LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI 9
being and had a Cartesian uncertainty about where I came from, the
feeling that "1 am I" would probably be impossible. I imagine that peo–
ple who are uncertain about their origins in the weak, rather than Carte–
sian sense-i.e., people who, although they know they must have been
born somewhere, sometime, do not know who their parents were or
where and when they were born-must have a seriously damaged sense
of identity.
Substance, memory, anticipation, body, and an identifiable begin–
ning-these are the five elements (four if we set aside the first as empir–
ically inaccessible) that together make up personal identity. But
personality is, of course, a cultural as well as an existential phenome–
non. My belonging to various collective entities is also part of what
makes me a person (although this does not entail that I am no more than
a part of these collective entities, nor that I am literally nothing if I do
not belong to them). And human collectivities have identities of their
own, which can be described in similar terms and categories.
Collective identity is, even more than personal identity, a matter of
degree. This is evident from the fact that we need a number of indepen–
dent criteria to describe it. The concept of collective identity is a legiti–
mate one; its legitimacy is not undermined by the fact that both personal
and collective beings are only "more or less" self-identical. Their iden–
tity is no more suspect in this regard than that of physical objects. This
becomes clear when we look at examples of collective entities such as
ethnic communities and nations.
It
is an obvious truth that no nation can survive without a national
consciousness. How strong that consciousness is depends on a variety of
historical circumstances. When we speak of nations, we usually have in
mind historically well-established ethnic communities, most often Euro–
pean ones, and we are reluctant to use the term more widely-to apply
it, for example, to African or Asian tribes or even to remote outposts of
European civilization in North or South America or in Australia . States
which lack ethnic homogeneity naturally have their own interests, and
some of them may one day establish national identity on the basis of the
common aspirations of their people, if these prove stronger than ethnic
divisions. But when we consider peoples whose status as nations is not
in doubt, as in the case of nearly all European states, we see that their
collective identity is made up of the same five elements discussed above.
The closest thing in collective identity to the metaphysical idea of
substance is the vague idea of national spirit or
Volksgeist,
which finds
its expression in cultural life and collective behavior, especially at times
of crisis. The
Volksgeist
is supposed to be something that underlies cul-
