Locke on Personal Identity: Consciousness and Concernment - Updated Edition

LOCKE ON PERSONAL IDENTITY

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Locke on Personal Identity: Consciousness and Concernment

by Galen Strawson

LOCKE ON

PERSONAL IDENTITY

Consciousness and Concernment

Galen Strawson

Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford

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All Rights Reserved

Strawson, Galen.

Locke on personal identity : consciousness and concernment/

Galen Strawson.

p. cm. — (Princeton monographs in philosophy)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-14757-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Locke, John, 1632-1704. Of identity and diversity.

2. Identity (Psychology) I. Title.

B1294.S87 2011

126.092—dc22         2011003915

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Janson

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

1  3  5  7  9  10  8  6  4  2

I DO NOT KNOW HOW WE MAY EVER KNOW, IN RETRACING THE RECORD OF THE PAST, WHERE OUR RESPONSIBILITY LIES, AND WHERE WE HAVE MERELY UNDERGONE RATHER THAN ENACTED, LIVED THROUGH RATHER THAN LIVED, AN EVENT, UNLESS BY THE SENSE WE HAVE OF ABIDING IDENTITY WITH THAT PAST SELF, OR EVENT, OR ACTION PERFORMED, FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE. I FIND, FOR MYSELF, THAT THIS SENSE OF IDENTITY WITH PAST SELVES IS BY NO MEANS CONTINUOUS. IT IS RATHER AS IF AT TIMES I WAS PRESENT IN MY LIFE, AT OTHER TIMES ABSENT FROM IT ALTOGETHER; ESPECIALLY AFTER MY CHILDHOOD. THE MIND WHICH WANDERED AMONG THE STRUCTURES OF MOSSES AND LYCOPODIA IN THE LABORATORIES OF DOWNING STREET WAS CERTAINLY MINE; BUT NOT THE GIRTON UNDERGRADUATE WHOM MANY OF MY CONTEMPORARIES SEEM TO REMEMBER BETTER THAN I REMEMBER MYSELF; NOR THE NEUROTIC BOHEMIAN WHO SO DISHONOURABLY PROLONGED HER RESIDENCE IN CAMBRIDGE, WHICH SHE DARED NOT LEAVE BECAUSE SHE DID NOT KNOW WHERE ELSE TO GO, BY THE TRAVESTY OF A MARRIAGE.

—KATHLEEN RAINE

¹

N’ATTENDEZ PAS LE JUDGMENT DERNIER. IL A LIEU TOUS LES JOURS.

—ALBERT CAMUS

²

¹ 1975: 74. Raine is referring to Downing St. in Cambridge. As far as I know, she knew nothing of Locke’s views on personal identity.

² 1956: 111.

Contents

Preface

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

CHAPTER 2

Person

CHAPTER 3

Person . . . is a forensic term

CHAPTER 4

Concernment

CHAPTER 5

Consciousness

CHAPTER 6

Consciousness . . . is inseparable from thinking

CHAPTER 7

From the inside

CHAPTER 8

Person—Locke’s Definition

CHAPTER 9

Consciousness Is Not Memory

CHAPTER 10

Personal Identity

CHAPTER 11

Psychological Connectedness

CHAPTER 12

Transition (Butler Dismissed)

CHAPTER 13

But next . . .: Personal Identity

without Substantial Continuity

CHAPTER 14

And therefore . . .: [I]-transfers,

[Ag]-transfers, [P]-transfers

CHAPTER 15

A fatal error of theirs

CHAPTER 16

A Fatal Error of Locke’s?

CHAPTER 17

Circularity?

CHAPTER 18

The Distinction between [P] and [S]

CHAPTER 19

Concernment and Repentance

CHAPTER 20

Conclusion

POSTFACE

APPENDIX 1

Of Identity and Diversity by John Locke

APPENDIX 2

A Defence of Mr. Locke’s Opinion Concerning

Personal Identity by Edmund Law

References

Index

Preface

THIS BOOK BEGAN as a paper in the autumn of 1994, when I reread Locke’s discussion of personal identity in book 2, chapter 27 (2.27) of his Essay concerning Human Understanding, three hundred years after its first publication in 1694, and realized that I’d been misrepresenting him in tutorials at Oxford for fifteen years. I should have inferred this from the fact that Michael Ayers’s chapter on personal identity in volume 2 of his book Locke (1991) had a year earlier seemed bizarrely peripheral to the subject I thought I knew and in any case taught. Reading Ayers is one of the things that sent me back to Locke’s text—for better or for worse.

