The quaestio mihi facto sum of Augustine and the resulting considerations about identity in Hannah Arendt

Abstract

The proposed work aims to investigate some issues related to the narration and interiority in Augustine's Confessions in light of the considerations on identity in Hannah Arendt. Upon discovering individual inner life, it's can say that Augustine was the founder of the autobiographical novel. It should be noted that the "question I became to myself," elaborated in his confessions, this kind of remembrance and religious self-reflection, seems insoluble both in their individual psychological sense and in its general philosophical sense, according to Arendt. Because it is unlikely that we can know our essence in the same way as we know natural things that surround us. In this sense, for the author, only in speech and action men actively show their unique personal identities, show who they are, unlike the otherness we share with all living things. However, this revelatory quality can rarely be achieved as a deliberate purpose. In this sense the who clearly appears only for others, while remaining hidden from the person himself. Thus, only when people are with each other, mediated by action and speech, is that the quality of revelation of the individuals occurs.