What Is Identity?

Quick Answer

Identity is the philosophical concept of who a person is — the continuity of selfhood over time and the characteristics that distinguish an individual. Existentialist, Greek, and Taoist traditions approach it differently: some emphasize conscious choice, others rational self-examination, and others the loosening of rigid self-concepts.

Definition

In ordinary speech, identity refers to the qualities, beliefs, and social roles that make someone recognizable as the same person across different moments of their life. Philosophy presses harder on this everyday meaning. It asks whether identity is something a person has, like a possession carried through time, or something a person does — a project of self-understanding that is never quite finished. The question matters because so much depends on it: moral responsibility, the coherence of a life narrative, the possibility of self-knowledge, and the grounds on which a person can claim to have changed rather than ceased to exist.

A useful distinction separates two senses of identity that philosophers often keep apart. Numerical identity asks whether the person here now is literally the same entity as the person who existed years ago — a problem of persistence. Qualitative identity asks whether two things share the same properties. Personal identity concerns the first: what makes me the same person despite the fact that nearly every cell, memory, and disposition I have has altered since childhood. The Greek tradition, existentialism, and Taoism each approach this problem from a different angle, and their disagreements are not merely technical. They reflect different convictions about what a human being fundamentally is.

Historical Perspectives

The Existentialist View

Existentialism treats identity as something achieved rather than given. Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish thinker often called the first existentialist, rejected the Hegelian tendency to absorb the individual into vast historical movements. For Kierkegaard, the single existing individual is irreducible, and the most important knowledge a person can have is self-knowledge of a particular kind — not objective facts about oneself, but the inward appropriation of who one is before God. In Either/Or and Fear and Trembling, he stages the drama of a self that must choose, and that becomes itself only through the risk and commitment of choosing.

This is why existentialism resists the idea of a stable essence that precedes a person's life. Jean-Paul Sartre later formulated the principle as "existence precedes essence": a human being first exists, finds itself thrown into the world, and only afterward defines what it is through its choices. On this view, identity is not a substance that endures unchanged beneath the surface of experience. It is the pattern of decisions, commitments, and refusals by which a person constitutes herself. To ask who someone is, existentially, is to ask what they have committed themselves to — and whether they have done so honestly or in flight from their own freedom.

The Socratic View

The Greek tradition approaches identity through the demand for rational self-knowledge. The Delphic injunction "know thyself," which Socrates took as a guiding principle, treats the self as something to be examined rather than invented. In Plato's dialogues, Socrates cross-examines his interlocutors about justice, courage, and piety, and the consistent lesson is that people who believe they know themselves usually do not. Genuine self-knowledge begins with the confession of ignorance, and from that honest beginning a person can undertake the slower work of understanding the soul — its parts, its desires, and its relation to the good.

For Plato, the self is not formless. The soul has a structure — reason, spirit, and appetite — and a person is well-ordered when reason governs the other elements. Identity, in this framework, is tied to the rational soul's grasp of what is true and good. A person who lives according to appetite is not fully himself, because he is governed by forces that obscure his nature. The Socratic contribution is the conviction that identity is bound up with examination: an unexamined life, as Socrates says at his trial in the Apology, is not worth living, because without examination a person does not know who they are.

The Taoist View

The Taoist tradition complicates both of the preceding accounts by questioning the rigidity of self-concepts altogether. The Daodejing, traditionally attributed to Laozi, warns against fixed categories, imposed names, and the rigid pursuit of a stable identity. The text's recurring attention to water, the uncarved block, and the empty vessel points toward a self that is supple rather than defined, responsive rather than self-assertive. Where Socratic philosophy asks the self to know itself, and existentialism asks the self to choose itself, Taoism asks whether the very project of fixing the self might be a source of unnecessary suffering.

