The Early Modern Subject: Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume by Udo Thiel (review)

A remarkable achievement, Mr. Thiel’s Early Modern Subject traces, as its subtitle announces, “self-consciousness” and “personal identity” from Descartes to Hume, with backward glances to Platonism, Aristotle, Lucretius, and the scholastics. In this meticulous parsing of four of modernity’s principal terms—self, consciousness, person, identity—no vacation from thought is permitted. The “historical contexts” in which he sets his thinkers’ arguments are other thinkers’ arguments on the same topics. No historical events, influential trends, or social changes at work between 1650 and 1750 appear. If self-consciousness, as Hans Gadamer insists, is modernity as flickering, fleeting process, how does clunky, more substantial personal identity fit? Can there be personal identity without self-consciousness, or self-consciousness without personal identity? Why must identity be personal? Is consciousness a reflex act by which one reflects on one’s own thinking, the simple act of thinking, or a motion of the will? How does consciousness, the mind’s awareness of perception, differ from self-consciousness? Does self-consciousness require consciousness of a “self or subject or I”? What then is this self or subject or I that one is conscious of? Can there be any position without an argument in its favor?

Arguing that consciousness emerges as a salient topic only in the 1720s, Mr. Thiel addresses a stunning number of early modern thinkers—over 53 French, English, Germans, and Americans appear in chapter or section titles alone: South, La Rochefoucauld, Spinoza, Pufendorf, Collins, Watts, Berkeley, Shaftesbury, Butler, Grove, Norris, Edwards, Tucker, Leibniz, Wolff, Mendelssohn, Reimarus, Herder, Kant, Hume, Kames, and 30 more. The introduction teases out the differences between conscience and consciousness, the histories of each as a term, and the ambiguities created by the recurring French failure to have two words for two things. Insistent that one word serve two concepts, they then create multiple neologisms of uncertain reference (Leibniz’s conscience, consciosité) and leave translators to guess which applies. Both the first treatise to name consciousness as its topic (Charles Mein’s anonymous Essay on Consciousness, 1728) and the first survey of accounts of personal identity (Thomas Wallace, 1827) appear late, written by authors unknown to fame.

Locke’s “subjectivist revolution” is impeccably laid out within the enlightenment shift from ontology to epistemology. Scholastic thought identifies the person as a union of soul and body, in which either is incomplete without the other. Souls separated from bodies are not persons, and consciousness cannot constitute individuality. Cartesians identify the soul with man or person, so that a soul, a “complete, simple, and immaterial substance,” separated from its body is still the person, and consciousness individuates. The debate between South, the schoolman, and Sherlock, the Cartesian, over the Trinity explored these issues, with South convicting Sherlock of circularity over individuation. Locke rejects the scholastic account without comment and extends the Cartesian account into a differentiation between man and person, replacing Platonic and Cartesian concepts of soul as an unchanging, immaterial substance with “unity of consciousness.” Locke distinguishes “person” or consciousness from “man,” understood somewhat dimly as a “vital union of parts in a certain shape,” and from soul, a “thinking substance” about which nothing is known. Individuation becomes existence in a particular spatial-temporal location. Mr. Thiel argues that the Sherlock-South Trinitarian debates did not inspire Locke, but guided him to his distinction between man and person to save himself from Sherlock’s circularity. So deft is Locke’s position that he can remain neutral on materialist or immaterialist accounts of soul and his theory of personal identity can deal with all the issues—except the Trinity, where it began.

Attacks and defenses pursued Locke’s subjectivist revolution, and Mr. Thiel hunts them down. Alternate accounts of subjectivity in Clarke, Shaftesbury, Norris, and Berkeley precede Leibniz and Wolff’s apperception and consciousness, ending finally with Hume and his bundle view of the self. Immortality, resurrection, the soul anchor the...