Chapter One
Introduction
ITāS WIDELY HELD that Lockeās 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, heās too free with the word āabsurd,ā and his misreading of Lockeās views on personal identity, which follows Berkeleyās, 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 Lockeās position in his Defence of Mr. Lockeās Opinion Concerning Personal Identity. His intervention was, however, little noticed.
The extent of the misreading of Locke is remarkable. Edmund Law judged it an āendlessā task to āunravel all the futile sophisms and false suppositions, that have been introduced into the present questionā; he āendeavoured [only] to obviate such as appeared most material, and account for themā (1769: 36). If, however, one embarks on Lockeās 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 heās 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, Lockeās chapter. I spend the next several sections introducing a number of distinctions that I believe to be useful, extracting some central notions for inspectionānotably person, consciousness, concernmentābefore returning them to context. The discussion lacks a standard expository structure, and itās not meant to be introductory. I assume basic familiarity with Lockeās 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 āmiserably misunderstoodāāthat so many āingenious writersā had been āso marvellously mistakenā about Lockeās views on personal identity, and had engaged in so much irrelevant and āegregious triflingā on the matter (1769: 23, 21). Law cites, as an āextraordinary instanceā (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 Lockeās readers to take the term āpersonā as if it were only a sortal term of a standard kind, i.e. a term for a standard temporal continuant, like āhuman beingā or āthinking thing,ā without paying sufficient attention to the fact that Locke is focusing on the use of āpersonā as a āforensicā term (Ā§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 itās natural enough to take āpersonā only in the first way, but this doesnāt 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 āconsciousnessā is, relatively speaking, a smaller mistake.) That said, Locke must also bear some of the responsibility for the misreadingāa point addressed by Law in the brief appendix to his Defence.
Chapter Two
āPersonā
THE WORD āPERSONā has a double use, both now and in the seventeenth century. In its most common everyday use, today as in the seventeenth century, it simply denotes a human being considered as a whole, a person1, as I will say. Its next most common everyday use, which I will call the person2 use, is the one that allows us to say, of a single human being, āSheās not the same person anymore,ā or āHeās become a completely different person.ā When Henry James writes, of one of his early novels, āI think of . . . the masterpiece in question . . . as the work of quite another person than myself . . . a rich . . . relation, say, who . . . suffers me still to claim a shy fourth cousinship,ā1 he knows perfectly well that heās the same human being (person1) as the author of that book, but he doesnāt feel heās the same person2 as the author of that book, and we all know what he means, even though the notion of a person2 is not a precise one. James is using the word āpersonā in the familiar way that allows one to distinguish the person or self that one is from the human being that one is considered as a whole. His claim is that he no longer relates to his early novel in such a way as to feel that heāhe who is here now in the person2 senseāis its author.
The current everyday person2 use of āpersonā is closely connected to the notion of personality, but we ordinarily think of personality as a property of a creature, a property that can change, and not as itself a thing of any sort; whereas when we use āpersonā to mean a person2, we naturally take it to denote a thing or entity that isnāt just a property. We take it to denote a persisting subject of experience, a self; we donāt feel weāre using the word just as a way of talking about personality, where personality is a mere property of a person1. When people say, āShe isnāt the same person anymore,ā using āpersonā in the person2 sense, they tend to feel that theyāre saying something more than merely that a person1ās personality has changed, although they may also allow a sense in which this is all that has happened.
At the same time, we donāt feel obliged to come up with clear identity conditions for these supposed entities, these persons in the person2 sense. For while people sometimes look back to a past time and say categorically, āIām not the same person any more,ā i.e. not the same person2, they donāt usually think thereās some sharp dividing line between the person2 in the past and the person2 present now (except, perhaps, in rare cases, e.g. those that involve a radical conversion).
I think that the person2 use of āpersonā gives us some useful insight into Lockeās use of āperson,ā because itās related, although itās not the same. A Lockean person, a Person, as Iāll say, marking my employment of the term in his sense with a capital letter, is certainly not a person1, because a Person doesnāt have the same identity conditions as a person1. A person1 is simply a human being (a man, in Lockeās terminology, in which āmanā refers equally to male and female). Itās a human being considered as a thing of such a kind that same human being doesnāt immediately entail same Person. In Ā§15 Locke famously and explicitly considers imaginary cases in which Persons switch human bodies: cases in which one has to do with the same man (human being) even though one doesnāt have to do with the same Person, and, conversely, cases in which one has to do with the same Person even though one doesnāt have to do with the same man (Ā§15). (Note that Lockeās functional definition of Personhood (see chapter 8) doesnāt restrict Personhood t...