This is not a simple denial that persons exist. Taoist thought recognizes individual life and agency. But it treats rigid self-definitions — the labels, roles, and fixed narratives a person uses to say "this is who I am" — as constructions that can harden into limitations. The Taoist ideal of wu wei, often translated as non-action or effortless action, describes a way of acting that flows with circumstances rather than imposing a predetermined self upon them. Identity, from this angle, is less a fortress to be defended than a capacity to be cultivated — the capacity to respond fittingly to a world that is always changing.

Major Thinkers

Kierkegaard is the central figure for the existentialist account of identity as inwardness and choice. His distinction between aesthetic, ethical, and religious existence describes different relations a person can have to their own selfhood. The aesthete drifts among possibilities without commitment. The ethical person accepts duty and continuity. The religious person makes a decisive leap of faith that no universal rule can mediate. Each stage is a way of being a self, and Kierkegaard's concern is whether a person genuinely inhabits their identity or merely performs it.

Socrates, as presented in Plato's early dialogues, supplies the model of identity as examined life. He wrote nothing himself; what we know of him comes through Plato's portrayals, which already raises a question about identity that scholars continue to debate — whose philosophy, exactly, is "Socratic"? The historical question itself illustrates the philosophical one. The Socratic self is known through its commitment to inquiry, and that commitment survives even the passage from one thinker to another.

Laozi, the semi-legendary figure associated with the Daodejing, stands for the Taoist suspicion of fixed identity. Whether Laozi was a single historical person or a composite tradition matters less than the text's persistent teaching that the named and the fixed are not the deepest realities. The person who "knows others is wise; the person who knows himself is enlightened," the Daodejing says — but the self known in this enlightenment is not a rigid essence. It is a capacity for harmonious responsiveness.

Different Views

The three traditions disagree productively, and the disagreement should not be smoothed into a single synthesis. Existentialism and Socratic philosophy share an emphasis on the self as a problem to be worked through, but they part ways on what the working-through discovers. Kierkegaard's self appropriates itself through passionate inward choice; Socrates' self discovers its nature through rational examination directed toward objective truth. For the existentialist, the truth of the self is partly constituted by how it is held. For the Socratic thinker, the truth of the self is there to be found, and passion without truth is mere subjectivity.

Taoism cuts across both. It shares Socrates' suspicion of unexamined life, but it would distrust the Socratic confidence that naming and defining the self leads to clarity. It shares existentialism's concern that rigid definitions can become prisons, but it would distrust the existentialist drama of choice as still too self-preoccupied. The Taoist sage is not someone who has chosen a self so much as someone who has stopped needing to defend one. These are genuine alternatives, and a reader does not have to pick a single winner to learn from the friction between them.

A further division runs through all three traditions: the question of whether identity persists or is moment-to-moment constructed. The Greek rational soul and Kierkegaard's existing self both assume some continuity that inquiry or choice can clarify. Taoist metaphysics, with its emphasis on constant transformation, makes continuity itself questionable — a theme that also echoes in later Buddhist analyses of the self, which argue that what we call identity is a convention imposed on a stream of changing processes.

Modern Understanding

Contemporary discussions of identity have moved well beyond the classical framings, though they remain indebted to them. Social and political philosophy has foregrounded the role of categories — gender, race, nationality, class — in shaping both how a person understands herself and how others understand her. These categories are not merely personal; they carry histories of power, exclusion, and recognition. A person's identity, in this modern sense, is negotiated between an inward sense of self and the social definitions that precede and surround her.

This negotiation has a philosophical depth that everyday identity politics sometimes misses. The existentialist insistence that existence precedes essence can function as a protest against the claim that a person is their category — that someone is reducible to a role assigned at birth. Yet the protest cannot be total, because human beings genuinely are shaped by the languages, communities, and histories into which they are born. The Socratic demand for self-examination remains relevant here: a person who has never examined the categories that shaped her has not yet taken responsibility for her identity, even if she rejects them.

Psychology and cognitive science have added their own challenges. Research on memory, narrative identity, and the constructive nature of autobiography suggests that the self is less a stable object than an ongoing story the brain tells itself. This does not refute the philosophical traditions so much as reshape them. The existentialist thesis that identity is a project finds empirical support in the finding that people actively construct coherent narratives from fragmentary experience. The Taoist suspicion of fixed selfhood finds support in the plasticity of memory and the malleability of the sense of self.

