Personal Identity as a Task

Abstract

In this paper, I explore a mode of concern with the question of personal identity in which the latter is raised as a problem of a practical order. What provokes this is a concern with the experience of discontinuity within the self and with the perception of continuity as a fragile and uncontrollable good. I discuss the relation which this practically oriented perspective bears to the philosophical form of engagement with personal identity, and the reasons which make the perspective of the latter particularly enticing to the former, yet at the same time entirely inadequate to its needs. Finally, I consider how the need in question can instead appropriately be met, within a broader (and broadly Wittgensteinian) interest in the tendency of philosophical questions to mask—and thus sometimes betray—the need that inspires them.

Notes

1. MacIntyre, A. (1990) Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (London: Duckworth), 199.

2. Wittgenstein, L. [1953] (2001) Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell), § 108.

3. This point, which will be resumed again below, connects closely with Richard Moran's illuminating discussion (one that centres on Sartre's reflections on the subject) of the insidious shift from the practical point of view to the theoretical one when the moment comes to adhere to a past resolution, in his (2001) Authority and Estrangement (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 77–83 (“the resolution itself appears as inadequate… because he is seeking it in the wrong place”—in a sense, the trouble is that he is seeking it at all).

4. And it is the aspects one values that enter into one's conception of who one is; which are also those that cannot be realised at all times. (“When do I feel most myself?”)

5. Sartre, J. [1943] (2003) Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London and New York: Routledge), p. 52; previous quote 83. Indeed this disengaging capacity of consciousness entails that I am separated from my present as much as from my past (see e.g. pp. 139–140).

6. And although my discussion here centres on the circumstances that could frame statements of doubt about one's identity, this is connected to the question concerning the circumstances in which it would make sense to assert one's identity (or continuity). One of my difficulties with a recent paper by Galen Strawson in criticism of the narrative concept of identity (“Against narrativity”, Ratio, 17 [2004], pp. 428–452) is his assumption that we would have no problem understanding what somebody means when one says that one “figures oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future”—a self‐attribution by which Strawson would distinguish two different modes of “being in time”, diachronic and episodic, and on which his argument depends. Strawson's defence of the episodic mode of being makes an interesting contrast with one of the dominant themes of my discussion here, which is precisely the anxious response to this kind of temporal isolation. But it would take a separate study to consider this contrast in greater detail.

7. Thus, if Sartre's anguish is “an uncertainty about the future [that] attaches not to the being of the world but to my own being”, the anxiety I am concerned with is one that attaches to my own being as infected by the world—the world I cannot fully bring under my control. Quoted from Caws, P. (1979) Sartre (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), 70. This difference in focus—one of many—is reflected in the fact that the term “dependence” is used by Sartre to signify our relation to our freedom, and not, as I have used it in the main text, to our lack of it—to our givenness (see Being and Nothingness, p. 56).

8. In order, the quotes are from: http://www.1stpm.org/articles/frominside.html, retrieved on 09/08/07; Adams, B. (2003) The Pits and the Pendulum (London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers), p. 154; Wells, L.A. (2003) “Discontinuity in personal narrative: some perspectives of patients”, Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology, 10, p. 299.

9. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self‐Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 38–39. And see generally the discussion in chap. 2. The second quote draws on the words of W.D. Winnicott, on whose writings Giddens is in part drawing for his own remarks. Winnicott's insights, in turn, are developed within the framework of the psychoanalytic theory of object‐relations initiated by Melanie Klein.

10. Shame is a pivotal notion here. For a suggestive list of works that explore the link between shame, anxiety and identity, see Giddens' references in Modernity and Self‐Identity, pp. 233–235.

11. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 60.

12. See, for example, Johnston, M. (1997) “Human Concerns without Superlative Selves”, in: J. Dancy (Ed.), Reading Parfit, pp. 149–179 (Oxford: Blackwell).

13. Korsgaard, C.M. (1989) “Personal identity and the unity of agency: a Kantian response to Parfit”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 18, pp. 101–132.

14. Ibid, pp. 119–120.

15. This is a thread pursued through various parts of the Philosophical Investigations, e.g. § 151 ff, § 179 ff, § 323–26.

16. Woody presents this as an echo of William James' discussion in his Principles of Psychology (“When narrative fails”, Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology, 10 [2003], p. 334), in discussing the reasons for a manic‐depressive sufferer's loss of self; whether ascribed to Woody or to James, this “qualitative sense” – which only comes to be represented through its privation, and is otherwise as chimerical as the quality of ordinariness – would be the wrong item toward which to look in order to appease one's anxiety over self‐identity, insofar as it is envisaged as an item in one's experience.

17. Arendt, H. [1958] (1998) The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 244.

18. In these remarks, I am aware of being inspired by several elements of Heidegger's analysis of the breakdown of our ordinary, absorbed practical relation to objects in our world, and of the emergence of representational intentionality by means of this disturbance – pursued in concentration in [1928] (1962) Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 102–107, and commented upon illuminatingly by Dreyfus, H.L. (1991) Being‐in‐the‐World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press), pp. 69–83. Evidently, any use one makes of this analysis in developing an account about persons will be a highly qualified and selective one; a case in point is the emergence of a theoretical standpoint out of the remains of a frustrated practical involvement – precisely the standpoint identified here as a deeply problematic product of the disturbance of one's sense of continuity.

19. This fantasy is powerfully expressed in Miguel de Unamuno's writings: “The scenes of life pass before us as in a cinematograph show, but on the further side of time the film is one and indivisible…”. The remark is situated in a context very much concerned with the loss of experience and the fragmentation of life (“nothing is lost, nothing wholly passes away”; “we must needs believe – believe and hope! – that it is not, but that somewhere it remains archived and perpetuated…”) [1913] (1976) The Tragic Sense of Life (Dover Publications), p. 202, p. 201. But this idea also emerges in writings closer to the mainstream of contemporary discussions of the person and identity, as they do in Locke, for whom the contingencies of remembrance and forgetting in the present life were envisioned as being transcended in the next by an eschatological eventuality of full self‐transparency: Seigel, J. (2005) The Idea of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 102.

20. For an overview of the various senses of the question, see Eric Olson's summary in his article “Personal identity”, online at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity‐personal.