"I" within measure

Abstract

Modernity provides us with a large number of technologies for self-identification. We meet them both in pseudoscientific discourse (for example: in astrology — natal charts, horoscopes), and scientific, in the field of psychology (classification of personalities by V. Stern, K.G. Jung, A.F. Lazursky, etc.). These technologies for self-identification, personality models are often misunderstood, being identified with the process of self-consciousness. The result of such identification is relativization of the image of the “I”, combination of various situational functions, social roles, character traits in the “I”. The author problematizes such an approach, in which the “I” is substatized, endowed with qualities, just as a thing is endowed with them; separates the concepts of “self-identification” and “self-consciousness”; raises questions related to the possibility of maintaining the continual unity of the “I”, with building the process of constituting the “I” through time. Unlike the procedure of self-identification, which can be modeled, self-consciousness cannot fit into patterns. Self-consciousness is plastic, changeable, rooted in time, but it always belongs to the same “I”.