In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

VII Logic, Ethics, and the Self It is common knowledge that David Hume has criticized the concept of the self as a mere “bundle” of different “perceptions” in constant ®ux and motion. No matter how much he thought that this compromised the self, he presents his view in relatively moderate terms, and he covers himself impeccably by his choice of words. He declares that some metaphysicians, who believe that they have a different self, must be ignored: for his part, he is quite certain that he has none, and he assumes (naturally, taking care not to talk about those few oddballs) that the rest of humanity are also nothing but bundles. That is how the man of the world expresses himself. The next chapter will tell how his irony rebounds on him. The reason why it has become so famous is the general overestimation of Hume, for which Kant is to blame. Hume was an excellent empirical psychologist, but he can by no means be called a genius, as he usually is. It does not take much to be the greatest English philosopher, but Hume has no overriding claim to be described even as that. Kant (despite the “paralogisms”) rejected Spinozism a limine because it regarded human beings not as substances but as mere “accidents,” and he thought that he had demolished it together with this “illogical” idea underlying it. Therefore, to say the least, I would not like to swear that he would not have signi¤cantly toned down his praise of the Englishman , had he also known his Treatise, and not only his later Inquiry, in which, of course, Hume did not include his critique of the self. Lichtenberg, who went to battle against the self after Hume, was considerably bolder than Hume. He is the philosopher of impersonality, and he soberly amends the phrase “I think” to the factual “it thinks”; thus the self, for him, is really an invention of grammarians. Incidentally, Hume had actually anticipated him in this respect by declaring, at the end of his disquisitions, that all arguments about the identity of the person were a mere battle of words. In most recent times E. Mach has interpreted the universe as a coherent mass and the selves as points at which the coherent mass has greater consistency . According to him, the only reality lies in the perceptions, which cohere strongly within one individual, but more faintly with those of another individual, who is distinguished from the ¤rst precisely for that reason. What matters, he argues, is the content, which is also preserved in others, with the exception of the worthless [sic] personal memories. The self, he claims, is no real unity, but only a practical one, and it is unsalvageable: therefore we can (gladly) do without it. However, he sees nothing reprehensible about behaving from time to time as if we had a self, particularly for the purposes of the Darwinian struggle for existence . It is strange that a researcher such as Mach—who has not only achieved exceptional things as a historian of his particular science and as a critic of its concepts, but who is also extremely knowledgeable about biological matters and has had a stimulating effect, both direct and indirect, on their theory—should take no account whatsoever of the fact that every organic being is indivisible from the outset, that is, some kind of atom or monad (cf. part 1, chapter III, p. 38). After all, the main difference between organic and inorganic matter is that the former is always differentiated into heterogeneous parts that are dependent on each other, while even a fully formed crystal is homogeneous throughout. Therefore it should at least be regarded as a possibility that the very phenomenon of individuation, the fact that organic beings generally do not cohere like Siamese twins, also has psychic implications and is likely to have greater consequences in the psychic realm than the Machian self, that mere waiting room for perceptions . There is reason to believe that such a psychic correlate exists even among animals. Everything that an animal feels and perceives is likely to have, for each individual, a different note or coloring, which is not only peculiar to its class, genus, and species, its race and family, but which differs in each individual from every other. The physiological equivalent of this speci¤city of all the perceptions and feelings of every particular animal is the idioplasm, and on grounds which are analogous to those of the...

Share