It seems as if some of us have minds that fashion identity in soliloquy while other do so in relation to a social network, more or less explicitly. These two types can never fully understand each other since communication serves a different purpose for each of them and so their every word and gesture means differently. Identity is crucial, but it plays different, often conflicting roles. Misunderstanding seems to be just as important a component of individuation as understanding. What then doesn't change in all this churning of mind and spirit? Why do you feel like the same person across every change of state and mood? Or is identity a judgment and not merely a feeling? But then a judgment of what? An obvious response might be that it applies to memory. Memories however are unreliable and contingent and only partially accessible; it seems as though they are shaped to support identity rather than forming the basis of it. Identity is constant and absolute - even when there are sub-personalities each has its own identity, which is precisely the problem - and so is closer in nature to a judgment, while memory does not judge, only testifies, subject to examination. Judgment is a process and so its results are products, while identity has the quality of always being prior. It belongs to the judging before it applies to the matter judged, or else it belongs to the judge - which in any case renders the judgment of identity redundant. We know it is true before we know why it is true and we know it with an unquestioned certainty. Identity is an hypostasis of the subject and so prior to the basic logical and causal structures required to frame a world. It remains a mystery in this sense. It is ever-present, it is both the cause and the object of individuation, but it lies far upstream of thought, or of any place where we can comfortably focus, or bring the weight of our existence to bear.