Triggered by my current reading of Robert C Solomon's In The Spirit of Hegel I was prompted to think about the concept of personal identity. In philosophy, this is the answer to the question: how do I know (or what do I mean by saying) I am the same person I was a year ago? What does that idea of “same” mean?
The first point is so obvious everyone misses it. It's that there would be no point to asking how we can be thought of as being the same person we were five years ago if there wasn't a very obvious sense in which we aren't. It's because we feel we do change, that we ask how we can yet be the same.
The second point is that there are two distinct answers: one to establish liability or benefit; the other to deal with the rest of daily life. Let's do the legal one first. The law needs to be able to identify that it was you who, ten years ago, committed a murder, so that it can arrest, try and jail you now. The family solicitor needs to identify you as the proper beneficiary of the will: that you are your father's son, even though you've been out of the country for twenty years. Here we are unequivocally identified with our bodies: what gets used here is an idea of physical continuity throughout changing appearances. This isn't a complex idea, but it is difficult to propose a fraud-proof set of criteria, let alone one proof against the wilder imaginings of philosophers. However, just because we can't produce a flawless operational definition of a concept doesn't mean we don't have a workable concept. Indeed, we couldn't produce any kind of operational definition if we didn't have a working concept.
In daily life we use a different concept: one far more contextual and purposive. To say someone has changed seems to mean that what we used to know about them leads us to make inaccurate predictions of how they now react, think and behave in given situations: friends might say that you have changed, you are now much calmer, but the sales analysts of a major bookseller might see you as the crime-fiction fan you always were. At work you seem as professional and motivated as ever: only your wife sees your emotional collapse at the weekends from the strain of your pretence.
This does not mean we have many “identities”, it means that no other person sees us playing all our roles. Nor does that fact that as an uncle we are affable and competent, while as an amateur handyman we are tense and irritable, mean we harbour contradictions: it means we like being an uncle, while our lack of manual dexterity and practice means we dislike having to put up the shelves. Someone who knows us as an uncle may say “you're totally different when you have to fix the shelves” but what they mean is “you're not as affable and competent now as I've seen you with your nephews”. They aren't making deep claims about you having been taken over by a different soul, or aliens, when you have to wield an electric drill. Indeed, if they didn't think you really were the same person, there would be no point in them saying you were “totally different”.
When we ask of ourselves or other people “who are you?” we are asking many questions, but none of them particularly philosophical. We may be asking how they could behave like that, or what they want to do with their lives, or what they value most, or what they would choose to wear or where they would choose to vacation (“Who are you? Someone who spends a week on a beach? I don't think so.”)
When we say “we don't know who we are”, we're not thereby expressing any great sense of a splintered soul hidden in darkness. We're saying we're uncertain about a number of decisions that are important to us now. It makes our indecision sound much more romantic and profound, whereas to others of a more practical turn it may seem simply weak and self-indulgent.
So do we have an “identity”? We do, just as we have an “appearance”. It's our ambitions, choices, tastes, decisions, the way we talk and the words we use, the clothes we wear from role to role, our craft skills and anything else you can think of. As time goes by, some of these things will change. Let's say that if we add something new to all these items, our identity remains the same (or “grows”, if you prefer); whereas if we drop some things and take up others, it changes, but with this qualification, that as long as the great majority of our identity-items stay the same, we say we haven't changed.
This, I think, gets it about right. Children grow, adolescents “change” because they adopt and discard a lot in a short space of time, adults “don't change” because they modify themselves gradually. Adolescent change is unstable, adult change is stable. It makes our concept of “sameness” temporally local, rather than long-term, which also fits in with the our recognition that over a long time, we aren't in any sense the same people we were at eighteen. The world would be a pretty awful place if we were.
Aren't some changes more important than others? Isn't a woman who turns up asking for a divorce undergoing a greater change than one who suddenly starts listening to Monteverdi? If this is an an implicit appeal to common values (“Marriage matters, music doesn't”) then it's harmlessly undeniable. If this is pointing out that some changes are more costly or beneficial than others, while others are treated with more or less censure by family, parish, friends, employers and the bridge club, and so some are likely to have more consequence than others, this is also harmlessly undeniable. What is deniable is that the divorcee's life will necessarily change as common values and likelihoods would predict. She might weather the divorce with dignity and goodwill, but find Monteverdi tips her into the giddy world of choral singing, from which few have emerged unscathed.
So when we ask others about their ambitions, tastes, abilities, preferences and favoured ways of passing a Sunday afternoon, we are not asking profound philosophico-psychologico-moral questions but merely interviewing them to see if they are the kind of company we want to keep. We can even do that to ourselves, and confuse ourselves with the answers. I suggest that the puzzlement we may feel about our own identity is caused partly because of the distorting mirrors (cynical and manipulative “appraisals” at work, pop-culture quizzes, shallow comments from friends, answers that are polite rather than honest, barely interested parents, teacher forced to “find something positive to say”, and “feedback” given to manage rather than inform) in which we are reflected to ourselves, and partly by a mis-match between what we do in fact and what we think we should be doing. And this is how we can surprise and puzzle ourselves.
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