Practical Identity and Open Cooperation

This chapter explores the notion of an open cooperation in democratic society, and its connection with a particular form of practical identity. This form of cooperation takes shape when the zero-sum games produced by the familistic and tribal forms of cooperation melt away, and the relationships based on loyalty and trust are generalized to a collectiveness, i.e., a multitude of strangers who are willing to establish non-zero-sum relationships. In this perspective, the possibility of a socio-economic take-off prominently depends on a specific relational motivation: the act of giving trust, construed as decision to entrust ourselves, according to our choice, to an interpersonal situation of risk within cooperation. It is possible, then, to make the hypothesis that good cooperation occurs only in virtue of a specific form of individualism that includes the concept of individual responsibility. For it is only through the permanent internalization of an ethics of individual responsibility that the strategies of trust among strangers can work effectively and prevail over the traditional tribal solidarity and the localist and nepotistical systems. Open cooperation originates from the individuals’ capacity to be psychologically autonomous, viz., to understand their own responsibilities, to choose new ones, to remain faithful to them. We construe the capacity to be psychologically autonomous as one of the two main aspects of the process of self-realization (the other aspect is “individuation”). The ‘self’ in self-realization is understood here in terms of a theory that combines contributions from philosophical psychology with a variety of findings from developmental, social, clinical and personality psychology. On our view, the self is constituted by the Jamesian couple “I, Me”, where the I is the process of constructing diachronically a series of self-representations, each corresponding to a tentative Me. The subject (a psychobiological system) who is engaged in this synthesizing “selfing” process is seen as primarily non-unitary and gaining its unity in the act of mobilizing resources against the threat of disintegration. In other words, human self-conscious subjectivity constitutes itself as a repertoire of composite psychological maneuvers, of activities that take pains to cope with its lack of ontological guarantee, constructing itself on the edge of its original “non-being”, as it were. This psychodynamic theory of the self is then placed within a personological framework where self-narrativism is well-entrenched in a naturalistic context. Here the claim that we constitute ourselves as morally responsible agents by forming and using autobiographical narratives can be combined with a view of narrative identity as a layer of personality. During personality development, internalised and evolving stories of the self layer over other layers of personality, and this process of layering may be integrative. The process of self-representation originated from the I/Me dialectic, then, takes the form of what Jung identified as “individuation”, namely, a striving towards the unity of the various strata of personality. Such a process has an ethical dimension that is reminiscent of the ideal of eudaimonia, the discovery and actualization of one’s own unique potentials and talents.