Modernity and Self-Identity

A person with a reasonably stable sense of self-identity has a feeling of biographical continuity which she is able to grasp reflexively and, to a greater or lesser degree, communicate to other people. In conditions of late modernity, people live ‘in the world’ in a different sense from previous eras of history. Everyone still continues to live a local life, and the constraints of body ensure that all individuals, at every moment, are contextually situated in time and space. ‘Living in the world’, where the world is that of late modernity, involves various distinctive tensions and difficulties on the level of the self. People can analyse these most easily by understanding them as dilemmas which, on one level or another, have to be resolved in order to preserve a coherent narrative of self-identity. The first dilemma is that of unification versus fragmentation. A second dilemma is that of powerlessness versus appropriation. A third dilemma is that of authority versus uncertainty.