Practical Meaning

The abstract question of identity has concrete consequences. Decisions about career, relationships, and vocation often turn on a person's answer to the question of who they are, and a rigid answer can close off possibilities that might have been life-giving. The existentialist counsel is to take responsibility for one's identity rather than treating it as something that simply happened. This does not mean reinventing oneself on impulse. It means recognizing that the commitments one makes are one's own, and that disowning them is itself a choice with consequences.

The Socratic practice of examination offers a complementary discipline. Before committing to an identity, a person can ask whether their self-understanding survives scrutiny. Do the stories I tell about myself hold up? Am I confusing a role I play with who I am? Am I avoiding self-knowledge because the truth would require change? These questions are uncomfortable, and that discomfort is part of their value. An identity that has never been tested is brittle; one that has been examined and re-chosen has a different resilience.

The Taoist contribution is a warning against taking any of this too solemnly. The examined, chosen self can still become a fortress — a rigid self-image defended against all contradiction. Taoist practice encourages holding identity loosely enough that it can respond to circumstance, age, loss, and surprise. The self that knows itself, in this view, knows itself as something that does not need to be clutched. This is not indifference. It is a different kind of care, one that protects the self by refusing to harden it.

Common Questions

Is identity the same as personality? Not quite. Personality refers to the relatively stable patterns of temperament, behavior, and preference that characterize a person. Identity is broader and more philosophical, encompassing the question of who a person is, what they stand for, and how they understand their continuity over time. Personality can be described by a psychologist; identity is something a person must interpret for themselves.

Can a person's identity really change? Yes, and most philosophical traditions agree on this even when they disagree about how. Existentialism holds that identity is remade through choices. Socratic philosophy holds that examination can reorder the soul. Taoism holds that rigid identity is already an illusion masking constant change. The harder question is not whether identity can change but what kind of change counts as transformation rather than destruction — and that question has no single answer.

Do other people define my identity? Partly. The social categories others apply to you shape how you are treated and often how you come to see yourself. This is why recognition and misrecognition carry real weight. But philosophical traditions from Socrates to existentialism resist the stronger claim that identity is entirely a social product. A person can examine, accept, reject, or reinterpret the identities assigned to her, and that capacity for response is part of what identity names.

What is the difference between personal identity and selfhood? Personal identity is a technical philosophical problem about persistence — what makes someone the same person over time despite change. Selfhood is a broader concept referring to what it is to be a self at all: the capacity for experience, agency, and self-awareness. You can ask about personal identity (am I the same person I was?) without yet asking about selfhood (what is a self?), though the two questions tend to pull on each other.

Does Taoism deny that the self exists? It depends on what is meant by deny. Taoism does not claim that persons are illusions in the way some later Buddhist arguments do. But it treats fixed, named, defended self-concepts as constructions that obscure a more fluid reality. The self exists, on a Taoist view, but it exists as a process of responsive becoming rather than as a static essence to be protected.

Sources

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Søren Kierkegaard" — a detailed scholarly overview of Kierkegaard's authorship, including his account of the existing individual and the stages of existence. Available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/.
2. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Socrates" — covers the historical and Platonic Socrates, the elenctic method, and the commitment to examined self-knowledge. Available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/.
3. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Laozi" — examines the Daodejing, its historical attribution, and its central concepts of dao, wu wei, and the critique of fixed categories. Available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/laozi/.
4. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or and Fear and Trembling — primary texts in which Kierkegaard develops the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages and the drama of self-choice.
5. Plato, Apology and Republic — the classical sources for the Socratic injunction to examine the unexamined life and for Plato's account of the ordered soul.
6. Laozi, Daodejing — the foundational Taoist text whose teachings on the uncarved block and effortless action inform the Taoist approach to identity.