Locke on Personal Identity

Locke on Personal Identity KENNETH P. WINKLER THIS PAPERIS an attempt to place Locke's discussion of personal identity in the setting Locke intended for it, and to consider some of the difficulties it presents once it is placed there. I begin by identifying a neglected feature of that discussion: its concern with what I shall call the subjective constitution of the self. This concern presents Locke with an intense case of a difficulty he faces elsewhere, that of reconciling or coordinating his chosen vocabulary--a vocabulary of persons and ideas--with the vocabulary of the philosophical tradition . I hope that a discussion of Locke's apparent response to the difficulty will provide a clearer picture of his overall project in the Essay. Before turning to the text itself it might be helpful to summarize Locke's conclusions as they are usually understood. A person, Locke believes, is "a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places."' Personal identity extends as far as consciousness: a later person is the same as an earlier one just because the later person is conscious of some thought or action of the earlier. Locke's account of personal identity is the ancestor of all those that dispense with sameness of substance (whether soul or body) or stuff (whether mental or physical) and concentrate instead on psychological continuity. According to these accounts I am the same as any person with whom I am psychologically continuous, and although the recollection of past thoughts or actions is the only source of continuity recognized by Locke himself, it is certainly within the spirit of his account as it is usually interpreted to understand memory more broadly, so that it encompasses not just the conscious recollection of episodes but (for example) the retention of character, or the enduring habits of movement and speech. Leibniz, who was in many ways sympathetic to Locke's account, held a view of continuity broad enough to transform Locke's account (as it is usually understood) into something very Essay 2.27.9. I quote from the edition prepared by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). [2Ol] 202 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 29:2 APRIL 199i close to twentieth-century accounts: "for I believe that each of a man's thoughts has some effect, if only a confused one, or leaves some trace which mingles with the thoughts which follow it."~ Locke's chapter on identity and diversity, which was added to the second (1694) edition of the Essay on the advice of Molyneux, is one of a series of chapters on relations, beginning with the introductory "Of Relation" (Chapter 25), continuing with "Of Cause and Effect, and other Relations" (Chapter 26), and ending with "Of other Relations" (Chapter 28), which is mainly devoted to moral relations. "Of Identity and Diversity" (Chapter 27) can be divided into two broad parts. In the first part, which occupies w167 1-8, Locke is primarily concerned with the principle of individuation, which is, he says, "Existence it self, which determines a Being of any sort to a particular time and place incommunicable to [that is, incapable of being shared by] two Beings of the same kind" (w Although he gives some account of the individuation of modes (w he devotes far more space to substances, which fall into three sorts: God, finite intelligences, and bodies. Because God is "without beginning , eternal, unalterable, and every where," it follows that "concerning his Identity, there can be no doubt" (w And because finite spirits always have a "determinate time and place of beginning to exist," he explains that "the relation to that time and place will always determine to each of them its Identity as long as it exists" (w Only the case of bodies calls for any real sophistication, and even here some cases are completely straightforward. Single particles of matter, "to which no Addition or Substraction" has been made, can be handled in the same way as finite intelligences (w A mass of matter, which is "only the Cohesion of Particles of Matter any how united" (w remains...