I set out to correct my errors in writing (with some enthusiasm, because I knew many held the same false views as I had), but was sidetracked early in 1995 by an invitation to give a lecture on the notion of the self in the 1996 Wolfson College lecture series From Soul to Self.¹ This led to an attempt to work out the necessary conditions of self-consciousness² and, eventually, to a book called Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. In the meantime, Marya Schechtman’s important brief observations about Locke in her book The Constitution of Selves (1996: 105–9) and Udo Thiel’s outstanding article Personal Identity (1998) were published, and I came to feel that the paper would be largely superfluous. Don Garrett’s paper Locke on Personal Identity, Consciousness, and ‘Fatal’ Errors (2003) later took some further steps in the right direction.

Appointment to a professorship at the City University of New York Graduate Center in 2003, and the faith of those who appointed me that I was a historian of philosophy, in addition to being a philosopher of mind, together with their expectation that this would be manifested in some way in my teaching, brought me back to Locke’s account of personal identity. It also prompted me to prepare a modern English version of 2.27 of the Essay for pupils on both sides of the Atlantic (see appendix 1). When I first read Locke, I sometimes found him hard to understand, even though I was a classically educated native speaker familiar with English literature from the fourteenth century on.³ Few who read Locke today have such a background, and many are not native speakers.

The Day of Judgment plays an important part in Locke’s discussion of personal identity, but those who—like myself—don’t believe in God or the Day of Judgment shouldn’t think that their place in Locke’s theory makes it less interesting. All questions about the Day of Judgment can be converted into wholly earthly questions about one’s overall moral status or being as one stands here now, firmly on the ground, with no prospect of going anywhere else. The idea of the Day of Judgment is, no doubt, a fantasy, but the fundamental idea behind Locke’s discussion of personal identity doesn’t depend on it in any way, although he was bound to pose the question of personal identity in eschatological terms in the intellectual context of his time. In particular, the respect in which his conception of personal identity (or moral identity) is intuitively natural is independent of the story of the Day of Judgment. It’s helpful, when reading Locke, to bear in mind Camus’s advice: Don’t wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.⁴

This book, though short, may be judged to be too long. One reason for its length is that I restate points in different ways. Some ways seem more helpful to some readers, others to others. It may not help to note that it can be said of Locke’s chapter, as "it can be said of many a book, that it would be much shorter if it were not so short" (Kant 1781/7:A xix); nor is it any justification that this book is a trifle next to the tens of thousands of pages that have been written on Locke on personal identity. If it were to lead to a reduction in the number of false things that are written about Locke on personal identity, that would be another matter; but also, no doubt, a vain hope.

This book may also be judged to be more difficult than it is, because of the respects in which it departs from patterns of interpretation of Locke’s views on personal identity that have become entrenched. There are of course many points of connection with other recent writings on personal identity—by Johnston, J. L. Mackie, Parfit, Shoemaker, Snowdon, Wiggins, and Williams, to mention some I know—but I have concentrated on Locke’s text.

I’d like to thank Max de Gaynesford for providing the book’s epigraph. I’m most grateful to Michael Ayers, Kathy Behrendt, Ruth Boeker, Aaron Garrett, Don Garrett, John Greenwood, Stephen MacLeod, Rae Langton, David Rosenthal, David Wiggins, Gideon Yaffe, and, particularly, Michelle Montague and Udo Thiel, for their reactions to larger or smaller pieces of this material, their reading recommendations, and other suggestions. Among my students on both sides of the Atlantic in the years 2004–2006, I would particularly like to thank Joe Krohn, Peter Langland-Hassan, William Tone, and Rosemary Twomey. I’m further grateful to Udo Thiel for directing me, late in the day, to Edmund Law’s Defence of Mr. Locke’s Opinion Concerning Personal Identity, which I’ve transcribed from the original 1769 edition and included as appendix 2; and to Mark Johnston (and more distally Dan Garber), for alerting me, even later in the day, to the relevance of the doctrine of mortalism, or more particularly thnetopsychism, the view that the mind or soul dies when we die. This doctrine was held by many Christians at the time, including John Milton. It’s also endorsed by Locke, or so I will assume in this book, and is one of the underpinnings of his radical claim about personal identity.⁵ One reason why Law understood Locke, no doubt, was that he (Law) too was a convinced mortalist or thnetopsychist.⁶

