Agency and the Other: On the intersubjective roots of self-identity
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-1-2012
Abstract
The essay argues that a systematic reconstruction of the intersubjective grounds of self-consciousness and self-identity will yield a complex non-reductive notion of agency. Core features of human agency include intentional causality, conscious understanding thereof, as well as the capacity to distinguish self-caused from externally caused phenomena. By analyzing how self-consciousness emerges from intersubjective perspective-taking and dialogue, a socially embedded and symbolically mediated notion of self-identity-one which is able to preserve the core features of human agency-becomes viable. G.H. Mead's work serves as heuristic framework to articulate the extent to which the Other's irreducible agency is constitutive of the self's capacity to establish an identity, now understood as a socially situated narrative self-interpreting process. Self-identity reveals to be an essential open yet not fragmented dynamic, a socially situated yet agent-driven phenomenon, and ethically indebted to the Other as providing the essential gift of selfhood. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Publication Title
New Ideas in Psychology
Volume
30
Issue
1
First Page
47
Last Page
64
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.1016/j.newideapsych.2010.03.010
ISSN
0732118X
Citation Information
Kogler. (2012). Agency and the Other: On the intersubjective roots of self-identity. New Ideas in Psychology, 30(1), 47–64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2010.03.010