Understanding Ourselves Better

Marya Schechtman and Grant Gillett acknowledge that my case in ‘The misunderstandings of the Self-Understanding View’ (2013) has some merits, but neither is moved to change their position and accept that the Psychological View has more going for it (and the Self-Understanding View less) than Schechtman originally contended. Schechtman thinks her case could be better expressed, and then the deficiencies of the Psychological View will be manifest. That view is committed to Locke’s insight about the importance of phenomenological connections to identity, but cannot do justice to this insight and as a result fails to explain things that it should. I will argue that my case still applies, re-expression notwithstanding, and that the Psychological View is much better off as an account of identity than either respondent acknowledges.

The Psychological View does not capture what Schechtman presents as Locke’s insight. Phenomenological connections only feature now and then in its account of the self and, although they are seen as important connections, they are not fundamental to the account. Phenomenological connections are one sort of psychological connection among the many that constitute the continuity that features in this account. The account allows, as she pointed out in 2005, even whole life phases that count as ours but to which we have no conscious access.

I maintain that the Psychological View has got this right. Much of our psychological life, relevant to our personhood, goes on without our awareness. Locke agrees: he imagines a “Spirit wholly stripp’d of all its memory or consciousness of past Actions, as we find our Minds are of a great part of ours, and sometimes of them all” (Locke 1975, 346 [my italics]). This is true of unconscious states like repressed ones, which may strongly affect behavior, and also true of everyday states like intentions: once an intention is formed, it will be most effective if we manage to get it out of our consciousness—thinking about it may well lead to wavering and giving in to temptation (Holton 2009, 98–9). In her reply, Schechtman concedes that the Psychological View copes well with unconscious states, something she seemed to deny originally. Her clarified position is that it cannot cope with them and capture Locke’s insight. But my point is that it only copes so well because it gives a lesser role to phenomenological connections: the narrative attempt to include them as fundamental alongside unconscious states is one of the places where narrative views unravel.

Schechtman presents the attractiveness of the Self-Understanding View as being its placement of phenomenological connections as central to identity (with the advantages this brings in explaining self-concern and moral responsibility) while also coping with unconscious states. My contention (which was not as clear as it might have been) was that in doing one of those, it loses the ability to do the other satisfactorily.

In its account of identity, self-concern, and personal moral responsibility, the phenomenological aspect is foregrounded. It is because we can make sense of actions and states as ours that they are ours and that we are responsible for them. However, this leaves out many unconscious states and activities which are ours. It certainly leaves out repressed states and the real reasons behind many actions—such as in the case of the shoppers that I raised. The states that the shoppers can make sense of as theirs are not the ones behind their choices—they are not the causes of their behavior. Schechtman’s Self-Understanding View included unconscious states in the picture by appealing to the need that others have in making sense of a person’s life (Schechtman 2005, 20). Now she puts it as such states being “in a position to trouble self-interpretation, and so to disturb the experience of unity” (Schechtman 2013, 49). But neither of these attempts manages to include the empathic access to states and experiences that performed the function of explaining them as ours and made us responsible ‘to and for’ them. Moreover, the repressed person—like the shoppers—may well...