I would also like to record a philosophical debt to J. L. Mackie, in whose company I first encountered Locke. Although Mackie never supervised me, we were colleagues at University College, Oxford, for a year in 1979–1980, and I’m very grateful to him both for the example he set as a philosopher and for equipping me, almost single-handedly, through his writings (especially his Problems from Locke, 1976), to teach the wide range of subjects I was called upon to teach at Oxford after a mere six months as an undergraduate in philosophy and three years of a very narrowly focused graduate career.

Finally, I would like to thank Ian Malcolm of Princeton University Press, for his patience when it seemed that this book would never be finished, Leslie Grundfest, also of Princeton University Press, for her expert production, and Joan Gieseke, for saving me from a number of errors at the copyediting stage. I’m also most grateful to the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust for awarding me a Senior Research Fellowship for the academic year 2009–10. I wasn’t awarded the fellowship specifically to finish this book, but it turned out to be a necessary part of the work I had applied to do.

When I cite a work, I give the first publication date or estimated date of composition, while the page reference is to the edition listed in the bibliography. I mark individual paragraphs of 2.27 of Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Of Identity and Diversity, with §. When I quote, I mark the author’s emphases in bold italics and my own in plain italics.

Preface to the Paperback Edition

In this paperback edition, which supersedes the hardback edition, I’ve corrected a number of typographical errors and made a number of other changes in an attempt to increase clarity. I’ve also made a few substantive revisions. On p. 44, n. 5, for example, I’ve deleted a quotation from Descartes that doesn’t support the claim I make about him, replacing it with one which (I believe) does.

There’s a more significant revision on p. 122, prompted by a insightful review of the first edition by William Uzgalis (Notre Dame Philosophy Reviews: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/28700-locke-on-personal-identity-consciousness-and-concernment/). In the first edition I wanted to emphasize the point that Locke’s main focus, in giving a theory of a person’s ‘forensic identity’, was on the actual human case. My phrasing led some readers to think that I held two views I certainly don’t hold (see e.g. page 37 note and page 82): [1] the view that Locke’s theory of personal identity, correctly interpreted, needn’t—and doesn’t—accommodate imaginary cases like the cobbler/prince case. [2] the view that it doesn’t really matter to Locke that his account of personal identity should be able accommodate imaginary cases like the case in which cobbler and prince swap bodies.

¹ This resulted in ‘The Self’ (1997) and The Self and the Sesmet (1999b).

² This appeared in abridged form in Self, Body and Experience (1999c) and forms part 3 of Selves (2009).

³ I came to Locke late in the day—some time after sitting the Oxford BPhil examination in 1977. One of the three exam papers I sat for that degree contained a question about the difference between man and person that I answered without knowing that it contained an implicit reference to Locke’s theory of personal identity.

⁴ 1956: 111. Camus had no religious beliefs.

⁵ The crucial underpinning remains in place even if Locke is not a mortalist. See p. 102 below.

⁶ To get an idea of the case for Locke’s thnetopsychism, read the opening of his book The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695). See also Nuovo 2002 and Ball’s very useful summary (2008: 119–26). The mortalist doctrine was perhaps most vigorously expounded by Richard Overton in his book Mans Mortalitie (1644; republished in an expanded version as Man wholly Mortal, 1655), whose title page announced it as A Treatise Wherein ’tis proved, both Theologically and Philosophically, that whole Man (as a rationall Creature) is a Compound wholly mortall, contrary to that common distinction of Soule and Body: And that the present [i.e. immediate] going of the Soule into Heaven or Hell is a meer Fiction: And that at the Resurrection is the beginning of our immortality, and then Actuall Condemnation, and Salvation, and not before (1644: title page). As Ball remarks (2008: 100), Overton wasn’t attacking religion in rejecting what one of his supporters called the Hell-hatch’d doctrine of th’immortall soule; he was agreeing with the mortalist Milton in Paradise Regained (1671: 4.313): Much of the soul they talk, but all awry. There is a rich discussion of some of the issues raised by mortalism in Johnston 2010: chap. 1.

