Identity Crises and Value Conflicts

Abstract

In principle, identity and value refer to incommensurable realities. Platonism offers perhaps the most convenient means for illustrating this incommensurability: the two belong to different ‘worlds’. Identity defines the reality of each individual or group of individuals. Value comes from the ideal projected beyond all reality. Identity and value refer then to two different realms in the universe marked by language. However, their contents and their paths have been intimately linked. Identity, when it is conscious, carries also the givens imposed and inherited, such as physical characteristics, as well as projected self-images, in which the ideal and the imaginary work with the given to compose something. Value is always expressed in a language that remains in one way or another local, rooted in a particular path.