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mental states either belong to a unitary thing or they do not--they could not fall
between being unified and being fragmented. The unity of the self is the unity
conferred by self-consciousness, and this unity cannot come in grades. So not only
does the question of the self arise only when a creature has reflexive awareness; it
also arises saltatorially.
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The concept of the self is to be distinguished from the concept of a human being and
from any other biologically based classification. Like other mental concepts, the
concept of the self already contains the essence of what it specifies; but biological
concepts do not do
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this--they wait upon empirical science to disclose what the designated biological kind
consists in. As we might predict, then, the concept of self will cut across groupings of
creatures made upon biological grounds, with the result that indefinitely many
biological kinds may permit the ascription of selfhood to their members. An indication
of this feature of the concept of self is this: if a creature understands the concept of
self and this concept in fact applies to that creature, then the creature must know
this--selves necessarily know that they are selves; but it is perfectly possible for a
creature to grasp the biological concept of a human being and for this concept to
apply to that creature, yet the creature not know that this concept applies to it--human
beings do not necessarily know that they are human beings. The basis of an
ascription of selfhood is manifest in the first-person awareness any person has of
himself; but the basis of biological classifications is not in this way a matter of
common firstperson knowledge. Any account of the self must accommodate this
feature of the concept.
These preliminary remarks have not been intended to rule out any of the classical
theories of the self; we have sought only to identify the nature of our enquiry and
allude to some of the considerations to which any satisfactory account must be
sensitive. We shall now turn to an examination of the main doctrines regarding the
nature of the self. These may be divided into three: theories which identify the self
with the body; theories which explain the self in terms of various mental relations; and
theories which take the concept of the self to be primitive and not to be explained in
terms of anything else. The first theory tells us that 'I' refers to a (living) body
endowed with mental attributes; the second theory says that the reference of 'I' is a
complex entity constructed in certain ways from the mental states we take to belong
to the self; the third theory claims that the self is a simple substance which is distinct
from the body and is not reducible to the mental states of which it is the subject.
In order to assess these theories of the self we shall address ourselves to the
question of 'personal identity'. As it is commonly understood, this is the question
under what conditions a person may be said to exist over time: we judge that the
person we see before us is the same person we saw last week, and the question is
what such identity over time consists in for persons. Answering this question can be
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expected to shed light on the question what a self is--the primary focus of our
interest--because it is reasonable to suppose
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that the conditions of a thing's identity over time depend upon what sort of thing it is:
so if we know what kinds of change a self may sustain and still persist, we shall know
what it is that constitutes a self-it will be that which cannot change without the self
ceasing to exist. The method is to see what can be conceptually detached from a self
and that self endure; this, it is hoped, will isolate the essential core of the person from
the inessential accompaniments. But it should be remembered that broaching the
question of personal identity is an indirect way of getting at our real interest. There is,
indeed, a sense in which the question of the nature of the self must be conceptually
anterior to the question of personal identity, since in order to determine what the
identity of a person consists in we must bring to bear our concept of the person that is
judged the same: the point of asking the question of identity is to help to lay bare the
concept of self which is invoked to answer the identity question. Since the concept of
the self determines the kinds of change a self may endure, we can hope to expose
the concept to clearer view by consulting our intuitive judgements about the
continued existence of a self under various sorts of real or imagined change. We
might say that the issue of personal identity has a methodological, but not a
conceptual, priority.
The problem of personal identity is often described as the search for 'criteria' of
identity. Here we need to distinguish two ways in which the object of this search may
be understood, and to note that the way that is relevant for us has an implication we
do well to make explicit. The notion of criterion is ambiguous between the idea of a
way telling that a certain sort of fact obtains, and the idea of what is constitutive of its
obtaining: the former is an epistemological idea, the latter a metaphysical one. In
application to personal identity, the distinction is between the evidence we use to
judge of personal identity over time, and our conception of what this is evidence for.
And there is no guarantee that what we actually use as evidential signs of personal
identity will coincide with that which these are signs of. To take an extreme example
in which these come apart: we can imagine a society in which judgements of
personal identity were always made on the basis of documents the people carried
around with them; these documents would be criteria in the epistemological sense,
but they are obviously not criteria in the metaphysical sense--or else we would have
to say that selves are constituted of documents! This is not, however, to say that the
two questions are
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totally independent; they are dependent in the way that any questions are about what
something is and how we tell what it is. But unless we are to assume that, in general,
the constitution of reality and our methods of knowing about it coincide, we cannot
take it for granted that how we judge of personal identity affords direct access to what
personal identity consists in. In fact this danger of conflating the two senses of
'criteria' is somewhat reduced by the fact that philosophers typically allow
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