Tales of Identity

<p>Any inquiry into identity must start at the beginning and continue until the end. Because identity is a contemporary issue, yet as ancient as thought itself, given that we can only (attempt to) know that which is the same as oneself. This logical evidence is based on an ontological fundamental: since everything changes and is perishable we think (and think ourselves obliged to believe) that something permanent must exist. Metaphysics has been dedicated from its beginnings to think this fundamental, that which gives (identical) being to things that appear. Its rst approach was so radical as to be innocuous: for Parmenides, what we see and worries us by its instability simply is not, since, as is asserted by the tautology, only being is. It was Plato who postulated that the world of becoming had to have some correspondence with its twin. If from all that is, only that which has identity merits consideration, this identity is converted forcibly and by force into the highest individual or collective aspiration. We say “aspiration” because identity, from the start, is not possessed: beings, for the sin of existing, have already lost it and can only regain it by returning to the ancestral model of that which they were originally…</p>