about the temporal continuity and unity of an entity that is not static and unchanging.

The basic claim of the narrative theory of personal identity is that the identity of human persons should be grasped through a life narrative. Versions of the theory (e.g., MacIntyre, Ricœur, Taylor) differ in specifying the nature, scope and author of the story. A major motivation for a narrative theory of national identity is the attempt to avoid both horns of the following false dilemma: either to comprehend national identity as a given object that we can describe from an external point of view or, on the other hand, to regard it as an arbitrary fiction in favor of special, mainly political, desires or interests. In opposition to these conceptions – and also in view of differences between the narrative conception of collective and personal identity –, I propose to understand national identity as the result of an interpretative discourse on significant common experiences and shared history, where the plurality of interpretations inevitably affects the process of interpretation.