LOCKE ON PERSONAL IDENTITY

Chapter One

Introduction

IT’S WIDELY HELD that Locke’s account of personal identity, first published in 1694, is circular and inconsistent, and blatantly so. Locke, however, thought long and hard about the matter.¹ He discussed it extensively with friends and colleagues, and was a profoundly intelligent, generally very careful, and exceptionally sensible philosopher. He made no foolish error.

Why has he been so misunderstood? I blame certain influential commentators, in whose vanguard one finds one of the worst readers of other philosophers in the history of philosophy: the good Bishop Berkeley. Thomas Reid is also to blame, for although he is a great (and often funny) philosopher, and sometimes accurate enough in his renderings of the views of his predecessors, he enjoys mockery too much to be reliable, he’s too free with the word absurd, and his misreading of Locke’s views on personal identity, which follows Berkeley’s, is spectacular.² Bishop Butler is the other main reprobate, although the objection to Locke for which he is well known is not his, having been put by John Sergeant in 1697 and by Henry Lee in 1702, among others.³

History has designated Butler and Reid as the main representatives of the circularity and inconsistency objections, and their influence has been such that few since then have had a chance to read what Locke wrote without prejudice. The tide of misunderstanding was already high in 1769, when Edmund Law provided an essentially correct account of Locke’s position in his Defence of Mr. Locke’s Opinion Concerning Personal Identity. His intervention was, however, little noticed.

The extent of the misreading of Locke is remarkable. Edmund Law judged it an endless task to unravel all the futile sophisms and false suppositions, that have been introduced into the present question; he endeavoured [only] to obviate such as appeared most material, and account for them (1769: 36). If, however, one embarks on Locke’s discussion confident that his view will not contain any glaring error, it becomes hard to understand how he can have been so misread for so long. For he makes his central point extremely plain, and he does so, it must be said, over and over and over again. To read the wonderfully fluent and imaginative text of 2.27 of An Essay concerning Human Understanding is to see how familiar Locke is with his material, how easy in exposition he is, how he has thought through the objections, and how much he’s enjoying himself. Locke likes to vary his terms, and is sometimes loose of expression by modern lights, but not in a way that makes it possible for a moderately careful reader to misread him in the manner of Butler, Berkeley, Reid, and many who have followed them.⁴

The following essay records my line of thought as I read and reread, and sometimes struggled with, Locke’s chapter. I spend the next several sections introducing a number of distinctions that I believe to be useful, extracting some central notions for inspection—notably person, consciousness, concernment—before returning them to context. The discussion lacks a standard expository structure, and it’s not meant to be introductory. I assume basic familiarity with Locke’s text, and criticize other accounts of it only indirectly. I think that almost all the elements of a correct view of his theory of personal identity are now to be found in the writings of a few Locke scholars, among whom Udo Thiel stands out,⁵ but misunderstanding is still widespread in the philosophical community as a whole.

The interpretative situation was hardly better in the eighteenth century, as just observed.⁶ Law was honestly amazed that Locke had been so miserably misunderstood—that so many ingenious writers had been so marvellously mistaken about Locke’s views on personal identity, and had engaged in so much irrelevant and egregious trifling on the matter (1769: 23, 21). Law cites, as an extraordinary instance (p. 22) of this trifling, the inconsistency argument that Berkeley gave in his Alciphron (1732), and for a version of which Reid later became famous (see p. 53 below).⁷

The root cause of the misunderstanding, perhaps, is the tendency of most of Locke’s readers to take the term person as if it were only a sortal term of a standard kind, i.e. a term for a standard temporal continuant, like human being or thinking thing, without paying sufficient attention to the fact that Locke is focusing on the use of person as a forensic term (§26), i.e. a term that finds its principal use in contexts in which questions about the attribution of responsibility (praise and blame, punishment and reward) are foremost. No doubt it’s natural enough to take person only in the first way, but this doesn’t excuse the perversity of doing so when reading what Locke says, and says again and again. (The common mistake of thinking that Locke means memory by consciousness is, relatively speaking, a smaller mistake.) That said, Locke must also bear some of the responsibility for the misreading—a point addressed by Law in the brief appendix to his Defence.