What is identity?

Answer

Identity is a less easy concept than it seems at first glance. What you mean and what is generally understood by it nowadays is something like ‘personality’ (in the sense of ‘having a personality’). Personal identity means that someone is a specific person who is or can be recognized as such, as a unit. An individual, therefore, someone with a more or less clear, more or less permanent, steadfast personality. External, physical characteristics are part of this (one is female or male, young or old…) and play a role in identification. But nowadays ‘identity’ mainly means behavioral and mental (psychological) properties or characteristics, such as personal beliefs and attitudes towards other people, situations and events.

Those beliefs and (mental, psychological) attitudes (or ‘attitudes’, in a learned word) are indeed the result of our involvement with certain groups and the choices we make based on our ideas – you got that right. But you also seem to experience this as a contradiction. Probably because you see and experience ‘personality’ as something very personal, ultra-individual. It certainly is, but that ‘personality’ or ‘identity’ is formed in and through contact, interaction and confrontation with others, with the outside world, the world outside yourself, outside your ‘I’.

Identity is therefore a comprehensive and also somewhat flexible concept, which is therefore interpreted somewhat differently by many people. In any case, it is something you are not born with, but something that gradually grows and through which you become more and more individual for others and yourself (‘individual’ is derived from an ancient Greek word for ‘indivisible’, ‘which cannot be become’, which is, in other words, ‘unique’).

This view is in stark contrast to an equally common but much older and more conservative interpretation of the concept of identity, something you refer to as ‘you are Belgian or not’. The conception of ‘identity’ as something that is determined wholly or to a very great extent by your genes (genetically, people are largely identical), or by the environment in which you end up or are born; something that is determined, imposed or refused by your biology or by circumstances and by others – in fact goes back to the original (‘old’, ‘conservative’) meaning of the concept of identity. In ‘identity’ you will find the same stem as in ‘identical’ (similar). Both are derived from the Latin ‘idem’ (the same). Belgian (or Flemish) you are never alone. This concerns common identities, which are mainly expressed in the contrast to Others, other common identities (Nederlander, Waal). The fact of being Belgian, Flemish or Basque is for many people a permanent and even essential part of their identity, something they are proud of, experience as a characteristic and personal merit.

This last, ‘older’ form of identity mainly has to do with an assessment by others than yourself. It is then judged from an external perspective whether you are similar to, or identical with, another person or others. Identity here has to do with identification. The other form of identity, say one’s own identity, has more to do with self-awareness and self-experience, although these are also created through and through the gaze and interpretations of others.