Talk by Dr David Vella: Rediscovering Oneself Through a Story of Conscience

Rediscovering Oneself through a Story of Conscience: Refiguring Identity in a Consumer Culture' - Dr David Vella

We live in a culture that is concerned with finding our truest self, our authenticity.  Claiming to assist us in this mission are various self-professed experts and the public media that offer us certain life-strategies for adoption, which we often conform to.  Fashion, entrepreneurship, travel, fitness, and self-spirituality are the most popular. 

 In our hyper-capitalized and consumerist society, however, these lifestyles are often designed by corporate companies with the purpose to make profit.  As such they are targeted toward instant appeal and quick feelgood effects, reflecting and celebrating the consumer ideology that has pervaded our everyday lives with its emphasis on personal wellbeing and status.

This talk seeks to introduce an alternative identity model that redefines our authentic self through a self-story about conscience.  It conceives our original self as committed to a call to live a good life.  Our fulfillment is seen as intimately related to our care for others and their political and civic institutions.  To realize this self, the practice of five values is emphasized that are promoted, though in an incomplete and distorted manner, by today’s commercial life-strategies.  These values help us attune to what is singularly foreign in our experiences while provoking ways to reconcile it with our established worldview.  Our worldview is thereby refigured toward more holistic, realistic, and ethical ways of understanding existence.

The Speaker

Dr David Vella studied for his doctorate degree in Critical and Cultural Theory with Cardiff University where he explored the relationship between experiences of the sacred in postmodernism and the ethical encounter in late-twentieth and twenty-first century philosophy.  He lectures modern and contemporary English literature and critical theory at the University of Malta and philosophy at St Edward’s College.