Page 132 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

109 The Development of Normative Structures

of the use of personal pronouns—a logic that is the key to the
concept of identity’®?—but I do want to call briefly to mind the
ontogenetic stages of identity formation, in order to render pre-
cise the sense in which ego identity is understood as the ability
to sustain one’s own identity.
I distinguished between the identity that is propositionally
ascribed to things and events and the identity that persons claim
for themselves and maintain in communicative action. I did not
mention the identity of boundary-maintaining organisms, which
have an identity not only “for us,” as observers, but also an
identity ‘for themselves,” without, however, being able to rep-
resent and to secure it in the medium of linguistically established
intersubjectivity. (In his important book on the Stufen des
Organischen (1928), Helmuth Plessner—employing a conceptual
apparatus influenced by Fichte’s philosophy of reflection—tried
to distinguish different “‘positionalities,’’ and to clarify the con-
cept of the natural identity of living beings.) The ‘“‘natural
identity’’ of early childhood is probably also based on the time-
conquering character of a boundary-maintaining organism, namely,
the child’s own body, which it gradually learns to distinguish
from the physical/social environment. By contrast, the unity of
the person, which is constructed by way of intersubjectively rec-
ognized self-identification (analyzed by G. H. Mead), is based
on belonging to, and demarcating oneself from, the symbolic
reality of a group, and on the possibility of locating oneself in
it. The unity of the person is formed through internalization of
roles that are originally attached to concrete reference persons
and later detached from them—primarily the generation and sex
roles that determine the structure of the family. This role iden-
tity, centered on sex and age and integrated with the child’s own
body image, becomes more abstract and, at the same time, more
individual to the degree that the young child appropriates extra-
familial role systems up to and including the political order,
which is interpreted and justified by a complex tradition.
The continuity-guaranteeing character of role identities is based
on the intersubjective validity and temporal stability of behavioral
expectations. If the development of moral consciousness leads
beyond this conventional stage, role identity is shattered because