Let's talk about another Frenchman called Paul Ricœur. We have to because he writes about Narrative Identity and the continuous work of bridging the gap between sameness and change in us people. And yes, of course we're not going to call it sameness and change, that would be sad and pathetic like playing the Guitar in church or attempting to modernize Lutheranism.
The two new words are not big words but they share a quality found in the word entropy that makes it difficult to remember the difference between an increase of entropy from a decrease of entropy. With entropy the effort to visualize the distinction, i.e. whether a decrease in entropy means more chaos or less, might not be worth it. But in understanding Paul Ricœur and Arendt's understanding of the role narrative and story-making play in the building of structure in us people the difference between idem-identity and ipse-identity is a useful one.
Ipse is Latin, it means "himself," "herself" or "itself." And we are going to light a candle, ignore the sneers and within the context of Narrative Identity, we're going to call ipse-identity, Selfdom. It's the place we are at the moment in the present. It's not where we have been, and while selfdom might contain where we are thinking of going or where we might want to be going, it's not actually where we are going because fortune telling is a sin and people have been burned at the stake because of it.
Idem is Latin. Lawyers use it a lot when they write confusing documents, it means "the same." As idem-identity, it means your identity in terms of everything that came before.
In Arendt and Ricœur's story of a self there's a slope between the sameness of a past that can only be reinterpreted or reinforced and the selfdom of the present. A challenge to unity or a challenge to the cohesion of the narrative such as "I thought you told me you went to the doctor yesterday" creates tension on this slope. These challenges can sometimes persuade a person to get off the skis walk back uphill in search of a reinterpretation. If that looks like effort, they can plain make stuff up, which is easier to do when the idem is shall we say less well documented.
However, tread warily grasshopper as you pad around in this swamp of what Paul Ricœur called Selfdom and which one of Arendt's lovers had called The Dasein, the being there which over time engages in the creative process of making its own meaning.
Yes! In our day and age we people as sources of milkable data might well become a bundle of data points who pay the bills. But Creative Is. We make our own meaning, or if you prefer this bundle of data points confronts it's environment, it remains unpredictable, it's an authentic contribution, irrational, emotion driven, disordered and unreasonable yet it's everything entropy can't help but run toward.
What's Ricœur and or Arendt's definition of freedom?
Is it: "Yes avoid the shortcuts in case you stop bothering to think." Or is it: "Staying true to one's unique, usually unlikable, possibilities." Or could it be a mixture of both.
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