A strong, rigid identity is commonly understood as a strength. However, the very idea of a fixed identity is premised on a philosophical myth: having a complete, all-encompassing account of The Truth, a worldview. Once we realise that we can recognise the imperative for having one, consistent identity as a relic of an ancient, eccentric ethical ideal, argues Raymond Geuss.

One of the earliest, and still, in many ways, one of the most vivid, literary representations of what has now come to be called ‘identity politics’ is Robert Musil’s novel, first published in 1930, Man without qualities.  The novel is set in Vienna during the period immediately before the outbreak of the First World War, and the central character, Ulrich, to his dismay, finds himself surrounded by people with strong fixed ‘qualities’ (we would say ‘identities’): feudal Catholics, socialists, people with strong commitments to Science, to The Law, to Commerce, or to Art, radical nationalists,  self-consciously ‘simple soldiers’, but he cannot see any of these forms of engagement as anything more than possible ways of living, chosen from among an almost unsurveyable group of others to which one could equally well devote oneself.  One of the other characters in the novel says that someone completely without qualities is not really a human being at all, and many nowadays would endorse that claim.  The novel focuses both on the realm of the individual and on that of the group: the political entity, too, of which Vienna was the capital, was a state that in one sense, as Musil says, died because of the lack of a simple linguistic term to refer to itself — was it Austria-Hungary, the Dual Monarchy, the Habsburg Empire? The linguistic defect was, however, merely a rather superficial expression of an underlying lack of a clear social and political identity.  It is somehow appropriate that the second volume of Musil’s novel, which was to deal with Ulrich’s actual attainment of a kind of realised ‘identity’ — through an incestuous relation with his sister — was never completed.   The intellectual world of the novel is presided over by the brooding presence of Nietzsche. Ulrich’s hysterical friend Clarisse even proposes declaring a ‘Nietzsche-Year’ to celebrate the impending sixty years of peace since Kaiser Franz-Josef became Emperor – that anniversary would have fallen in December 1918.

What happens, however, if the idea of a single, clearly accessible Truth which can substantially structure human life is abandoned?

Identity and worldview